Tag Archives: gluten free

Travel

Gluten Free Munich

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Munich was definitely not the easiest place to eat gluten free. I did research before and it seemed like there were not really specific restaurants you could go to with gluten free menus, but suggestions of places or things to eat which would be celiac-friendly… and well, I don’t necessarily need a list of places to eat if I have to wing it like that.

The first night we got there we wanted to go to something like the Hofbräuhaus, but going to this typical German-style restaurant with beer and wurst is really hard for me. We ended up at Augustiner-Keller which was all right, but nothing special.

The waiter was a little abrasive. When I asked about a gluten free menu or gluten free possibilities, he reacted like, “What? You can’t eat bread or flour? What can you eat? Can you eat anything??”… kind of like, well… you’re going to be a difficult customer, what are you doing in my section of the restaurant?

We noticed later on that he seemed to be the roughest of all the servers. He really just wanted to take our orders and serve us our food quickly and make a tip and I can’t really fault him for that, but I always appreciate when waiters and cooks are sensitive and understanding about my diet. I can’t help it and yes, it sucks, but please don’t make it worse for me!

I couldn’t order from most of the menu, but I ended up with good old potatoes (celiac classic), lamb without sauce and some fresh horse radish, which was honestly the most flavourful part of my dish. I also had some mediocre wine because gluten free beer is not to be found in any Keller in Munich.

Breakfast at our hotel was better. I picked the NH Hotel Group which we first stayed at in Madrid. I had booked this hotel before Madrid, hoping that it is a nice chain and it does not disappoint.

The German version of the hotel offers even more gluten free options, including packaged bread, gluten free muesli, fresh veggies, deli options, etc.

On the last day at the Deutsches Museum, I wanted to go to a restaurant early before our bus at 6pm, but even after we scrambled to get there on time, it was not open yet at 4:30. We ended up running back to the train station where I was almost crazy hangry. I ended up breaking down and ordering my very first döner box. I have been really afraid to eat döner since going gluten free, but I just ordered it in a box and I didn’t seem to react, so I think it was OK without the bread and watching out for the base. Kay asked if I wanted couscous or rice, and of course couscous has gluten so that’s a no!

I  felt a lot better after the döner. We picked up a few more snacks for our 4 hour ride back to Zurich and were on our way.

Food

Winter/Spring GF Eats

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We’ve had a fairly cold start to the year with spring taking awhile to get started. Although we enjoyed a little warm weather in the past couple weeks, it went back to the single Cº digits, or around the 40s in Fahrenheit. Boo.

To keep warm, we’ve been eating lots of delicious gluten-free food! Here is a little highlights tour of some of our meals.

I’m slowly trying out GF oatmeal in my diet after over a year quitting oats completely while I flushed gluten out of my system. I need to double check if I have symptoms when I eat it. I did not feel feverish after though and that seems to be a common symptom on gluten for me.

Above was a delicious dinner from cooksmarts with garlic and rosemary cauliflower mash, spicy chard salad and roasted chicken thighs.

I do a lot of fish dinners during the week now because it’s so easy to throw them in the oven with some roasting veggies. Here we had avocado with balsamic cream on the side.

Kay made an Indian Cooksmarts recipe but mixed up “Kümmel” with “Kreuzkümmel” in German and accidentally used caraway (Kümmel) instead of cilantro. It tasted special… not bad, but a little strange. I’m not a big caraway fan. I should probably just chuck it all!

It made good leftovers though!

This Pineapple and Cashew Curried Fried Rice below sadly made me feel awful afterward. It has eggs in it and since this meal, I’ve pretty much been avoiding eggs. It makes me sad, but they are giving me horrible stomach pain.

Easy stir fry beef always goes down well in this house.

And again, filling out the week with an easy herb butter fish tossed in the oven with some veggies. Yum!

I was proud of this one below because I whipped up a random stir fry using random stuff in the fridge, including the sauce, which I normally use a recipe for. It was so tasty!

A friend posted a recipe to a tahini bowl that sounded really tasty, so I made that one day and Kay grilled up some steaks we got on special after Easter. We ate a lot of steak that week and both of us were happy.

