Time, Time, I Need Time to Cook!

I’m posting this on both my regular blog and my gluten free blog. This past few months has been a time of real frustration for me, mostly diet-wise. I’m not talking diet as in counting calories, but my usual struggle with the food allergies, intolerances, and the gluten issue. Now I’m gluten intolerant, which means gluten isn’t going to kill me but it sure makes life miserable. And my allergies aren’t life threatening. Yet. But put all the allergies and intolerances together and I’m simply miserable. What do they do to me? My asthma flares up into bad attacks, my mouth gets sores in it, my lungs get congested, my joints hurt, I get such horrendous heartburn it feels like I’m going to keep over. I get flu-like symptoms. I get horrid stomach cramps. I ache. In other words, living becomes a pain in the ass.

I can live with the allergy diet—as long as I don’t cut out starch entirely (I have issues with starch and can’t have too much), I’m okay on it—the problem is finding time to cook. Because canned prepared foods are out. And prepared frozen foods are out—at least 85% of them. There is no convenience in foods that have garlic and onions and black pepper and peppers and yeast and gluten in them when you can’t eat those foods. Try reading labels sometime, if you don’t have to. And start looking for the foods that don’t have: garlic, onions, peppers, yeast (of any kind), black pepper, gluten (wheat, rye, barley), eggs, peanuts, shrimp, oysters, oranges, oats, in them. Add in I have to limit soy of all kinds, and limit starches, and you’ll quickly discover yourself in the world I live in.

This morning I stared in the refrigerator thinking, “What the HELL am I going to have for breakfast?” Because I’d forgotten to take any meat out of the freezer. We didn’t have leftovers I could eat—I made tacos last night but used a jarred mild sauce I thought I could get away with and ended up miserable a good share of the night due to some spice in the mix. And the fridge is looking rather empty.

And that’s when it hit me: I just have to start accepting that I must have time to cook for myself. I cannot live like other people. I can’t throw a few things together on a plate without consideration of each and every food and whether it will be a problem. Now, I do not have a freezer, nor a big pantry, so I can’t just cook up a bunch of things and tuck them away—no, this is a day by day process. Fresh from the oven/fresh off the stove is the way it has to be until we own a house where I have more storage room.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to cut down on things that take time, in order to have more time to cook. Which means—I have to get serious about cutting out Twitter and Facebook, except for I have an announcement about a blog or book news. My writing suffers from them…Hell, even my blogging has suffered because of those two venues. Cutting them out, and making sure I don’t overload myself with blogging, well—that is going to help a lot on both the writing and cooking front. And my forums, well, I’ll put in an appearance now and then but my mods can watch over them for me.

So tonight, I am going to attempt a dairy free, onion/garlic/pepper free, gluten free form of Swedish meatballs, and gluten-free corn muffins. If it works, I’ll put the recipe on the GF blog. And I’m going to organize the spice cabinet, and go through the cupboards to see just what we have, and what we don’t. And I’m going to get domestic again. I love to cook—and I’m at the point where there’s no choice. I have to now.

Yasmine