Gluten-free FTW

So, last month I talked about how I’d switched to a gluten-free diet due to a gluten intolerance. I’d just started it, and it was going well. I wanted to give a bit of an update about my progress. 🙂 For the most part, I’ve been doing well. I’ve either been making actual gluten-free recipes, or modifying my own to make them gluten free. That hasn’t been too hard…yet. Except when you are running late and are starting dinner and have completely forgotten that some ingredients aren’t gluten free and you aren’t sure if you have any gluten-free equivalents on hand because this is the first time you’ve made it since going gluten free. Yeah. That happened recently. Luckily, it worked out. I just omitted the ingredient in question and checked that the other one was in fact gluten free (the brand was, thankfully) and all was well. Thing is, my cooking, since the pandemic started, has been what I call “fast and loose” — meaning that instead of figuring out which day I am making which meal on any given week like I used to, I literally decide the night before. Sometimes a few nights ahead if it’s more complicated. So things unfortunately slip my mind. I’m human. And I’m still adjusting. I’m sure at some point this will become more normal and natural and I won’t have to think, “Oh crap, is everything gluten free?” because all of my ingredients will be. I’m still in transition. Which brings…

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Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes…

Like the song, I’ve had a pretty big change in my life recently. I started having symptoms of what I thought was another food allergy. For the record, I was diagnosed with quite a few nut allergies — including a deadly peanut allergy which did not manifest in childhood, oddly enough — and fruit allergies, as well as a few other random ones (latex and wintergreen, I’m looking at you). Fun fact: If you are allergic to either latex or bananas, chances are, you will be allergic to the other one, too. I didn’t know that. I’d known about my latex allergy for years, having worked in foodservice and was forced to wear latex gloves and basically suffer with hives going up my arms every night until they allowed me to start using non-latex gloves later. But the banana allergy took some time to figure out. Anyway, this all happened in my twenties, and I am forty-six now, so it’s been awhile. My symptoms were similar to hay fever: runny nose and tearing eyes, and also some fun digestive issues. (We won’t get into that). So after making a list of the culprit foods (a very varied list, I might add), I went to my allergist and got a scratch test. Which, by the way, is no longer a scratch test but more like a poke test. Anyway, nothing came up as an allergy. She told me that it was possible that these symptoms were due to an intolerance, which…

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