Gluten Blog

Potato salad is a great side that is pretty cheap to make and still hearty.  While the recipe is high in fat, the crispy veggies help provide a nice boost of vitamins C and B6.  Of course, this recipe is gluten free and budget conscious!  Now, making the potato salad is a little bit involved, but once you fix up a batch it will stay good for a while and provide a convenient side for any meat dish.  A little bit of beef or tuna salad makes a great meal.

Ingredients

• 6 medium Potatoes
• 6 large Eggs
• 1/3 of an Onion
• 3 large Celery Stalks
• 1 tbsp Sugar
• 1-2 tbsp Spicy Mustard
• 1-2 tbsp Dill Relish
• 1-2 dash black pepper

Cooking

Boil or bake the potatoes inside the skin.  Cook them for about an hour, and be sure to remove them from heat before they’re completely soft (if you boil them too long, you’re going to end up with mashed potato salad.)  Set them aside to cool and don’t worry about seasoning them.

Hard boil the eggs.  Place eggs into cold water and pour in a little vinegar.  Heat up the water slowly to a boil, then cut the heat when it starts to really bubble.  After a few minutes, transfer the eggs back in to some other container of cold water to cool down.

Chop up the onion & celery as finely as possible.  These add a lot of flavor and crunch to the dish but big chunks can be distracting and unpleasant.

Chop up the potato and egg.  Peeling the egg shells is the worst step, so be patient (or share your tips if you know a better way of doing this).  Then, just chop up the eggs and potatoes into smaller than bite-sized pieces.

Make the Dressing

Mix about 3 heaping tablespoons of mayonaise, a tiny bit of sugar, about one large spoon of mustard, and a big spoon or two of dill relish (every time I make this dish I add a little more relish than the last time).  Drop a bit of salt and pepper in, but not too much!  The mustard will provide most of the spice and the celery is naturally salty.  I wouldn’t personally add more salt, but a dash or two of black pepper can add a bit of kick.  Mix in the celery and onions into the dressing.

Then, just mix the dressing into the potato and eggs!  Don’t stir too vigorously, or, as I mentioned, you’ll end up with mashed potatoes.

The final step is to pop it in the fridge and take a break while it all cools down to a consistent chill.  This recipe makes a whole lot of salad, so be sure you’ve got some help eating it all!  It makes a great side for barbeques and picnics, or it can be a nice snack any time you want a cool bite to eat.

Cost

The biggest cost is the time you spend in preparation.  Otherwise, the recipe is cheap:

• 6 potato ~ $2
• 6 egg ~ $.60
• Mayo ~ $.60
• Relish ~$.20
• Mustard ~$.20
• Celery ~ $.50
• Onion ~ $.50

$5 may sound like a lot for a side dish, but this recipe is loaded with calories and it will go a long way.  I didn’t have relish or mustard on hand, but WalMart has bottles of each for just $1 a piece and the recipe will leave you with plenty of leftovers for the next kitchen adventure.

If you’re cooking for yourself, you might want to cut the ingredients in half unless you really like the potatoes as much as I do!

I’ve got some pictures of some gluten-free food I’ve been cooking, but I’m experiencing technical issues with the camera and our home computer network!  I’d like to get these photos online so you can see how terrible food can look despite being delicious.  🙂

My girlfriend is particularly finicky about food and she’s an artist so she loves to make visual judgments about a new dish.  (Eww that looks disgusting.)

Luckily, I’ve gotten enough trust from good tasting dishes so that she’ll actually give it a try now.  Hopefully, I can figure out how to get these pictures online and published – and hopefully, the look of the food won’t scare you away from trying some of my favorite gluten-free recipes!

I don’t even know when it hit, but without fail I started feeling the effects of gluten soon after leaving town for the holidays.  Maybe it was some of the snacks I ate on the way, maybe it was kitchen cross-contamination or traces of wheat in something that seemed innocent and gluten-free.  Whatever it was, I ended up sleeping most of Christmas and now I’m still in the phase where the itch is crawling all over my skin.

And its not just getting sick that makes holidays and travel difficult, there was also this odd sense of being incredibly hungry while being surrounded by the most delicious food.  Oh I’d love some of that meal you’ve cooked up – but I really shouldn’t. Pies, cakes, cookies?  You can’t just hop in the car to Walmart to get a gluten-free version (Publix near here does have some great gluten-free cookies, though they’re incredibly expensive.)

Here’s another unique dilemma faced by the gluten-intolerant at Christmas:  gifts containing gluten!  I mean, of course I like chocolate, but not the kind with barely malt in it 🙁

Families tries to accomodate and I love them for it, but I can barely keep track of my own ingredients and kitchen space when I’ve got such a huge incentive to do so.  I think next year, I’m bringing some gf brownies…

I guess living gluten-free has kind of become a routine.  I think of it less often then I did when I first started, and I think that is partially because I know what I can eat and I have more time to cook whole foods & mess around with recipes at home.

The last meal that made me pretty excited was some rice penne pasta that I prepared like a baked ziti.  I swear, if the pasta was just a little more bread-like it would have been just like a deep dish pizza.  I’ve done the fried chicken thing a few times but mostly its been a lot of dried beans & rice since the price of well, everything is through the roof.

BTW the baked penne was about $8 for ~6000 calories.  Not exactly a great deal, especially since I managed to eat the first pan in just over a day.  It definitely hit the spot!  Hopefully in the next few days I’ll post the exact recipe & some pictures I got before I devoured the meal I expected to last me half a week.  I need to figure out how this camera works, its got my pictures and it won’t give them up!

Global wheat and rye prices have been doubling on an annual basis for the last few quarters, and U.S. exports of wheat and other gluten grains has shot up to all-time records. The price of food going up generally isn’t a good thing – but for Celiac sufferers, the fact that gluten-free substitutes are rising in price more slowly means that more and more U.S. food producers are likely to use the cheaper and naturally gluten-free alternatives.

I’ve seen a few brands and stores trending toward this already: Wal-mart and Publix each offer generic brand choices for their products and they tend to label items “gluten-free” more often than more mainstream brands. Wheat starch seems to be less common in everything across the board, from soups to bbq sauce (I’m usually using Cattleman’s, although it might just be a regional brand).

Corn is also going up because of increased consumption but also because of the increased use of federally subsidized ethanol. What I’ve actually seen is more potato and bean starches – is wheat’s global popularity as a cheap filler suddenly going to backfire?

Considering how often gluten ends up in foods that could honestly do without it, I’ve often speculated that wheat was extremely under-priced to the point of a market distortion tending toward over-supply. I don’t think wheat is particularly healthy regardless of an individual’s specific level of gluten sensitivity, and its main value to society has been its low cost ability to feed the masses. If its not low cost, the only reason left to use it would be in bakin.