Technology is amazing.

And to answer a couple of questions:
1) Is the kitchen at the top of my website my actual kitchen?
Yes it is! Well, in my mind anyway. Got to have something to shoot for, right? My current kitchen is featured in the video below.

2) What kind of camera do I use for my videos?
Camera, shamera. It's my iPhone! I can upload directly to YouTube. Amazing.

3) Why haven't I figured out to turn the phone sideways so that it's oriented on the screen correctly?
Ah, but I have! I just haven't demonstrated my learning. Plus I need to do an experiment to figure out which way to turn it so that I don't do a video all upside down.

4) What editing software do I use?
None! You'll note that they are all expertly done in one take. If I really goof up, I start over. It's sort of the difference between stage and screen. No telling what kind of excitement might unfold in this "live" format!

5) Is this all I do all day?
No! Not yet, anyway. Mostly I go to a day job and then I spend meaningful time with my family on the evenings and weekends! And I work out! But still, I want to do this more.

Thanks for visiting!

Oh, and check out my video tips on how to live happy and gluten free even if you share your space with gluten-eaters.

I ate at Philadelphia Chutney Company for the first time months ago. The pictures here are from my lunch outing with my friend Kathy. I fully intended to blog about it right away, but I did experience some GI system distress later that day, so I decided to wait until I'd eaten there again before I made my call on whether to encourage other gluten free folks to eat there.

I've recently lunched there twice more, introducing the place to a different friend each time. On every visit I've asked the person at the counter to direct me to a gluten-free option, and each time the person has answered with confidence that ALL of the dosas (including the vegetarian chicken -- soy) are gluten-free. I had googled the restaurant beforehand and read about other people's positive experiences, and I'm pleased to report that they seem to be the real GF deal. [Between my first visit and my second, I got seriously glutened -- see this blog post for details -- so now I have a real benchmark for what accidental gluten exposure does to my system.] 

I've tried something different each time: First visit was #2 Old School Masala Dosa with a tomato chutney -- masala being the potato filling, and dosa being the wrap made from rice and lentil flours. The second time I had the #6 Grilled Portobello Mushroom, Spinach and Roasted Onions with Goat Cheese with a masala base and a coconut chutney, and the third time I had the #10 Spinach and Balsamic Roasted Onion with the masala base with both a coconut and a curry chutney. I meant to order the #6 without cheese (I'm in the middle of a detox, after all, and I'm not a big goat cheese fan) but the place was busy and I wanted to visit with my friend Debbie rather than spend time sending the food back when it arrived with cheese on it. It was SO GOOD! Of the three, it was my favorite. I do want to try it without the cheese to see if I like it as well (or almost as well.) All three items I've tried were delicious. The masala base is tasty on its own, but my advice is to get a dosa with it AND some of their add-ins. And try the different chutneys -- all three I've tried were interesting and truly enhanced the experience. And my three non-GF friends really liked it too. Kathy, Debbie and Amanda, let's do it again sometime!

And take a look at the SIZE of the dosa! And CHEAP! The Old School Masala is only $6, and the ones with all the stuff are only $7! An interesting gluten-free Center City Philadelphia business lunch for $7! I did add a bottle of water, but still I was in and out of there for under $10.

Eat there. Go there today. You'll have to wait a couple of minutes while they prepare your food. TOTALLY WORTH THE WAIT. Do this. Thank me later.

Burger King recently got some press for the roll-out of their new French fry, which is gluten-free. This is different than McDonald's, whose fries are neither gluten-free or vegetarian, which sort of boggles my mind. Even with GF fries, some folks are apprehensive about the fries because of issues of cross-contamination. Apparently there are some BK's that dedicate a fries-only fryer and who are very conscientious. That is great news! However, I feel like I need to share my story from the inside of the fast food world.

I worked as a manager of a Roy Rogers restaurant (remember them?) in the early 1990’s. It was the worst job I’ve ever had, but I did get some amazingly funny anecdotes that I still get to tell, and I got a huge insight into race and class issues, and techniques used for getting over on one’s employer (my employess enlightened me on the many ways they could steal food and money!). Now that I have to navigate a gluten-free existence, working at Roy’s was a gift in that I gathered loads of data on ways that food prep in the fast food world can lead to cross contamination.  As a result, I will never eat at a burger-and-fry-centric fast food place again.

First, I have to note that I was in my 20’s and to my eye at the time, the food wasn’t that unhealthy (my 48-year-old eye has a different opinion, of course.)  The chicken was just chicken and we had a dedicated staff person whose sole job was to bread and fry it all day and evening long. If the restaurant was slow some evening, we did let it sit in the warming window longer than company specifications allowed, but I wasn’t allowed to give it to the co-workers (lest they start over producing in order to get the food themselves), so we would have to throw it away and we had to count the waste at the end of the shift, which counted against me as the manager who made the call on how much chicken to make.  The burgers were just ground meat (albeit already formed into patties and frozen for shipping). Sausage and bacon was the same as in the grocery store. The rolls came on big racks every other day and looked exactly the same as rolls I bought at the time for home consumption. The fries just looked like potatoes to me (the more I read about fast food fries now, I wonder what the heck was really in them). We cut up tomatoes and lettuce and onions every morning and afternoon for use on the fixin’s bar and for tossed salads. The biscuits were hand mixed and rolled (breakfast) or scooped (lunch and dinner) all day long. The oil in the fryers was vegetable oil that we cleaned daily and changed on a regular schedule.

