The Great Pantry Purge

This week I started what will be now be known as "The Great Pantry Purge." Everything comes out, shelves get wiped down, and things only get put back on the shelf if they're confirmed gluten free. I've decided to keep some gluten things, like my wheat chex that I eat for breakfast every morning, but for the most part everything will be GF. A lot of my items will be given away, some will be trashed, and hopefully quite a bit will be put back. I have to email and call a lot of companies to find out if certain products are GF.


Here's a start. Bob's Red Mill potato and rice flours, all gluten free. And Xantham Gum, who knew it'd be so expensive?! We'll be baking our own bread now since GF bread in the store is about $5.00 a loaf. The Zojjirushi bread maker has been recommended to me as the best bread machine for GF bread (since it tends to be thicker than regular bread). It does cost a pretty penny though, however at $5.00 a loaf for bread, I think we'll pay it off pretty quickly!

I've found GF pretzels, chips, puffs, cereals, granola bars, oats, and quite a few more "snack" items at my grocery store so far. The tricky thing is regular stuff like mustard, and things that you'd think might be naturally GF but are somehow cross-contaminated in the production process.

Someone told me that a local bakery sells GF cupcakes, so I popped in one day when I was out alone to check. They sell GF products only on Wednesdays- and it happened to be Wednesday- so I picked up two chocolate buy-one-get-one-free cupcakes. YUMMY. The kids like them too!

It's nice to know we'll have options like that for a special treat every now and then, since we won't be able to pickup donuts anymore. Not that we did that often, but special treats are nice every now and then, as long as there's a sink nearby.