How Gluten is Attempting to Ruin My Life

     I love food. I love to cook. I love to bake. I can look at a recipe and know how good it will taste just by seeing the combination of ingredients. I can change recipes on the fly depending on the status of my pantry. I am not a gourmet I just really like food. I grew up being called a picky eater but I prefer to be called a discerning one. Everyone has foods they don't like and mine are onions, mushrooms, sausage and most seafood. I can work around all of these things. Now I have encountered a road block that I am forced to break down chink by little chink. Celiac has come to my little family and I don't like it (feel free to picture me stomping my foot, crossing my arms and making an undignified huff.)
     It started with Froggy, my poor little 3-year-old and his, um, "fear of the caca." After struggling for a year with this "fear" the doctor decided it would be prudent to rule out celiac. "Rule out" proved to be an incorrect term as the blood test floored everyone with its' results.
     Bad enough that we now needed to persuade our willful preschooler that those yummy butter crackers he prefers are no longer an option but the news would only get worse. Less than two weeks after his diagnosis we were floored again to find that not only does Froggy have it but so do I, his sister Kitty and his brother Lego. Luckily they are young enough that they don't understand the whole genetic thing or else they would be giving me the stink eye everytime they eat.
     I find myself going along just fine and then BAM, I remember something that I will never have again (unless I cheat of course.) Shakespeare's Pizza, Dixie Cream Donuts, Randy's Pumpkin Pie Concretes are up there as the big contenders to bring me low if I think about not eating them again. My daughter has to be reminded that Cookies and Cream ice creams are no longer an option and we have yet to remind her that cookie dough ice cream is out as well.
     I have come up with my own gluten-free all-purpose flour mix that I am happy with and have started adapting recipes and found other recipes that have been pretty good. The pancake recipe is a work in progress but it is getting pretty darn close to what we are used to eating every Sunday. My husband is kind enough to point out that I am the only person tasting a distinct difference in anything and that he and the kids have no problems with these new adapted recipes.  
     The mourning period looks to be long. I have my good days and my bad days dealing with this issue. We have family that don't understand why we are taking gluten out of our diets and will hopefully consent to be educated about the disease we are now struggling with daily. I have friends who are dealing with this too so we have a support network. When I feel like I need to talk about it there is always someone there to listen. When I need to get a person's take on a recipe there is always someone there to taste it for me and give me feedback.
     Our support network made up of friends and family will keep us sane, thankfully.

Easter Egg Science Project

     I am a terrible parent sometimes. This truth was brought to my attention when my oldest pointed out to me that we never dye Easter eggs. There are reasons for this I admit with much chagrin. First, I'm lazy and it never seems like there is enough time to do this time-honored tradition. Second, I have terrible flashbacks to another Easter just a few short years ago when my daughter's hands were dyed during a grandmother/granddaughter bonding time. Lastly, I hate the smell of vinegar. It makes me nauseous to the point of gagging reflexively when I encounter the smell, especially when it is heated.
     This year I decided to get past all of the above reasons for never doing this with my family before, ignore my gag reflex and dye eggs with my children.

    
     Instead of the traditional food dye method which does nothing to hide the smell of the vinegar concoction necessary for the process I went the Food Network route and went through the kitchen cupboards. Did it take more time? Of course. Was it worth the extra effort? Most certainly. It turned an Easter tradition into a science project. Will the kids remember the year that we dyed Easter eggs using candy, fruit and spices? I have a feeling that next year they will help find the ingredients to make the colors they want to use.

     The plus side of using turmeric to get gold, blueberries to get light bluish-purple, Now and Later's to get light green and purple, and Hawaiian Punch to get bright blue and pink? The smells, varied as they were, left a much better scent in the house than I remember from my childhood. Happy Easter!

Pretty basket of eggs!

Harry Potter Fans vs. Hunger Games Fans

     Today I am watching the latest Harry Potter installment and during a break to dry my hair my mind wandered, as it is wont to do, to another book series movie adaptation, The Hunger Games. It is a different world that this movie is being filmed in as opposed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone way back in 2001 and I think that makes all the difference.

