gluten-free – in thriver words

Conservation Conversations

Given current prices on everyday necessities, it’s a great time for a conservation conversations. How can you stay on your required diet, eat healthy food, not exhaust yourself, and spend less money?

Let’s start with a given. It will not be easy. Fighting this fact will delay making progress and mentally exhaust you. The quicker you make peace with a need for change that may make portions of your life more difficult, the sooner you will be able to improve your circumstances and quality of life overall.

Pink round piggy bank with pennies around it on white background.

Here are a few guidelines to follow when conservation is required.

Explore things that can stay the same. This can make transitions easier. For example, instead of giving up meals at a favorite farm-to-table restaurant, reduce the frequency. Skip the iced tea or soda in favor of water.

Stop buying things you throw away. We all have things that sit in the refrigerator or pantry because we thought they were a good idea at the time, but we don’t use often enough to justify keeping them on hand. Cocoa powder, vanilla beans, saffron, lasagna noodles, and hot sauce are things I seem to think I need all the time. I don’t.

Use less. Following a low histamine diet has resulted in me recognizing how much flavor can be imparted by a smidge of tomato sauce, a spoonful of ranch dressing, or a sprinkle of parmesan cheese. Reducing the amount I’d typically add has made things tolerable for my system and saved me money as well. For what to do with leftover tomato sauce – freeze it in ice cube trays to make it go a long way. You can also share with friends or neighbors.

Rely on herbs, spices, and veggies rather than cheese. Cheese is delicious. Cheese is also expensive. You can enhance the flavor of casseroles with herbs and spices. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, and even beans can be used to add a creamy element to casseroles, soups, and one pot meals.

Add rice and/or beans. A meal will feel more substantial if you serve it with rice or beans. You can pull back on the amount of beef, pork, or chicken per person by serving bowls that include rice and/or beans.

We’ve made it through five guidelines that don’t require extra baking, sorting through sales, or organizing coupons. That may be enough to keep your budget working. If not, consider a few more:

Make more soup. Soup is delicious and filling whether it’s hot or cold. As we enjoy the farmers market, it’s a great time to use bits and pieces, leaves, and stems in soup. Fruit is best used quickly, but vegetable bits can be collected in a container in your fridge for several days before you need to cook them. Think carrot tops, beet greens, Brussels sprout leaves, chard or broccoli stems. Prep them when cleaning up after the meal in which you used the rest of the vegetable. That will leave you with a container of prepped vegetables to use in soup.

Substitute ground turkey for ground beef. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years because I prefer it, but it also makes sense for budgetary reasons. In meatloaf and burgers, I add a splash of Worcestershire sauce to beef up the flavor (see what I did there).

Make yogurt. This may sound like a big deal, but yogurt is one of the easiest things to make. You don’t need anything but milk, starter, and a place to keep it warm. I prefer to use whole milk, packaged starter, and a yogurt maker that holds jars. But you can use yogurt with live cultures as a starter and an instant pot to keep it warm. Making your own allows you to process it for 24 hours to break down all the lactose if you’re lactose intolerant. It eliminates all the added sugar of flavored yogurt, and it means your yogurt isn’t housed in plastic. Lots of bang for a minimum of prep time.

Freeze gluten-free items. Instead of buying ready-made gluten-free muffins, pancakes, waffles, or cookies, make two batches at a time and freeze one. Since 2020, the selection of prepackaged gluten-free items available in local stores has shrunk and prices have increased. This makes an occasional afternoon of baking seem like an increasingly welcome activity.

Dispose of disposables. Paper towels, paper napkins, and disposable plates all have washable alternatives. If you’re already overwhelmed with laundry or dishes, this may not be the appropriate place to cut back, but it’s an option to explore. You can also conserve by saving paper towels used to dry clean hands for later use cleaning the table or countertops.

These ten guidelines don’t eliminate but do minimize change and additional effort while reducing costs. Keep them in mind as we all deal with rising prices and are required to have conservation conversations.

Holiday Cheating

Specialized diets are especially prone to holiday cheating. Sometimes that’s because it’s hard to resist the family favorites. But too often, it’s because a restricted person doesn’t have needed support.

Prior to 2020, I viewed this as a problem. I even recognized it was significant, but I failed to understand the depth of the issue. Watching people fail to protect themselves during a pandemic in order to fit in has been an eye-opener.

It’s so easy to brush off someone else’s dietary concerns as imagined or unimportant. It’s tempting to think that just a little bite of a food they cannot eat won’t hurt them. And it requires effort to become informed, provide alternatives, and be thoughtfully inclusive. Better to just make light of their concerns and move on, right?

If you asked that of a Thanksgiving gathering as a direct question, I don’t think anyone would answer, yes. Unfortunately, when the question is unspoken, behavior toward the restricted often indicates a yes. Teasing, pressuring, making rude comments, whispering, eye-rolling or huffing when someone doesn’t take a dish are not supportive behaviors.

I understand that it’s hard to take some people seriously. My mom used to refuse chili at lunch because she was “allergic” to tomatoes and eat pizza with red sauce for dinner. Who can possibly understand that logic? And with some food intolerances, maybe you can have a little without significant damage.

