Soaring Through Blue

do you have celiac?

One sunny day, on our way to a lovely, intimate, private, exclusive, by-special-invitation-only dinner party with our wonderful real online friends, Papa Chef and I were stopped at an extra-long stop light when we looked over to see a woman drinking a beer. Glowingly tan, not bloated or gassy, slender, talking energetically to her friends and hardly enamored to distraction with the plate of food in front of her, I knew immediately that there was a problem.

She clearly had celiac.

She must give up whatever it was that was making her so happy, I thought. Whatever was giving her such joy. Immediately.

Papa Chef agreed. Us being of one loving, united, guffawing mind, we both longed to cry out to her, lovingly, concernedly, in earnest, “please put down that beer. You don’t need it. Try duck fat and pork lard instead.”

I have many passions: grocery shopping, eating, cooking, nibbling, adapting recipes, snacking, reading and writing about food, lounging and consuming. They spill out voraciously, like lambent, luminous, leaping grains of quinoa, overflowing from a slutty, short-skirted summer lunch salad, eaten always from a vintage bowl, made only of the freshest farm stand Island vegetables, perhaps accompanied by local, in-season winter fish from the dark, ferocious Atlantic. It’s hard to keep up, I know.

I have come to realize, though, that I have one clear mission in life: I want to help everyone become gluten-free. I want to help them cook from multiple copies of my current and upcoming books and eat well, happily, ravenously, and as often as possible.

The last two years have been, without a doubt, the best of my life, and not just because I’ve finally achieved all the dreams I longed for and watched my friends whirl through, both lovingly and jealously. But without duck fat, caul fat, pork loin, pork sausages and little bags of flour, none of it means all that much, now.

I’m not suffering, though. Please understand. Oh god. I’ve discovered that everything in life is inexplicably, ineffably related to and surrounded, lovingly and calmingly, by food, and I spend so much time around food that my life is truly complete. I don’t focus on being gluten-free, YES, it just happens naturally, creeping into my life like the overgrown poison ivy at Grey Gardens. Most of the time, I don’t even think about gluten. I don’t talk about it. I hardly mention it at all. I forget that it exists. Oh god. I am not focused on poor substitutes for gluten-filled foods, like, for instance, gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free cupcakes. We can be happy without those disgusting, artificial things, now. Truly.

So you see, you can be gluten-free and live a joyful life, if only you put voracious speed-eating at the forefront, joyfully, daily, hourly.

A surprising number of people have written to me to say that they, too, have discovered that they have celiac. It’s wonderful, but it’s not enough- I want more. I am hoping that enough people buy my books that they, too, can embrace the joy of a gluten-free life without the shackles of cynical advice and invasive, inconclusive testing.

Dr. Google can help as well, though you must be wary. There are many online tests for celiac that can help you in your decision, but as I said in my Food Network show (know that you can find all you need here, and not at the Food Network site, now), if you Google "gluten free" you get a million hits, and how do you know which ones you can trust? That's why I started this site. That is why I am here. For free. Unpaid. Covering my own free blog expenses. Working hard, day and night. FOR YOU.

With your help, we can get most school-aged children and at least half of their parents to grow wary and suspicious of gluten. And perhaps their extended families, too.

And if you go gluten-free, what do you eat? People whine and wail and moan, but truly, it is a joy to go without gluten, now.

You can cook vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, grains, chocolate, store-bought boxed macaroons, cupcakes, cookies, cheese and yogurt in lovely, vast, puddly ponds of soft lard. You can devour vegetable, seafood and potato salads drenched, drippingly, in gallons of tangy ranch dressing. You can strangle sausages in layers of caul fat, poach them meltingly in duck fat, and then sear them searingly in butter before sandwiching them, lovingly, between pork breakfast patties and prosciutto. You can revel in troughs of cold, creamy ice cream for midnight moonlit post-coital snacks and noontime weekday breakfasts, in bed. You can nibble on platters of flabby-crisp, salty bacon for breakfast, lunch, dinner and everywhere in between. You can even combine these things and eat bacon-lard-caul-fat-ice-cream (I’m sorry to all the poor vegetarians out there, but really, who wouldn’t want that?!).

You think we suffer? Oh, please. Far from it.

Take a few moments to think about whether or not you, too, have celiac. It could change your life, and your cholesterol levels, forever.