"Why you in that bubble, boy?"

Now I understand why moms are so paranoid when their children have health problems. There are times when I have flashes of thought where I think “this isn’t safe”. This stems from the whole cooking process my boyfriend and I have. We don’t just have to worry about buying safe food, but also we have to make sure that nothing sneaks in while we are cooking. Living in a college dorm, we don’t have the luxury of having our own kitchen. Most of the time the counter has broken bits of ramen noodles all over it and the sink is perpetually filled with dirty dishes which are left like Moses in the basket. But I digress.

In order to avoid contamination from the kitchen, my boyfriend and I use designated pots, pans, and cutlery which are stored in a large container which is clearly marked (which sometimes works). We also use our own dishcloths instead of the communal sponges, however even if allergens weren’t an issue we’d probably still use our own dishcloths. The worst part about sharing the kitchen (other than all the dirty dishes) is the fact that we can never be sure if the table and counters are safe. Even though one patch looks clean, it could just be that someone wiped of some breadcrumbs. This means that when we are cooking, if a piece of food falls onto the table we have to throw it out. It breaks my heart to throw away a large piece of onion!

Of course, there is always this way...

I’m used to being paranoid in the kitchen about surfaces and whatnot, but sometimes I think about how easy it would be for crumbs or residue to accumulate on door handles, sink faucets, and desks. There are literally thousands of opportunities for my boyfriend to be accidentally exposed to allergens throughout the day. I suppose anyone would exhaust themselves worrying about all of the possibilities, which is why I guess my boyfriend chooses to only worry about the most common ways allergens could get into his system. However, now I am thinking about all of the people who can have allergic reactions just by touching peanut butter and the like. That was why we had special lunch tables in middle school and why we weren’t allowed to bring any nuts into the classroom. All of that went away as I entered high school and moved on to college, and now I wonder how people with severe allergies are able to keep themselves safe.

 (image from here)

The trouble with quinoa

One of the staple ingredients my boyfriend always keeps on hand is quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wah, as the label annoyingly insists). The fallback dish almost every day was usually what we came to call "quinoa and beans", which was pretty much what it sounds like: a mixture of quinoa, beans, and whatever vegetables we happened to have in the refrigerator. When I was first introduced to the dish, I was completely in love, probably because we use plenty of onions and caramelize them thoroughly (yum!). I professed that I would never tire of the dish, that is until I got a nauseous migraine one evening and tasted it coming back up. Since then, whenever I have eaten quinoa I can't finish the meal.

Let me back up and explain what exactly I am talking about. Quinoa is a grain from South America which is prepared and used almost identically to rice. However the taste, unlike rice, is a sweet nutty flavor. It's also less starchy than rice and apparently is an excellent source of protein, which makes it favorable among the vegan/vegetarian crowd. The only thing that would be off-putting is that it is more fragrant than other grains, so it may take some getting used to.

So why can't I eat it if it isn't unpleasant? In short: I don't know. For a while after the migraine incident, I couldn't eat it because it brought back memories of nausea. Once I forced myself to break the habit of slightly-embedded conditioning towards associating the taste with feeling ill, I still found that I couldn't finish what was on my plate. I just didn't want to keep eating it. Even the act of chewing was difficult, so I was forced to give the rest of my meal to my boyfriend, who is, in a nutshell, a human garbage disposal.

What I think may have happened is that I simply got tired of the taste. This has happened to me before with foods that I eat too often, and since I was eating quinoa for at least two meals each week, this seems like the best possible explanation. To counteract this, we started to experiment with adding different flavors, like using a chile pepper to kick up the vegetables and boiling a piece of kombu seaweed with the quinoa to get a salty/meaty flavor. Sometimes it worked, depending on how hungry I was, but there is still some experimenting to do.

Since I haven't been able to eat with my boyfriend for a while and haven't had quinoa in nearly two months, I decided to buy a bag to see if I could at least finish a portion. As of yet, no avail. I caramelized a vidalia onion, used plenty of carrots, red bell pepper, and snow peas hoping that the vegetable flavor would help. No luck. Maybe adding new spices. I used the traditional oregano and basil, and tried a dash of tarragon because I was intrigued. That didn't work either. What resulted is a mixture of sweet and bitter from the balance of the vegetables mixing with the quinoa. Plus, the cooked pepper tasted slightly acidic and tomato-y, which isn't exactly my cup of tea. I decided that what was missing was a meaty flavor, and in having no kombu I added a leftover bratwurst. The result was a game of "find the pieces of bratwurst in the quinoa".

I definitely think that I need some saltiness to offset the overwhelming earthy-sweetness that has been established. Adding meat clearly didn't help, so I was thinking of perhaps simmering the mixture with a bit of chicken stock so that the flavor permeates rather than just sitting on top. Or I could just add more salt.

-----Edit------
It turns out that adding more salt helped immensely. Plus an obscene amount of pepper didn't hurt either. I guess when it comes to flavor, always cover the basics before you get fancy. Although eating quinoa is still slow-going, it doesn't feel like an uphill struggle after a few bites. Since I discovered the secrets of salt and pepper I have finished off the batch of quinoa and vedge I made, although I'm holding off on cooking the rest of the quinoa.

