Choosing to be gluten-free

As someone who believes that things "happen for a reason," I am finding that whether or not my child is sensitive to gluten (or something else), it's been a good experience to try living without wheat. I stopped cutting it out because it seemed like I was the same before and after, and when I tried it after a couple of months of strict, gluten-free eating, nothing seemed to change. So now I'm not going out of my way to avoid it, but I am still baking gluten-free things and trying to rotate new grains and vegetables and starches into our daily diet.

No one likes risotto as much as I do, but polenta works if, like tofu, you season it well and serve it with highly flavorful things (like veggies roasted in olive oil and cheese, and/or a rich marinara sauce), or if you fry it and serve it with something tasty and bright. Quinoa hasn't caught fire in our household, but I still serve it once in awhile anyway.

But now I know more about what is out there. Now we're eating buckwheat and amaranth and coconut flour and teff. We're using tapioca and arrowroot powder instead of cornstarch. Brown rice flour is a good staple, but tends to be bland, dry, and gritty when baked; brown rice flour needs to be mixed with other flours for added flavor and texture -- sweet, nutty sorghum flour is a good addition. (Now I get why people have recipes that call for six, seven, eight, and more kinds of flour.)

What I find missing from the gluten-free living sites I've seen so far is a more systematic discussion about baking and living gluten-free. A couple of organizations are trying to organize gluten-free information on restaurants, and there are lots of ambitious home and professional cooks with great recipes online, many of them on their blogs. But what I don't see is a breakout, for example, of each type of flour, with descriptions of how they behave in cooking and how they taste, with optimum preparation methods suggested for each. Wouldn't that be a great resource? It would be a lot of work. You'd have to test like crazy to get all that data, but wouldn't it be wonderful to look at a table that allowed you to find the best flours when you wanted to make pancakes or cream scones or yeasted bread or pie crust or crackers or hamburger buns yourself? You could take it even farther and test the mixes and products available on the market today.

I would also like to see a more comprehensive information set about gluten-free dining in the forms of cards that diners can present to servers, training for restaurants on gluten-free food preparation, etc. I know you can find this stuff out there, but it's not all in one place. We've had so many experiences when I have wished I could just send someone to one page on a website for more information. Misconceptions abound: "You can eat spelt, right?" "You can just take the bread/bun off." "Just eat the ice cream, not the cone." "No, that peanut sauce doesn't have gluten in it -- just hoisin sauce [which contains soy sauce, which contains wheat]." That last one is a variation on this one: "If there's no wheat flour in it, there's no gluten in it." We have heard all of these ourselves, just in the last four months of cooking and eating out gluten-free, when eating at the homes of friends and families, on playdates at friends' parents' houses, and dining out at restaurants. It would be great to steer people in the right direction. That said, I appreciate absolutely every relative, friend, and waitperson who has tried to work with us during our trial of this diet.

For us, we are no longer convinced gluten is the culprit, since many of the same complaints persist in our daughter. And she had the same experience I did when she had a "gluten challenge" and we tried some white wheat flour a couple of times: no change. I now wonder about the gluten-free/casein-free diet -- our daughter eats so much dairy -- and I wonder about eggs (we'd be sad to lose them -- what a staple they are in our diet).

We don't even know if it really is our diet that is causing our child's tummyaches. We have also theorized that she has a more limited set of perceptions (a classic symptom of sensory integration disorders) of her body's signals than we have; when she says, "My tummy hurts," it could also mean different things: "I have sensation in my tummy," or even: "I have pain somewhere, but I'm thinking about my tummy because I just ate."

But I know we're better off eating this more diverse diet. I feel healthier knowing that I'm eating so many different foods, even though I don't have much direct evidence that my overall health has changed significantly (unless you compare photos of me six years ago and now -- I do think I look healthier).

Best dinner this week: Kale with bacon and balsamic vinegar, black japonica rice, fresh yeasted bread (flours: brown rice, white rice, arrowroot, potato, amaranth, coconut, sorghum, flaxseed meal, and oat flour), tomato and avocado salad. Served with toasted pine nuts, for any or all of the dishes.