Thursday, August 26, 2010

Good news & bad news.

Savvy celiacs already know that gravy is almost always a huge blinking red flag item for us. One glorious exception was the poultry gravy at Boston Market. Key word: was. Today I spotted a sign proclaiming that it's been reformulated and now contains wheat and soy. Boo, hiss!

It is commendable, however, that they mentioned the allergy info right on the marquee. You get used to relying on certain brands or products, but the reality is you must keep checking ingredients in case anything changes. Thanks to Boston Market for keeping the food-sensitive community (or, more likely, our attorneys) in mind, although obviously it would be even nicer if we could have our gravy and eat it too!

Monday, August 9, 2010

New items at Trader Joe's!

Hello, my gluten-free friends and allies! For the last month I have been incredibly busy packing and moving into my fantastic new home and getting ready for a crazy new chapter in my life, but I'm finally getting settled. One perk of my new location is that Trader Joe's is now only 10-15 minutes away, whereas I used to drive about half an hour each way to get my TJ's GF goodies. (One of the fun realities of celiac life: it is virtually impossible to find everything you need in one place. I shop at three different food stores, at least, to find the products I want/need.) Trader Joe's has been rolling out a number of new items lately, several of which are relevant to this blog's interests.

Item #1: Peanut flour. I haven't tried this personally. I'm not really sure how one would use peanut flour, but the product card recommends using it for baking cakes and cookies. I think it could also make an interesting coating for baked chicken or fish.

Item #2: Snickerdoodles! These are free of the 7 biggest allergens (wheat, soy, egg, dairy, peanuts, tree nuts, and shellfish - whew, that's a relief. I hate shellfish in my cookies!) so they're vegan as well as celiac friendly. Made with sorghum flour and date paste, the texture is very soft and chewy, a rarity in GF cookiedom. They're more like a cinnamon-y fig newton than the buttery sugar cookie you might recall from pre-celiac life, so I'm not sure snickerdoodle is the most apt name. The cookies are quite small with a serving size of 2 cookies at 130 calories and 4.5g fat; each box contains only 12 cookies.