This is not true for people with celiac disease. Even though they won’t die of anaphylactic shock at the table, even a little gluten can cause long-term damage. It is not reasonable to ask someone with celiac disease to just take a little bite simply because the effects are not immediately visible.

It’s also not true for people who are following certain regimens because of drug interactions, chemo, or the possibility of anaphylaxis. Everyone is entitled to privacy regarding their health. A long explanation shouldn’t be required in order for a request to be taken seriously.

Obviously, the primary burden of communicating and adhering to dietary limits falls with the person who has restrictions. It is incumbent on them to communicate clearly and consistently. Without extra effort as host, you can help them not be tempted to cheat this Thanksgiving by:

Welcoming them warmly without judgement. Assume that you don’t know the whole story.

Not treating their restrictions as a burden. Don’t worry about providing alternative food. Answer questions about ingredients graciously or save labels for them to read. Accept that their plate may be sparsely filled.

Helping redirect the conversation. Interject with a quick apology and change of subject when someone else at the table becomes pushy or inquisitive in an unfriendly fashion.

Being willing to learn more. If someone with restrictions is helping you in the kitchen, casually inquire what you would need to do differently for a dish you’re preparing to work for them. The answer could be change the whole thing, but it might be that a simple adjustment would make that dish appropriate for them next year.

Treat them as equal. Just because someone has to eat differently doesn’t mean they are less important, less deserving, or less polite. Support begins with simple gestures like these.

As your knowledge grows, you may want to provide additional layers of care. Or you don’t have to. Most of us are grateful for any level of support that makes it easier to avoid holiday cheating!

Dairy-Free Thanksgiving

Start Where You Can Today

When your child is diagnosed with a food intolerance, start where you can today.* I recently met someone at a boxed dinner event chowing down on everything in her box. She offered me part of her cookie. When I said, I’d love to eat it, but I’m gluten-free. She said, “I’m supposed to be too.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this. And when it comes to children who are picky eaters already, it can be easy to ignore the risk of long-term effects and ignore the doctor’s advice.

The problem with that approach is our children could feel so much better, avoid potential chronic disease, and excel in ways we can’t imagine. I say this as someone looking back remembering how I’d puke when running track after a certain kind of breakfast. It was embarrassing to hurl in front of my classmates.

Cutting my track career short wasn’t particularly problematic, I wasn’t that good. But I was a good swimmer who felt increasingly less motivated because I didn’t want to expose my problematic skin. This has even affected me in adult life – robbing me of the joy of being in the water as often. Yes, rash guards help, but having to do something to hide something still weighs on self-esteem and makes everything feel less care-free.

I don’t think any of us want to deliberately rob our children of the option to feel carefree. We just may not be up for the struggle we imagine it will take to get our children to change how they eat. And it can be a real struggle. I’ve seen even very young children who will refuse to eat for so long that they make themselves sick. We don’t want to make food a battlefield.

The age and personality of your child will lead you to the best approach. Observation and listening are a good first step. From that point, start where you can today and build up to the optimum diet.

So often when we get a diagnosis that requires dietary change, we feel like we’ve just been told we have to halt everything immediately and do a 180. While this is true in the case of life-threatening allergies, other conditions allow us time to get our footing and make a plan.

A simple plan can begin with serving familiar foods that naturally fit the regimen your child has been instructed to follow. This means you don’t have to alter anything immediately or announce you’re taking something away. In fact, you can eat this way for awhile before even discussing upcoming changes (depending on the age of your child).

Once you are ready to ease further into the new plan, mention to your child that they can keep eating the things like X, Y, and Z that you’ve been serving. From that point, introduce something new that’s an adaptation of a favorite or incorporates ingredients the child likes.

For example, if your child loves chocolate and needs to be gluten-free, begin the switch-over with chocolate cake, brownies, muffins, chocolate-chip cookies or pancakes. The goal is to ease into the restrictions by providing foods that feel good but are adherent to prescribed restrictions.

A diabetic child who enjoys chocolate might like strawberries dipped in lightly sweetened dark chocolate, hot chocolate lightly sweetened with honey, a brownie made with almond flour, or chocolate hummus on celery sticks.

You can incorporate your child’s best motivators – stickers, a treat, money, time alone with mom or dad, a movie, a trip to the park, a bug or dinosaur hunt – as incentives for trying new things. I just don’t like to begin with, or wholly rely on, incentives because it feels too much like bribery and as though I’m not confident the new foods I’m offering taste good.

That’s not the impression I want to create, and I’d like the changes to feel like an organic extension of what the kids already enjoy. But I’ll be the first to say, if it works, it works. You know your child better than I do.

Another consideration when making dietary changes is the altering of routine. Routines can be comforting. That includes meal times, locations, and menus. When there’s a way, I like to keep as much as possible the same until everyone is comfortable with the changes.

At my house, lunch and dinner are both variable, so I start by slowly introducing new foods into one of those meals before moving on to the other two. This lessens the shock of change.

