Gluten Free?

I've been avoiding this for a year or more now.  We finally decided that we just had to give it a try.  For the last five weeks, Lucy has been gluten free.  I can't say yet if its helping her or not; we're still in the trial period.  Initially it seemed soooo hard, but we're fumbling our way through and finding our resources. Because we began this when I was very pregnant, I've been buying quite a few pre-made things, instead of playing with recipes.  My thought has been to just do whatever we can to get through a trial period, and then if we stay gluten free for the long term, I'll do more of my own baking.

This is definitely not a comprehensive guide to going gluten free; I just thought I'd post what we are doing to start.  Rather than pages of gluten free resources and recipes, I think I would have liked to see a basic "this is how we started" kind of post.  So here is mine:

Recipes:

These are all very basic, normal recipes that are gluten free.  They don't require any fancy flour mixes or anything.  She does use coconut flour in a couple things, and we've had good success experimenting with that.

Coconut flour muffins are easy enough to make.  We like them with chocolate chips or blueberries.

These raw cookie dough bites are yummy!  (They use coconut flour.)

I've made these black bean brownies before and we all enjoyed them.

My baked oatmeal recipe is gluten free, as long as you buy gluten free oats.

This is my normal waffle recipe, again, gluten free with the right kind of oats.


We've purchased gluten free: Udi's whole grain bread, a couple kinds of crackers, brown rice tortillas, a gluten free pancake mix, breakfast bars, Annie's bunnies, etc.

Normal things that we eat that are gluten free: any fruit or veggies, rice, potatoes, quinoa, tortilla chips, brown rice pasta, eggs, cheese and other dairy.


Lucy's meals look like:

Breakfasts: eggs, smoothies, Udi's GF bread with peanut butter and honey, breakfast bar, oatmeal, pancakes, or waffles

Lunches: leftovers from dinners, GF bread sandwiches, GF crackers and cheese, tortilla chips and cheese or hummus

Dinners: anything with rice, potatoes, brown rice pasta spaghetti, soup with rice instead of noodles, etc

I just purchased this book to start gluten free baking with.  I also just bought the dry container for my Vitamix blender so that I can grind my own flours (brown rice, etc).  We have had to watch out and not let Lucy eat things just because they are gluten free.  Many of the foods or mixes sold in stores are overly processed, contain too much sugar, or are made with white flours (white rice flour, and other things that are pretty lacking nutritionally).  Hopefully I will be able to figure out a few more recipes soon here.

There you go, a jumble of ideas to help you get started if you are considering giving gluten free a try.  Please leave a comment and share your favorite gluten free resources!