‘Beyond gluten free’ and other woes, and the life-saving solution!

Feeding my large family is always well, interesting, but it got so much more…erm…challenging after Elliana’s Celiacs diagnosis. Oh my word, that first grocery bill afterwards! I still shudder when I think about it. I realized very quickly what a friend of mine meant went she said “we eat beyond gluten free”, echoing Joel Salatin’s “beyond organic” quip. If you buy the gluten free counterparts to your normal processed food (like macaroni and cheese), you will pay double and triple what it usually costs, and don’t even get me started on gluten free “bread” that runs $6-8 dollars a loaf and tastes like, well, cardboard. Over half of the things we bought her that first month she never ate because it tasted so bad.

Then we tried to have two separate cooking areas and cooking her meals separately from ours. This never worked properly. Up until recently, she was extremely sensitive to cross-contamination. For her, cross-contamination meant at least twenty four hours of severe gastrointestinal upset and high fever for three or four days. It was not. fun. For her or for us. It also felt doubly expensive to me, and much of her food would sit in the refrigerator until it was eventually thrown away because she was only one small kiddo with a near toddler sized stomach and never could fully eat even the single sort of portions we’d make for her.

The only option left, as my friend gently and teasingly tried to tell me, was for us all to eat gluten free from scratch. We figured that out about oh, month two.

It’s taken me FOUR years to finally get a handle on it. Our grocery budget has been all over the place over the intervening years. I’ve tried all sorts of gluten-free and vegan cookbooks (vegan/vegetarian cookbooks are often easy to make gluten free). It’s been a mess. What’s also been a struggle for us, too? The unpredictability of our schedule. I always meal plan and shop for the week (our finances would never survive without it), but there have been times that a whole week’s worth of food rots in the refrigerator because someone has been admitted or something else unexpected and without James or I available, the meals planned can’t be made. It was always one thing when we knew that something was coming up- there would always be caregiver friendly meals on the plan- frozen, crockpot, simple type things. I swear, though, that seemed to happen only one time out of five. It has been a formidable thorn-in-my-side for years now.

On one such occasion sometime in January of this year…an ER visit, if I’m not mistaken…a nurse heard me bemoaning this very aspect. I can’t remember if I was on the phone with someone or if I was speaking to my husband as she came in or out but the bottom line is, she said that she overheard me talking about the whole gluten free, kids, meal-planning thing, and “had I ever heard of Trim Healthy Mama?” She said, their “plan” aside, the cookbooks were chock full of kid friendly gluten free (or almost gluten free) recipes “and a lot of them can be frozen ahead of time”.

Y’all, I wish I had her name. I could literally kiss her and name my first grandkid after her. It has been a tremendous life saver, and we are finally on track in both meal prep and planning and our grocery budget. Actual predictability? Sanity? What is this rare bird of which you speak? <weak grin>

We have yet to hit a THM recipe that my kids have hated. Do you have any idea how impossible this is? Do you know how many ‘gluten free’ meals I’ve made from recipes over the years have sat poked at and barely eaten and some we’ve just given up and thrown away because none of us could stomach them? It’s like angels are singing somewhere, seriously. We also choose to eat vegetarian due to religious reasons during parts of the year, and it was, quite literally, something that would leave me in tears trying to deal with and plan for. For something that was supposed to reduce distractions, it was a profound distraction. Not anymore. Glory!

Obviously, we started using the THM recipes just for survivals sake, not worrying what it was (E, S, FP, or XO)- I didn’t even look at that! We just wanted good food that didn’t cost an arm and a leg and was relatively easy to make. I have ever so slowly been transitioning my family “on plan” since about half of us have some weight issues we need to deal with, and I’ve found it very doable. That being said, I noticed right out of the gate using those recipes just for dinner that it started making a change in my kiddos. They were fuller, happier, and calmer, and some health issues started to shift. And that was one meal a day. It will be interesting to check in again in another six months to see what we think with us eating on plan. The best part, though, is Elliana. She loves the food- she eats seconds and thirds and fourths sometimes, a miracle I never thought I’d see. She gets ‘bread’ that she likes. (We like it too.) My child is eating! Can I put it in all caps? MY CHILD IS EATING.

Most of the meals can be made and frozen ahead of time. We take an afternoon one Saturday a month and have at it. No more grabbing food on the go, no more caregivers being caught in a lurch, it’s already there, easy to pull out when it gets all harum-scarum. Cue angels singing again.

Our favorite book, of course, is the Trim Healthy Table that came out just over the last year. It is especially geared to families. The Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook is good too (and it has some single-serving recipes that might be helpful if it’s just one person), but it doesn’t seem to have as many kid-flavor friendly recipes, so if you’re debating with kids in mind, go with Trim Healthy Table first. I recently checked out the actual Trim Healthy Mama Plan book from the library, and I’m learning tons. My favorite online sources for help? Breezy Brookshire’s mom, MamaShire, and Briana Thomas. I have a crazy artist crush on Breezy, but that’s a story for another day. If you have diet/allergy meal issues, I can’t recommend these cookbooks enough. They’ve already done all of the hard work for you, and it’s one less thing you have to puzzle over. Whether or not you ever use ‘the plan’ itself, they are worth every penny.