Room TemperatureFriday
Nobody Was Making Me Eat the Mushrooms
Three things I wish somebody had told me when I went gluten-free. The first one took me two years to find.
Let’s talk about mushrooms. (Stay with me.)
For the better part of my life I ate them. Not once with pleasure. I didn’t like how they looked, I didn’t like how they tasted, and I truly did not like the texture, which required a chew-and-swallow maneuver I had fully mastered by my early twenties. If mushrooms were going to be part of dinner, the whole day had a little cloud over it.
Here’s the thing. Nobody was making me. Not one person ever asked me to. I’d decided somewhere along the way that if it was on the plate, I had to eat it, and then, like a reasonable adult, I never went back and checked if that was true.
It took me years to arrive at the stunning conclusion that I could simply say no thank you. So I did. Reader, I have never been happier about a food decision in my life.
I bring this up because it took me an equally embarrassing amount of time to apply that logic to being gluten-free, which is a way of living absolutely crammed with rules nobody ever actually wrote down.
So. Three things I wish somebody had told me at the beginning, starting with the one that cost me two years.
1. Gums are not your friend
I’ve written about gums before, so I’ll go fast on the part you’ve heard and slow on the part you haven’t.
When I cut gluten, baking was what I wanted back first. I’d only recently fallen properly in love with it, and losing it felt like a punch to the gut. So I did what any sane person would do and went in headfirst. There were blogs! Cookbooks! Ingredient lists that looked, to me at the time, like actual sorcery. What I did not understand was that there was a trade. The soft donuts, the loaves that behaved like real bread, all of it was leaning hard on gums, and I was eating them in everything I made.
Two years to work that out. Two! In that time I cut and cut and cut nearly everything else, like a woman tearing up floorboards to find a smell.
And now the part that got me a second time. I thought it was xanthan gum. I took xanthan gum out of my baking, felt better, and declared the case closed. (It was not closed.) I had not considered guar gum even once. I certainly had not considered that gums turn up in things with nothing whatsoever to do with baking.
Heavy cream. Heavy cream! I was blending it into smoothies and whipping it for pancakes, hurting every single time and utterly baffled, because I knew for a fact there was not one grain of xanthan gum in my kitchen.
It wasn’t only the pain, either. Brain fog, constipation, aches, a heaviness I couldn’t shake off. Every symptom I thought I’d waved goodbye to, back again and making itself comfortable.
When I finally cut all of them rather than the one, it stopped. I’d reached a point where eating frightened me, and I’m not being dramatic. Food had become the thing that hurt, and I couldn’t tell which part of it was going to do it.
So if you’ve cut gluten and you’re still not right, my friend, go looking for gums everywhere. Not only in the flour.
From the Recipe BoxGreek Yogurt Chocolate MousseSee the Recipe →
2. Eating out is optional
This one took me far longer than it should have, and I would like those years back, please.
At the start I felt guilty about absolutely everything. I was certain I was single-handedly ruining the evening, so I’d go wherever we were going, order something, cross my fingers, hope not to die, and eat it. I did that for years. I also spent a generous number of the following days paying for it.
Is this a safe space for a confession? Nobody ever asked me to do that either. Not once. I’d simply decided it was the deal.
So you don’t have to. It’s a rule you invented and you’re allowed to put it down. If you love eating out, wonderful, that’s a different conversation entirely and you should go and have a lovely time at the places you trust. But if you’re only doing it so nobody at the table feels awkward? Stop. You don’t owe anybody a stomach ache. You can skip the dinner. You can say no to the thing. None of this is your fault, it’s simply how your body turned out, and the sooner you make your peace with that, the less of your life you spend recovering from being polite.
Rip the Band-Aid off early. I wish I had.
3. Processed food wasn’t doing you any favors anyway
When I first cut gluten I was sad about the snacks. Properly sad, which sounds ridiculous written down and was not ridiculous at all at the time. All those little things I’d grabbed without a second thought, gone in an afternoon.
Years later, I’m grateful.
I make them now. When I want popcorn, I buy kernels from somewhere I trust and pop them myself. When I want something sweet, I bake it. I know what’s in it, how much sugar went in, where every single thing came from and whose hands touched it. Before that I was buying with no idea about the facility, the equipment, or roughly half of what was printed on the back.
My gut noticed. So, eventually, did I.
You don’t have to do it all at once, and honestly, you shouldn’t. Start with one. Granola bars, energy bites, little chocolate clusters, cake pops, ice cream. Make a batch, eat it across a few days, make another when it runs out. It’s so much less work than it sounds, and what you get in return is that you stop gambling every time you’re hungry.
From the Recipe BoxDark Chocolate Molasses CrunchSee the Recipe →
I spent a lot of years not sleeping right, not feeling right, hauling something around I’d grown so used to that I’d stopped noticing it was there. These three changes are most of the reason that stopped. I sleep! I breathe! I walk around feeling like a regular person, which, for the record, I had never actually done before.
I can’t give you back the years it took me to work all this out. I can hand you the shortcut.
And whatever your mushroom is, leave it on the plate. You have my full permission.
One More Thing!
What do you wish somebody had told you at the start? It doesn’t have to be a big one. The small ones are usually the ones that would have helped most.
Write to me. I’m collecting them, and I want to put them in front of people who are right at the beginning of this.
Thanks for reading, and see you next Friday.
Write to me at hello@brimly.co. Past issues are archived here.
Stephnie Grace is a recipe developer, editor, and co-founder of Brimly, specializing in gluten-free, soy-free, and gum-free baking. She writes Room Temperature, a Friday letter from behind the scenes at Brimly, for anyone who is new to gluten-free and not sure where to start.
