Tucked into Seattle’s University district is the charming Portage Bay Cafe in Seattle, a classy breakfast joint typical of the Pacific Northwest: lots of wood, good coffee, tons of hip urbanite patrons dressed in the latest high tech fleece apparel, and omelettes/scrambles with ingredients like goat cheese, baby spinach, and nicoise olives. Here we had a breakfast to go absolutely crazy over.

Their buckwheat pancakes are the best we’ve ever had. They are made with a touch of sugar, making them intrinsically a little sweet. Topped with maple syrup and some whipped cream, they are out of this world. The Portage Bay also has a toppings bar, where you can load up on fresh fruit, berries, nuts, and a host of other goodies before heading back to your table, satisfied that the 10-lb. plate you’re carrying will constitute enough exercise to warrant the calories.

In addition to the pancakes, their omelettes and scrambles are outstanding. We had the Italian omelette with andouille sausage, basil, asiago, tomato, and sautéed mushrooms. This was served with some of the best homefried potatoes in Seattle. After breakfast, we took our coffee to go and walked through the University grounds, nearly comatose with satisfaction. All in all, we would be hard pressed to find a better spot to have a gluten-free brunch anywhere north of the 47th parallel.

The breakfast offerings are inspiring enough, but what really makes the Portage Bay special is their commitment to local and organic food. They have a large posting near the door that tells you where many of their ingredients come from. Most of the items are from within a few hundred miles, so you can feel good that your eggs and bacon didn’t send a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Much of the produce is organic.

I had a very invigorating trip yesterday to our much beloved health food store here in Portland. I’m always on the prowl for new, delicious gf foodstuffs and yesterday I hit the jackpot.

Exhibit A: A new kind of bread. Angeline’s white rice loaf.

We normally try to stay away from “white” breads and tend to skew toward the millet breads, red rice breads, and seeded loaves, but I’ve gotta say the Angeline’s was pretty yummy. It made great toast. More importantly, though, it comes unsliced so you can cut the pieces however thick you like (super juicy thick for gf french toast!). That, to me, was the big treat. I find that as a celiac I am searching, above all else, to recapture the small wonders of my glutenous days. So the idea that I can now get an unsliced store-bought loaf fills a small hole in my heart (and stomach).

Speaking of which, wouldn’t you just kill for some gluten-free cookie dough ice cream? Well, pine no more.

I found just that in the freezer section from a company called Purely Decadent. It’s dairy free as well as gluten-free so it’s great for those of you who have other food allergies. It tastes like your standard soy-based ice cream–a little tart and a little thin–but one can overlook that to experience the thrill of dipping one’s spoon into the cardboard pint and coming out with a wad of raw cookie dough. It was divine (and organic!). Let’s all cross our fingers that they come out with a milk-y version.

On the other side of the spectrum, I found Double Chocolate Delite cookies from Natural Food Mill Bakery.
I’ve never had a communion wafer before, but I imagine it tastes very much like that. Bad texture, and little to no chocolatey goodness. If you want my advice, I’d say steer completely clear of the Delite.

I still get a thrill even when I find gluten-free products that I don’t much care for because it means that companies are taking the gf market seriously, that they’re developing new things all the time, that they understand that we celiacs need to have delicious, wonderful, healthy food.

Here’s to living in a time when we celiacs are finally getting noticed. Eat well. Be happy.

In addition to being the chief technical officer for gfplanet, a guest contributor to this blog, and a fantastic husband, Joshua is also a fourth year medical student. It is not uncommon, as you might imagine, for his workday stories to be sad and dispiriting. But last night when Joshua and I were recounting our days for one another, he told me something that made me so happy.

A young girl came to the hospital with terrible g.i. symptoms that weren’t going away. She had been treated with antibiotics for an infection, which didn’t seem to be working. The medical team was sitting around talking about all the possibilities it could be: IBS, colitis, crohn’s, giardia…

Joshua got excited because he immediately thought of celiac, and wouldn’t he be the hero, the genius of the world for coming up with something so far below the radar. Just then the attending physician started going through the patient’s blood work: “Her CBC is normal…and her celiac panel was negative…” The antibody test for celiac was one of the first things they tried! I couldn’t believe it. Joshua said that it’s becoming routine to test for celiac and that doctors are really starting to pay attention to the epidemiological research on it, which says that celiac disease is a lot more common than everyone originally thought.

