Of Stupid Dogs and Headaches

Today, I had a Headache. It was not quite a migraine, as it responded to the Alieve that I took, but still worthy of a capital H.

You know those Headaches: they're the ones that color the rest of the events of your day. It's never a pleasant color either, nothing sweet like "Prince Purple" or "Periwinkle" or "Puce". No, it's more like "Parsnip" or "Puke". Yup.

Where was I?

Oh, yes, my dog puked on the floor today. Twice. Because she's dumb. Not sick, just stupid. Apparently she chewed on a bone until it splintered, then ate the splinters, then ate a pine tree branch, then ate a few rocks (maybe she thought she was a chicken?). How do I know this? Because my canine mulch making machine left me a pile of it. Twice.

I love my stupid, stick eating dog Bill. She's the best.

So where was I?

Oh, yes. So when your dogs are dumb and irritating, AND you've a Headache, AND the garbage men refuse to change their schedules to match your Headache's whims, life is blech-y. Tomorrow is garbage day, and the tree must go. I have a Headache. Jim (ever-loving husband, for you new readers - welcome!) has a Headache and a half. The tree must go.

So.... we pile the ornaments in a sheet to contain the glitter, bundle it up, and put them in a chair. We detatch the tree stand and take the tree outside to remove the lights. We unwind maybe a third of one strand, look at each other, and I say, "You know, we could always buy new lights next year...." (I couldn't believe I said it. Me! The queen of don't throw that away! I can use it for ... uh ... something!)

"No! We just bought these."

"Ok. Well, here, unwind some more."

We try. The cord gets stuck. He pulls. I pull. We figure out it's wrapped on a branch somewhere, but we're both wearing gloves because the tree is so darn dry and pokey, and we can't figure it out. Our eyes meet over the tree again. "You know..." he starts.

"Yeah," I said.

We took the tree to the curb. I sheepishly tried to tuck some of the lights back in so maybe the garbage guys won't notice tomorrow that the lights are still there.

--sigh-- I need another Alieve.

A Celiac Christmas - The End

Thanks to everyone who was so supportive - especially my kids; my amazing husband who didn't bat an eye when I ate a cookie, cried because it was bad, and then ate another cookie; and my moms and dads - during this first holiday adventure with Celiac Disease lurking behind me like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

I gained much knowledge. I dealt with my losses. I made new blog contacts. All in all, a good season.

Some things that I gained:

• The knowledge that brown rice flour makes cookies gritty
• Excitement that cream cheese cookies and holly cookies are still good without gluten
• Encouragement
• Support
• A chance to spread knowledge
• Health and energy
• New traditions and foods
• A box of microwave popcorn that my mom forgot to take home with her. (Thanks, mom!)
• A chance to recreate an old favorite with new flours (I'll let you know how the honey oatmeal bread turns out, Aunt Syl!)
  

Some things that I lost:

• A favorite recipe or two
• Pre-suppositions on what has to be
  
• The fun of beater-licking and taste-testing
• My fear of standing out because of food
• Momentarily and at different times: My temper, my sense of humor, and my composure (Yes, I am emotionally attached to my cookies)
  
• A sock

New blog contacts:

• Ginger Lemon Girl
• Mama Kat's new blog: Allergies Shmallergies
• Gluten Free in Baltimore
  
• ...sez Mark (not a GF blogger, but a good writer and a nice guy who leaves funny comments on my posts. And no, I'm not in the least bit INCREDIBLY jealous that he nearly won Rachelle's haiku contest, got mentioned twice, and I didn't even get mentioned AT ALL. Ok, I am, but I'm still proud of him. Go Mark!)
  

I'm dreaming of a White Random-Day-In-January

There was no White Christmas to be found in my corner of VA this year. We did have sunny warm weather and mild breezes. We turned off the heat and opened the doors and windows. At one point this week it was 70-ish. It was really quite nice. On Sunday, we didn't even wear jackets to church!

It's hard to ask for a White Christmas when the weather's so nice at 2 AM on Christmas morning that you're outside, barefoot, in your jammies. That was beautiful.

We had a wonderful gf feast this year, too.
Standing rib roast (aka prime rib) with a red wine marinade/ au jus sauce
Mashed potatoes
Green beans
Ceasar salad
Bread (regular stuff for everyone else)
Cookies (gf and regular)

Yummy, yummy tasty goodness. We lit candles, got down the fine china, and sat down to a sumptuous feast in the comfort of our jammies. The nice thing about staying home for Christmas was that no one minded!

Hope you all are having a fun Christmas with your family, too. Onward now to our White Random-Day-In-January! Hopefully the long-range forecast is right!

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas...

I grew up in Michigan, right abooouut... here! (points to middle of hand) and we used to get loads of snow! Oodles of snow! Snow like you've never seen!