Kay also started cooking for me a bit more lately, so he made this lovely garlic quinoa dish that another friend posted. I pinned it ages ago! It was also wonderful. As usual, Kay did the best job plating it. He makes all his recipes look so divine on the plate! 🙂

Right now I am branching back into dishes with lactose to see how I adjust, but we are staying away from eggs and gluten obviously. Sometimes I still get very frustrated how hard it seems to substitute things or know what to cook instead, but we still enjoy a lot of yummy food. I’m just pretty darn compulsive about our meal prepping and cooking. 😉

What’re you cooking lately?

Food, Travel

Gluten Free Madrid

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Again, I looked up a ton of different options for Madrid. For just a few days I had two breakfast places, some tapas places and dinner places so that we would have a wide range of choices and some backups in case places were closed or didn’t exist. Unfortunately like we discovered in Barcelona, sometimes places are closed when they say they will be open… or in the case of two different places in Madrid, they just didn’t exist anymore, even when they had been written about less than a year ago, had working websites and Google had no indications that they were permanently closed.

Breakfast:

OH!CELIA bakery: This place ended up not existing. It was not a big deal because it was a short walk from the next place.
Celicioso: Gluten free bakery with sit down option. We had the lasagna for breakfast as well because we were really hungry for just cupcakes and cake, but it was just reheated in the microwave.

Lunch/Dinner:

El Arrozal: Unfortunately, this place was also closed permanently, but luckily Bar el Taller was close by, so we ended up eating there instead.

La Crêp’: This was a crepe place that opened only around 2pm on Sunday. It was such a cold overcast day and all we wanted to do was go in somewhere warm to eat, but when the place opened up it was so cold inside. Spain is not made for cold weather! The food was very nice and I didn’t have any gluten reactions later. I ordered a mushroom and cheese crepe and later on a dessert crepe as well.

Bar el Taller: I loved this place! We arrived here because El Arrozal did not exist, which was frustrating that two of the places we tried to eat at on Saturday no longer existed, but I was really happy to find out that pretty much all the tapas at this place were gluten free and they even had gluten free beer, which has been very hard to find in restaurants on trips. I ordered two because I was so pleased and we all stuffed ourselves silly. 🙂

Mozzarella stack from Bar e Taller above.  Shrimp carpaccio below. Delicious!!

Complimentary strawberry dessert. Mmm.

Salad from a place near Kay’s brother below. In a pinch, we could do gluten free just by asking them to take care about certain ingredients and ordering the typical gluten-free salad with meat.

Overall, I wasn’t that worried about GF in Madrid. Spain is actually pretty good about celiac disease and they have a lot of options that you wouldn’t find in Germany, for example.

If you go, don’t miss out on the Serrano ham or the Iberian ham!

Food

First Gluten Free Cakes

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I am not a big cake baker because cakes are too much dessert for just Kay and myself, and it’s always tricky arranging Swiss expat schedules to help finish a cake off. (Surprising, no?)

Gluten free baking is also tricky because flour, baking, rising… all that acts differently without gluten, so I was a bit afraid to attempt my first cake. But I knew for my Swiss citizenship party that I wanted to make a real, chocolate cake!

I decided to make Blackbird Bakery’s chocolate cake and frosting, and as you can see, it did turn out OK. (I made a little mistake, so it wasn’t perfect.)

Most of the recipes in this book are pretty complicated and the chocolate cake had about seven different flours in it. This is by far the most complicated cake I had ever made and i was really nervous that the whole thing was going to turn out poorly.It had been over a year since I had made a real gluten cake and since then I had gotten rid of most of our cake pans in the de-glutening, so I had to buy another spring-form pan. I baked two pans of cake, although I could have left them in the oven even a little longer, because they were still a bit gooey in the middle when I cut them in half the next day.

The frosting is where I made my mistake… we don’t have cornstarch syrup in Switzerland, so I tried to substitute sugar and water, but I didn’t dissolve the sugar properly into the water before mixing it in the frosting because Kay and I were both in the kitchen trying to finish a million and one things the night before the party. Failing to do that made the final frosting a little crunchy from the sugar, which was a shame because I took so much care with all the other steps of the frosting.

