Gluten-Almost Free

Yeah, it's been a long time. And my "readers" are probably not even checking anymore. I wouldn't be checking regularly if I was them. Oh bother, same old post as last time. I've been pretty busy though because I have just been diagnosed as Gluten Intolerant. First reaction? Anger!!!! Grrrrr!!! Can't bake anymore--have to start reading those doggone impossible- to-read-because-my- eyes-blur ingredients on the backs of boxes and jars. Have to buy SPECIAL food. Dang, dang and double-dang. But then, as always when presented with a problem, I threw a book at it. I went to the lovely, local Barnes and Noble and found Gluten-Free Recipes for Dummies and, more importantly, a recipe book for Gluten and Egg Free Baking (did I mention I also tested positive for egg intolerance?). The recipe book is called Flying Apron's Gluten-Free & Vegan Baking Book and is written by a woman who owns a bakery in Seattle--www.flyingapron.com .  I'm not going to become a Vegan but they don't eat eggs (among other things I find very delicious) so this will work for me.

Okay....so....I've been reading and researching and buying expensive gluten-free things.  My husband is flinching at the grocery costs (we have a grocery budget and he keeps track of it).  I flinch, too, when I buy a loaf of gluten-free bread and it costs nearly $5!!  But I love bread and it's one of the things I just can't live without.  I'm learning, though, that there are things I will have to live without.  I won't be able to eat Ralph's donuts anymore--maybe one, but not one everyday like I was doing when he brought me a bag full at one of our 50th alumni reunion planning meetings.  And his potato salad is incredible partly because he puts so many eggs in it--another dish I will have to avoid.  Then there are all those things I love to made--cookies, bars, muffins--that I'll have to re-invent.  Sounds like I'm not going to be any fun anymore, doesn't it?  That's part of why I don't much like this diagnosis.  I should not drink regular beer anymore, either....and that hurts.  I have found gluten-free beers, but they aren't Gary's Irish Death or Silver City Brewery's Panther Lake Porter, my two favorites.  Even a pretty light beer like Corona is now off my list.  Did I mention I turned the air blue with cursing when I got the word about the gluten?

The thing is, I have suffered from intestinal stuff for almost my entire life, and now I have arthritis that is progressing fast and I have to take anti-depressants for my moodiness.  And from December to April 2011-12 I had three bad colds.  So instead of going to a regular doctor who would have had nothing but pills in their arsenal of remedies, I went to a naturopath.  I happened to know Jane already--she's in my writing group--and I trust her.  She is the one who had me tested and she is the one who had to tell me about my intolerances.  She was afraid I might say, "Screw it!" and never come back to see her again, but I did go back and she gave me all kinds of ideas and resources.  I'm getting used to the idea, sort of.  It's only been a couple of weeks since the tests came back.  I found out right before we went to Gary Parker's Iron Horse Brewery in Ellensburg ( www.ironhorsebrewery.com ) for a tour of his tiny brewing building.  He gave us a taste of every beer he had on tap.  They were delicious, cold, refreshing and I knew with each gulp that they might be some of the last tastes of real beer I'd have in a long time, if ever again.  That made them doubly wonderful and I felt wicked and intoxicated.  We had a great 24 hours with Gary, and I ate all kinds of things I wasn't supposed to--it was a wheat binge--flour tortillas, bread and waffles.

The upside to all this "intolerance" is that without wheat gluten (which includes barley and rye) I feel more energetic, my stomach isn't rebelling, I'm less moody.  My fingers are still aching--we'll have to give it more time to see if the new diet helps that condition.

That's one of the reasons I haven't been blogging--the others are that it's summer (yahoo!!) and I can work in my garden, I'm taking an online writing class for several weeks and it's intensive writing, and my writing group demands something new every two weeks.  Reasons, reasons.  If only I could be satisfied with a one paragraph blog post....I'll work on that.  I hope this post satisfies some of my readers, if they're still out there.  If you have any gluten-free, egg-free advice, let me know.

School Lunch

From left, Nancy K., Jeanette Y., Yours Truly, Anne H., Vicki C., Anges, Helen C.

One of our number, the number being CK Alum of '62, recently challenged me to write about "school lunches" and being the writer type that I am, I am taking her up on that dare.

What I remember about the lunchroom and what went on there is only what I remember, meaning it is not the whole story.  My memory is spotty about those high school days and I am always finding myself responding to some fascinating, what should be memorable, high school story, with "Wow!  I don't remember that at all!"  So, being in my own little world during high school means I only remember my portion of what was actually going on.  I hope some of you will share your memories of "school lunches" so we can get a clearer picture.

I remember that lunches were divided into First Lunch and Second Lunch.  I don't know what that meant exactly, as to WHEN those two lunches were, but I do know it all depended on your schedule of classes, or maybe it all depended on which one you chose when you were choosing the classes you were going to take (a frequent dream of mine, by the way, the choosing of the classes).  I know that my group of friends all wanted to have the same lunch period and we managed to get it, judging by the picture above, so maybe it was chosen BY us, not for us.

