Everything will always be alright (when we go shopping)
My first few forays to the grocery store after finding out about the Coeliac disease took twice as long as usual. I assumed, correctly, that I would become one of those shoppers who reads the ingredients list on everything but I can’t discourage this habit. It did take me a few months before I was seriously vigilant, almost aggressively so with myself, but I realized the only way I would find out how much I can tolerate is to cut out the gluten altogether. That way, if I were to accidentally slip up, I could more easily trace the culprit.
The obvious things like bread, pasta, beer, I cut out almost immediately. Substitutes are certainly readily available and I have since found some gluten-free favourites, as well as some blasphemous attempts at alternatives.
There are so many things that I initially took for granted, never thinking for a moment that they could contain gluten. An alarming proportion of food, both fresh and non-perishable, use wheat flour as seasoning, binding agents, or preservatives.
Like soy sauce.
We were in the habit of regularly making stir-fry and sauces with soy sauce at home, not to mention eating Chinese take-away or sushi on the run at least once a week, and it was at least 6 months before I stopped to read the label on our soy sauce bottle. Bam. Wheat preservatives. I was so unbelievably angry with myself for overlooking that one and I was, once again, angry at the injustice of being deprived of even more of my favourite foods.
TAMARI SOY SAUCE, I was to discover, is a gluten-free alternative to your regular run-of-the-mill soy sauce. With no wheat, it simply has higher concentrations of soy beans, though the brand I use doesn’t taste quite as strong or salty but is still a perfectly acceptable substitute. They say the recipe for Tamari soy sauce is actually closest to the original Chinese soy sauce recipe introduced in Japan. While eating out is still something to be wary about, at least I could be certain I was safe at home.
I’m convinced adding breadcrumbs to hamburgers and sausages is just a way for the manufacturers to save money as opposed to doing anything structurally beneficial to the meat. With the exception of Tesco Finest Pork and Chive sausages, the labels on every one of their other packaged sausages flag up the presence of gluten/wheat. Whether the Chive ones were actually made without breadcrumbs, I’m not sure but one day when they were out of stock and I was having a little sulk in the chilled meat section, I took a few steps further down the aisle and my most favourite discovery yet showed its pretty little face (in part because its packaging decidedly stands out).
Enter HECK SAUSAGES. Farmer’s quality sausages from a UK-family run business, with a lovely ‘Gluten Free’ proclamation on their cheerily bold and colourful packing. The good part? When on sale, these babies cost the same as Tesco Finest sausages; a rare occurrence in which a gluten-free option doesn’t cost more than a glutened alternative. The best part? They taste infinitely better than any pre-packaged grocery-store sausages I’ve ever had. Paul agrees. They are heavenly plump with hardly any grease and/or fat oozing out during the cooking process, come in a variety of flavours, and the company operates by ethical and fair production standards. Heck sausages are the one gluten-free food I’ve tried that I happily recommend to even non-Coeliacs.
So life is feeling a bit more normal. I have soy sauce, I have sausages. Anything fresh in the way of fruits and vegetables are obviously fine. The next step was finding a great substitute for pasta and bread. I’m still waiting on the latter. Pasta, sigh, will never hold the same appeal to me. I’ve tried pasta made with rice flour and corn flour. I can say most of the corn flour options I’ve tried tend to fall apart during the boiling process. I like my pasta al dente but no gluten means that elasticity is greatly reduced, making it is slightly more difficult to assemble things like cannelloni or lasagna, and a lot of things effectively wind up having the texture of cardboard. That being said, some of products made with rice and/or potato flour turn out just fine and if enough love is put into the seasoning, I’m a happy camper.
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