Eating Gluten-Free in Thailand, Part 3

If things go awry...

Hopefully, this will not happen to you. I did not "get glutened" except by my own fault one time when I ordered an american-style hamburger in Thailand without double-checking the ingredients and on my way home when I ate a questionable dessert at the Tokyo airport and then on the plane, I ate some cornflakes.

However, here are some things that are helpful to know about bathrooms.

• Always bring your own toilet paper and hand sanitizer if those items are important to you.
• Do not throw toilet paper away in the toilet, most facilities will have a trash can for that purpose.
• If you are using a more rural toilet that has to be flushed manually make sure you scoop a good amount of water from the barrell next to the toilet for that purpose into the bowl or porcelain hole in the ground as the case may be several times.
• If you are on a train, do not go to the bathroom when the train is stopped. All of the waste is voided right onto the tracks. You'll get yelled at if you go at a station.
• Train toilets are some times flushed with a foot pedal.

Eating Gluten-Free in Thailand, Part 2

Eating in restaurants is different in Thailand in a few, notable ways.

• Learn to say hello - sounds like So-wa-dee-ka if you're a woman or So-wa-dee-ha if you're a man. Thank you is Ka-poon-ka if you're a woman or Ka-poon-ha if you're a man.
• Most parties share food so splitting the check is unusual. You can avoid a lot of headaches by figuring the money out amongst yourselves.
• Often service is very slow by American standards. Imagine the worst service (time-wise) you've ever had and then multiply it by 3. The food is often worth the wait, but eating out is a leisurely affair. Don't wait until you're starving to sit down and order.
• Bring your patience. You are probably making some special requests. Be polite to the waiter even if there is some initial miscommunciation. Your future gastrointestinal happiness is in his or her hands.
• Tipping is expected in Thailand. Tip generously, especially if they have checked ingredients for you.
• Don't expect everyone's food to be served at the same time. They usually just bring it out when it's ready.
• Although most places will automatically give you less-spicey food, you can ask for mild by saying "Mai Ped Ka" if you're a woman or change the Ka to "Ha" if you're a man or ask for it to be even spicier by saying Ped or "Ped, Ped."

Eating Gluten-Free in Thailand, Part 1

I was intimidated to try travelling to SE Asia for the first time on my own, so I signed up with GAP Adventures because they promise to cater to special culinary needs. I had travelled with them to Peru and hiked the Inca trail and been blown away when they made me quinoa pancakes from scratch on the trail.

I was similarly accomodated in Thailand, even on a 3-day hike into the hill tribe region when our guides packed in all of our food. Although at first, my tour leader tried to talk me out of it.

"Are you sure you can't have soy sauce? Maybe just a little?"

I was pretty firm that I was not willing to try that. Frowning, she asked me, "What do you eat at home?"

Flabbergasted I answered, "Thai food!"

I ended up eating copious amounts of green curry on the trip because that and sweet and sour chicken wer often the only things we knew for sure were gluten free.

Here are some tips I learned about eating safely in Thailand while still getting to experience the local flavor.

• At restaurants you can almost always have green curry, yellow curry, masaman curry or sweet and sour. Also, coconut lemon grass soup with chicken (Thom khao gai.)
• Fruit shakes with or without yogurt are a delight and are offered on many street corners and also at restaurants.
• Fresh fruit is readily available almost everywhere and quite tasty.
• Rice porridge is a traditional SE Asian breakfast dish that is normally gluten free. You can get this with or without chicken.
• You can make a good breakfast out of two fried eggs over white rice with butter and jam. It's better than it sounds.
• If it's hard to tell at a street market what you can eat, look for fried eggs, white rice and fruit.
• Mango sticky rice is often available on the street or at a restaurant and is a wondeful GF dessert.
• Grilled bananas on their own or swimming in sweetened coconut milk make a great snack and are sold on the street.
• If you are going to take an overnight train, your best bet is to get food ahead of time to take with you. The only thing I could find that was gluten free was the green curry and it was lackluster and expensive.
• Convenience stores routinely carry a variety of gluten-free snacks including pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, nuts, the Original Lays Potato Chips, Fritos, dried fruit, etc.
• 7-11s in Thailand are a treasure trove of gluten-free eating. They almost all carry ready to eat boiled eggs in two or four packs. Just don't eat the soy sauce included in a small packet. Also, there is the most wonderful yogurt in the world. It has small cubes of young coconut in it and is incredibly rich. When you get to the checkout, they'll give you a small plastic spoon to eat it with.

• I had cards from Select Wisely printed in Thai and they worked fairly well, but lots of people aren't familiar with hidden sources of gluten. For instance, one cook didn't know soy sauce was an ingredient in plum sauce.
• Bring any protein bars you want to have, I never found any the whole time I was travelling.
• I always poke my head into any food store just to see what they have and one day in Ao Nang - in the southern tip of Thailand - I found a tourist specialty store that sold gluten-free cereal and peanut butter. What luxuries! So, keep your eyes open.

Eating Gluten-Free in Siem Reap, Cambodia

I admit I was somewhat terrified to travel alone to Siem Reap, Cambodia because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to figure out what I could eat that is gluten free. I special ordered some cards explaining what I could and couldn't eat in Khmer from Select Wisely and kept one copy in my pocket and one copy in my money belt.

