Introduction and Purpose

This is my first post here on Blogger, so please bear with me if there are errors or things that I end up having to come back to and change afterwards.

The backstory:
My husband has had Ulcerative Colitis since 1995. About one month ago, in the midst of a few days where he was feeling crappier than normal (pun intended), missing too many days of work, and contemplating a future that might include surgery, he decided to finally try going Gluten-Free

The one thing that I hate about this whole lifestyle....is that we waited so long to finally try it! He's been feeling great ever since. His tummy bloating has gone down. His gas pains are diminished. He hasn't had a bad day since. Really and truly. And I am not feeling too shabby myself. :)

For various reasons that I won't get into here, we both ended up getting tested for gluten sensitivity and celiac disease, and we both came back negative.  There is a pretty high rate of false negatives on these tests, and as it turns out, we weren't provided with the "full panel" of tests, so who knows the whole truth.  The fact is that the less gluten we eat, we both feel better (in more ways than one)....and that's all we need to know.  Perhaps what we are observing with ourselves is akin to what is described in the book Wheat Belly by William Davis, M.D.

In any case, as you can probably tell from the title, we are major "foodies" -- we love to cook, eat and just generally experiment with all aspects of food.  This blog will be all about our adventures as such.  Most (but not all) of the journey will be gluten-free.

We try to be GF as much as possible, but because neither of us has been medically proven to be G-sensitive or have celiac, we do let ourselves "slip up" once in a while (for example: when we're at a restaurant, when we're at a friend's house and they are serving the meal, for a really good looking dessert, for the occasional beer, etc). An example of a slip-up at home was one time when we were planning all day to make GF tacos for dinner (using corn tortillas that we know exist) only to find at the end of the day that the store was out of them, and the tortillas "made with corn" had wheat flour as the first ingredient!  Sometimes Hubby pays the price for slip-ups or over-indulgences, but other times it doesn't bother him at all.  For the same reason of there being no medical diagnoses, we don't concern ourselves with cross-contamination....and this (thankfully) doesn't seem to have any consequences for us whatsoever. 

We like to say we are 98% gluten free.  But in all honesty, it hasn't been hard at all for us to do it.  We don't eat bread and pasta all that much anyways, and generally try to keep to whole, natural, unprocessed foods and ingredients (minimal things from boxes, bags or packages for us).  We find that if we are cooking our own meals at home (which we prefer to do anyways), we can easily cut out the gluten and make substitutions of other various sorts to suit our needs and desires.  For example, even before we decided to go gluten-free, we would leave the breading off of chicken parm -- we just like it better that way and found the breading calorically unnecessary and even detrimental to the flavor of the chicken itself.  We are here to show you that being gluten-free doesn't have to be a challenge -- on the contrary, it can be wonderful!

That said, please know that although we have found this new way of eating to be beneficial for us, we by no means are out to get the rest of the world on board.  This blog isn't a mission to further what some people, understandably, see only as a fad or trend.  If you can't follow this diet plan, or simply don't want to -- that's all cool.  We believe that each and every person should do whatever their heart desires, based on their own wants and needs, and we aren't trying to get anyone to subscribe to anything or do anything or eat anything they otherwise wouldn't.  We also don't expect anyone to cater to our dietary wants, or feel the obligation to accommodate our needs in any way.  These are our choices, we take responsibility to look out for ourselves, and we wouldn't ever want anyone around us to feel uncomfortable or obligated because of it.

I have had a food blog going on my diet/exercise website for some time now (therobinator's "Foodventures"), but I thought it was time that I moved it over to a more public forum. So here I am on Blogger.  In addition to making all future posts here on Blogger, I will also copy my posts from the old blog over to this one, a little bit at a time.

And that's why I am here. I hope you enjoy the ride with us....