Some items were pre-fab: The roast beef came pre-cooked, but we sliced it down wafer thin and heated it in pre-packaged au jus for the roast beef sandwiches. The chicken breasts for chicken sandwiches came frozen with char lines painted on. The instructions were to microwave them, but I would throw mine on the 2-sided grill and drop the platen on it for a few seconds to heat them through for a more tender offering. The chicken nuggets and fried chicken patties and hash browns all came frozen and were fried in the same fryers as the French fries. The eggs for scrambling came out of a carton. The pancakes came pre-made and were microwaved in their plastic clamshells.

I was 28, a middle class, college educated lesbian. The store was located at Broad and Snyder near a subway stop and a public high school and two hospitals in South Philadelphia. South Philly is a melting pot of races and cultures, but for the most part, though I lived just a few blocks away, I was not a typical denizen of the hood. I supervised a 65-year-old Cambodian lady for whom English was almost non-existent. She made great biscuits and introduced me to a funny kind of broom that was great for cleaning under tables that the company told me to get rid of but which we kept using anyway. I had two shift supervisors. One was a 55-year-old hard-living alcoholic who would blow her paycheck on booze every Friday night and show up first thing Saturday morning looking all askew in her clothes from the day before, and I was always so grateful to have her there (running short-handed on the weekend was the pits!) My other shift supervisor was a 16-year-old over-achiever who got straight A’s at Girls High. I supervised work-release inmates, budding mobsters, moms who had 5 kids, and a few men in their 20’s who had no real skills and no real promise for a better life. 

My motto for my shifts was “Make every item as if you were preparing it for your grandmother,” or “Clean the dining room/bathroom as if your favorite aunt were coming to visit.” This resonated with some, but frankly, not everyone has the gene for good service. And as the manager, especially in a shop where labor hours were carefully watched, I’d end up at a station, like the cash register, for long stretches, so it was hard to keep an eye on what was going on behind the line in the food prep area all the time.

I give all that background to note the huge disconnect between a company’s policies around food handling and the realities of food prep at the actual store. If I worked at Roy’s under the same conditions today and they told me to dedicate a fries-only fryer in order to not cross-contaminate the oil, I would not have any confidence that when the restaurant was busy that a co-worker wouldn’t drop a load of fries into the contaminated fryer to speed things up. Fries are way more popular than nuggets or chicken sandwiches, and the line is long, and who’s really going to know, right?  And what about the fry baskets? If a co-worker accidentally pours a bag of frozen fries into the nuggets basket causing cross-contamination, they are not going to throw all of those out on the off-chance that someone with a gluten issue might wander in. And then, depending on where they end up frying them, they’ve just contaminated either that load of fries or the whole gf-dedicated fryer, the warming bin for cooked fries, and the fry scoop.

And as far as items from the grill, I can’t imagine how they wouldn’t be cross-contaminated. At the very minimum, an employee can get fresh gloves and a clean spatula and maybe even wipe down the grill, but midday cleaning of a hot grill in my experience was either just scraping grease into the grease trough with the same spatula or maybe pouring seltzer water over the grill and then scraping it down. Even if bread is not ever technically on the grill, spatula contact from burger to bun is how it’s done. And, as with my chicken breast sandwich prep for personal consumption, I’m living proof that employees don’t always follow company regulations.

In my restaurant, the veggie prep area was separate from all of the chicken breading and biscuit making and hot food cooking, so it would have been the zone least likely to experience cross-contamination. Not all restaurants have that luxury of space, so I wouldn’t count salads as a sure bet, but I suppose I might gamble and eat a tossed salad from a fast food place if I really had to, as long as it didn’t have croutons and the dressing came in a packet with a list of ingredients (or no dressing all together.)

So, in the end, I applaud any corporate efforts to accommodate the needs of gf patrons. Even if I don’t believe I can eat safely in these restaurants and cannot recommend that anyone with celiac disease eat there either, they are raising awareness both with their employees and the general public about gluten issues.

Until yesterday, if you'd asked me what happens to my system if I accidentally eat gluten was, "Oh, I'm pretty lucky. I just get a little gassy." And then I ate eggs at a diner for lunch two days ago.

The diner didn't demonstrate any actual knowledge of gf food handling, and there weren't too many interesting choices on the menu. I decided to risk it and have a spinach and roasted pepper omelette. This was the only meal I'd not prepared for myself for several days, so when my stomach upset began, I zeroed in on the omelette as the culprit pretty quickly.

And the stomach upset quickly turned to diarrhea which turned into excruciating abdominal pain that had me doubled over, shaking, vomiting and crying. Oh. My. God. It was terrible. After a couple of hours, the episode passed, though I'm still feeling the lingering effects today.

I don't blame the restaurant. I was careless and knowingly took a gamble. Now that I know just exactly what can happen, I will not make that mistake again.

And, because I try to find the gift as well as the lesson in everything, this episode reminded me how lucky I am to have such a terrific spouse who took care of me and sat by me even when all there was to do was to put another blanket over me or rinse out the bedroom waste basket. I am truly blessed.

Like Whole Foods, it looks like someone in the back room of Trader Joe's is hand-making gluten-free shelf tags. Whole Foods actually has way more GF products that TJ's, and for way more money. TJ's has products that look like they should be free of gluten but which have a suspicious-sounding CYA disclaimer about the possibility of allergen sneaking its way into the product. Even the GF markings on some products are accompanied by the statement "No gluten-containing ingredients," which is different than making a gluten-free claim and which leaves the door ajar for worrying about possible contamination.

All that said, the pre-fab Indian food pouches at TJ's are inexpensive and tasty, so I buy them despite all that. And I'm glad they now carry Udi's, though the price is just as high as everywhere else.