# The First Weeks of Celiac Life: Rebuilding Your Kitchen By Gregory Wilson ยท 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 toaster โ€” our one toaster, our perfectly good toaster โ€” 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. 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. 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 second toaster A few days into the first week, I bought a second toaster. The second toaster 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. If a second toaster isn't going to fit in your life, get yourself a stack of toaster bags โ€” reusable heat-resistant pouches that let you put GF bread in a shared toaster without contamination. They work, and they remove an entire category of low-grade anxiety from your kitchen. ## The 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. It is, without exaggeration, my best friend in the kitchen. 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. One important caveat: if your air fryer has ever been used to cook anything with gluten, it is now useless to you. You cannot clean it well enough. 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. 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. This turned out to be the single most calming thing I did that month. 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. --- This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Celiac vs Me. The full chapter also covers the four-hour first grocery run and why the goal is not to come home with a week of meals, the food-court-on-a-Saturday panic moment that almost every newly-diagnosed celiac has somewhere in the first two months, the delicate first conversation with a non-celiac spouse about what kind of solidarity helps and what kind doesn't, the inevitable first accidental glutening, and the perfectly ordinary afternoon, somewhere around week three, when you notice you've stopped having to organize your day around proximity to a restroom. - [Paperback](https://a.co/d/0ci9KEzr) - [Kindle Edition](https://a.co/d/0dqv86CH) ## Related chapters - [The Day You Get the Celiac Diagnosis](https://celiacvsme.com/the-diagnosis/) - [Telling People About Your Celiac Diagnosis](https://celiacvsme.com/telling-people/) - [Reading Gluten-Free Labels: Certifications, Ingredients, and Hidden Gluten](https://celiacvsme.com/the-aisles/) - [Eating Out with Celiac: Trust Signals, Dignity Signals, and the Bridgeport Ribeye](https://celiacvsme.com/the-table/) - [Celiac Travel: Road Trips, Hotels, and the Parking Lot Moment](https://celiacvsme.com/the-road/) - [The Holiday Calendar with Celiac: Thanksgiving, Birthdays, and the People Who Love You](https://celiacvsme.com/the-calendar/) - [The Body Underneath: Bloodwork, Healing, and the Real Goal](https://celiacvsme.com/the-body-underneath/)