Gluten free Thanksgiving

[lunabee34]

My mom has been sick for awhile, and she had a colonoscopy/endoscopy last week. They took biopsies, and she has celiac disease.

I will do my own research, but I want to do some crowd-sourcing from you guys because I know several of you have extensive knowledge.

Do you have any recipe, product, websites, cookbook recs I can pass along?

We are hosting Thanksgiving, and I want to show her that gluten free can be good, tasty, and easy.

Gluten comes from wheat, right? So gluten free foods include meats and vegetables, right? (I am so ignorant about this issue; I feel like I'm asking stupidly dumbass questions)

Mom is really upset, and I suspect that part of it is because she's worried that my dad won't be supportive and she'll be stuck having to cook/be around a lot of food she can't eat. :/

Gonna go call her now; she sent out a mass email to the family.

Anything you can tell me is appreciated.

ETA: I have totally sold my dad short. He has actually been super supportive and told mom that the whole household would be gluten free and that they were doing it together. I kind of feel like an ass for assuming he'd be an ass about it, but past behavior seemed to indicate that he would. Whew!

Comments

[torachan]

Carla's childhood friend and friend's mother both have celiac and have had it for a very long time, way back before gluten-free stuff was a trend. Back then it was super difficult and you had to really limit your choices and make almost all of your own meals, but these days it's so much easier.

It does still limit you for sure, but a lot of products are now being made gluten-free, and you can find a lot of recipes online with good substitutes for flour and such.

The big thing to be careful about is hidden gluten in things that don't seem obvious. For example, unless it is specifically made gluten-free, soy sauce contains wheat, so it does have gluten, which means you need to avoid a lot of Asian food that uses soy sauce, unless you make it yourself with gluten-free soy sauce.

[lunabee34]

I am so glad she's finding this out now when it is really easy to find stuff in the stores and when the internet makes searching ingredients, etc. so easy. I can't imagine how hard trying to figure this stuff out was 20 years ago.

Thanks so much for weighing in. *hugs*