(image from here)

Five Flavors Gluten Free

I recently (as in 5 seconds ago) saw a commercial for Rice Chex advertising the fact that five of their flavors are gluten-free. They have even written it in rather large letters on the front of the box! The commercial addressed the fact that it's difficult to find safe foods that people actually want to eat and also included the line "as a mom, I don't want to tell her no all the time". So basically, they are saying "yes" to Rice Chex.

On top of their gluten-free stance, the website is extremely helpful. Just click on the flavor you are interested in and you immediately get the nutrition information and not a flowery "Sweetness of honey with a hint of nut flavor" schpiel (sp?) one would expect.

As for my situation, the plain ol' rice flavor is the only thing that would even be remotely safe. Not to my surprise, most of the other flavors rely heavily on corn and the chocolate flavor contains milk. However, this is a promising start. I'm going to check with my boyfriend, but the rice flavor might be a possibility for a snack I can keep in my room without too much fear of contamination. I'll probably still have to be careful around finals to make sure, but it might be alright for casual grazing.

I'm really happy that the General Mills company is directly advertising to the gluten-free population. Not only are they showing some of their products are safe, but they also indicate which ones are safe, which takes out some of the guess work. They aren't just referring you to a brand, but a specific flavor. I hope other companies follow suit and don't mess opportunities like this up. If they claim a product is gluten-free when it really isn't, they would have hell to pay from someone who had a reaction to their product. It would be like saying that their product absolutely has no nails in it and then opening it up and finding little iron spikes that could be used to adjoin pieces of wood.

(image found here)

"You need to watch your diet"

One time I was watching one of those "overweight teenagers lose weight" shows, and there was one parent/child dynamic that startled me. The mother would buy cookies or other snacks and leave them in plain sight of her daughter, knowing that she couldn't resist eating them. Then she would find the wrappers that her daughter tried to hide and just leave them out on her bedspread as if to say "I know what you did". She would constantly set her daughter up to fail by buying the snacks and then would punish her for it.

My family works a little bit the same way, but to a less extreme extent. After every candy-associated holiday (Christmas, Easter, etc), we have what I call the "Sugar Holocaust". This is when my dad starts to feel sluggish from all the holiday food and throws away our treats, sometimes without us knowing. He claims that we don't need the stuff, which is true, but this purge only happens a few times a year. Even less frequently, about once every two years or so, one or both of my parents decides that the entire family needs to eat healthier and we try a diet (or something resembling one). This usually lasts a week or so but then my mom starts to crave brownies and the whole thing goes down the tube.

Like the girl from the TV show, I can't really control myself when I'm surrounded by treats. Just knowing that there is a bag of Mike and Ikes "hidden" in the cookie jar means that I can walk by and grab a handful whenever I happen to walk by the kitchen. The same can be said for the rest of my family, although they tend to eat in substantial amounts during one sitting as opposed to grazing. I've been trying to get away from this habit and next year it should be easier because I won't eat "unsafe" foods, and therefore won't eat as often. However, until I actually move into my new dorm room next semester, I am still out to pasture.

What really chaps my khakis is the fact that my family doesn't know a wide range of food groups. My parents are the children of WASPs (on my dad's side) and Scottish-Canadian immigrants (on my mom's side). Therefore, our diet is mostly made of meat and starch. A meal might be steak, potatoes, and corn. Or chicken and peas. See the pattern? My mom doesn't make too many salads because she knows that they won't get eaten, however somehow this has translated into very few greens at all. The most exotic we get with our vegetables is green beans or maybe asparagus on occasion. There are even times when the meal is only one item, but in vast quantities. These are often quick meals that my mom makes when she gets home late or has me or my sister start, things like spaghetti or some other pasta. Now don't get me wrong, all of this tastes great. However, I think my parents are having trouble thinking three dimensionally when it comes to meals.

Recently, my dad saw me eating a bowl of instant ramen noodles. For the record, I hadn't had any in just about a month, but my dad made a comment about how I should probably watch what I was eating. The truth is, I have been craving "safe" meals with quinoa or a delicious mixture of veggies with a little bit of ground beef but I am afraid to suggest them because my parents don't really show an interest. The most adventurous grain we use is white rice, and most of the recipes I've made over the last year have relied on beans as the protein source, and my mother isn't that keen on legumes.

Furthermore, my dad said that come fall, when both my sister and I go off to college, he and my mom would start cracking down on what they were eating. Why wait? Why are they telling me to watch what I eat when they aren't going to bother until the fall. Okay, the hypocrite horn is sounding right now, I realize. However, I want to make quinoa and eat cabbage but can't find an outlet (or inlet as the case may be).

I think one of these days I might just break down and make one of my recipes, even if it's just for me to eat. The trick will be finding the quinoa....

A decision is made

When the new semester starts and I can visit the farmer's market again, I am canning everything I can for winter. No joke.