     I loved The Hunger Games series all the way through to the end. Notice that the end of the series and the closing of the storyline did not bother me in the least? I at first wondered if it was because I was reading it from an adult perspective and lacked the romantic ideology of the target audience. I have since been dissuaded of that notion by reading comment threads on different websites where women of my age were angered by the resolution of the “romantic” storyline. ( Come on, everyone loves a good romance, right? Kinda missing the point of the books aren’t you? I use the quotations because the storyline was never romantic as it takes two to make a romance and Katniss was never fully invested in either boy. Blame another series, of course, for this idea that two boys fighting over a girl is the ultimate in swoon worthy romance. Team Edward/Team Jacob? I for one have always been Team Buffy/Spike/Angel, an infinitely better story of two guys, one girl and no winners.) Anyhoo, Mockingjay is when I started to notice the negative comments lambasting the author on her choice of ending. The comments of the fans were both voracious and downright mean. I at first was offended by some of the comments and wrote others off as teenagers too young to see that the real story was how it is impossible to recover from war.  

     Now we approach the beginning of filming for the first movie. The three main characters have been set and the negativity is back. You can’t go on an internet site that mentions the movie without seeing the bitter diatribes of the fans. Josh Hutcherson has the jaw line of a god and has exhibited a love for his character that makes me trust that he will not screw up Peeta for me which is good because Peeta is my favorite character in the story. Does he look like the Peeta in my head? Of course not, but that doesn’t get me foaming at the mouth as others seem to be doing over his casting. I mean, who cares what color his hair is if it serves no actual purpose to the story? Do Peeta’s blonde locks make him more of a hero? If Josh colors his hair blonde as has been widely reported will it make him more believable? He is not portraying a real person. He is portraying a fictional person from a book. Everyone needs to get over themselves.

     Then we have Liam Hemsworth as Gale and he has not been overly vocal on his casting so I have no opinion on how well he will play his part. I always found Gale to be a sneaky, underhanded user of Katniss. Go ahead Team Gale, be peeved. It is no skin off my back. He wanted a revolution and he found the object to start the revolution sitting right next to him. How convenient. Unfortunately, he and the other revolutionaries chose to not notice that she was never actually on board with being the face of the uprising.

     We will skip over Jennifer Lawrence and her casting as Katniss, partly because I have no opinion on it and partly because I have gotten off track from what this started out as earlier which was a statement on fans and their “ownership” of beloved characters and stories.

     Back to Harry Potter: The internet was not what it is today when Harry Potter started filming. The target audience for Potter when it first started was pretty young and not wired in as much as they are a short decade later. What kind of response would they have had if they had been as connected as they are today? Would they have lamented over Daniel Radcliff’s blue eyes or the great age discrepancy of the impeccable Alan Rickman as the gloriously dreadful Snape? It is true that some people were disappointed in the final book but even they did not have the tone of disparagement in their comments that I have seen for Mockingjay.

     I for one do not believe that the fans would have been as overwrought as The Hunger Games fans. Why do I think this? I think it is because most Harry Potter fans that have been around since the beginning don’t feel that J.K. Rowling owes us anything for the success of the series either in print or on film. She doesn’t owe us the correct color of eyes for Harry or an actor a few decades younger for Snape because ultimately it is the narrative that needs to be faithful. That has never changed in seven movies even if the timelines were fiddled with and scenes were added/changed/deleted. The story is always there, recognizable and complete. Throughout the series, a new book or movie came out and we said “thank you.” We didn’t say “but you did it wrong!” We only whined when there was too much time between books or movie adaptations because we were hungry for more.

     That is what the comments on anything concerning The Hunger Games movie come across as, though: people who believe that Suzanne Collins owes them for her books succeeding instead of fans who owe her their trust for writing books that we love. Yes, other books have been massacred on film. Chris Columbus will never be forgiven for Percy Jackson. He didn’t stay true to the story and the film suffered for it.

     As long as Suzanne Collins, who seems to have the reigns of the movie well in hand along with the director, stays true to the story the fans should have no complaints. Complain they will though until the movie is done and their opinions either confirmed or denied, from Peeta’s hair color to Katniss’ height and on to Gale being too pretty. I hope the movie is as well told as the books because it is a worthy story that deserves a worthy telling.