I remember how unheard of celiac was eight years ago when I was diagnosed. I remember having to go to doctor after doctor after doctor just for them to tell me that nothing was wrong with me. One of them even told me to stop eating vegetables and to stick with toast and oatmeal (I wish I were kidding).

Joshua is at an academic hospital in a fairly cosmopolitan city and was curious to know if word of celiac has spread to smaller hospitals and private practices in all parts of the country. We’d love to hear your comments about your diagnosis experiences and if you think the medical community in your area is becoming more hip to celiac disease.

cabin

stove

Happy New Year.

We just got back from a two-week vacation in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica and have been dying to tell you about it.

Although we’ve done a bit of international traveling since my celiac diagnosis, I’m always a little hesitant about finding safe food in countries where I don’t speak the language. So, as always, we packed our food suitcase full of millet bread from Food For Life, Bumble Bars (me likey the chocolate ones), dehydrated lentil soup that we get in bulk at the health food store, and whatever other gf goodies we could squeeze in. (We foolishly put our organic peanut butter in a carry-on bag. It was confiscated at security so we wouldn’t try to blow up the plane with it.)

We rented a sweet little casa with a full kitchen in Playa Grande so that we could make our own food if we needed to. One of our first stops was to the local mercado in Huacas where found gorgeous sweet plantains (platanos); mini rice cakes (which are good, it turns out, with scoops of chocolate chocolate chip Haagen Dazs); the best corn tortillas you ever tasted; yogurt; aged gouda with cumin seeds, which I absolutely love and can’t get in the states; and local, organic shade-grown coffee for Joshua (he was in heaven). Most of our meals consisted of rice, beans, and cheese on a tortilla with a side of sweet plantains. It was extremely simple but absolutely delicious.

The most exciting food experience we had in Costa Rica–and perhaps in a long time–was at a place called La Carolina Lodge in Bijagua, about a three hour drive from Playa Grande. We were drawn to the lodge because it is extremely rustic (no electricity!) and is located on a working farm (check out the photo above of our sleeping quarters). The rooms come with three meals a day, which are all prepared from food grown on the farm. Breakfast consisted of eggs (from their chickens), black beans (from their bean plants), cheese (made fresh from their cow’s milk), and coffee (from beans, which–you guessed it!–they grow and roast themselves). For lunch they usually included tortillas that were freshly ground that morning from their own corn. For dinner they cooked meat from their animals over an open, outdoor, wood stove (see second picture above). And while you’re eating, someone from the staff sneaks off to your cabin and fills it with candles in every room so that when you get back, after drinking wine in front of the outdoor fire or wallowing in the wood-fired jacuzzi, your place is all aglow.

Because the food is so simple and naturally gluten-free, I didn’t have any problems with my diet. Joshua told them about my gluten allergy (in his rapidly improving college Spanish) and they said I would be able to eat everything except the bread, which was served in a separate basket. They even made a special treat for me, which they fed to everyone: instead of battering fish in wheat flour, they dusted it in homegrown corn flour. I tell you, it was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life. Joshua and I have plans to remake the corn-battered Tilapia as soon as humanly possible.

So here’s to traveling safely and boldly and exploring our Great Big Gluten-Free Planet!

We happened to find ourselves in Minneapolis, MN recently and, recalling a time long ago when we insouciantly wolfed down bear claws and apple fritters without batting a jejunum (that is, before we were diagnosed with celiac sprue), wondered if there weren’t a nook or cranny somewhere in town where we could find some GF pastries. Well, we didn’t have to look too hard. At The Wedge on Lyndale Ave at Franklin, just south of downtown, we found a wide selection of freshly baked GF pastries, cakes, and cookies that very much rocked our world. We giddily picked out a box of pistachio cake with vanilla and apricot frosting, chocolate marjolaine, a chocolate éclaire, a chocolate chip cookie (peanut butter and shortbread were also available), and a few chocolate truffles for good measure. It was all we could do not to gobble them up before taking the delicious-looking photo below.

The éclaire, it turns out, is the best éclaire we can remember ever eating. It’s flakey and light, and the filling is rich and delicious. The dark chocolate icing was fantastic. It was every bit as good as the pastries we remember from childhood. The pistachio cake was likewise delicious, though the vanilla icing could have been more flavorful. The real prize was the chocolate marjolaine cake, which was almost as good as the best cake we ever ate, period, which was our chocolate birthday cake last year (which was also, it so happens, from The Wedge). Their marjolaine is chocolatey and almondy, structured in three layers with light chocolate icing between.

