New Year’s 2021: Our 2020 Year-in-Review

Happy (Almost) New Year!

It’s that time of year again. With New Year’s 2021 quickly approaching, we’ve been looking back at what we’ve learned about food in 2020. We did something like this last year, with a whole decade of learning, but we were still surprised to see how much has changed in 2020.

We’ve acquired many new kitchen gadgets, both as presents and during our deal-hunting. There are no surprises there. We’ve changed up our go-to meal rotation a good bit, too. Some foods we realized we loved, and some restaurants came into our life. We experimented with grocery ordering and food delivery (both a little nerve-wracking for a Celiac). We also went on a bit of a health kick pre-pandemic, but (thanks to a major curveball) we learned that “healthy” food is a far more complex idea than we could have imagined.

So, here it is. For New Year’s 2021 we bring you our 2020 year-in-review.

Our Favorite Things

Kitchen Gadgets

Most of what we got for Christmas this year was food-related. We got some silicone donut pans, a pizza stone, and an apple peeler/corer. Before that, we got into the wonderful world of Instant Pot cooking thanks to a very good deal (thanks to Peter’s time spent on SlickDeals).

Recipes & Ingredients

One of our biggest accomplishments this year was making our own flour blend from scratch. We’ve been baking our own bread for almost 2 years now, but after Peter’s sorghum allergy came to light, we had to start making our own gluten-free flour. It was a long process, but now all of our baked goods are better than they’ve ever been.

By far, the recipe we’ve loved the most this year is our pasta Alfredo. We usually make it this way, but we’ve also tried it with bacon where we use bacon grease in place of the vegan butter and crumble bacon into the final dish.

We’ve also tried SPAM for the first time, which went so much better than we could have expected. We also started throwing bok choy and bean sprouts into our ramen, which has been a nice way to add some veggies into one of our favorite dishes. We’ve also been eating a ton of sriracha this year on just about everything. We also ate a lot of pumpkin pie this year, but (as you’ll see soon) we didn’t quite have the Thanksgiving we’d planned despite this sweet treat.

Dining Out (Well, Carry-Out)

Our old favorite restaurants still haven’t changed, but we did find some new ones that we’ve been loving.

First, we’ve eaten at Kona Poke (a local small chain) every week or two. It’s the closest Isabelle can get to sushi, and it’s a healthy meal that we both love. They also sell Stubborn Soda there, a cane sugar based soft drink, so we often try out different flavors whenever we pick it up.

Not too far from the Kona Poke we found Zaza’s (another local small chain). They didn’t have much allergy information for us at first, but one of the managers did a lot of work to get that rolling and we were able to try it out with no worries. There were some small modifications they had to make for Isabelle, but it worked out great. We can’t get enough of the vaca frita.

Trying Something New: Delivery Services

While we were anxious about how a Celiac could have someone else pick up her food from the store, we needed (and often wanted) to avoid leaving the house.

We tried Shipt through Target when they had a good deal for a year-long membership and did a lot of grocery orders. We always chose the “no substitutions” option for our items and we didn’t really run into any issues.

We also used DoorDash a few times and Uber Eats once. DoorDash we mainly used for Kona Poke when there was a good deal (because everything is usually up-charged on these apps), and it allowed us to put Isabelle’s allergies in with no problem. Uber Eats does not have that option for every restaurant. We tried it once with Five Guys delivery and Isabelle didn’t have a reaction, but we probably wouldn’t take that risk again.

What the Health?!

It wouldn’t be 2020 if we didn’t have a major curveball hit us.

We started this year by deciding to eat a little healthier. Our pants were getting a little tight, thanks to all the deep-frying we’d been doing. We were getting a little too good at it, honestly. We didn’t try anything too radical, just a little less frying and a little more produce.

Once COVID-19 hit, we were already well on our way to feeling better physically. Isabelle got really into Just Dance, and we both decided to swap out meat for plant-based meals at least a couple of times a week. It’s tough with Isabelle’s soy allergy, but we made it work.

And then November hit.

We were just finishing dinner when Peter got the most intense pain in his abdomen. On a scale of 1-10, his pain was an 11. One trip to the Emergency Room later and it turns out he had a kidney stone. More than that, he’s actually prone to them genetically. This was all in time for Thanksgiving.

After one more ER trip and some consulting with his doctor, we learned that Peter had to follow a “low oxalate diet” (for his specific kidney stones). We’re still getting the hang of it, but basically, it’s the least intuitive diet you can imagine. Meat, dairy, eggs, and even soda are fine, but spinach and almonds are some of the worst foods for Peter’s condition. There’s a huge list of foods he has to eat in small or nonexistent amounts, and almost all of them are typical “healthy” foods because oxalates are only found in plants.

So, the last month or so we’ve been trying to re-navigate things. We’ll be including some information on the oxalate content of our recipes once we’ve pinned it down, as well as we’ll talk more about this in future posts.

Final Thoughts on 2020

We changed up more of our eating than we expected to this year. Between finding new things we liked and having to make health-related changes, we’re still learning a lot.

In 2021, we’re hoping to get much more comfortable with low-oxalate cooking (and with identifying safe foods without having to look at multi-page spreadsheets of data), as well as we want to bring you more recipes using all our new tools.

Have a happy new year!