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Cooking for Beginners… as a Celiac
There are a lot of reasons why people learn how to cook. Maybe as a kid, you grew up cooking alongside an older family member. Maybe you learned when you first moved out of your parents’ house. Maybe you learned (or re-learned) cooking after your celiac disease diagnosis. Or maybe—just maybe—you learned how to cook when you were self-quarantined during the COVID-19 outbreak.
In any case, cooking for beginners can be a challenge. If you’re celiac or have other food allergies or dietary restrictions, then you’ll more than likely have more work to do than someone who can eat anything when you’re learning to cook for the first time.
We definitely had some basic cooking knowledge when we started cooking together (well, at least Peter did), but we’ve come a long way. But that being said, we definitely still have some kitchen blunders and run into new, unexpected challenges.
The Availability of Convenient Gluten-Free Foods
One of the best things about being a celiac in 2020 (as opposed to even 10 years ago) is how available gluten-free foods are in stores and restaurants. It’s pretty rare that we can’t find gluten-free options everywhere we go, even though Isabelle’s additional allergies do make this frustrating sometimes.
While we do buy gluten-free pasta, and occasionally pick up other snacks or treats that we like a lot, we’ve increasingly realized how expensive it can all be. We’ve been making our own bread for a while, but we’ve also taken to making as much as we can ourselves.
However, we’re not going to pretend that we always love having to make our own food. For example, we sometimes go a couple of days (usually longer) without bread because we have to make it ourselves. We don’t want to buy it in stores, but it can be awfully tempting.
Time, Patience, and Practice
Over the last 3 years or so, we’ve become much better at cooking than we’d ever imagined. But this was never a smooth road. From testing out recipes or ingredients that didn’t quite work out to finding better alternatives later down the road, we’ve become much more familiar with how to cook gluten-free.
While we are still learning and continuing to try new recipes, we still have some tips for (gluten-free) cooking for beginners that we wish we knew all those years ago.
Our 5 Tips for Cooking for Beginners
Tip #1: Make Sure that You Have a Safe Kitchen Space
There’s a reason why this is our first tip on the list. Above all, the most important thing that you can do when you’re learning how to cook gluten-free at home is to make sure that your workspace is 100% safe.
But what does a “safe” kitchen space look like for celiacs?
As Peter explained in a post earlier last year, if a celiac and a non-celiac are cohabitating, then there’s a big risk for cross-contamination. This could mean kitchen surfaces, equipment, tools, trays, etc. Anything might be contaminated with gluten, especially if you are new to gluten-free cooking (or you’re a beginner cook).
The problem is that you might not be sure what has touched gluten and what hasn’t. Every time you start cooking, the best rule to follow with determining if your kitchen space is safe is: “If in doubt, clean it.”
The other thing to do is to avoid having your non-celiac make food that has a greater risk of contaminating the kitchen. For example, Peter can only bake cookies that contain gluten if he buys the premade dough. This is because flour can get everywhere in a kitchen, which increases the risk of gluten contamination.
We also tend to make most of our meals 100% safe for both of us (at least when it comes to dinner). If we’re making two separate meals that need similar space (for example, they both need to be heated in the oven or cooked stovetop), then either Isabelle’s meal needs to be cooked first, or one of us has to use the full oven and the other has to use the convection oven.
Tip #2: Start With Something Simple
Now that we’re working with a safe kitchen, an important tip for cooking for beginners is to start by making something simple. Instead of jumping right into pastry making (which we can’t even handle yet), maybe start with a stir-fry, a protein with a veggie and starch (like potatoes), or a pasta dish with pre-made gluten-free noodles.
The point here is that gluten-free cooking (and cooking for beginners) can be very challenging, so it’s better to start with something within your comfort zone so that you don’t get defeated from the outset. From there, you can slowly increase the difficulty of your recipes.
Tip #3: Make a Favorite Food
Another way to become comfortable as a beginner cook is to make something that you know and love (or even something that you miss from your days pre-diagnosis). This also means that you’ll be more excited about your meal… and that you’ll probably know where you went wrong if it doesn’t turn out.
Tip #4: Take a “Regular” Recipe and Adjust It
This is actually how we got to the point where we are with cooking. We’d think about a recipe that Isabelle hadn’t had in a long time because of her celiac diagnosis, and then look up substitutes for those ingredients. While this can seem daunting, when you break down a recipe that already exists you at least have a starting point.
We actually created a number of our recipes from trying to replicate foods that Isabelle missed. You can check these out here.
The one thing that you do have to be careful about with adapting a “regular” recipe to one that’s gluten-free is that you’ll probably have to change more than you realize. For example, you might need more binding agents (like eggs), more fat (like oil, butter or vegan butter), or less starch (because gluten-free starches can sometimes be very absorbent).
Tip #5: Take Advantage of Your Spice Cabinet
Jumping off of our previous tip, one thing that beginner cooks can do to make their homemade gluten-free food so much better is to add flavor. We’ve talked about this a bit before, but what you’ll probably find when you start cooking is that recipes that have many flavors (like these) can often hide the fact that you’ve subbed out many of the ingredients for ones that are gluten-free or allergy-friendly.
Adding in spices, seasonings, and other flavors can also make cooking more fun. Even if you’re just making chicken thighs in a pan (which was our go-to for a long time), switching up the seasoning every time helps you understand what you like and don’t like, and what flavors you might want to experiment with in the future.