The Prinicple of the Cheese

I think we all like the principle of things. I love watching the TV courtroom shows where people sue their best friend over 40 bucks just on the principle of the matter. The fact that she borrowed the 40 bucks then went and got her hair done, sent this woman over the edge. We do a lot of things on principle these days, we cut people off because they cut us off and we argue over things we really don't care about in the need to just be "right".

I will eat a whole shit load of cheese on principle.

My brother Robb took me to one of the best concerts I have ever been to. It was Roger Daltrey and he sang the entire Tommy Album plus all The Who hits. Because The Who is my brother's favourite band in the entire world, he bought the diamond platinum VIP package. I have no idea how much this cost but I assume it was a lot. And because I am one of his two favourite little sisters, he brought me.

The show itself was awesome. We had front row centre and spent the whole time on our feet screaming our heads off. If you ever wondered if Roger Daltrey still had "it" I am here to tell you that he does...in spades. Before the show though we got to meet Roger Daltrey and get his autograph and everything. There is nothing like a classic rock star looking at you, opening his arms and saying in that gorgeous British accent, "Come here darling," That's what he said to me anyway, I am fairly sure he said something different to my brother.

We also got to have this little reception thing before hand where it was all you can drink and it had a big buffet of food and everything. I didn't realise that this was going to happen or else I would have called ahead and told them about my Celiacs. My brother most likely did tell me but I stopped listening after he said "Front Row Rodger Daltrey" and started putting on my shoes and lipstick. But almost everything in this room had gluten in it, except for the vodka and the cheese. Therefore, ON PRINCIPLE, figuring how much my big brother probably shelled out for this event, I ATE AS MUCH CHEESE AS I HUMANLY COULD. I drank a lot of vodka too.

I swear, it was gross but I just kept going. I had to, on principle, eat my weight in cheese. It's that feeling you get when you feel like suddenly, the scales are not in your favour and you have to even the score. At one point, Robb looks at the buffet table and says, "Did you take the whole wheel of brie?" I nodded as I shoved a triangle of it in my mouth. "Nice," he replied with approval. The servers had to replenish the cheese platters like three times, it was wicked cool. And don't think that I was making an ass of myself. The Who fans are hardcore and one lady just asked for the bottle of Rye and a straw from the bar. Eating pounds of cheese was really the least form of Gluttony going on in that room.

I could have stood there and demanded that the servers whip something up for me. I could have stomped my foot and caused a scene that how dare they not  prepare for allergies, I could have assumed that the whole world should cater to my problem. But, on principle, I will never do that. And in repayment for my principles, I got to eat my weight in cheese and have a cuddle with a real live rock star.

Stick to your principles but not at the detriment of those around you. The world doesn't owe your Celiac ass anything.

                                   Just cuddling with a Rock Star and my belly full of cheese.

Whip, Puff and Roll the Balls

Turns out, other than my talent for head stands and eating lobster, I have a talent for making cream puffs. Well, it might not be an ACTUAL talent as much as it is a great recipe but whatever. Last week we had friends over for dinner and I figured that I had better attempt to do something for a dessert considering this is the friend who made the GF cheesecake and GF chocolate pies. Basically, the woman could be Celiac and wouldn’t struggle at all. Oh Murphy, you and your laws need a shake-up.

 I have also been craving something like a donut for weeks now. It is "Roll up the Rim" time here in Canada. I will explain to all of my non-Canuck readers. (Side Note, I would like to welcome Albania and Argentina to my readers)  Tim Hortons is the best coffee shop of all time and somewhat of a Canadian institution. I love my Starbucks, don't get me wrong but there is something in a Tim Hortons coffee that can not be beat. Every year they have a contest where they give away prizes by hiding the wins under the paper rim of the coffee cups. After you finish your coffee, you "Roll up the Rim" to see if you won. You can win everything from a cup of coffee to a car. We Canadian's love our Tim Horton's coffee and expecially Roll up the Rim time. I NEVER win, ever, ever, ever and yet THIS year I have won three times, what did I win you ask? Well a DONUT of course! Again, I say, Fuck you and your Laws Murphy.

So I have been craving donuts and I have no intention of paying 12 bucks for four of them from the grocery store.

So I flipped through my Gems of Gluten Free Baking cookbook and find the recipe for Cream Puffs. It was fairly easy, mix some stuff, heat it all on a stove, mix again and make into balls. Now, this one calls for 3 inch balls (insert inappropriate childish giggle here) and after making them I think that is a bit big. I think next time, I would make them smaller so that they could be eaten in two or even one bite if you were a porn star. *Minds deeply in proverbial gutter now * Anyway, it only made eight and so I made a second batch so we had about 15 because I ate one.  Ok, fine, I ate two, it is important to quality test.

All you have to do then is let them cool, cut them in half and fill them with whipped cream. I am a bottomless believer in REAL whipped cream. It takes moments to whip cream and yet everyone goes out and buys shit that is packaged to look like hairspray from the 80’s. Why?