I had done some research ahead of time by looking through some regional cookbooks. It appeared that I would be safe in general, but that some dishes might have soy sauce in them. Khmer cuisine seems to be similar to Thai and Indian food in the best ways. It features lots of fruits and veggies and many of the dishes have simple sauces.

I hired a driver for my first couple of days and asked him to help me find food in addition to his other duties. This turned out to be important because he could read the card and some of the food vendors didn't seem to be able to do so. My card was written in Khmer and English. I picked out items on the menu that sounded likely to be gluten-free and then he'd double check. I was only going to be in Cambodia for a few days, so I decided I'd just memorize my order and if I liked it, I'd eat that for the rest of the trip!

This didn't turn out to be necessary, but it would have worked. In Siem Reap, there were several Indian restaurants with familiar gluten-free staples that I could eat and then a fellow-traveler told me about the Cambodian specialty Amok, a coconut-based dish. Bad for the diet, but great gluten-free eating!

Also, a friend from Laos had told me breakfast should be no problem. One traditional Southeast Asian breakfast staple is rice soup with or without fish or chicken. Rather bland, but gluten free and widely available. Also, it was likely that I'd be able to find fried eggs, fruit, yogurt and steamed rice. This was all true. Also, the coffee was fantastic.

As far as eating on the street, there was plenty of fruit and I'd brought a pocket knife so I could slice up dragon fruit and eat it. There were some packaged foods available, but I was glad I'd brought some bars and single-servings of peanut butter which I ate on apples.

In general, I had much more success eating tasty, flavorful food on a regular basis in Cambodia than I do in the states!

Flying Gluten Free to Thailand

Recently I flew from the Dallas/Fort Worth area to Bangkok. I flew to Tokyo on American Airlines and then connected on Thai Airways to Bangkok. The first flight was 13 hours long and the second was about 6 hours.

Whenever I fly anywhere I bring extra food. Just in case there is an unscheduled stop, bad weather or the plane gets stuck on the runway for some other reason. Since airlines have responded to the peanut allergy folks, they no longer have peanuts on board which means there is a scarcity of gluten-free food on board. Certainly any gluten-free food with even a modicum of nutritional value.

So, when embarking on basically 24-hours of travel, you can imagine the type of food I had with me. Single serving containers of Jiff peanut butter (which were allowed on the flight out but confiscated as a liquid on the ride home), protein bars, Glutino's breakfast bars, Quaker snack cakes, etc. I was more likely to eat myself to death than starve.

I had called American Airlines months in advance and booked my flight with frequent flyer miles. I dimly remember the agent telling me to call and confirm my gluten-free meal, which I guess I forgot to do. Ack.

I realized there was a problem when the first meal was served and no "special" meal was brought out to me. The flight attendants were horrified. "It's not like we can turn back and there is no gluten-free meal on board at all!"

OK, really? On big giant plane flying to another continent they don't load up with a couple of extra "special" meals just in case? No vegetarian, Kosher or other specialty meals? Maybe this should be S.O.P.

However, that doesn't change the fact that I should have remembered to double check and I didn't. Lucky for me, my seatmate was sympathetic and he and I traded food from our meals, he gave me his cheese, I gave him my bread, etc. Also, two awesome flight attendants scrounged food for me from business class and first class and I was probably on calorie overload for much of the flight. As my seatmate said "You have to survive."

My protests that I was unlikely to starve to death in 13 hours with 3,000 calories in my carry on were ignored.

When I got to Tokyo, I was excited to find a cafe that served edamame, yogurt, milk and some snack food with the ingredients in English including Peanut M&Ms. There were also so kelp-covered rice balls that I probably could have eaten.

Then came the best surprise of my life. I boarded my Thai Airways flight after making sure my gluten-free food would be on board at the check-in counter. "Of course" they said in a way that made me doubt my sanity in asking the question.

Thai Airways served two wonderful meals including rice-based rolls that if I could get them in the states I would eat every day. OK, maybe not really, but they were very good. The food was excellent and way better than I ever would have hoped for.

On the way home, Thai Airways succeeded again, but due to the timing of my flight, I only got breakfast (which included gluten-free toast) and a snack - a mandarin orange. Still, not bad considering the only snack available on American Airlines was a packet of asian-style chex mix that seemed to hit every major food allergy group except for dairy. It warned of crab, shrimp, peanut, wheat and soy contamination. Interesting.

Feeling tired from traveling and wanting to get to my flight, I went straight to the Tokyo Airport concourse my flight on American would be departing from. This was a bad call. I needed to do lunch in the Tokyo airport and the only place that sold food within a few blocks of my gate mainly specialized in hamburgers, hot dogs and what looked like a variety of Ramen Noodles. Some of it might have been gluten-free, but I couldn't be sure. I had been hoarding my protein bars, a bag of chips and an apple, so I bought some water and another gluten-free looking snack and had a picnic at the gate.

There were several vending machines at the gate, but they didn't accept credit cards and only took yen.

