You can call me awesome if you want to....:)

One of my favorite lines that my son said to his big sis while we were driving from Atlanta to Jacksonville, on our cross country vacation, but I have to say I feel a little like saying that about one of my best friends, Henrietta, and my cooking day.  Gluten Free Diva, Pasta Mama....alot of great names come to mind today with our amazing sucesss in the kitchen.  We talked about it for months, we planned it for days, then...finally...it happened!  We started at 9 am and cooked until we couldn't stand any longer!  Henrietta has spent the last year testing for an amazing woman who is writing her own cookbook due out next Christmas called "The Art of Gluten Free Baking", her name is Jeanne and I am not kidding when I say this.....she is a GENIOUS! .....AND possibly a life saver! Here is her website: http://www.artofglutenfreebaking.com/

Yeast intolerant beware! Everything we made today was gluten and dairy free but Yeast was in the rolls, pizza dough, bread.....YEAH...it's one of those things that it's more of an every now and then things but man was it good!

We started out making her Parker House Rolls, like you have at Thanksgiving. I cannot tell you how I missed those lovely piles full of fluff and yeast. When we finished making the batter, the mix just smelled like bread....I thought my tastebuds would explode before I had waited for them to cook, cool and could taste one!  All I can say is I CANNOT WAIT for the holidays this year!  My sweet angel and close friend can eat EVERYTHING they want!!! Next we moved to pizza dough and pasta dough and pastry dough....once all the doughs were made and settled in their appropriate manner we made a real pizza marguerita, we made homemade pop tarts (strawberry to be exact), we MADE homemade PASTA (tagiatelle) and finished it with a yummy sauce of tomatoes, capers, lemon juice butter alternative, galic and olive oil)  along with buttermilk biscuits and used the extra pasta dough to make Nutella Eggrolls as well, one of my all time favorite deserts!  I learned to make dumplings for chicken and dumplings and also all the things we could do with the different doughs!

It was the most amazing day...we were able to have so much fun creating wonderful meals that taste like the "gluten original" and in half the time since we were helping each other.  This is going to be a trend in our households from here on out. We are going to make batches of different things we would normally make in our homes before diagnosis and freeze them so we can have some easy meals on hand.  I think that is the hardest thing about gluten free living.  Gluten free and dairy free living is a very clean way to live and very healthy but you can't just throw a frozen dinner in the oven or order pizza EVER and not be sick.  Every now and again it would be nice to be able to have something in the freezer that didn't take an hour to cook as well.  ie. a frozen pizza or whatever....and it not cost an arm and a leg and taste good.  Well, we made it happen!  It might go down in history as one of my favorite days in life thus far.  To make food that my child loves that does not taste bad or make her sick...it means so much to me and to be able to conquer my worst fears in the kitchen and gluten free realm successfully, it's the most amazing feeling ever.  I cannot wait for our next cooking day when we make Biscotti an all sorts of other foods!