Here is a simple Whipped Cream Recipe. Like seriously, this is how easy this is. Don’t buy anything in a spray can anymore.

Ingredients:

·         1 cup heavy cream

·         1/4 cup sugar

·         1 teaspoon vanilla

Preparation:

Whip cream until almost stiff.(tee hee)  Add sugar and vanilla; beat until cream holds peaks.

So I filled my cream puffs with some lovely whipped cream and then dusted some powdered sugar all over it and threw them in the fridge. I was worried that they would get soggy while we were eating dinner but they didn’t and they were awesome. We ate them so quickly that I forgot to take a picture. So I snapped one at the end of the last one after I took a bite of it.

Next time I am going to add some drizzled chocolate too, that would be really good on the balls.

I am adding my talent for GF Cream Puff making to my resume. Go get “Gems of Gluten Free Baking” and see if you have a talent too. Don’t forget to make the balls a little smaller!

Maturity is for assholes.

If anyone wins the car, camera or TV at Tim Hortons, I will take it off your hands.

I Am In Recovery....sort of

I have discussed this before. I have a problem with bread. I am an addict. Plain and simple. Every other Celiac blog out there (which may be what some people call 'informative' but aren't funny so just read this one) tells me that I will stop missing bread. They are vague on the time it takes for this magical moment to arrive and therefore I think they are all liars. I think not missing bread is a myth like unicorns and unbiased news reporting on FOX. Seasoned Celiacs have been without bread for like fifteen years and maybe they have just forgotten how great a piece of glutened goodness is.  


 I just woke up from a dream where I was lying in a hammock eating naan bread. It could have had talking monkeys and Ryan Gosling in it and I would never have known. It was all about the bread. Bread is what I dream about, it’s sad, it’s true, I promised you honestly. I still see commercials for Tim Horton’s breakfast sandwiches and drool and man I would love a croissant with my morning coffee right now. And I KNOW that reasonable facsimiles of these products are readily available (for triple the price and half the flavor) without gluten. But my addict brain cannot be fooled and realizes that a gluten free donut is like methadone and while pretty good, isn’t EXACLTY the same. We addicts need it to be exactly the same sometimes.


We need to have some sort of recovery group for bread addicts. We all sit around and talk about the many ways we have shamed ourselves over bread. I could talk about the day that we went to the Cattle Barron and I ate a hunk of sour dough bread the size of my head while all the other ladies ate salads. I am, if nothing else, a classy gal. Or that when my heart was broken as a teen I didn’t want ice cream, oh no, I would eat seven pieces of toast. Or the many times I went to the Grey Eagle Casino, not to gamble but to eat Bannock by the bucket-full? Dark Days but I would do it again in a heartbeat if I could.



Maybe there could be some sort of brain washing therapy? They could put up pictures of breads and then shock our chairs until we realized bread means pain. Of course that’s what having Celiacs is all about; eating bread causes pain and that really hasn’t deterred my cravings. What if there was a medication that made it so that every time we ate bread, we puked….oh wait… that’s what happens with Celiacs sometimes too. Or that if we ate bread we had to stay in bed for three days….wait…that too is a byproduct of my Celiacs.



So I guess Celiacs is the best deterrent for my bread addiction and it still isn’t working.   



Pre-emptive response letter to the previous paragraphs.

Dear Stupid Person who hates me and yet reads my blog obsessively,

I apologize that you were offended that I equated bread addicts with the serious diseases of substance abuse. I in no way meant to belittle the grave afflictions associated with addictions to drugs and alcohol. It was meant to be a humorous satire and I am sorry if I offended you.

Please don't stop reading, just stop sending me angry and/or passive aggressive letters

Bunches of punches in the neck :)

Laurie

So I’m a bread addict….still. I will let you know when that changes.  If someone hears about a bread addict recovery group, let me know. Maybe I will just start one myself, we can get blind wasted and talk about bread. (Read letter above)

A Big Bowl Full of Memories

It's a happy day in the Lyons household.

Let me back track... as a child, on special occasions, my siblings and I were allowed to pick a flavour of sugary cereal. So for Easter or Christmas or maybe even for our birthdays we got to get a cereal that we learnt about from some loud and brightly coloured commercial. Now, let me preface this by making it clear that I did enjoy our treat cereal every once in a while because really, I was a kid and it was a bowl of marshmallows and no self respecting child passes up a bowl of marshmallows on Easter morning. I do remember though that I would always gravitate back to my favourite cereal, Rice Krispies. I have always loved them. Its the food I ate most mornings as a child, as a teen it became dinner and when I was pregnant it was my saving grace.

 Rice Krispis are one of those foods for me that hold memories. It reminds me of early mornings with my sister, sitting cross legged on the floor watching Bugs Bunny. We could make Rice Crispies, thus making us practically grown up women. The way we saw it, we could totally live on our own at the age of 8 and 10 because we could make this bowl of crispy rice and milk.

