'What I Eat' - Day Six

Gluten-Free Choices - I had a patient suggest that I give some hints about what gluten-free products I would recommend.   I can generally suggest the following:

1) Bread is best purchased out of the freezer section, and toasted before eating
Here is my list of gluten-free breads in order of taste preference (leaving aside the issue of which breads are healthier and/or free of other allergens):

Udi's Gluten Free Whole Grain Bread

Glutino Flax Seed Bread 

Kinnikinnick Breads 

Genius by Glutino Multigrain Bread

El Peto Brown Sandwich Bread 

Metro also makes/sells a loaf of gluten-free french bread that tastes pretty good with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, but I'm fairly certain it would survive the apocalypse unscathed (if food doesn't go bad, we have to wonder if it is really 'food'?).     

President's Choice just started selling a gluten-free bread in their bakery section, and it's pretty good.   It's like the Wonderbread of gluten-free breads. 

2)  It's very easy to find brown-rice noodles these days.  They taste great when they're first cooked, but they do not make great leftovers.   I'll give more tips about noodles in a future post.  

3) Don't try to recreate everything you used to eat, instead try to embrace the direction you're heading in.  Your days of eating flaky croissants and phyllo dough are probably over.   Generally, I recommend just accepting (and embracing) moving away from processed carbohydrates.  That said, one of the easiest, and healthiest, things to bake at home is muffins.   Gluten is what holds bread together, so you can kind of look at the muffins as mini loaves of bread.  I'll include my favourite muffin recipe in a future post.  

Breakfast - Blueberries with my Mom's banana bread.   Thanks Mom!  I buy local blueberries in season, and freeze them to eat them over the winter.  

Lunch - Soup made with vegetable broth, water, white kidney beans, spinach, diced onion, garlic, and dried thyme.   I bring my soups and stews to work in a thermos.  Last time I looked, you could find nice thermoses with stainless steel interiors at Canadian Tire.  The trick to keeping the food hot is to fill the thermos with boiling (or very hot) water for a few minutes before you put the hot food in.  

I'm pretty good at cooking my own food, but for some reason I never seem to get around to making my own vegetable broth.  Usually, I just make my soups and stews with water, but sometimes I use a prepackaged mix
(http://www.campbellsoup.ca/en-ca/eating-well/gluten-free).

Dinner - Curried chickpea dish made with chickpeas, tomato sauce, diced potatoes, onions, jalapeno pepper, and spices (a mix of curry, cumin, coriander, and cinnamon).   

Tomato Sauce -  I was excited to find jars of tomato sauce in North Bay (I found them at Freshco).  Tomatoes, and other acidic foods, are often sold in cans with white plastic lining.  That plastic lining leaches all sorts of chemicals into the food, including BPA.   The Aurora jarred tomatoes contain only tomatoes and salt!