Once everyone is feeling comfortable, it can be fun to have a contest among siblings to see who is the bravest and will try the most new things. If you’re worried no one will participate, imagine what would happen if you put a new kind of packaged sugary snack in front of them. You’d probably get at least one taker, right?

Even if they don’t end up liking the new snack, they’re willing to try it because they’ve had a good experience with something similar before. Building slowly to this point with new foods will build the same kind of foundation for comfort in trying new things at home.

It can be hard to stick to a plan, so committing in advance to a certain length of time for implementation may be helpful. Once you embark, you may discover that the timetable can be accelerated or may need to slow down. But don’t overwhelm yourself with the big picture at first.

Getting started is the key. Instead of worrying too much about what you’ll do tomorrow, start where you can today.

Keep the Costs Down

With expenses rising, how can you keep the costs down on a specialized diet? It’s a question we’re all having to answer. All food costs more right now. It doesn’t matter whether you cook at home or eat out – everything is more expensive than it was a couple of years ago. And that’s on top of higher gas prices and increased shipping costs that are driving up prices on other items. The trip from feeling comfortable to feeling pinched can be a short one.

Having a plan can help remove some of the stress from the necessity of adjusting the budget. And to keep stress as low as possible, that plan must stem a realistic analysis of yourself, your obligations, family dynamics, finances, and time available. What fits well for one family will not work for another.

How can you get started making a realistic plan?

Here are some steps to take. Use them in any order that fits your situation.

Review your budget. If you do not have one, take a look at how much you’ve spent on food in the past 3 months. If you already know the past three months were over budget, go back to a 3 month period in 2020 or 2021. Use this as a rough guide for future budgeting.

I don’t really use budgets, but I have a sort of running idea of how much I spend per week/month on groceries. This is easy to keep up with ordering online. I can simply go to past purchases in my accounts and see what I spend.

If you’d like additional automated help, consider a service like Imperfect Foods, Misfits Market, or Hungry Harvest. Imperfect Foods allows an “always include” list. You can add to or take away items during the shopping window, but each order will begin with a list of foods you’ve specified. This makes it easy to hit a predetermined price range. It also saves time.

Assess your priorities. Within your specialized diet, there will be many ways to be compliant. What is most important? Fresh food, convenience, patronizing restaurants, budget, quality of food, time management, being able to include favorites. Make a list that includes any significant priority. Number them in order of most to least important. Let this guide your plan.

Explore options. My priorities include fresh food and having something I can grab in a pinch available at all times. That means that my ideal plan should include time to bake or prepare food that I can store in the freezer for quick, easy use later. This might mean making and freezing biscuits, muffins, waffles, soup, and baked chicken breasts. It could also mean making one pot meals that will last a few days without creating lots of dirty dishes. Or it could mean that I splurge on steak because it’s quick to cook and cheaper than restaurant food.

Because I enjoy the physical benefits of gardening – fresh air, sunshine, playing in dirt, bending and stretching, I reduce my vegetable costs by growing some of them. And you simply can’t get anything fresher or tastier.

One blackberry bush can produce enough berries to save me about $100 per year. Of course that amount may vary due to weather conditions and whether I am a consistent harvester. But planting a raspberry bush alongside it will double the savings. And growing fresh herbs in pots can quadruple the amount of savings in my pocket. Even if you don’t have much space, growing one pepper plant in a pot can make a difference if you eat a lot of peppers.

If you love baking, consider buying gluten-free flour in larger quantities from online sources or warehouse clubs.

If you’re looking for convenience baked goods, consider buying direct from the brand’s website. When I order, I buy enough to get free shipping and freeze many of the items on arrival.

One site I use is Katz® Gluten Free. They offer flash sales and other specials. Katz also allows you to sort by gluten-free; gluten & dairy-free; gluten & corn-free; gluten & egg-free/vegan; gluten & rice-free; gluten & soy free; gluten & sugar-free. They have some mini-donuts that are completely grain free. I like that the site is robust and customer friendly and the sales allow me to purchase items when they’re most affordable.

Be Realistic. Even though I may prioritize fresh food, there are periods of time when baking and freezing or cooking 100% of each meal simply won’t happen. Family obligations and work projects sometimes dovetail into too much to do in a given amount of time. That means I need to rely on the closest I can get to my priorities for a period of time. I allow for these times in my overall plan by researching prepared foods that I can purchase online in bulk and place in the freezer. Anticipating and allowing for a few periods of up front allows me to keep myself on track.

Know yourself. I am not a coupon shopper unless there’s a coupon that shows up on the item when I click to order it. If a code comes via email, it’s out of sight, out of mind. If a physical mailer comes via snail mail, I will file it so I can find it and still never think to look in the file before I make a purchase.

My haphazard coupon use means I know not to rely on coupons to keep costs down. It’s not a realistic strategy for me. I don’t feel bad about that. A lot of managing finances comes down to managing to your strengths.

Whether you’re like me and keep a rough budget in your head, have a strict written budget, or fly by the seat of your pants, you’re sure to see a difference in the prices you’re paying for food. Developing a plan now can help you navigate what’s to come with less stress.

Review your budget, assess priorities, explore options, be realistic, know yourself and keep the costs down without giving up your specialized diet.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”