Catered by Costco

Life in the ‘burbs often involves Costco. Those of us living here use the phrase “catered by Costco” when prepping for team dinners, BUNCO or book group nights or throwing a big party.

Recently, my family’s gluten-free dinner was catered by Costco! I was pleasantly surprised to see many prepared foods with a label indicating that the product was gluten-free or had no ingredients containing gluten. I picked up two rotisserie chickens, carrot and potato soufflés and a salad. Dinner was ready upon re-heating the soufflés and tossing the salad.

Those were not the only entrées available, pulled pork or chicken meatballs could have been on the table for supper! Plus, there’s always a huge selection of gluten-free snack foods like hummus, guacamole, tzatziki and loads of cheese. Over the month of December, I sustained myself on this incredible block of French goat milk cheese, this delicious cinnamon/ sugar pecan and craisin mix and these addictive peppery pistachios.

Of course, there is gluten-free junk food available too. I bought this monster bag of popped BBQ flavor chips that do not contain gluten. So many varieties of BBQ chips do have wheat on the label, but this brand of popped chips specifically said “no gluten.”

As I did my kid drop offs and pickups yesterday, I told my celiac to try the BBQ chips to see what he thought. Well, he accidentally ate the other junk food chips I had purchased for lunch boxes, the individually packaged baked BBQ chips that very much contain wheat and say so right on the label.

Poor guy was so sheepish when I held up the right bag and asked him what he thought…he told me he ate the other ones and then asked me if they had wheat. So, we now have reinforced the “double-check” rule about labels. He has to take a look at the label before eating just to double check because there are four other people in our household who are able to eat wheat so our pantry is a mixed bag.

In the meantime, I’ll be back at Costco soon if I want a night off from preparing a gluten-free dinner or if I have another month where I need some “gluten-free-get-through-the-day-reward-myself” French goat milk cheese.

Kendall Egan