Breaking (gluten-free) bread

I’ve learned a lot about myself through cooking. Some of my fonder memories include sitting around while my dad made dinner, eating grapes and picking up on things through exposure while not really paying attention. When I got a little older, I started helping my mom make things too, which involved “recipe following,” or kind of vaguely throwing things together with the assumption of common sense about how things taste. By some kind of magic, it always seemed to work.

When I was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012, I had to really try to remember all the little tips and tidbits I picked up from my parents growing up. Celiac disease is a genetic autoimmune disease that, in short, causes your immune system to attack your small intestine (and sometimes do other funky, random things) when it detects gluten. Gluten, a now infamous protein, is found in wheat, barley and rye, which limits which food I can make and buy, but having to be gluten-free has opened up a culinary world I had never known about before.

If you can cook, you can make just about anything gluten-free. However, while I don’t mind gluten-free bread and noodles at this point, they aren’t exactly savory to others. To me, one of the most important parts of cooking is feeding others, so in an effort not to disappoint people with gluten-free substitutes, I’ve had to do a lot of research, reading and hard thinking to get around the wheat factor.

While I love cookbooks (all of mine are specialty gluten-free ones) and consult plenty of food blogs to find new recipes, I almost always change what other chefs have decided they want for their meals. Figuring out which herbs and spices I like has been simultaneously the hardest and most fun aspect of cooking for me, which I can only learn by tasting.

I do really love food, both healthy and unhealthy, so it was a real blow to find out that pizza (pizza!) and sandwiches were more or less off limits to me unless I make it myself or spend a fortune on a frozen one. I’ve always really loved mac and cheese, so now I have perfected about three ways to make it, just with gluten-free noodles. As I get older and my metabolism slows down more each year, I’ve also made an effort to collect tasty recipes and ideas that include fresh meat and vegetables.

Over the holidays with communal dinners and plenty of helpful folks that made gluten-free variations of things for me, I started to think about why I like cooking and eating so much. Logically, it’s because I’m hungry basically 24/7, but it’s more than that too. The first thing I do when I cook or come up with a good recipe is tell someone. If I’m cooking just for me, it’s haphazard experimentation. If someone else is going to eat it, I really think about it and choose what I’m going to make.

I thought about years past and whether I actually remember what we usually make for holiday dinners, and I don’t, because that’s not really the point. The hardest part about having a restrictive diet is not the unavailability of certain food, it’s how limited you are with sharing unless others are willing to make the changes you have to make all the time. Very little bums me out more than someone refusing to eat something I made because it’s gluten-free, but it happens more than I thought it would.

Most of the experience of eating is eating with other people. Going out to lunch or dinner isn’t usually about the food, after all, but spending time with others. Sure, nourishment has an awful lot to do with our daily diets, but as I’ve become better and better at cooking (and feeding myself in general) I realize I gain most of my satisfaction from feeding others.

The social aspect of cooking and eating is the major reason I love mac and cheese so much. My grandma watched my brother and I for a little while when I was growing up, and she had small index cards with recipes written in her unmistakable handwriting–it always looked like square little houses to me–and when I see it to this day I smell whatever she put in her German cookies. Together we made mac and cheese. I don’t remember all of the specific ingredients. I remember the basics because I remember spending time with her, snapshots of that kitchen. I’ve never looked at a recipe for it, which means sometimes it’s better than others. As a result, with those few hours hardwired in my mind, I can make mac and cheese in several variations–it’s what I always thought to make when I had people over.

The span of dishes I know off the top of my head has varied since college, but most of my go-to dishes have an emotional significance that’s completely related to other people. In some ways, celiac disease has made me more generous and open to trying new things, which has brought me closer to everyone I know. We all have eating in common, after all, even if some of us have different needs.