I remember vividly that shortly after being diagnosed with Celiac I thought to myself that at least I could still have Rice Krispies because HELLO, they were made with RICE! I was devastated to find out that Rice Krispies contain Malt....no good. It is one of the few foods that I have had heroin-esque pangs of cravings for. I have thought more than once when I move softly to the kitchen at midnight,  that I would I love a bowl of Rice Krispies. Nothing else seems to fill the void so I usually end up eating a half a brick of cheese and calling it a night.

I have been seeing ads for GF Rice Krispies on the US channels for a few months now. This is incredibly frustrating for those of us in the Great White North. The US gets all these wicked new items and then it takes months or years for us to get them in Canada. All these yummy foods just a border away.  What is up with Jack in the Box and Sonic...yowza those places look intense. I want to be a part of that ice cream slurpee thing they make.

Anyway, I heard at a party this weekend that GF Rice Krispies had arrived. We almost left to go to the store.

Today, I found them at my local Walmart and I was giddy! I raced home and could not wait to tuck in. I poured myself a huge bowl and of course portioned the milk to the perfect amount and then tilted my head and sighed at that magic sound. It's delightful. They taste almost the same....but....better! I know! It's so rare that a GF product is superior but it happened. They hold their texture longer and are crunchier and they are LOUDER! AND they cost less than half the price of the GF cereal that tries to copy them. I sat back, turned on some cartoons and enjoyed my bowl of happy memories. If only my sister were visiting from BC, then it would have been perfect. Miss you Dee.

So it is a fine day in the Lyon's household, I am all grown up and making myself some Rice Crispies. I have friends over for brunch on Sundays and I am SERIOUSLY considering waylaying the bacon for everyone to have a bowl of cereal. They will thank me....really, they are THAT good.

Pre -Fab Celiac Gal

It’s all about convenience these days. Some of the ads on TV amaze me. I just saw a commercial for a product that appears to be a bag of shredded cheese mixed with breadcrumbs. They show a family thoroughly enjoying their dinner now that it took 7 less seconds to make it. And I ask, how slothful can we get? Apparently. some families don’t even eat on plates anymore. They use paper plates exclusively, for every single meal because they don’t want to do dishes anymore. I am stunned by this. Completely dumbfounded.

There are meals that you can buy now where you just “pop the dish in the oven and in one hour you have a perfectly cooked roast”. I have a really good secret for you. THAT IS HOW YOU MAKE A NORMAL ROAST! Added to these items is of course enormous amounts of preservatives and chemicals to maintain that “fresh” taste.  Rather than actually preparing something fresh, we are spending twice as much money and not any less time to eat something that in most cases, is bad for us. Odd.  

Enjoy a big Sunday dinner every once in a while. Take some TIME to make a meal for your loved ones. Enjoy the act of cooking. However, as I always say, everything in moderation.  If you’ve run out of time on a Tuesday before gymnastics and need to have dinner on the table in 3.3seconds, go ahead and fling something in the microwave and toss it on a paper dish. Just don’t do that every day because over time I think you (and our planet) will regret it.

THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUCEMENT

 I think I speak for the majority of the population when I beg you to NOT post your meals on Facebook.  Why the fuck would ANYONE give a shit about what you had for dinner? Unless it is your last meal prior to execution or the first one after battling stomach cancer, it isn’t notable to anyone but you. You sound like a pompous snit and people don’t like you for it. I know I take pictures of my food sometimes but it is for this blogs benefit only and I get the douche chills from myself every time I do it.

THIS ENDS THE PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUCEMENT

That being said, I do wish that there were more convenience foods for Celiacs.  We don’t have a lot of “heat and go” items. If we do, they are so expensive I must question whether or not there is a Faberge egg hiding in there for a prize. In addition, most frozen GF meals taste pretty terrible too. The texture goes “off” and everything just melds together.  I grab one once in a while though, because we all get lazy sometimes, even (shocker) me.

Some of the meals I would recommend are the Glutino Brand. They are usually pretty good. And really, anything made by the fine folks at People Food; their perogies are a wonderful fast and easy meal made with delicious love. A word of caution though, I love Amy’s GF frozen burritos but the NON GF ones are often put with the GF ones so be cautious when buying those.  Read the labels.

I do try to make fresh meals as much as possible, and I highly recommend it. Skip the chemicals and the extra fat and sugar and salt to keep the food tasting acceptable. Try to limit the amount of pre-fab food you put in your person but feel free to be lazy once in a while. Whatever you eat, don’t publicize it because I guarantee that you are getting more eye rolls than admiration.

Kony 2012

Hi Guys,

This blog isn't about my celiacs and I have to admit that it isn't going to be very funny. I just saw this video on facebook. I don't think I will ever be able to get it out of my head. It asks us to share it in any way that we can. This is a way I can share. Please watch this video, please learn who Joseph Kony is.  Please help the world change who we are as a people. When we know  better, we can do better. 

Thanks a bunch and remember, doing the right thing is Gluten Free

Love ya
Laurie




Kony 2012