I have been in a rut. Again. It's been a hard year. I thought going gluten free was hard, but oh if I could only be gluten intolerant. That to me would be heaven.
Last fall, getting diagnosed with multiple food allergies sent me over the edge. I have to say, I've adjusted fairly well. This year, when I traveled on our annual trip to San Diego, I even ate out almost every meal and still stayed healthy. It was a big step.
All that eating out and no grocery shopping spoiled me! When I came back home, I didn't feel like cooking at all! A couple weeks ago, I was so overwhelmed, I didn't even want to blog anymore. I hated the kitchen.
I got an email about a new website. It's called GFree Cuisine. They wondered if my readers would be interested in their service and if I wanted to run a contest. I checked it out. In a nutshell, it's a gluten free meal planning service. The site was created by Carol Fenster. Carol has written many gluten free cookbooks over the years. Some of which are my favorites! She offers 10 meal plans each week. You pick 5 from the choice of 10, how many people you are serving, and from that you can print off a grocery list and recipes. This still leave two meals per week for you to experiment on your own or go out.
I have been horrible about making a weekly menu. I end up going to the grocery, buying whatever looks good, then standing at the fridge every night wondering what to make. Or worse yet, sitting for hours with cookbook with too much to choose from and can't make up my mind.
GFree Cuisine cost $10.00 a month. The price drops if you do it long term, but I decided to try a 3 month run of it. I hate to recommend something I hadn't tried myself. So far, I love it. I love being able to choose from just 10 items. I love having the grocery list and all the recipes for the week. The food is good. Simple things. I love simple. And, best yet, I am excited about cooking again. What I also like is, it's easy to change a couple things if I need too. She labels meals if the are easily made dairy free and gives you some vegetarian options too. All the nutritional information is available for each meal which is also nice to have.
Saturday's menu was chicken kabobs with a brown rice salad. This brown rice salad had mint in it. I don't know why, but that just didn't sound good. It's not something I would have ever picked out of a recipe book. I made it anyway and now it's one of my new favorite recipes! Very hardy and summer like and I love the flavor of the mint, garlic, feta, cumin and coriander together. I would have never tried that on my own! It will become a family favorite.
The other thing I"m finding I like are her salad dressing recipes. Most have been very simple and very good. I especially like ranch dressing. I've never been able to make it homemade and have it really taste like real ranch, but the recipe from GFree Cuisine tasted so good!
Another really neat feature is the freezer cooking. Every month she offers up to 5 freezer menus with a shopping list, recipes to print, and labels. That's cool. She also has a section on picnics, dinner parties, bread, snacks, and various other categories to choose from.
Go check out the site. Then come back here because I have a contest. My first contest! GFree Cuisine is offering a free months subscription and a $50.00 gift certificate to Crate and Barrel! Now that's fun. Please leave me a comment on this post. It has to be a story about the worst meal or the worst thing you've ever cooked that's gluten free. I know we all have stories! I do. The Jello Bottom Pizza.
Tell me yours. Then I will throw everyone's name into a hat and draw a name. Please make sure you leave me your email when signing into the comments box so I will have a way to get a hold of you should you win! You will have until next Monday the 10th to leave a comment, so get commenting now! And check out GFree Cuisine. I love it!
