Blog Face Lift
Does the blog look different to you? I gave it a long-overdue face lift!
My website is getting redesigned as well, so the blog may change later to be more in-line with the overall site look. However, I just couldn’t stand looking at the old black background and gray text in the previous blog template. Ugh. Anyway, because I changed templates, some of the formatting in my older posts (especially photos and photo descriptions) might be a little off. Please forgive me for that.
Diet Face Lift
In other news, I’ve been gluten-free for over 3 months now. I’m seeing incredible improvement to my skin. I definitely is not hot, inflamed, itchy and gross like before. In fact, at first glance, most people don’t even know that my skin is still not 100%. The plus side is that I can now wear t-shirts and shorts during this hot summer heatwave! I think there’s still a long ways to go until my skin is back to “normal.” There’s still discoloration from the 10 months of inflammation as well as some residual inflammation. I also still break out in random hives 2-3 times a week, though the breakouts are no longer super intense.
Photos of my adaptation to GF cooking, Taiwanese style using veggies I can have and GF soy sauce: Left: Garlic stir-fried ong choy + rice + fish, peas and beech mushrooms; Right: Yam leaves with organic ground turkey + quinoa and rice + mushroom medley (trumpet, maitake, beech, wood ear mushrooms)
I still find the whole ordeal incredibly frustrating though. My list of can’t-have foods is long and extensive. Even the nutritionist with whom I was consulting had no ideas for me. She and her department head were not able to suggest any new foods or ideas that I wasn’t already doing or couldn’t have. She was mystified when I sent her my excel spreadsheet with a log of those no-no foods.
Photo: My first recipe experimentation – Gluten-Free Lemon Coconut Cookies. I’m still tinkering with it. When I’ve got it *just* right, I’ll share the recipe on the blog.
Thankfully, I have several friends who are also gluten-free and they’ve offered me some suggestions. One cookbook suggestion is The Gluten-Free Asian Kitchen. I was also referred to the blogs Gluten-Free Girl and FrannyCakes. When I was researching books, I decided to buy The Essential Gluten-Free Baking Guides 1 and 2 and have found the books to be simple and informative — great for a beginning GF baker like myself. The one thing that I have NOT yet gotten used to is the idea and fact that gluten-free baking and cooking is not always going to taste like what you expect and are used to from gluten-containing foods. For example, while I am no stranger to rice pastas due to my ethnic heritage, spaghetti with rice pasta is just not the same, and neither are GF potstickers. It’s just simply a different animal altogether. Pepe LePew can pretend to be a cat and love cats all he wants, but he will still be a cute little skunk. (Not that GF foods are skunky, smart asses.)
