My eleven gluten-free days

[eve_prime]

About two weeks ago, I decided to embark on a gluten-free experiment. I was wondering if maybe my fairly frequent digestive upsets were a result of eating much more wheat than usual, lately, because I’ve been making bread twice a week. (Other theories: Celestial Seasonings had changed the formulation of the peach tea, which tastes just fine, but the timing matched; maybe my digestive tract still hadn’t recovered from that incident with the cauliflower tacos; maybe some other food was bothering me. Eventually I had to add the possibility that digestive upsets were one of the symptoms of the virus I had throughout this entire process, not realizing it at first. Sorry for denying my readers the suspense element here, but given that my eventual return to wheat and rye went without any digestive consequences, I’d have to conclude that the original problem was one or more of the other theories.)

The point of the experiment was first to see if it reduced my digestive complaints (it did not; I actually got a bit worse for a while), and then to see if adding gluten back later would make things worse (it did not). One complicating factor is my tendency towards hypoglycemia – I couldn’t just buy the gluten-free crackers I found at the store, for example, because I avoid products with simple carbohydrates, other than those found naturally in fruit and fruit juices.

Here are some of the things I learned and did.

• Quinoa pasta (and quinoa-corn pasta) are quite reasonable substitutes for wheat pasta, especially with tomato-based sauces. Rice-flax pasta, on the other hand, was gummy and tasted kind of bleh.
  
• I eat five meals a day, and most of the smaller ones end up being some combination of bread products with cheese or peanut butter. I ended up substituting various types of hot cereal “mush” with cheese stirred in or on the side (oats, brown rice grits, cornmeal), and rice cakes with peanut butter. I already eat brown rice for lunch fairly often, so that stayed the same.
  
• I bought lots of other grain flours (oat, brown rice, buckwheat, teff) and made pancakes to go with breakfast and sometimes for lunch or an evening snack, too. I also bought amaranth and flax but never got around to using them; come to think of it, I may not have used the buckwheat either.
  
• I also made several kinds of muffins. One aspect of the experiment I was looking forward to was being motivated to really learn to understand the science of baking, so that I could figure out how to make breads, etc., based on the various recipes I could find online, but since I was sick pretty much the whole time, I never got the energy to do so. I hope I’ll still get around to it.
  
• It’s much easier to shop for gluten-free pasta, flours, etc., at Market of Choice and Sundance than Safeway. It’s not overly expensive to buy the flours or even the pasta products in the bulk sections, but the pre-packaged pastas are rather pricey.
  
• The hardest thing was having to forego having a slice of our traditional weekly pizza! I know there are some gluten-free options out there, and I could certainly have made my own pizza dough, but we get a delivery from Papa’s once a week (D’s favorite meal of the week), and it was really tempting.

Overall, I’d say it was a worthwhile experiment. It would be a fair amount of work to go gluten-free, and if I ate out a lot I’m sure it would be something of a hassle, but for 11 days it was definitely do-able, and I found I could even be kind of lazy about it, once I’d stocked up enough. (A year or two ago, though, this experiment would have been pretty difficult!)

Even though I’ve returned to the wheat-eating mainstream, I’m still eating oatmeal with breakfast, rice cakes with peanut butter for snacks, and oat flour pancakes when I’m extra-hungry. I even bought more bulk oat products today; it’s nice to have more variety in my diet.