Ever since my boyfriend and I discovered this amazing jam-making site (well, hub), we've been a tad obsessed. Admittedly, we have only made two batches of jam, but we hope to someday make all of the recipes there. Plus, I really want to make my own ketchup because there is probably no way that the store-bought stuff is safe, and also because it would be awesome to recreate that opening scene from Meet Me in St. Louis (I'm a movie nerd).

I started to remember how many amazing fruit seemed to go to waste at my hands. I would buy a small package of plums thinking that they would be a snack through the next week and then the last third would be left to sit and go soft. I would still eat them, but without the relish that I had when I first bought them. Then when winter came  I prayed for some sort of fresh fruity flavors. That's when Beaumont's came along. The Beaumont's jam lady came to know my boyfriend and I by sight and it even came to the point when she knew we were after her strawberry rhubarb jam.

The canning funnel: the one kitchen accessory I never knew I needed

So why can't we do it too? We could even preserve tomatoes or other veggies through canning or even freezing them, which is how some of the farm stands were able to sell peppers during the drudgery of March (that month should secede from the calendar year). Since my boyfriend is rather committed to eating only in-season foods (i.e. no grocery store veggies), this might be a way to save some peppers or plums when we crave them.

Plus, it will be fun. Both times that we've made jam have been wonderful experiences. My boyfriend and I are still amateurs, so when we made dandelion jelly we forgot to increase the amount of pectin needed to thicken the amount of the dandelion infusion we made. The result was a thin mixture closer to Jell-O than jelly, but it was still great. It's just little mishaps like this that indicate more practice in determining when the jam is thick enough, but at least we'll have some delicious things when we're done.

I think the most interesting thing I've noticed while perusing the jam sites is the fact that a bunch of recipes include rosemary. Here I was thinking that it was merely the perfect spice for beef or potatoes, but I guess it also compliments those plums I'll buy once I get to the market!

(image from here)

Curses!

I find it strange that I willingly have taken to historically "feminine" pursuits. I love to cook, I knit/crochet almost constantly, I adore dresses, and I crave shoes. However, there is one part of femininity that I have never mastered: makeup.

Maybe it's my Nova Scotian farm wife heritage, but I never really had a need for make up. My daily toilette includes mineral foundation with SPF 15 and if I'm feeling particularly invested in how I look, L'Oreal's Bare Natural's mascara. In the winter, I add gluten-free lip balm out of necessity. When I was a pre-teen, I dabbled in lip gloss but I always hated the sticky texture that it had and I always put on too much, causing a sheer pink glossy streak all across my lower lip whenever I pressed my lips together. I played around with eyeliner, but being incredibly near-sighted made it difficult to see what I was doing . I would either have to hold a hand mirror 3 inches away from my face, which would get in the way of my hand, or I would bend over the bathroom sink and my back would hurt before I was done with one eye (no contacts).

I realize that most makeup skill is acquired through practice, and since I never really practiced that much it would account for my inability to apply liquid eye liner. However, ever since I started dating my boyfriend I was a little relieved that I would never be expected  to wear that much make up. In truth, I was dreading learning how to apply lipstick and was putting it off for the longest time. However since I couldn't be sure what was exactly in the lip stick, I could just forgo the whole ordeal.

And then curiosity killed my cat. I decided to see if there were any allergen-free cosmetics on the market and I came to find out that there are a few companies who are gluten and allergen free. It seems like the gluten-free market has reached into cosmetics!

I haven't looked at too many companies thus far, but one that caught my eye was Afterglow. What I like about them is that they list their ingredients right on the web site and most of their ingredients are organic. In fact, I love this quote from their website:
"Full disclosure - we disclose every ingredient in every product we sell. Since the FDA allows companies to conceal and not list the true ingredients in items listed as “fragrance”, “flavors” and any ingredient under 1% of the total formula – you never know what you might be using." 

Another cool thing is that they don't use preservatives, which although it reduced the shelf life of the product, means that they are even further committed to safe ingredients. Plus, they are also free of petro-chemicals, which is reducing the dependance on oil. Sure, fossil fuels are being used to ship the product all around the world, but at least it's not being put on your face! 


The absolute thing that I appreciate about this company is the fact that they are gluten-free. The founder has family members with Celiac disease and is therefore committed to making safe products for people with similar problems. In perusing the ingredients list for the products, I see that there are no soy, casein, or nut products in there and the company states that most of their products are free of major allergens. There is some corn in a few of their products, but it is clearly labeled. For example, their Color Lock says that it contains fructose, however after that it says (organic, made from corn). Awesome! That saved me an email asking if there were any potential corn derivatives! 


This company is so sensitive to allergens and it's great that they spell everything out in case there are any questions. With sensative skin or allergies, you don't want to spend money on a product, test it out, and then find that you got a reaction from it. Letting people know up front what they are in for so that they can decide to take that risk makes the process easier. 


Although I am now in love with this company's message, now I begrudge them for making such a safe product. Now I might have to start wearing lipstick!

The inevitable result.

(images from here and here)