11/21/2010

Making Gluten Free In A Hurry

There are little ways to make living gluten free easier. According to one news article in The Boulder Jewish News by Lisa Velick, she whips up quick gluten free meals for her family by keeping ten common and easy things available to make in her pantry.


Top Ten Gluten-Free Dinners for a Busy Family

1.Tacos: Gluten-free tortillas or corn tortillas, ground meat or just beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes and cheese.

2.Chili: Chicken or Turkey, a variety of canned beans, salsa, and chilies.

3.GF Hamburger Helper: Can be made with meat or beans. Make with a salad.

4.Hamburgers: Gluten-free hamburger buns, turkey, beef or vegetarian burger, lettuce, tomatoes and onions.

5.Pizza: A gluten-free pizza crust (many ready-made ones in the freezer section), sauce, cheese and veggies.

6.Falafel: There is a gluten-free mix by Orgran. Serve with spinach, yogurt and white rice in gluten-free tortillas.

7.Spaghetti: Sauce and parmesan cheese on top, and any left over meat or vegetables.

8.Chicken Taquitos: chicken, corn tortillas, cheese, cilantro and onion.

9.Salmon: marinade, quinoa and frozen broccoli. Full of color and nutrients.

10.Nachos: chips, salsa, rice, beans, lettuce, tomato

11/14/2010

Gluten Free Christmas Gifts To Show You Care


What do you give as a gift to a child you love who lives gluten free?

Well there are a multitude of items that you could give to show how much you care...

Like:
A gift certificate to a really kid friendly gluten free friendly restaurant.
Our local favorites are Fuel Pizza or Jason's Deli

A gift basket of favorite gluten free snack foods - Even better if they are homemade or maybe some visions of sugarplums from Babycakes NYC Bakery - Yum!


A small gf makeup sampler or maybe a gluten free body care sampler from a company that provides gluten free alternatives like Arbonne

How about a patch or sticker from Jeeto that your child can add to their backpack for school as a litttle reminder to the teacher about them remaining gluten free?

Or how about tickets to a ballgame whose arena serves GF friendly foods?
Or maybe it can simply be that you make GF sugar cookies together from Bob's Red Mill mix and then ice them.


Millions of possibilities exist.
Just be creative and strive that extra mile as always and you'll come up with a winner:-)


11/08/2010

Happy Gluten Free Holidays!

Since our schedules have been extremely busy with all kinds of adventures - Charlotte Talks Radio interview, planning the next Charlotte Gluten Free/ Allergen Free Expo on April 30th, 2011 and life in general as the holidays near - we are now going to announce happenings for our R.O.C.K. Charlotte Kids to participate in and keep those feet grounded by connecting with others like themselves!

One of our members suggested a gluten free cookie exchange which we think is a fabulous Holiday event to plan!
We have posted an invitation here: Rockin' Around The Holidays GF Cookie Exchange
We felt that getting Dr. Allesio Fasano of the Celiac Disease Research Center at the University of Maryland to speak at the next Expo was a big Santa present! So we'll all settle for cookies and be glad:-)

Because we love the family traditions of Thanksgiving and how it is based around food, and because having to make your first gluten free Thanksgiving dinner can be daunting - Here is a link in our archive of Thanksgiving recipes in the R.O.C.K. Charlotte Diner: Making A Gluten Free Family Tradition

And if you are looking for restaurants or products in particular to help simplify your Holiday load - R.O.C.K. Charlotte Product List
We have even updated our Game Zone for our R.O.C.K. Charlotte Stars - R.O.C.K. Game Zone


We hope you and your family have a very Happy Thanksgiving!

11/01/2010

A Sister's Celiac Story

One of the members of our R.O.C.K. (Raising Our Celiac Kids) Charlotte Chapter is Caitlyn Mahoney. Her sister, Jordan, is 11 years old and in the 6th grade. She wrote the following story about her sister's celiac disease as an assignment for school on a true conflict which she has had in her life. The story is quoted word for word from Jordan without any changes. We thought it was a touching example of the feelings a sibling can have in the face of celiac disease and how a diagnosis touches everyone in the family, not just the one diagnosed. A big R.O.C.K. thank you to Jordan for sharing her story!



It all started when my sister, Caitlyn, started eating food when she was a baby. We would feed her animal crackers, or cheese it’s, or toast and not even an hour later, she would be really sick. I mean like 105° fevers, throwing up, leg pains, dehydrated, ect. No one knew what was wrong.

I would spend my afternoons after school in the doctor’s office doing my homework. When I was done, the nurses would get me Junie B. books to read. Caitlyn would just be laying there very sick. She was only about one years old, as pale as a ghost. Of course being her big sister, I was scared. She would be screaming as the doctors held her down putting needles in her arms. Who wouldn’t be scared? This went on for almost a year.

Poor little Caitlyn soon got so sick we had to put her in the hospital. The doctors ran all of these strange testes over and over. When Caitlyn wasn’t being tested, she was sleeping or my mom was holding her and feeding her food which just kept making her sicker. Of course, with just my luck one night when my dad and I went home from the hospital to sleep and get me ready for school we realized that someone had broken in to our house. The sliding glass door in my parents’ room was broken. Clothes and were thrown all over their bedroom and my dog, Scooby- Doo, was going crazy. So that night I slept over at a friend’s house while my dad stayed at home, my mom at the hospital, and my sister still as sick as ever.

Finally, after several hospital visits Caitlyn was to sick to come home. Her immune system was attacking her body and she was really sick. The doctors didn’t know what to do, They had run every test possible. It was a life or death situation. My mom was talking to my granny, who was in England at the time, crying because she didn’t know what to do. My granny asked my mom if we have run a blood test to check for Celiac Disease. At that same time Caitlyn’s doctor’s wife was asking the same questions. Supposedly, this disease can’t cross oceans or so our doctors here in the United States thought. Wrong, they thought that celiac supposedly only happens in Europe. Wrong. The doctors chose to do this blood test and the surgery to check for Celiac Disease. After a week of anxiousness, worries, and sickness, the results were in.

That one random blood test saved my sisters life. Now we are all on a special diet with no wheat, rye, barley, oats, which is a gluten free diet. My sister has never had any food with gluten in it sense that day. Except when she was younger and licked a piece of bread at the store but that’s another story!

Looking back my family and I realize how lucky we were to have all of those wonderful doctors who helped save my sister’s life. If we didn’t diagnose her I don’t even know what would have happened. Would she even still be alive? Would my mom and I ever have been dianogesed with Celiac Disease also? We like think about how many people we have helped sense our journey began. My mom used to go to the grocery store, sit in middle of the aisle, and cry, at the beginning she did not know what foods to feed my sister, We had no one to help us. Now anyone that has just been diagnosed to the Celiac diet have people like us to help them. Back when Caitlyn first got dianogesed all the Gluten Free (GF) stuff tasted horrible!!!And you had very few choices of foods to eat, now you can’t even tell that many of the foods are Gluten Free!

Thanks to the help of all of those doctors and my parents my sister now very rarely gets sick from gluten anymore. The Celiac community has come a long way from seven years ago, and many lives have been forever changed for the better, especially ours.
*Information on our site and shared by members of our support forums is not intended to be medical advice or to replace the relationship between a patient and his/her physician*