The Perils of Dining Out.

During the horrid humidity we had last week we were forced to go out for dinner. After all when it's almost 90F inside and you have no air-conditioning its best to go somewhere cool.

There isn't a great deal of choice round here for restaurants unless we drive into Peterborough. All the menus have variations on some sort of dead animal between some sort of bread with a side order of fries. Salad dressings are usually out of a bottle. I usually have burger without the bun and fries or salad or both. Why no bun? Because the bun is full of gluten and gluten and I are enemies.

This means no wheat, rye, barley, malt, oats, or anything made with them. No beer, pasta, pizza, bread, fries with coatings on them, malt vinegar or anything made with it, glucose made from wheat, no soy sauce. It's ok for eating at home but eating out is problematic.

I also have a problem with MSG, monosodium glutamate, when I eat that my hands and feet swell up and get very hot. Not like a balloon but enough to be uncomfortable.

Plus my gall bladder is an angry thing and does not like me to eat fats especially deep fried dead animal with a side order of fries with ranch dressing.

So you can see our dilemma

On Wednesday we headed off to a much praised Italian restaurant. A bit of a ride from here but we had been told it was by the water and the food was very good. It was by the water but the water was stinky. The food was nothing special but they did have gluten free pasta and I ordered seafood linguine without the scallops. After a while I thought to ask if the pasta sauce was also gluten free, you would think they would realise that would be needed but no, the sauce wasn't but they would fix it.  My linguine turned out to be macaroni and the sauce had 7 shrimp/prawns in it. That's all. 2 bucks a prawn. The crab was missing in action- turns out  that it was 'select crab' ie not crab at all but those fish sticks. Dumb eh? Select should mean the good stuff not the crap stuff.  MSG featured in the meal too but at least they had air con and the wine was good.

On Thursday we were still sweltering so this time we went local. To Capers in Campbellford. They have no trouble with the whole gluten free thing and their specials are not deepfriedandwrappedinbread. This time they even had gluten free gnocchi, a thing of wonder and delight. No chemicals just real food.