GF Holiday Food Traditions

Today, I am on a self-imposed fast!

Fifteen years ago when the Christmas celebrating had ended, I would not have gained an extra pound due to my new gluten-free diet. That is not the case today. This year all of my holiday traditions were made with gluten-free ingredients, not just for me but for my extended family and friends.

One week ago at the annual cookie swap, I made cake pops with a festive red and green candy coating. For this recipe, I used a gluten-free chocolate cake mix, Betty Crocker, and store bough chocolate frosting. The Wilton Candy Melts are vanilla flavored and pretty much all sugar! Not only did they look adorable on their lollipop sticks, they were really tasty and everyone wanted to know how I made them.


Then we have my immediate family's Christmas Eve fondue tradition. My husband makes this dinner which, for me, is the best part of tradition! Our fondue is a gooey pot of sharp cheddar, cream, dried mustard, garlic and a bit of flour. Over the years, my husband has been able to adjust the recipe using gluten-free flour. The first year it was a congealed mess that we had to dilute with milk, but he has figured out how to reduce the amount of flour in his recipe so we get a really thick but not cement-like structure to the cheese.

The baguettes go on separate trays for warming, but it’s pretty tough to tell the difference between the Schar’s gluten free baguettes and the one’s from the bakery. I used to just toast up the bread I had made in my bread machine, but today I have options such as Everybody Eats or Against the Grain or Schar’s baguettes. I have two separate fondue pots so we can all eat without worry!


We had a mix up for the extended family celebration desserts so I brought two, both gluten free! One was my traditional apple crisp with Bob’s Red Mill GF Oats and Mi-Del ginger snaps. The other dessert I brought was gluten-free chocolate cupcakes from a King Arthur mix with a candy cane butter cream frosting and a sprinkling of peppermint sugar on top! We did not have much in the way of leftovers.

I received three Christmas cards where a friend wrote me a little note saying that he or she had just been diagnosed with either a gluten intolerance or celiac disease. My new year’s wish is that everyone who finds out he or she needs to eat a gluten free diet realizes just how far GF food has come in the past fifteen years and they learn that this diagnosis does not mean that they will have to give up holiday traditional foods like I thought I had to fifteen years ago!

However, there is one unintended consequence of all these GF food choices, I am embracing a different type of new year’s resolution this year…”lose five pounds.”

Kendall Egan

The Ants Go Marching…

Two things have been constant since the end of June. The first is that my sons have had a baseball game almost every single night since June 18th. The second is that we have been under siege this summer by little black ants.

How do these two things go together and how do they relate to a gluten-free diet? Those are both excellent questions and there is an explanation!

Because I have been traveling all over Westchester County to watch baseball, I have been grocery shopping all over Westchester County. I am popping into stores for essentials that are not my normal shopping places. My youngest had a game at a field in Ardsley, so I made a pit stop at DeCicco’s Food Market on the way home to pick up food for the weekend. They also have an impressive section of gluten-free items so I am always happy to have a game in Ardsley.

I picked up a package of regular store baked cupcakes and a frozen package of The Grainless Baker’s gluten-free cupcakes for dessert treats that evening.

When I got home, we ate a light supper and I left three cupcakes defrosting on the counter for later. I’m not sure they were fully defrosted before my celiac wolfed down two. I wanted to enjoy my cupcake at room temperature so I left it there.

Here is where the ants come in…I walked back into the kitchen about an hour later and there was my cupcake in a full swarm of little black ants. They had never been up on the counter like that, ever. The dog food bowl, yes. The garbage container, yes. But, never, ever, ever swarming all over something left on the counter.

I don’t know if I was more grossed out or dismayed. I really was looking forward to that cupcake with its pretty white frosting and sprinkles. The ants had shimmied their way into the wrapper, they were doing the backstroke in the frosting and they seemed to be calling to all the ants in the neighborhood to come join in the gluten-free feast.

It’s not like I could pick off an ant and pretend it didn’t really eat much, there was no way I could eat this cupcake without chewing on some ants. I threw it out and put a glop of poison ant gel down for a more deadly snack for these stupid pests.

The next day I was at a meeting in the office in Hastings-on-Hudson and I stopped in at By The Way Bakery and bought two cupcakes, a lemon cupcake and a carrot cake cupcake. The owner put them in a pretty box and I took them out to my car, opened up the box and ate them right there. I don’t know if ants have a preference for gluten-free food, but I wasn’t taking any more chances on losing my gluten-free cupcakes to little black ants!

