Grocery Shopping with Celiac Disease

Have you ever come home to 12 bags of chips, 6 packages of cookies, 6 boxes of tea bags, 2 bottles of vanilla and 4 bags of almond flour on your front porch delivered by UPS and FedEx?  Well I have!  That’s what I came home to on January 3rd.  Don’t worry…I did actually order it.

Truth it, this part of life now for Henry and I; except for the cookies as they are mine and mine only.  Haha!  At $3.68 per package, Henry can get his own cookies   There are some gluten-free items that I have truly loved from the first bite I’ve tasted!  After 4 months of trying various products, I’ve learned some products that I definitely can take part in over and over again. That said, shopping for them at HEB, Central Market or Whole Foods consistently can really dig into your wallet.  That same cookie package is nearly $5 at HEB!  Knowing that, the products I know I want, I know I’ll use are now being purchased in bulk on Amazon.com.  I LOVE it!  This now makes me wonder why I haven’t been trying to save by shopping on Amazon in the past!!!

So how has grocery shopping changed overall?  Well, as far as what ends up in the basket when I head for the checkout, it’s really not all that different. IF I am buying pasta, then I’m buying gluten-free (usually brown rice) pasta.  Bread is purchased even less than before, which wasn’t often to begin with, and it’s out of the freezer section for the GF bread.  Tortillas are always corn tortillas.  When sausage is purchased, it is always Jimmy Dean All-Natural sausage; each of you should be buying this anyway, regardless of your diet.  Crackers are always Glutino brand crackers.

Outside of the grocery store, all flour is ordered on Amazon.com and shipped to our doorstep.  Currently, we have a freezer stocked with multiple bags of each of the following:

• Almond Meal/Flour
• Potato Starch
• Potato Flour
• Brown Rice Flour
• Tapioca Flour/Starch
• Sorghum Flour
• Gluten Free All-Purpose Flour Note: I do NOT NOT NOT recommend this flour as a replacement for All-Purpose Flour in regular recipes.  It’s NOT good for this whatsoever.  I use this in cooking recipes only that require an all-purpose flour for thickening.  This is the red-headed step child of GF flours; used only when needed
• Millet Flour
• White Rice Flour
• Xanthan Gum

As I have mentioned before, I am excited to learn the ways of gluten free cooking/baking, which I have indeed started, and all of this starts with the grocery shopping.  Once receiving this diagnosis, I was thankful that Henry and I had truly begun to change our eating habits once we married.  I gradually began shopping the outside of the store more and the inside of the store less.  I actually stopped shopping the chip aisle all together!  Thus, my diagnosis of CD did not turn our world completely upside down because the style of grocery shopping I need to be doing was already mostly being done. 

All that said, the area that seems most difficult to others when I talked about it is shopping for condiments.  There are various things that Henry and I need to look for in ingredient lists on condiments that mean gluten is in the product.  For instance:

• modified food starch
• malt and other malt ingredients
• semolina
• dextrin (depends on origin)

Those are just 4 of many examples that create problems in condiments or other things in the center of the grocery store.

Hopefully that sheds some light on our grocery shopping experiences these days!  If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Christmas Lights!

I can’t believe I forgot to share this in my Holidays 2010 post!  Henry did a fabulous job with our Christmas lights this year, and I’m really proud of him.  Up close, you are able to see just how precise he was when hanging them.  Now, we didn’t have a full elaborate display like Christmas yard of the month or anything, but I still think they were pretty awesome!

Of course, Ember likes to be part of everything

One night, as I helped Henry put debris and leaves out for trash pickup, a woman drove by and stopped to tell Henry thank you for putting up the lights.  “My son loves them and calls them the ‘star lights!” she informed him.  HOW SWEET!  While he may deny his happiness from that comment, I know it made him feel so good!  Good job on our lights hunny!

Holidays of 2010!

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year

We certainly did!  Thanksgiving was well celebrated at the annual Kornegay Family Reunion on Thanksgiving Day.  We then proceeded to Corpus Christi for the remainder of the weekend to have some relaxation time with family.  During the Christmas preparation time, we were CERTAINLY busy.  It seemed as though we never stopped going or doing.

One of the things we did was attend Cody and Megan Porter’s lovely Ugly Christmas Sweater party!  Want to know what we wore?  Have a look…

That’s right   I’m a little disappointed to say that I borrowed mine from my cousin Ashlee; I love her, but she is marrying a t-sip.  Sadly, we paid money for Henry’s at Walmart, but we then quickly gave it to above said t-sip (Phil).  Haha!  Sweet Michele Guthrie was not impressed when she walked in the house to see what we’d worn to the party.  Cody agreed to take our picture, but had a difficult time doing so.  The above picture is the FINAL result, but here’s some of the messups which do provide some laughter.

This one isn’t Cody’s fault…

Not really a full view of the sweaterness…

Blurry from the laughter than ensued from a picture I shall not post.

Also, catch a glimpse of the classy….girly…matching…PAID FOR AT DILLARD’S sweaters that Michele and Mike wore.

Definitely a fun time at the Porter’s.  Thanks for the fun night!

The next weekend we enjoyed a wonderful pajama party with our bible study group at Stacey and Jason Metts house!  Lots of fun had by all in our white elephant gift exchange of random stuff form your house you want to get rid of.  I ended up with a Brazil T-shirt.  Haha!

The following day we had our carpets cleaned, and they are FABULOUS!  I can’t even believe how great they look.  With some very awesome stuff going on in the Borchard house in January, I definitely needed them to be cleaned.  If you are looking for someone to clean yours in the Houston area, I highly recommend Restore Works of Houston.  My aunt and uncle use them and recommended them to us.

The following Monday, we joined Mindy and Gordon Young, Samantha and Judson Brown, Sarah Koopersmith and Brian Miculka for dinner for Mindy’s birthday.  So exciting to join all of them but cool to see Sarah and Brian while they were in town from Singapore!

During the weeks before Christmas, shocking I know, I was excited to send out our Christmas cards, which are pictured at the top of this post.  I love sending out Christmas cards just a little too much.  The labels this year were of equal highlight to the cards.

Continuing, our Christmas plans were short but still fun and family filled.  We celebrated Christmas with the Brod family on the morning of Christmas Eve.  Our white elephant gift exchange was a little more fun and mischievous this year as each one of us, besides Ashlee and Phil, bought presents from from Ashlee and Phil’s wedding registries.  We selected and opened gifts as normal, but, at the end of the exchange, we all yelled “Merry Christmas” at once and placed the gifts around Ashlee and Phil.   Lots of fun to surprise them with a small impromptu wedding shower on Christmas. 

Christmas on Corpus followed, and we did our first white elephant gift exchange in Corpus with 20 people.  It was A LOT of fun, and I think we started a new tradition there as well.  Eddie and Velma (Henry’s aunt and uncle) hosted a fabulous Christmas gathering on Christmas day. 

Henry and I both went back to work post Christmas, but we looked forward to gathering with Carissa, Nick, Anne and Scott for NYE.  I was excited for another chance to use my new camera that Mom and Dad gave me for Christmas

The six of us had a great time eating dinner, playing board games, and ringing in the new year.