The First Weeks of Celiac Life: Rebuilding Your Kitchen

By Gregory Wilson · Excerpt from Chapter 2 of Celiac vs Me

The morning after the endoscopy, our kitchen looked exactly like it had the morning before, and that was the problem.

The flour was still in the pantry. The bread was still in the bread box. The four boxes of breakfast cereal, every one of which, I would learn over the next hour, contained gluten in some form, were on the shelf above the coffee. The croutons were in the salad bowl. The soy sauce was on the fridge door between the mustard and the maple syrup. The cutting board on the counter had a dusting of crumbs from somebody's sandwich. The toaster — our one toaster, our perfectly good toaster — sat where it had sat for years, its slots full of evidence of every loaf of bread that had ever passed through.

A celiac diagnosis is not the kind of news that gets delivered and then sits politely in a corner waiting to be processed. It walks into your kitchen and starts opening drawers.

Find your closet

The first instinct, and the one a lot of articles will recommend, is to throw away anything potentially contaminated and start fresh. That works if you live alone, or if everyone in your household is going gluten-free with you. If you don't, it doesn't. Elaine still eats bread and enjoys pasta. She had not, on the morning of the kitchen audit, suddenly stopped wanting any of the things in our kitchen. Throwing the food away wasn't going to make my house gluten-free. It was just going to make my house out of food.

So I did something different. I opened the nearby laundry room closet, looked at the half-shelf of cleaning supplies, and decided that the shelf above it had a different job now. It became my gluten-free pantry. I migrated a few things over: the unopened jar of natural peanut butter, the bag of rice, a can of black beans, a bottle of olive oil. I left everything else in the kitchen where it was. The shared kitchen would stay a shared kitchen. What had changed was that I now had one cabinet, in a different room, that was mine. Anything that went in there I had personally vetted.

I cannot tell you how much that closet helped me in the first weeks. I had a place to put the new things I bought before I had any idea where else they should go. I had a place to look first when I was hungry. I had, in the most literal sense, a small island of food I could trust in the middle of a kitchen I was no longer sure of.

If you live with non-celiacs and a full pantry purge isn't an option, find your own version of the closet. A shelf, a drawer, the top of the bookcase, anywhere. Make one place yours. The rest of the kitchen does not have to change overnight.

The second toaster

A few days into the first week, I bought a second toaster.

The second toaster deserves a moment, because it is the small object that physically changes your house from "a house where someone has celiac" into "a celiac household." You can shop differently. You can cook differently. You can read every label in the store. But the second toaster, sitting next to the first one on the counter, is the object that makes it real for everyone who walks into the kitchen. It says: the rule lives here now.

I have since learned about toaster bags, which are reusable heat-resistant pouches that let you put gluten-free bread in a shared toaster without contamination. They are an excellent solution for people without counter space or budget for a second appliance, and an essential one for traveling, hotels, and visits to family. If a second toaster isn't going to fit in your life, get yourself a stack of toaster bags. They work, and they remove an entire category of low-grade anxiety from your kitchen.

But if you can — if there is a corner of counter to spare — the second toaster pays for itself in about six minutes. Not because it's safer than a toaster bag, although it is. Because it is the moment your kitchen stops being a place you have to reason about, and starts being a place you can just be in.

The air fryer (and the kitchen that doesn't ask questions)

While we are talking about kitchen objects, let me also introduce you to my air fryer.

The air fryer is a gluten-free zone, full stop. Nothing breaded, nothing floured, nothing that has been near gluten ever goes into it. When we have visitors over, I unplug it, so that an unthinking hand doesn't drop a piece of breaded shrimp in to reheat without asking. It is, without exaggeration, my best friend in the kitchen. I have learned to cook almost everything in it. Chicken, vegetables, frozen gluten-free fries, leftovers, bacon, fish. If you are starting from scratch and looking for one thing to invest in, an air fryer would be near the top of my list. They are inexpensive at the lower end, easy to clean, and they cook fast.

One important caveat though: if your air fryer has ever been used to cook anything with gluten, it is now useless to you as a celiac. You cannot clean it well enough. Air fryers cook by blowing very hot air around a tight chamber, which is the same mechanism that flings flour, breading crumbs, and tiny scraps of gluten into every crevice, vent, and seam of the unit. Wiping it down does not fix this. Buy a brand-new one and dedicate it from day one.

What I started doing in those first weeks, which I want to recommend to you with my whole heart, was cooking at home. Not fancy cooking. Not project cooking. The ordinary act of putting a piece of meat in a pan with some oil and salt, and putting a vegetable in another pan, and putting some 90-second rice in the microwave, and eating that. I was not trying to be Julia Child. I was trying to feed myself a meal where I could account for every ingredient that had touched it.

This turned out to be the single most calming thing I did that month.

There is a thing that happens, after a celiac diagnosis, where every meal in front of you is now a question. Did somebody touch this with a wheat-floured hand. Was this pan used for breaded chicken three days ago and not properly cleaned. Is there flour in this sauce that nobody mentioned to me. The questions are real and they are exhausting, and you cannot turn them off.

In your own kitchen, with your own pans, with the ingredients you put there, the questions go quiet. You know what is in the food because you put it there. You know the pan is clean because you washed it. You know the cutting board doesn't have crumbs on it because you scrubbed it yourself. The interrogation is not happening because there is nothing to interrogate.

I cannot overstate how much your own kitchen will hold you up in the first weeks.