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.