About The Wedge

The Wedge is a coop, one of a network of member-run health food grocery markets around the country. The community-mindedness of such stores is evident in the way they cater to persons with food allergies, by clearly designating their foods as allergen-free. In particular, celiacs can feel comfortable shopping the dessert cases, as the cakes and pastries are clearly marked with “Gluten-free” cards in the case. Moreover, coops like The Wedge specialize in offering organic and fair-trade food options, making shopping easy for socially- and environmentally conscious consumers.

GF Planet has recently discovered a lovely new cracker from Mary’s Gone Crackers of Gridley, CA. These delicious crackers are available in a variety of flavors and are light, crunchy, and hold up well under conditions of aggressive dipping. In fact, they taste so good with a slice of gruyere that we recently almost fainted.

Okay, we’re exaggerating a little, but these little crackers are really good. Not only that, but they’re organic, which we feel is an important factor in making food-buying decisions. Another attribute of these crackers is that you can buy them online at the Mary’s Gone Crackers website, or buy in packs of twelve from Amazon.com.

These crackers are available in Onion, caraway, black pepper, and herb flavors, as well as plain. The basic formula starts with whole grain brown rice, quinoa, flax seeds, and organic brown sesame seeds; again, all these ingredients are organic. The crackers themselves are very thin, with a very crunchy texture. The flax seeds make the crackers seem especially hearty. And as you read above, they hold up well with dipping, surviving some very thick hummus in our rigorous testing.

A little about quinoa, since many people are unfamiliar with this grain. The plant is considered a “pseudocereal”, meaning it isn’t a grass, but produces a grain that is very similar to grass or wheat-type grains. Quinoa is an ancient grain dating back to the time of the Incas, who treated the grain as sacred and cultivated it at high altitudes in the Andes mountains of what is now South America.

Quinoa is high in protein as well, with a protein content of 12-18%, and with an amino acid constituency that is uniquely high compared to other grains. This means it is a more fully balanced source of protein, so much so that NASA is studying this grain with an eye towards using it in space travel applications.

To read more about quinoa, visit a great Washington State University article on the grain, and read about it on Wikipedia. And while you’re reading, crunch away on some Mary’s Gone Crackers crackers, which we also found to go well with magazines and short novels.

The Mayo Clinic just published a study that shows a potential link between celiac disease and cognitive decline. They were surprised to see how many untreated celiacs suffered from dementia. Unlike the regular, garden variety dementia, the CD-induced variety was shown to be reversed when the patient was put on a gluten-free diet. You can read more about it in this Web MD article.

This just goes to show what we’ve known all along, which is that untreated celiac disease can lead to very severe secondary illnesses. We must increase awareness about CD so that no one has to go years without a diagnosis.

Speaking of which (check out the smooth segue) October is Celiac Disease Awareness Month, so get out there and make people aware! Talk to restaurant owners and grocery store owners and any other kind of owner you happen to come across. Get the word out.

And always remember to eat well and be happy.

What did we find when we went to the health food store last week, you ask?

Gluten-Free BEER!

Turns out Bard’s Tale just got distribution in Oregon and a six pack of it lept right out at us when we were walking down the wine and beer aisle at the market (which is usually an uneventful trip).

Here’s a shot of the website’s founder later that evening. She’s in celiac heaven swinging on her porch swing, drinking her first store-bought beer in six years.

Does life get any better than that?

It has recently come out that MacDonalds has been lying about the ingredients in their french fries. The company has always maintained that their french fries were dairy and gluten-free. It has just been revealed, however, that the flavoring agents they use do in fact contain both dairy and gluten.

So please avoid Mickey D’s fries. And also, if you can, consider avoiding Mickey D’s entirely. We at GF Planet believe in stearing clear of fast food as much as possible (inflammatory to our poor, sensitive celiac digestive tracts) in favor of healthy, whole foods.

If you have a hankering for fries–which is unavoidable at times–find a local joint that makes them just the way you like. That way you’ll be supporting your local economy (instead of a mega corporation) and you’ll have a better shot at knowing exactly what’s in your food.

Live long and prosper.

We’ve had to migrate over to another web server and, as a result, have lost some content (all the posts from September come to mind). We’re working like bunny rabbits to get everything up and working again, but please bear with us if you experience a few glitches. And as always, please feel free to report any funny business to us at soundoff@gfplanet.com.