Traveling Gluten Free and Homemade Jerky Recipes

Eating gluten free is so easy at home that I do not even have to think about it. We just do not buy any gluten-containing foods. No worries about cross-contamination. Until I step outside.

One of the downers about celiac disease is that it appears to be permanent. Mr. D and I wonder if we will ever be able to travel without my food being more hassle than it is worth. Yes, I hear that Italy is the best place in the world to eat gluten free, but the language barriers freak me out. If I cannot get waiters in the U.S. to understand what I mean by taking whatever steps are necessary to prevent cross-contamination, am I likely to fare better by presenting a card with instructions in their language to that effect? Plus, there are places other than Italy where we would like to visit eventually.

Theoretical woes aside, this is a very practical conundrum. What does one eat on a road trip? Some restaurants - mostly ones called Chipotle, where all the food is gluten free except the tortillas - are OK for a filling, tasty meal without being too expensive. Alas, along the 500 miles between our home and where I grew up and the rest of my family lives, there are no Chipotle locations to be found. Even if there were, snacks help make a long drive more bearable.

To drink, we enjoy bringing along a jug of kombucha or some chilled brewed herbal tea lightly sweetened with a touch of honey - it's like juice, but without the truckload of fructose to poison you along the way. It's most refreshing. Oh, and stainless steel bottles of well-iced water, because most snack foods are salty enough that you will want it!

Food just takes some thinking ahead, and this goes for any healthy or reasonably frugal food on the road.

Honestly, the most difficult part is getting enough healthy fats. Excellent ideas include starchy fruits (think bananas and berries), store-bought gluten free crackers, grass-fed whole milk cheese, and Mr. D's favorite, homemade grass-fed beef jerky. Avocados would be a fabulous snack, too.

Oh, did I say homemade jerky from grass-fed beef? Yep. Healthy jerky in any flavor you can manage to put together, and even $5/lb. ground beef will end up making fantastic jerky for less money, probably, than cruddy jerky. It was my husband who made the jerky for a recent weekend trip, and his ideas were so delicious I just had to share. He invented all four of the combinations suggested below.

Jerky
Ingredients:
for each pound of ground beef:
1 T. unrefined salt
1/2 t. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. onion powder
lots of freshly ground black pepper

plus one of the following combinations, or invent your own:
- 2 T. gluten free soy sauce, 2 T. raw honey (warmed a little to facilitate mixing), a few pinches of ground cloves, and 1/4 t. ground cinnamon
- an additional 1/2 t. garlic powder, plus up to 1 T. each of dried rosemary, thyme, oregano, and basil; do not be shy with these!
- 1 1/2 T. gluten free soy sauce, even more black pepper, 1 t. paprika, and 1/2 t. red wine vinegar
- up to 1 T. ground cumin, 1 t. paprika, 1/4 t. mustard powder, and a little or a lot of chili powder

Method:
Mix ground beef and your flavor ingredients together thoroughly.

To make in a dehydrator: Spread no more than 1/4" thick on solid insert trays or parchment paper cut in the shape of your dehydrator trays. Using a dull utensil such as a butter knife, so as not to tear paper or damage trays, cut jerky into strips before it all hardens and becomes more difficult to cut. Dehydrate for at least six hours, but do check on it every hour after that and remove it as soon as it is not at all pink anymore but still soft. It will harden considerably as it cools.

To make in an oven: Spread no more than 1/4" thick on parchment paper or silicone baking sheets. Cut with a dull utensil. Put in the oven and turn it on to the lowest setting, ideally 150°F, and no greater than 200°. Check after 4-6 hours and take out while still soft.

Theoretically jerky does not need to be stored in the fridge, but I put it in there anyway just in case enough moisture might remain to make spoilage feasible. An airtight container is recommended as well.

While all of Mr. D's jerky was enjoyable, my favorite was definitely the version with Italian herbs that made the jerky taste like pizza. I was eating bite-size jerky atop crackers with bits of cheese, having what fun one can during a nine-hour drive. My least favorite was the cumin version, but I dislike almost anything spicy, and if you like spicy then you stand a good chance of enjoying it mightily.

What travel snacks do you like?

Cheese Muffins and Eating Gluten Free at Work

Being gluten free in the workplace is no big deal, but there have been a few things I never anticipated. The reality of being on a severely restricted diet for the rest of my life has made me think in ways I never did about how social eating is.

Business meetings, in particular, typically revolve around food. This means that when I get invited to have lunch as, say, part of an interview day, there might be a restaurant already booked that has nothing there that I can eat! A sit-down restaurant will probably have something that can be made to be gluten free, but it is absolutely necessary to have a detailed discussion with the waiter about everything, which in turn means that the conversation will at least temporarily revolve around something like surprising avenues for gluten cross-contamination. It is a complex issue that most people know just enough about to know what I am talking about and be curious to hear more. Plus, I feel like I have to explain why I am drilling the waiter on whether he has access to the ingredient label for the garlic powder in the chef's seasoning. I suppose this could be a plus if I am trying to show how detail-oriented I am, right? Eh...this is why even though I am not a coffee drinker, I prefer to meet at a coffee place.