Kendall Egan

Devil's Food Cupcakes

The new issue of Gluten-Free Living arrived in my mailbox yesterday. The cover is gorgeous, cupcakes with pink frosting and sprinkles. I typically do not write articles, but every now and I then I enjoy doing interviews or expanding a blog post a little bit. I happened to do the interviews of our cupcake panelists that correspond with our delicious looking cover.

At the end of an article there is typically a little “blurb” about the author and my blurb says “Kendall Egan is advertising manager for Gluten-Free Living. She and her son follow a gluten-free diet. So, she has made countless gluten-free cupcakes. Her favorite is terribly unoriginal Devil’s Food chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.”

Last night, I was participating in an interview committee for my school district and a text message plinks into my phone. I ignored it until a break and then I checked to make sure one of my kids wasn’t stranded somewhere without a ride.

My celiac sent me the following text message, in full text-speak, “I cant w8 4 those chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting, I cant w8 4 U to make some of those.”

My first reaction was laughter, what a smarty pants because he knows that I am just a terrible baker. But, my second reaction was a nice feeling of pride. If he saw the little blurb at the end, that means he read the magazine and he read my article. That made me very happy.

Of course, the wise guy just texted me forty-five minutes ago and asked, “did u finally make some of those devils food chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting?” I did not, but I quickly ran downstairs and threw some frozen cookie dough in the oven so warm chocolate chip cookies will have to do!

Kendall Egan

Lots of gluten free lunch choices

In the 17 years my daughter, Amanda, has had celiac disease, she has come to view the gluten-free diet as second nature. She does not spend a lot of time fretting about the foods she can't have.

In one way she is lucky that she was diagnosed when she was only two, both because she did not go long with undiagnosed celiac disease and suffer the consequent intestinal damage and because she did not develop a love for foods that are hard to get exactly right in a gluten-free form.

She eats a lot of naturally gluten-free, healthy foods and has a favorite bread that we always make at home. We have a few tried-and-true cookie recipes. In restaurants she orders simple meals and if nothing else seems to work she is pretty satisfied with a salad.

But this afternoon we headed to Sweet Sin Bakery in nearby Baltimore to try out their new lunch menu. I can't really describe what a pleasure it was to watch Amanda's excitement at being able to sample the all the soups, order the entree of the day, and then fill a bakery box with an assortment of cupcakes to take home.

The staff, including co-owner Richard D'Souza (whose wife Renee is the gluten-free pastry chef who makes all the baked goods) couldn't have been nicer or more attentive. It would be one thing if we were the only ones in the cute little cupcake shop/restaurant. But customers came in at a pretty steady flow, toting carry-out lunches of Thai chicken and coconut rice, savory soup or a cupcake.

Amanda, a college student who has been known to leave all her gluten-free cookies at home when she heads back to school after a break because she doesn't want to eat a lot of sweets, couldn't wait to pick from the enticing selection of cupcakes displayed like jewels in the bakery case. In the end, she picked the birthday cake cupcake because it had such pretty pink and orange decorating sugars sprinkled on top, plus German chocolate, raspberry, cinnamon, and caramel apple.

She actually had the dilemma of what to choose for a change.

For that I am thankful to Sweet Sin and all the other places like it across the country. If you are gluten free and have a little restaurant or cafe or bakery that meets your needs, count yourself lucky. Despite the growth in all things gluten free, there are still many places where people can only imagine what it's like to order a hot delivered gluten-free pizza, choose from an array of gluten-free sandwiches for lunch at a deli or enjoy a gluten-free cupcake at a local coffee shop.

The economy has put a whammy on many mainstream restaurants so you can imagine the challenges faced by small gluten-free establishments. I urge you to support these gluten-free businesses. Usually, you will get great food and service - as we did at Sweet Sin.

Amanda's father and I raised her to never let celiac disease stand in her way when there is something she wants to do. We did whatever was needed so she could go to birthday and pizza parties, travel to Spain to visit her friend's family when she was in middle school, choose a college that would best help her achieve her career goals and live in the dorms like other freshmen.

I've come to expect her to be very matter-of-fact about what she can and can't eat. And she is.

How nice that at lunch today she did not have to be.

Amy