It was still very yummy though and very chocolatey! This cake is brushed with chocolate liquor before frosting and it gave it a definite alcohol flavour. I loved it!

The party was a success and it was great showing off all the gluten free food we made for the night. We also had bite-size cordon bleu, bacon wrapped potatoes and dates, veggies with hummus and dill dip, guacamole and tortilla chips, dried meat, coconut and chocolate date balls, Kay made his gluten free tiramisu, and plenty to drink.

The next day, Kay and I were invited to his parent’s house for a lunch with some Brazilians from out of town who had attended our wedding. I told Kay’s father I could bring a gluten free dessert, which he was happy to accept because he always struggles coming up with gluten free desserts for me. I decided to try out Blackbird Bakery’s German chocolate cake with my own pecan coconut frosting.

I cut the cake recipe in half since it really called for three pans and I thought the final cake would be too tall for my cake carrying case, so I made a half recipe in one spring form pan and then cut that in half to frost.

On this cake I didn’t make any mistakes and it turned out pretty well. Success! Everyone thought it was really tasty and Kay has been going nuts for the pecan frosting ever since then. It is his favourite frosting of mine. 🙂

I was really pleased with my cakes. Even if I made a few mistakes, they turned out as well as my normal cakes would, or were even prettier in some cases.

Life gluten free is not the end of the world and even if I cannot have the office birthday cake, they don’t know how much of that chocolate cake I devoured every evening as we finished the cake after the party. It was so rich that even with 20 guests, we still had half of the four layer cake leftover afterward!

Life

Gluten-free Year One

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Well here we are, one year later.

When people I haven’t seen for a long time asked me how I have been doing, it’s hard to hide the truth: It was a tough year. It was a depressing year.

“Do you feel better now that you cut gluten out?” they ask. No, not really.Even with a complete diet overhaul to fix my nutrient deficiencies from the celiac damage and exercising daily to improve my health, I have experienced more stomach pain and problems in the last year than I did the entire time I was stuffing my face with gluten every day.

I also spent a lot of time inexplicably hungry. I have never tried to lose weight, so I don’t know what dieting feels like. Do others also feel like their stomach is caving in and that they might pass out if they don’t eat something soon?

The truth is, I still do not know what I should be eating in order to feel full, satisfied and pain-free. My gliadin levels are normal again and I’m not experiencing my gluten-reactions, but my stomach is still all sorts of unhappy more often than I’d like.

There is this promise of magically feeling like a “new person” when you cut gluten out and while it feels slightly different, I don’t feel reenergised or reborn. I still feel broken and vulnerable, like there is still so much more for me to figure out in order to be a happy, healthy person.

Mentally, I felt much better after ridding gluten from our house, but I’ve almost entirely stopped eating out in Zurich, which is hard for some friends to understand. I anxiously research tons before trips and bring snacks so I always have safe food to eat. I am much less spontaneous regarding food and easily upset when food plans change.

Through the year I’ve gotten better with protein so that I don’t feel hungry all day long. At home, I’ve come a long way from a totally overwhelmed newbie. Cooking gluten-free at home is a breeze and I slowly started experimenting with more foods that I used to eat  gluten versions, like cake and pizza, for example.

(Breaded fish tacos with homemade corn tortillas)

Actually… that’s a lie, I haven’t really done a proper cake, only a cheesecake, but I am baking one tonight. 😉 It’s just taken this long to get to a place where I feel comfortable dealing with multiple types of flour and branching out into new baking territory.

Hopefully in another year I will feel better internally, but it’s also still depressing to go to the grocery knowing that half of the store is not applicable to me anymore. Even a year later, I am still depressed to shop for groceries alone and find myself looking at all the foods I cannot eat whenever Kay is not there. There are constant reminders of my former diet everywhere, from the bakery smells in the train station in the morning to the birthday and visitor cakes sitting across from my desk in the kitchenette at work.

I must also be conscious of whatever goes into my mouth whenever I’m not eating my own prepared food. It’s getting better, but it’s never going to be as good as when it wasn’t a problem. I think I will never stop wishing that it wasn’t a problem.