I've been thinking about going gluten free for about 4 months or so. Never actually seriously thought about it, but every now and then following a gluten free or paleo diet comes up and I think about it. Tom and I have talked about it a few times in passing but never seriously.
Three weeks ago I went to the doctors bc my blood pressure was OUT. OF. CONTROL. I'm talking 150/100. Yikes. So now I'm on medication. Let me start by saying that I am not someone who is anti medication. If the medicine is going to make me better, then I am all for it. However, I tracked my sodium intake for the first week I was on the medicine just to see how close to the recommended 2000 mg a day I was. I averaged between 2000 and 3000 mg a day. On a day where even one meal came from a restaurant.... we're talking 4000 or 5000 mg!!!! It is insane the sodium in a flour tortilla from Chipotle. Anyway, I'm getting side tracked. I was noticing while I tracked sodium that bread seems to be the biggest culprit in my diet for sodium. I normally have a slice of bread with peanut butter for breakfast and then a sandwich for lunch. Even with the homemade bread I eat, there is 300 mg in one slice. My bread consumption alone is 900 mg of sodium a day!!!! That's insane. So this is when I started to think more seriously about being gluten free.
I have a co worker who is allergic to gluten so I've been talking to her about it too. We had a staff breakfast two weeks ago so I decided to try gluten free baking and made muffins:
http://www.spartan.com/food-of-the-day/recipe-of-the-day/lemon-strawberry-muffins/
The batter was so stiff and not at all like normal muffin batter. I figured that it was just a product of all the weird ingredients so I baked them anyway.
They didn't rise! Like at all. They were these hard, tasteless muffins. :( I still had half the batter left so I emailed the author of the recipe and asked for help. She suggested adding more coconut milk or egg. I added both. I also decided to go to the store and get more vanilla extract.
While I was at the store... I found out that Aldi now carries gluten free products!!! I got all of this (granola, crackers, mac and cheese, pizza crust mix, baking mix, chocolate chip cookie mix) for only $22. Take that whole foods!
Anyway... the second round of muffins turned out better. The taste was still a little weird but I guess that's to be expected when you bake with quinoa flour.
In the last few days I've been experimenting with other gluten free stuff. I'm sticking to mixes from a box for now so that I don't have as much to try and get right.
 Sunday morning I used this baking mix to make waffles. They were delicious! |
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Sunday night I made gluten free pizza dough (again, from a box). I spread the edges of the pizza a little too thin and it burned but other than that it was yummy. The sodium is still really high in this mix so I need to find a better option, but for now it was great.
Tonight for dinner I had gluten free brown rice pasta with sauce, peppers, onions, spinach and meatballs. The meatballs are not gluten free because I have frozen meatballs to use up. But the brown rice pasta was good!
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