I was one of those people who brought their lunch to school every day.  I certainly had many lunch boxes over the years, because I never was able to buy hot lunches, even though I would have died to get them.  I am pretty sure the lunch box I had was red plaid--that's the one that I picture.  And what was in that red plaid lunch box?  Sandwiches, tuna, peanut butter and raspberry jam, or bologna with mayonnaise.  No lettuce, not because I wouldn't have liked it, but because it would have been horribly wilted by lunch time--there were no thermal lunch boxes then, only tin, with a space for a thermos (pint-sized) of milk.  But I got to buy milk and sip it with a straw, which had a certain cache for me, since I couldn't buy the hot lunch.  Better than nothing.  

So I had my lunch, which sat in my lunch box in my locker until lunch time, getting warm and soggy.  I suppose there was fruit in there sometimes--or a cookie--something to break up the monotony of the sandwich.  I didn't pack my lunch--my Mom did--and she wasn't very creative about it, I'm afraid.  But I didn't care, because my main goal at lunch was to get something off of somebody else's hot lunch tray!  Not a single one of the girls I had lunch with seemed to understand how cool it was to be able to have a hot lunch.  They took them for granted, I guess.  They hated the food that was dished onto them, particularly Shepherd's Pie.  Well, lucky for me and for them, Shepherd's Pie was one of my favorites of the coveted hot lunches.  When Shepherd's Pie was on the lunch menu for the day, I was in heaven.  I knew that at least one of the girls at our table would let me have the whole thing.  They would eat whatever else was on the tray, but I would get the Shepherd's Pie.  Oh, glorioski!  Did I ever love those mashed potatoes and carrots and string beans and meat and gravy all mixed together. I can still taste that Shepherd's Pie as if it was yesterday.   I liked the Swiss Steak, too, which most of my friends did not like and there were probably other meals they gave to me.  It's a wonder I didn't have to diet in those days, isn't it?

The other thing about school lunchtime that I loved was the laughing and the talking we did.  Was the lunch an hour or 30 minutes?  I don't know.  But I do know that we filled it with gossip about boys, joking, teasing each other, griping about our brothers/sisters, complaining about teachers, homework, organizing slumber parties, wondering who was going to be asked to dances, making elaborate plans for how to get a boy's attention.  I don't recall talking about clothes much, we didn't wear makeup except lipstick for some of us, we didn't talk about our weight or our hair, that I recall. 

I suppose we talked about what we were going to wear to dances.  That was always a problem in my house--how we were going to afford the dress for the dance.  I remember getting a used white dress for one of the dances and buying green velvet ribbon, which I made into little bows and sewed onto the dress.  It reminded me of a dress I'd seen in Gone With the Wind, so I was happy with it.  And with every dress there had to be shoes and gloves, because (remember?)  we used to wear gloves then.  I had a pair of little white gloves (and one pair of white heels) and probably one of the lunch discussions was how to wash the white gloves and keep them clean.  We might have talked about the white buck shoes we all wore then--and the little powder packet we used to slap on the shoes to keep them white.  We might have talked about starching and ironing our petticoats, the more petticoats you had under your full skirt the more status you had.  I only had 3.  Poor me!  We might have talked about getting permanents to keep our hair curly--for those of us who had straight hair.  Many of my friends had curly hair and I don't believe there were hair straightening techniques then, or they would have used them.  No teenaged girl is ever satisfied with her hair.  My mother started me out at 4 years old with my first perm and bankrolled them, at the Cinderella Beauty School in downtown Bremerton, for the rest of my school career.  After high school there were no more perms for me.  The smell of the "neutralizing solution" was enough to put me off them forevermore.

I bet we talked about football and basketball games and cheer leading.  Some of our circle aspired to be cheerleaders and one of us, Helen Callison, actually achieved that goal.  Bonnie and I tried out once, but alas, we did not succeed.  But we all went to the games and cheered for our Cougars and sang the school song and the fight song and in my case, didn't really watch the games.  I knew all the rules, because I watched sports on television with my Dad, but high school sports, for most of us girls, was more a social occasion than a sport to follow, unless one of the boyfriends was on the team.  Then it was a different ball game, so to speak.

Which brings us full circle back to school lunches, which were not about eating, except when there was Shepherd's Pie.  School lunches were about being social, about eating with friends, about laughing, as that picture, which was in the Senior section of the 1962 Echo,  shows.  They were about belonging and that high school family that you form, that is more important, sometimes, than your real family and often more supportive.  There is a movie that I would recommend, called Mean Girls, that is all about high school, about lunch rooms, about the angst of the teen years.  I don't recall being one of the Mean Girls.  I hope I wasn't, though, as I say, others might have different recollections.  I hope we didn't cause angst, because we had enough of our own--in our families, in our "romances", in our insecurities, which are at their height in high school.  Any and all of our anxieties could have been aired at that lunchroom table, during that one blessed hour (or half hour) of the day when we were allowed to forget about classes and what might be going on at home.  Mostly, though, we just laughed.

PS:  I nagged Silver City Brewing (www.silvercitybrewery.com), in Silverdale, to please add Shepherd's Pie to their regular menu and they finally did.  Try it some time--it's absolutely delicious and the taste of it takes me back to that lunch room 40-plus years ago.  But now I have to pay for it with money rather than with my dignity!  I think it tasted a little better when I had to grovel for it.