(That ought to get a good corrective comment from my mom! teehee)

Well, there is this one picture I've seen of tiny me on grandma and grandpa's sidewalk between two walls of snow several feet deep. And once, there was a blizzard: 20" of snow. And I remember sledding, and snow on Halloween, and waking up to find that three inches was not enough to close school. I love snow. More than I love peeps!

Then I moved away...

1. I lived in Florida: no snow.
2. I lived in Missouri: just ice. (whee!)
3. I lived in Seattle: the Emerald city. (well, there was that one freak snowstorm during the 3 years we lived there)
4. I live in Virginia now: totally unpredictable.

In 06-07, we had a forecast for 1/4" of ice. We got this:

Yup, that's 7" of ice and snow that we woke up to. Some 1/4", huh?

We had no school for 3 days-ish.

The kids built these to show the three developmental stages of the snowman. (Yes, they're weird, and yes, I'm proud of it.)

The 07-08 school year came and went without a single snow day or snow photo to show for it. We did have one day of snow: it started around 10 and was done by 2. And melted by 2. No frolicking was to be found. I don't know who was more sad: me or my (high school) students! You never saw so many pouty faces as on that day!

Now, it's 08-09 and time for more snow. Everybody says so. It's supposed to be a real good year for it. It even snowed in November! Twice! (maybe thrice! depends on who you talk to.) And here is our exciting December snow to date:

yup.

On the bright side, there's snow and ice just 50 miles away right now, so keep hoping! Wear your jammies inside out, flush some cubes, and do your favorite snow dance in our honor!

I'm hoping and dreaming for that most joyous of joys: the white Christmas.

An open letter to the manufacturers of Peeps brand treats

Dear Just Born, Inc.:

WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!
(ahem, excuse me)


I was so super excited when, trolling through Target, I came across these pink speckled, peppermint Peeps. I love Peeps! I love peppermint! I love Christmas stars! I love treats that are gluten-free! I love marshmallows!

I hate these.

And by hate, I mean: (plug your ears, kids) these are the stupidest excuse for a candy since the candy cigarette, which at the very least tasted good.

"Mmm! Here, honey, have a Listerine breath-strip flavored candy star!" Bleagh.

I made myself eat a whole one. I thought, These can't be bad! After all, I love Peeps! I love peppermint! I love Christmas stars! I love treats that are gluten-free! I love marshmallows! These just can't be bad! But, bite after bite, they were bad. And then, I got a real, super minty bite. And gagged on it. I would like to take this moment to point out that I have no gag reflex. None! It astounded the doctors when I was little (ask my mom!). These candies made me gag.

Then I thought, Maybe it's just me. My daughter loves peppermint candies. I'll give her one. So I did. She spit it out in the trash and ran for a drink of water. I kid you not, RAN.

Then I thought, Maybe it's just us. They're Peeps after all, and I love Peeps! I love love love Peeps! They can't be bad. So I gave one to my son. My sugar-craving, 9-year-old, I-don't-care-if-it-fell-on-the-floor-and-got-licked-by-the-dog-it's-still-candy-and-I-want-it! son.

He took a bite.
We waited.
He rolled it around on his tongue.
We waited.
He took a second bite.
We waited.

"Well!?!" we screamed.

"These are really bad," he said, and took another bite. "They kinda remind me of those little plastic things you eat to make your breath smell better."

I give up. If she won't eat them, and even he thinks they're like those breath strips, it's not just me.

BUT!!!! Please, Just Born, don't give up on the peppermint Peeps! I love Peeps! I will faithfully buy all types of Peeps except these horrible monstrosities that you have created. I'm sure it was by accident. I'm sure you've fired those responsible. I'm sure any day now that you'll issue a recall and then I will be glad that I just can't seem to bring myself to throw them out. I'm sure you'll do better next year. Right? Right!?

I am so, so disappointed in you.

Your faithful Peep lover extraordinaire,
Mikki

Christmas with Celiac #7 - The Christmas Party

I love my friends. I have really really great friends. I am now going to talk about my friends. Remember, I love my friends.



I went to my first Christmas party last weekend. We had food, there was music, we did the white elephant exchange game, we had food, we made fun of each other, there was this great punch, and did I mention the food? I love food. I shamelessly ate most of the shrimp. Twice.

What's great: I had plenty to eat. What's not great: There were three tables of food, and only five things I could eat:

A cream cheese and cranberry cookie topping, sans cookie (foreground)
A bowl of kisses and Snickers (background)

A chicken salad for sandwiches, sans sandwich (foreground)
Some tasty shrimp (not pictured)

and the stuff I brought: yogurt and granola

I didn't take a picture of the third table: it was just baked goods. It was pretty easy to pick out what I could eat; I only had to ask for ingredients on a few things. I ended up with a nice plateful of food, and was very happy with it. Sure I wanted to eat everything else, too, but like I said, I shamelessly loaded up on the shrimp! (Twice!)

