My genes LOVE sugar. Seriously, I have an uncle who LOVES his mother’s sugar pie, but feels it still needs a healthy dose of maple syrup on top. I still remember my grand-parents telling me “you don’t need to feel hungry to have maple taffy”. And, both my father and I like to take a spoonful of maple butter and eat it as is. No kidding, yeah, we love sugar.

It’s no surprise then that some of my favorite meals have some kind of sweet stuff hanging around them. One of those is indisputably french toast. I may not make it like a lot of you know it, but it’s fairly straight forward. You take your stale bread (of which we never have any, so I usually just use fresh or toasted) and dunk it in a mixture of eggs/milk & cinnamon (or any other savory spice you prefer). Then you pan cook it until both sides are golden and the middle is cooked through. Then the “cherry on top” as it were, is a healthy dose of maple syrup (or table syrup, which would be boiling equal parts brown & white sugars with the same of water).

I’ve tried making them again with homemade GF bread, but the bread usually sort of dissolves and isn’t quite as tasty as it should be. When I do get it right, I’ll be sure to share.

Therefore, when I came across a french toast package in our GF frozen section, I was beyond thrilled! Maybe someone finally figured out what I had been trying to do. I looked over the package and was surprised it was free of many other common allergens. That should be where the first red flag went up. I love that so many foods are being made available to people who otherwise wouldn’t ever be able to have them, but let’s be honest, if you replace milk, eggs & flour with some non-allergenic equivalents, chances are it simply won’t come even close.

I give you Glutino’s French Toast

If you love this product, more power to you and keep on enjoying it. I simply found it wasn’t worth the price and it tasted pretty bad no matter what you aren’t able to eat. I’ve had the pleasure of reading a few more reviews on this product and the scales are largely tipped in favor of them being quite un-palatable.

It’s rather oily looking and is as tough as a piece of cardboard. The taste, wow, it’s just bad. I could not make myself eat it. Actually, I’m fairly sure I spit out that first bite entirely. My Celiac daughter didn’t seem to mind much of it, but she’s never known anything different. My husband agreed it was pretty tasteless but still managed to eat it. I hope I never have to eat anything so vile again.

I’ll make an effort and taste the other brand we have in the basement freezer, but I’ve heard there’s really no contest between them, they are both quite tasteless. A shame really. It’s not THAT hard to make gluten free foods that taste good. It IS however almost impossible to make completely allergen free foods that want to look and taste like the real deal. Maybe it’s time we stop trying to recreate old “favorites” and rather try to get back to basics and create newer fresher recipes.

Next time: How about a nice simple organic granola-type bar? Well, take a good hard look, that’s just “too much sugar!”

Like it or not, we can’t all love everything that we taste. Some kids pale at the sight of broccoli, for other’s it’s melted cheese. I’ve been graced with two wonderful girls that have, so far, open palates. Actually, my eldest’s first favorite veggies (like, when they were pureed!) was broccoli. Once she started eating actual “food”, she adored asparagus!! Who’d have thunk! Of course, this kind of luck doesn’t go on forever. She’s now at an age where she truly wants to assert herself (um, well, maybe all ages of childhood are like that really), but she decides, from one meal to another, that she “doesn’t like that” anymore. Um, o… k…

That said, we have a 2 bite rule here. I’ve explained it NUMEROUS times, since she was just about 2 I think, maybe even before, that you have to take 2 bites before you decide you don’t like something. As she got older, she wanted to know, well, WHY?

• First bite: it’s all about letting your mouth get used to the new texture, weird taste and just all around new sensations.
• Second bite, well, you know what it tastes and feels like, it’s not a surprise, so you can better appreciate, or dislike, the actual TASTE of the food.

Being a very “logical” child, she accepted the explanation and even went so far as to explain it back to me while she was doing this. I must say, 95% of the time, she realizes that she actually LIKES the item in question. The rest is divided between spitting out the first bite with almost a fearful gagging noise (alright, REALLY don’t like it, that’s fine!) or after she swallows the second bite, she still decides she doesn’t like it. Fine by me.

