Gluten Free Camping

Camping Gluten Free means taking along two sets of foods-one with wheat and one gluten free.

When 40 family members gather and cook meals together, my job grows twice as hard. When we are home, there are no wheat products in the kitchen. When everyone chips in, I must cook a special meal gluten free.

When traveling, we have a RV with a kitchen. The food stored over the winter was bad and had to be fed to the wild animals. I even cooked up the dried out pasta so as not to waste it. The raccoons are smiling tonight.

We are off to Lake Michigan South Haven for a week. I have new stashes of good gluten free food for the summer.

Happy Fourth of July!!!

Shop Gluten Free

Every now and then I find information just too great not to share. When shopping for gluten free food driving around from store to store is not fun. The cost of gasoline makes it difficult to visit all of the stores around town. Of course if you live in a small town, there may be no good place to shop for gluten free food.

The Gluten-Free Mall is a wonderful web site. It contains may products that I had never before seen or used. It also is missing some products that I use. So it must take several on line shops to find all of the gluten free products you need.

The web site has additional gluten free information. Go to: http://www.glutenfreemall.com/catalog/glutenfree-books-c-48.html .

BBQ

Gluten Free Barbecue Cooking presents a when buying a prepared BBQ sauce. I find that most of them contain wheat or wheat products. The sauces make cooking on the grill fun and tasty.

I made my own sauce this weekend. It was great. There is no exact measures just a little of this and a little of that.

I took a hunk of brown sugar about a cup or so, and added shakes of balsamic vinegar, mustard, ketchup, hot sauce and garlic. I mixed it up and brushed the thick paste on a pork roast.

It roasted for about 1/2 hour and then re-brushed the roast. The meat was tender and had great flavorand was gluten free. Most of all my husband loved it!

I will attempt to do this again. I do not feel that the BBQ sauce must be consistent just fun and tasty and gluten free.

Grocery Stores

When I first shopped for gluten free flours, there were none in the traditional grocery store. The groceries did not even have health food sections.

Some health food stores carried a few gluten free products. Health Food Stores were primarily concerned with organic foods.

I had to order most gluten free flours on line.

For convince and the cost of fuel, I am pleased that now the local grocery carries a representative amount of gluten free products along with organic food products. At one point the selections were on one small shelf section. Now there is a whole section and even new freezer sections.

I still go to Whole Foods for beer and pasta and soda with sugar instead of high fructose syrup.

As the traditional groceries loose market share, they adjust their products and will continue to add more gluten free food selections.

Gluten and Autism

My daughter's friend has a child with autism. They are investigating the relationship of gluten to the problem. Since we know that the intestine is the problem in gluten related distress, checking if the child has GI problems may help the autism.

The autism causes so much stress in family relationships. If there is an impact on the child caused by gluten, it would be a relief to the family.

I found a site offering insight to this issue. Go to: www.NutritionandAutism.com

I hope this helps my daughter's family.