Note to self: yogurt on a plate does not photograph well! (Sorry 'bout that!)

The hardest part of the night was listening to the comments people made when (a) they saw what I brought or (b) I asked for ingredients. Here are some of the things I overheard:

• Yogurt? Yeah, it's Christmas! Let's eat healthy! (sarcastic laugh)
• Man, I would hate to have to figure out what I couldn't eat.
• Who brings yogurt to a party?
• What a pain. I'm glad I don't have any food restrictions!

None of these comments were directed at me. When I asked for ingredients, the lists were happily given, but you know how you always chatter when you're at a buffet? No one talked to me this time. So, I felt uncomfortable, and conspicuous. So I waited until everyone was done, just stayed out of the way, and then got my food and went and sat down.

It was weird. (Don't forget - I love my friends!)

Once I was seated with my plate, it was totally normal, sorta. It helped that I sat with close friends, ones who know that I can't eat the yummy gluten-filled holiday goodies, but we still ended up talking about it.

I felt defined by the food missing from my plate.

It was weird.

The party was fun. I got brass candlesticks. I ate a pile of shrimp and yogurt. (Not at the same time! Ew) I hung out with my buddies. I took home my yogurt and granola and ate it every day for lunch this week. And thought about Christmas. I love Christmas. And I love my friends.

Christmas with Celiac #6 - Cream Cheese Cookies

One of the few cookies that we're committed to each year at Christmas is the cream cheese cookie. This is Jim's favorite and SUPER easy to make.

All I did to make this a GF recipe was to substitute a GF cake mix for the regular cake mix. Ta-da!

The cookie ingredients:
1/2 stick butter, softened
1 pkg (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
1 egg yolk
1/4 t. vanilla extract
1 box yellow cake mix

The icing ingredients:
Powdered sugar
Ice water

The process:
1. Cream together butter and cream cheese
2. Add egg yolk and vanilla, mix well
3. Add cake mix, about 1/3 of the mix at a time to help with mixing
4. Chill for 1 hour or so
5. Bake 10-12 minutes at 375
6. Cool and ice

Tips:
If you don't have a heavy duty mixer, you'll end up struggling to mix by hand - it's a dense dough. I often lay the dough and last of the cake mix in a big sheet of plastic wrap and knead the final bit of mix in by hand instead of trying to stir.

Keep the icing a little thick. You want it to be thick enough to stay on top of the cookie, but thin enough to drizzle a little bit. Play with it if you're unfamiliar: if it all drips/runs off the cookie right away, it's too thin.

You shouldn't be able to see through it after it settles/hardens. Add sugar or sprinkles if you like.


Cookies will fluff a little as they bake, but won't really change shape. You'll pretty much get out of the oven what you put in. I did notice that the GF batch was a little spikier...


...while the regular batch was a little smoother in appearance.



Happy baking!

Merry SITSmas!

Merry SITSmas to all of my sisters at The Secret is in the Sauce!
I hope you have a fabulous holiday season.

A season filled with family.

A season filled with wonder.

A season filled with silliness.

A season filled with fun.

A season filled with fuzzy friends.


But most of all a season filled with love.

Merry Christmas!

The Traditional Lack of Tradition

In my family, we don't like to do things just because. We like to try new things. So, from one holiday to the next, there's no guarantee what we'll be doing or where or with whom. This makes for some fun times and some funny times.

For example:
Last Christmas, we decided to try out the Disney Christmas experience. As Christmas Day rolled around, we were with the mouse himself! It was a long, fun day. This picture was taken shortly after midnight.
On the other hand, last year for St. Patrick's day, the kids decided the world was not green enough, and they got into the food coloring while making dinner. We ended up with green mashed potatoes and green milk. Trust me on this one: you do NOT want to see the picture.

[no picture - you're welcome]

So, in keeping with our non-traditional tradition, this year we decided to hunt down a tree farm and go cut our own Christmas tree. It was so much fun wandering around the tidy little forest. For the most part, the tree types were intermingled, and so it was easy to compare the different variations.
There were clumps of all one kind of tree here and there, and we ended up in one of these because we were looking for a different type of tree: one we couldn't find on a tree lot at home.

These are blue ice trees. They're super fragrant and pretty nifty looking, too. In this picture, we're just starting to try to decide which one we want. See the tall tree behind Jim? That's the one!

We took turns with the saw, but Jimmy got to finish off the final cuts.

And here are my proud little tree hunters.

The tree is home and up in the family room. Right now it only has white lights on it, and because of the way the branches grow, as you move around, it makes the lights look like they're twinkling. Check it out:

We're going to decorate it in silver so that it looks like an ice tree. I'll put up more photos later.

