The Reader Travels

A gluten free diet can be surprisingly tasty, but there’s still the occasional assault on the palate. The texture of rice flour breads is not quite right, and the yeast aroma can be overwhelming. Dry pastries, crunchy bread, tasteless cookies, tooth-chipping crackers - these are all things we had to try before we found the ones that actually taste good.

My mind keeps going back to the profiteering Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, who bought up all this Egyptian cotton and couldn’t figure out how to offload it. Finally, in desperation, he covered it in chocolate and tried serving it in the mess hall. Every time we try one of these new products, I hope and pray it doesn’t taste like chocolate covered cotton.

Then again, you probably consume more cotton than you realize, cottonseed anyway. It’s funny, I found this article in the New York Times archive from 1910, which looks to be bought and paid for by the fledgling cottonseed flour industry, hoping to do what corn has achieved in the hundred years since this was written. Sorry, cottonseed, you lost.

Oh, and if you read the fine print, you’d see that cottonseed bread isn’t very good unless you mix a little wheat flour in it. On the other hand, the South might have actually won the Civil War if they’d known they could eat bread made out of cottonseed.

And to top it all off, “It has another property that should commend it to many. It clears and tones up the complexion of humans, just as it polishes and electrifies the glossy coats of animals to which it is fed. This may serve to make the new flour very popular with the ladies.”

When the only safe options for eating out on a gluten free diet are really expensive restaurants and chains, it’s time to start eating in more often. I don’t mind, though, because I love to cook.

The biggest problem now is that I’m constantly reminded about the deficiencies of my kitchen. The house was built in the 1970s when appliances were much smaller and actually fit into the spaces built for them. The new appliances are too big for the kitchen, so it’s a puzzle to get into drawers and cabinets. You have to open the dishwasher to get into one drawer, the oven to get into another; and you can’t open the refrigerator wide enough to get into the bottom, left-hand crisper drawer. I dream of one day gutting the whole thing and starting fresh, but I have too many other home improvement projects to finish first.

It reminds me of the 2003 Norwegian movie, Kitchen Stories. I can imagine a Swedish man sitting on a high director’s chair in my pantry, observing my patterns and behaviors. The pantry door gets in my way because I can’t access the counter where I want to mash my potatoes or grind my spices. So I slam it shut, and the guy in the pantry is just sitting in the dark trying to divine the answer to a well-designed kitchen. First order of business - the pantry door comes off.

I guess since the Swedes did so much research on proper kitchen arrangement, I ought to consider buying my next kitchen at IKEA.

So, since we’re now a gluten free household, we’ve had to break down and become the type of people who shop at Whole Foods. We still resist it, only shopping there for specialty items like gluten-free andouille sausage, this non-frozen gluten-free bread we can’t seem to find anywhere else, sorghum beer and an array of snacks.

Thing is, we don’t have one of these stores in my town, so we have a few choices about where to go. At the new store in the Lakewood neighborhood of Dallas, they have more parking spaces reserved for hybrids than they do for handicapped people. The one time we went to the store at Preston and Forest, we couldn’t find anything because it was such a maze, and the staff was even snooty when we asked for help. “You walked right by it,” the woman proclaimed. Months later, my sister-in-law wanted to stop there for something, and I stayed in the car, not wanting to feel the bad energy in there ever again.

The best option open to us was the Whole Foods in Arlington, Texas. I knew the store, had even been to two cooking classes there since they were taught by my girlfriend’s brother. As I remembered it, it wasn’t that bad. But still, when we drove out there and I gave directions, I said, “It’s on the right up ahead, just follow the smug cloud.”

Just as I remembered it, it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t set up on one of those crazy mazes where you can’t find what you need or you have to start over at the beginning if you miss something. Easy in, easy out, and good customer service. I’d like to think that if they ever put in a Whole Foods in Irving, Texas, they’ll put in one like that — nice staff, efficient layout, minimal pretension.

I must admit, it was a little depressing to read Two for the Road at the time I was reading it. We were on a short road trip of our own, staying in a little cabin on Lake Murray, a few miles north of the Red River in Oklahoma. I’d been there before with friends, and I was now sharing the place with my man and our little dog.

I remembered the great catfish and home cooking restaurants I’d been to with my friends, and I would have shared those too, except for one minor problem. The husband had just been diagnosed with Celiac disease, and he couldn’t eat any of it. Add the fact that it was Thanksgiving week, realizing that naked green beans, naked turkey and naked mashed potatoes were the only things he could eat on that normally joyous feast day, and it makes for a pretty sad vacation.

Meanwhile, I’m reading this book about all these places he wouldn’t dare eat in, reading all these recipes I’d never be able to cook for him. I’d look up from my book and smile a little sad smile at him, altering the recipes in my head, thinking, yeah, that could work.

Thank goodness for our next-door neighbors, who don’t even realize how they saved our vacation. Before we left for Oklahoma, the doorbell rang, and there was Ted Brown with a great big smoked pork loin wrapped in tin foil. He’s a wizard with the barrel smoker, and the meat was magically tender and delicious.

We made pork nachos to watch Monday Night Football, pork omelettes for breakfast, soft pork tacos with lime, onions and cilantro on corn tortillas for lunch the next day. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t have the requisite BBQ sandwiches. That meat made everything delicious. Oh, and imagine how wonderful our Sunday soup tasted with all that neighborly warmth cooked in. Food is still amazing, even without the wheat.