Solving the Dinnertime Dilemma?

This is just a brief post to thank Sarah for the advice to try crockpotting (if it wasn't yet a verb, I'm making it one!). I hope to join the converted ASAP. She also provided a helpful link, http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/. Actually, what I really want is gluten-free recipes (as she noted), and that link seems to be broken at the moment. But I'll check back when I actually get a crock - er - slow cooker. I’m sure a lot of the recipes will work well.

The gluten-free topic is almost a blog site unto itself (oh, yes, it is: http://www.celiac.com/). By now, a lot of people have heard of celiac disease, and some also know that it’s more common in people who, like me, have weird immune systems (me by dint of the diabetes). Well, I’m not at all sure that I have celiac. I weaned myself off wheat about 16 years ago, when I started getting migraines (complete with the severe digestive distress that’s a hallmark of true migraine – no, I won’t provide details, Halloween is coming soon enough for those who like guts and gore). What made me think of dropping wheat was that I’d also broken out in hives after eating granola. I did feel a lot better when I stopped eating wheat, and I also lost 10 pounds. But I kept on having migraines. And about 12 years after I’d stopped the wheat binge (I was really addicted – not good for a diabetic), my doctor tested me for celiac disease, and it came back negative. The only problem is that some reliable sources (e.g., http://www.celiac.org/cd-diagnosis.php) say you need to be eating wheat for any of these tests to work, while others have said that certain blood tests should work even if you haven’t eaten wheat. So who knows whether I have celiac or not. Actually, I suspect I might have a straight allergy to wheat, given the hives and other symptoms I had at the time.

Either way, I’d rather not repeat the symptoms I had (as my daughter now says when eating lettuce: “yuck!”). So in addition to the diabetic diet and cooking around a toddler’s habits, I avoid wheat as much as possible, which rules out a lot of even partially processed (a.k.a., easy) food. When our daughter was a couple of months old, my husband tried several times to help with grocery shopping but ended up with a lot of food that I couldn’t eat. He’s just not used to reading labels obsessively like I am. (To his credit, he still helps with the shopping – he just doesn’t try to do it all.)

The combination of the diabetes and the wheat-free diet also means I haven’t tried food-shopping services that have saved a lot of parents. I wouldn’t be able to allow substitutions when they didn’t have what I wanted, and I might end up without the food I need (when you take insulin, you don’t just have to avoid certain foods, you have be sure you eat the right foods at the right times, more or less, even with a pump). I might have to break down and try it sometime, but so far the supermarket around the corner and my fears about the havoc it might wreak have kept me from experimenting there. But I’m gung-ho about the crock pot!