Now, some of you must be shaking your heads saying “that’s all well and good for you, but my child will have a horrendous tantrum if I even suggest such a thing!”. And I get that. Really, I do. Have you met my second child yet? Um, the one I so nicely titled “drama queen” in my previous post? Well, yeah. This kid has been having actual honest temper tantrums since she was 3 months old. I KID YOU NOT. I have witnesses She never took to signing (HUGE protests at 7 months!) because she simply did NOT want to do the hand gesture I was telling her to do. Hence, she will NOT put something in her mouth if I insist. She will throw a complete fit when I repeat the 2 bite rule. SO, new tactic. I just don’t insist, but I don’t take them away either. I tell her to just leave them, or move them elsewhere on her plate…

Now, to explain further, she usually takes a eternity to eat. There’s nothing to do, we’ve tried. She just eats super slowly. And, when we let her take her time, something truly weird happens… She’ll actually clean most of her plate off… including those things she said she didn’t like!! There are those few exceptions. She doesn’t like melted cheese. Does NOT. But, I still make pizza, I still melt the cheese, even for her, and every so often, she’ll try it and usually discard it. But I still don’t insist. By happenstance, we discovered she loves to eat shredded cheese, so we do that often, or do a “no cook” pizza.

All I’m saying is, yes, taste IS subjective.

But, in my humble opinion, to a point. Now, the 4 year old took to the store bought GF bread like it was, well, the best thing since sliced bread, and with reason! Finally something she could eat that didn’t hurt. The baby, on the other hand, refused GF store bought bread for a while before realizing that it’s what we were now eating. She did NOT appreciate the bread at ALL at first. It would crumble under her fingers into mush, and honestly, even I didn’t like it all that much. It became quickly apparent when we started converting our whole house to Everyday, Gluten-Free living that I would not be able to eat that bread. I’m just not personally a fan of cardboard. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

In the beginning, although I asked her every so often if she really did like her bread, she invariably replied that it was good. So I kept buying it. I tasted it sometimes, a crumb here or there off the counter after I’d peanut buttered it, and I almost had one of those gag moments. It wasn’t “bad” but it just wasn’t worth the 5+ dollars I had paid for it! I quickly started baking my own bread after that. Of course, seeing as we are now 4 living on bread as a daily staple (although I’ve cut a lot of the superfluous bread myself for reasons that aren’t yet related to this topic), I quickly realized we’d have to supplement with store bought bread to tide us over between bread batches. I love baking bread, but baking a whole loaf every day and a half to 2 days was just getting to be a little too time consuming. So I usually bake 2 loaves at a time twice a week and we have store bought bread in between batches.

Fast forward to a couple months ago, and as is my new habit, I was looking at all the new products at our local Maxi & cie and noticed a new type of Glutino bread. Corn bread. Cool!

I was looking forward to tasting some REAL corn bread, made with corn flour and all that. I didn’t give a glance to the label (duh moment!) as Glutino is a very well respected Gluten Free brand. And, my issue has nothing to do with it’s gluten free status, it very much IS gluten free. No worries. The hiccup came when I opened up this new bag and toasted us all up some bread one breakfast. Well, it smelled fine and looked ok, although much whiter then I had anticipated… After one bite, seriously, I had to spit it out. It was just so far removed from what I had thought it would taste, it just baffled me. Of course, 2 bite rule, right?? So, I took it up again and tasted it once more, now expecting the taste. Sadly, it really didn’t please my taste buds in the slightest way.

Of course, I have to be the black sheep in all this, both girls ate it and didn’t complain, but there was none of the usual “HMMM mom! That’s some GREAT bread!” as I get EVERY SINGLE time I serve them my home made bread. (well unless I really screwed up the recipe, which has happened before! lol) My husband agreed, really not the most tasteful bread he’d ever eaten, but “passable” with a nice thick layer of peanut butter. So I got up, took the package and looked over the ingredients…

Ingredients: Water, corn starch, tapioca starch, safflower oil, evaporated cane juice, egg whites, salt, guar gum, glucono-delta-lactone, yeast, pectin, sodium bicarbonate, sodium alginate, modified cellulose, iron, niacin, calcium, vitamin B6, thiamine, riboflavin.

Um, do you read “corn flour” or “corn meal” in any of those ingredients? Neither did I. To ME, personally, this is NOT corn bread. We did find a cornbread MIX that tasted good (be warned, this particular site doesn’t ship to Canada, but you can probably find the mix in your local grocery store that carries GF items), although it was slightly too sweet to serve as a “corn bread roll” for supper, again, in my humble opinion.

In the end, I guess taste really IS that subjective, but still, it makes you wonder who taste tests all these gluten free products before they roll out of production. Are they taste tested by people who have been eating cardboard type bread for most of their life and find that “this just taste SO much better!”? Or, like some products I’ve recently found, actually has non-Celiacs taste their products to see if they truly ARE tasty. Just “food” for thought, eh?

Next week: Is it possible to make french toast taste bad? I didn’t think so, but I was proven wrong!