I got onto the American Airlines flight and relaxed, looking forward to my gluten-free dinner in a few hours. The dinner did come and it was gluten free, but it was fish, which I don't like. I KNOW, beggars can't be choosers, but I did have another protein bar with me, so it was all good.

Around 2 AM I was brought a snack, which I thought was kind of odd, but it was very tasty. I think there were some kind of potato pancakes involved, it's all kind of a blur now.

But by the time breakfast rolled around, I was definitely hungry. There, on my tray was a box of Kellog's corn flakes. Now, I know, in the states that these are not gluten free. However, I thought, maybe the Japanese version is. Also, I couldn't read the ingredients because they were in Japanese, so I ate them.

They were not gluten-free. Happily, there was not that much of the flight left. Although there was not a huge amount of wheat in them, I dealt with a cranky stomach for the next 48 hours. I'm sure the matter was not helped by all of the random food I had been eating in general and adjusting to the new time zone.

I sent all of this - the helpful flight attendants and the unfortunate cereal - in a note to American Airlines. They were very nice about it all and said they would talk to their caterers immediately. Also, they generously credited my frequent flyer account 10,000 miles.

I guess the lesson is always have back up food, confirm your gluten-free meals on airlines and always be responsible for making decisions on whether to eat what people bring you.

I intend to write more posts in the following days about eating Gluten-Free while traveling in Cambodia and Thailand.

How to make your own gluten-free yogurt

Recently, a friend pointed out an old episode of Good Eats on youtube with Alton Brown that shows step by step how to make your own yogurt, yogurt cheese and finally frozen yogurt.

I had to try it! The idea of controlling all of the ingredients and knowing where it all came from was fabulous. I used my normal low fat plain Stonyfield yogurt for the starter cultures.

After 3 days of fun, I managed to produce the yogurt cheese and the lemon, ginger frozen yogurt. All of it was as delicious as promised and gluten free. However, I found out that the plain yogurt has twice the calories of my normal yogurt. So, I will have to eat it sparingly.

Still it was a fun experiment and I may repeat it with 1% or skim milk and see how it all tastes then. To keep my yogurt at a stable temperature, I got a large cooler, lined it with electric blankets and then had lids for both the yogurt container and the cooler. This way, I could fine tune the temperature of the yogurt.

This was a highly entertaining process with a tasty result. People with kids who eat gluten-free might want to try this as well.

Fresh yogurt:

Ingredients

• 1 quart 2-percent milk
• 1/2 cup powdered milk
• 1 to 2 tablepoons honey
• 1/2 cup plain yogurt, room temperature

Directions

Pour milk into small saucepan and whisk in powdered milk and honey. Place over medium heat and bring to 120 degrees F on an instant read thermometer. Once milk has reached 120 degrees F, pour into a cylindrical plastic container, reserving 1/2 cup. Whisk in the reserved 1/2 cup into the yogurt and add back to the milk mixture.

Place container into a narrow wine bucket, lined with a heating pad. Set the heating pad to medium. Let the mixture ferment for 3 to 12 hours making sure the temperature stays as close to 115 degrees F as possible.

After fermentation is complete place into the refrigerator overnight.

Yogurt Cheese

Ingredients

• 2 quarts plain yogurt

Directions

Place 4 layers of cheesecloth in colander set over a bowl. Add the yogurt and let drain overnight in the refrigerator. The desired consistency is that of soft cream cheese.

Lemon-Ginger Frozen Yogurt

Ingredients

• 8 cups plain yogurt
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons finely grated lemon peel
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
• 1/4 cup sliced crystallized ginger

Directions

Place yogurt in a cheesecloth-lined colander set over a bowl. Cover and refrigerate for 12 hours. At end of 12 hours, discard the liquid and cheesecloth.

In a bowl combine the drained yogurt, corn syrup, sugar, lemon juice, lemon peel, and fresh ginger. Transfer mixture to ice cream maker and process per manufacturer's instructions, about 25 minutes. Transfer frozen yogurt to an airtight container, fold in crystallized ginger and freeze for 2 hours.

Celiac for the holidays

Here are some survival tips for the holidays:

• Carry food with you in case you get trapped at the mall or elsewhere. Everyone else can eat at the food court, but you might be stuck.
• If you are going to a friend's for a party, call ahead and ask if there will be food there you can eat. Either way, offer to bring a dish or two to share with everyone that is safe for you. Make sure you get your portion early so there's no danger of cross-contamination. I once watched someone dip crackers into my gluten-free pumpkin risotto.
• Keep gluten-free crackers in the car to be whipped out at cocktail parties. I don't know how many times I've gotten overly tipsy from having wine on an empty stomach while everyone else is munching on canapes perfectly sober and not saying ridiculous things loudly.
• Try to think ahead to the holiday favorites you're really going to miss this year and make your own gluten-free version. Even if the "normal" people don't think it's that great it might make you feel not so left out.
• Watch out for turkeys! They often have modified food starch in them. Get a fresh turkey if possible.
• It's not about the food. Even though food is often a focus at the holidays what really matters are the friends and the family. Plan to bring your own food to gatherings and then it will be a pleasant surprise if you can join in on some of the offered grub.