Reviews, reviews, reviews!

This past week has been very interesting. Both good and bad. Work was beyond stressful. Grades were due. For any of you who are not teachers, this is the worst time of the school year. As the music teacher I have to calculate grades for over 600 students. That's a whole lot of grades! I turned them all in yesterday. They are done. Woo hoo!!!!! Well, done until the end of second quarter.


Unfortunately, all of that stress and work meant that cooking was the last thing on my mind. Who has the time or energy to prepare a meal from scratch when you have so much work to do? As a result I tried out a few new products. I had purchased GF muffins from Whole Foods a couple weeks ago and was not pleased. Weird texture. Eh? So this week as I opened the loaf of GF bread I had bought at Trader Joe's I did not have much hope. I had read that most store bought GF bread is better when toasted. I have to admit that I did not own a toaster. I remedied that on Monday. Being my father's daughter I could not buy just any toaster, it had to have the cool gadget factor. I did a little research and shopped around. In the end I purchased Back to Basics Toaster and Egg Poacher. Coolest toaster ever! If you have never heard of this machine, it can cook an egg, heat up breakfast sausage, and toast bread at the same time. AND it all finishes at the same time! It actually works. I took it out of the box, ran it a few times to get rid of the plastic/chemical smell, and loaded it up. My late night feast included Food for Life Brown Rice bread and Polaner black raspberry preserves. Yum! This bread is great! The preserves even say gluten free on the label. I was so pleased. The next morning I tried out the egg cooker. Worked like a charm. This was the best purchase ever. Also, It looks so great sitting on my shelf along with the Angel of Good Health that my mom bought me after I was diagnosed.


On Thursday night I was super hungry but did not have any time to spare. All I wanted was some pasta with sauce. Easy cooking. Then I remembered the Tinkyada Pasta Joy fusili I had in the cupboard. I remembered Karina over at Gluten Free Goddess saying how much she loves this pasta. So 10 minutes later I was feasting on fusili with spinach and marinara. I couldn't tell the difference. While much more expensive than my beloved Barilla, this holds up to scrutiny (even one of my non-GF friends said he could tell the difference when he tried a bite the next day.)


Today I am off to by huge quantities of everything. Mom and I are going to Costco. Brown rice, frozen shrimp, frozen chicken tenders... all of those staples that I would rather not have to keep running to the store to purchase. I have gone through more rice in the past three weeks than in the past year. Wow, three weeks. I didn't realize it had been that long already. I feel as though I just started. By the time I hit three years I will feel as though I have been doing this forever. Let's hope it is all second nature to me by then.