Less uncomfortable but sometimes also a challenge is packing my lunch. There is a hidden benefit to this because homemade food is almost inevitably going to be cheaper and healthier than any other option I have, but I run out of ideas fast! Plus, some mornings I get in a rush and want to grab breakfast on my way out the door. This recipe is good for both problems.

There are a lot of lunch ideas out there that revolve around sandwich bread or microwaving things. I am not convinced by anything I have read thus far that microwaving actually damages food in a significant way, but it is a possibility, and at any rate microwaved food tastes funny. Gluten free sandwich bread exists, but I am used to doing without bread and regular bread baking is a hassle to me right now. Some things I do pack are pâte and crackers, leftovers like macaroni and cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and smoothies with coconut milk, egg yolks, yogurt or kefir, and a little fruit. I am always up for more ideas!

Cheese and Egg Muffins
Generously adapted from this recipe from Cheeseslave (the original recipe is also delicious!)
Ingredients:
4 large eggs
3 T. coconut flour
1/4 cup sour cream
1/2 t. paprika
1/4 t. baking powder
1/4 lb. cheddar cheese

Method:
Whisk eggs together, then add coconut flour, sour cream, paprika, and baking powder and whisk until there are no lumps and it is completely blended.

Finely grate the cheese. Stir it in. Grease a muffin pan or line with muffin papers, or if you have silicone muffin cups, just put them on a baking sheet. Fill cups about 2/3 of the way; I love my 3 T. large scoop for muffins, which yields 10 muffins per batch for these. Bake at 350°F for 15-20 minutes until the centers are no longer runny. These freeze well and I find that four make a decent lunch.

Does anybody have suggestions for packable, nourishing, no-heat lunches? What other muffins do you like that could make a meal unto themselves?

Life with Celiac Disease: Diagnosis and Implications

This is the first post in an ongoing series about life with celiac disease. This condition usually starts out with a puzzling array of symptoms that will worsen over time if a gluten free diet is not administered. For many celiacs, like so many people with chronic illness, the process of trying to figure out what is wrong takes years and results in much needless suffering.

I tried to write a brief overview of my experience from the onset of symptoms to my odd diagnosis story to my recovery, but it's too complicated to explain without devoting an entire post, and I don't want this blog to be just about me. Let me summarize in bullet points:

• Years of atypical, severe, unexplained, worsening, eventually debilitating symptoms
• The advice of various doctors caused much harm and never helped
• I cured myself by finally trying a quasi-elimination diet free of some of the most common dietary offenders for a few weeks. No doctor even brought this up as a possibility, though the worst that can happen is a few weeks' inconvenience.
• I was never officially diagnosed with the disease, though not due to the common situation in which a patient is already not eating gluten and will not go back so any testing results in a false negative (tests can only measure the response to gluten, so no gluten means no evidence of an abnormal response to it).
• Many people feel much better on a gluten free diet but most of them do not have celiac disease. Sometimes this matters because a person may have a condition that needs to be addressed by more than a gluten free diet or may have a curable sensitivity to gluten and need not commit to a life of going to great pains to avoid it.
• I still tested borderline positive while on a gluten free diet(!), which means my response was so severe that it took longer to go down than my doctor said was possible. That does not fit the technical specifications for a diagnosis but tells me that I clearly have the disease.

See? Even the bullet-pointed version is complicated. This difficult process is actually typical for celiac disease and many other common chronic conditions that are considered difficult to diagnose. Doctors are wonderful for many things, but they cannot have the same investment in solving your health difficulties as you can. Therefore we need to take active responsibility for our health and, for most of us, the biggest way we affect our health is through what we eat. Many of us who feel healthy now fail to make this a priority or only think of healthy eating in relation to weight management. I think this is a blight on our culture and we are paying for it with our long-term health.

Active responsibility, though, is not reliance on WebMD, Dr. Oz, the USDA, Dr. Weil, or other quacky or fad-driven sources rife with conflicting claims and shoddy logic. I am sorry to say that just because Oprah says something does not mean that actual facts of nature conform to her will. When the government agency promoting the expansion of American agriculture markets starts telling you what to eat because their panels voted on what is most nutritious, run the other way!

I often hear people complain that healthy eating is futile because what is considered healthy changes every couple of years. This, however, comes from relying on shoddy advice. There are many things we do know scientifically that simply have not permeated our culture (e.g. saturated fat and cholesterol consumption is not associated with cardiovascular disease or other negative health outcomes), but it is true that there is very much that we do not know about nutrition. Intellectual humility is necessary for us to be honest with ourselves. For those gaps in our knowledge, however, we have many thousands of years of human history to go on. Have superbly healthy people eaten the way you do for hundreds of years? In any ways that they have not, are your deviations supported by exhaustive scientific research? If you do not know, then aren't you gambling with your health?

Do you have or do you know anyone with celiac disease or a similar chronic health problem? Were there any issues with figuring out what was wrong?

Are you convinced that good nutrition is really important? Do you eat a truly healthy diet most of the time? If not, what challenges would you have to overcome to do so?