technicolor troglodyte's Profile

@JP MONEY
I'm pretty sure you're supposed to tip according to service, not quality. Quality is what you pay for in the base price of the food or drink. If the drink quality isn't up to snuff, then don't go back, and maybe let them know that you want better quality for the price you're paying.

Hey Emmi, thanks for bringing that up. I hadn't been too worried about cross-contamination with McCann's because their oats are processed in an "oats only" facility. It does merit some exploration. One of the reasons that I'm comfortable with McCann's is because it is basically a whole grain in the colloquial sense. It's not ground, and is therefore unlikely to contain a lot of hidden wheat flour/grain.

I was able to find a resource that addresses gluten contamination in McCann's specifically. As it turns out, it is possible for McCanns steel cut oats to be contaminated with wheat. Several tests of various oat brands were ordered by Tricia Thompson, M.S., R.D., and described in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. Of the four manufacturing lots of McCann's tested, one contained levels of gluten that would cause me concern, one was below the limit of detection, one was low enough to be considered gluten-free, and the last had only slightly more gluten than would be allowable in certified gluten-free products. The high levels of gluten found in one sample could have been caused by a single wheat berry collected during harvesting, or could have been the result of contamination during transportation with wheat flour. I'm sure there are other possibilities, and it would be interesting to find out the source of the contamination. Given these results, I'm still comfortable with McCann's, but others might be more wary.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200411043511924

I've been on a gluten free diet for the past six years, and I have found (so far) that the easiest and healthiest way for me to eat is to cook a lot of Chinese and Japanese style foods. I live in a large city, so it's easy for me to find the necessary ingredients. I stock up on gluten-free soy sauce and other essentials, and I stir fry one dish every weeknight. I usually eat half of what I've cooked, and save the rest to eat along with the next night's dish.

I eat a lot of vegetables this way, and my stir fries are typically quick and easy Sichuanese or Cantonese recipes. I generally eat these dishes with Japanese haiga (semi-milled) brown rice (Kagayaki Haiga Brown Rice on Amazon.com). This rice is pretty tasty and the particular variety (or cultivar), Koshihikari, has a nice low glycemic index of 48+/-8. The fact that the variety I use is semi-milled means that it is likely to have an even lower glycemic index than the fully milled variety.

I also eat a pretty healthy mix of proteins, usually salmon or tofu, along with a little meat on the weekends. All of this ends up being pretty inexpensive because the vegetables are dirt-cheap and the meat is usually a cheap cut of pork or chicken, and is usually used sparingly anyway. The most expensive elements of my diet are farmed salmon ($6-10 per week) and the haiga brown rice ($10 per week).

For breakfast I often eat a large bowl McCanns steel-cut oats in addition to a bowl of low fat cottage cheese with diced fruit. I cook both the steel-cut oats and the rice in a Zojirushi programmable rice cooker that allows me to set up the oats the night before so that they're ready at 7 AM.

Another breakfast that I eat sometimes is kimchi fried rice with an over easy egg on top (in a nonstick pan with little oil). It takes about 10-15 minutes to prepare and uses up any leftover rice that I have in the fridge.

Flourless chocolate cakes are a little boring to me, as a gluten-free eater. The texture is just fudgy or mousse-y (actually fudge and mousse are both more enjoyable to my palate). They are more of an exciting change of pace from a standard gluten-containing cake.

Something that I find a lot more interesting is "Claudia Roden's Orange and Almond Cake" (Google that). It's really delicious and not too difficult to make. Starbucks used to sell a pre-packaged version of this cake as a gluten-free option, but they found long-term storage problematic. Nevertheless it was quite good in my opinion.

Actually it appears that only the cranberry bread recipe in the link I posted above is not gluten free, so there's a pretty good collection of stuff. I think I'll try the Chocolate Sorghum Buttermilk Cake next.

You can rewire it pretty easily and put a nice lamp shade on it. Filling the glass with aquarium sand type material could be really cool I guess, but it all depends on the look you're going for. I suppose you could paint the brass, since you can always remove the paint in the future, but then again you could just take some metal polish to the brass and shine it up.

I liked the before. I would have done new wallpaper with a lot of green and bold patterns, better lighting (maybe a small chandelier), and some new accessories. Several gold framed mirrors would really lighten the place up and make it more airy.

After looks like your standard Martha Stewart Living/Shabby Chic nonsense.

I have celiac disease and these are my top annoyances when sharing kitchen stuff:

• Crumbs in butter, jam, nutella jars, etc.

• Starchy pasta residue on colanders and in pots.

Don't expect your roommate to eat gluten-free items off of a plate that has gluten-containing crackers on it or to eat the filling out of a cheesecake crust (or even to taste the filling).

Probably "too-ah-ka", emphasis on the second syllable for extra Italian flair?

Would you people please stop using the word 'unitasker', Alton Brown drives me nuts!