Merry Christmas!

(PS. If you go to my Facebook page, you can see all the pictures from yesterday's experience.)

Christmas with CD #5 - PIE!

Today was pie day.

I looked at a bunch of recipes and finally settled on one that was not too complicated, but seemed promising.

I made a pumpkin pie with half of the recipe and I am planning to make cranberry pecan tassies with the other half, tomorrow probably.

The pie turned out super yummy, and I liked the crust, too. So did the kids and my mother-in-law. Pumpkin pie is her favorite, so I am encouraged.

Jim, my husband did not try it. He hates pumpkin. Perhaps next time. :)


I found the recipe through a link at celiac.com, and could probably find it again for you if you want the original link, but here's the ingredient list.

1 C tapioca flour
1 C white rice flour
1 t xanthan gum
1 T powdered milk
6 T butter (or cream cheese)
6 T shortening
1/3 C water

Step one. Mix dry ingredients
Step two. Cut in butter and shortening
Step three. Add water and mix so dough forms a large ball
Step four. Divide in half
Step five. Place each half between two sheets of plastic wrap and roll out to 8-9in pie crust

Bake as needed based on your filling.


A few notes:
- The dough is super white. Surprisingly so.
- The crust is also very forgiving. If you need to form it with your hands once in the pie plate, you can do it with no problem.
- The edges will probably burn so have tin foil or a protective crust ring on hand.

Christmas with CD#3 - The trials begin

Before I could do anything, I had to shop and setup a prep area. As I don't have a lot of space, but I DO have a Costco membership, the results were a bit, um, overwhelming.

This is what happens when I wander Costco with baking on my mind...

And here is my prep area.

Had to have Christmas tunes, too, of course!

Once prepared, I made regular oatmeal raisin cookies to bribe my taste testers! (just in case!)


Ready to go! I have started with something simple: peanut butter. It's really hard to make a bad peanut butter cookie.

Cookie #1 was a flourless PB cookie. It's something I'd never heard of before, but apparently it's fairly popular. They turned out crisp and tasty. The recipe I used is at Lea's Gluten Free Blog. I made them without the chocolate chips that you see in her picture, and I flattened them with a fork first, too.
Yummy and delicious, but I wanted kiss cookies, so I dug out another recipe. One that uses flour.



Cookie #2 uses a combination of GF flours, and I found it at Recipe Zaar.

This is a very good cookie. It's not terribly soft, though. Once it cools, it's crisp like cookie#1, but it still has a great taste. A couple of tips for this recipe:
1. Below the recipe (follow the link above) you'll find some substitution comments and suggestions.
2. You may find it helpful to chill the dough for a few minutes so that it's a little more workable.
3. Make the dough balls much smaller than you would think you need for the kiss cookies. Otherwise you may end up with the oddly proportioned results you see on the right in the picture below!

The dough ball in the picture below is the size I used for the cookie on the left above. It's about 1", maybe a little smaller

4. Let the cookies set on the sheet. If you remove them too soon, it won't work well.

Overall, Saturday was a pretty good cookie-making day. Up next: pie crusts!

Christmas with CD #2

Guess what?! My ever-fabulous hubby has found me a good resource for cookie-ing. (I don't think that's a word....)

Here it is! http://gingerlemongirl.blogspot.com/2007/12/2007-gluten-free-christmas-cookie.html

I am very excited. I've already started a (mini)batch of peanut butter cookies, and he's agreed to be my guinea pig. I'm going to try to find some good recipe substitutions, too, so that I can keep making my favorites and not have to find ALL new recipes.

To the oven! AWAAAAAAY!

Christmas with celiac disease #1

I love tag. I've always loved tag. In fact, I was rather excited to get tagged again since I missed out on the first one. (Sorry, Mom!)

BUT

I was about to start a new train of thought on thishere blog. So, take 2, here we go.

Christmas is coming. I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Christmas. But I have been worried lately about how I will deal with Christmas and family dinners and hors d'ouvers and especially how I will deal with Christmas cookies.

If you don't know me, you need to realize that Christmas cookies are the BEST part of the whole year. No exaggeration there...we even have special aprons that we wear once a year when we bake. It's a 2 week operation at least, from planning to shopping to baking to feasting to gifting. Let me tell you something. When I realized that I could no longer have Christmas cookies, I put my head down on the table and cried. (It was at work, and my friend who mentioned them felt really bad. Sorry again, Sam! I luv u! I'm coming to your cookie party anyway!)

I have decided that there is no reason to give up on the tradition of the past years. I will still make my family's favorite cookies, and my personal mission for this year is to find good ways to make MY favorites gluten-free.

So, if you're out there reading this and you have tips, tricks, or recipes to share, please do so! And, have a very merry Christmas.