Olive Garden, a Pop Tart, a Bad Reaction, and Kugel

It's been a very glutenous few days! I'll give some of the highlights. On Friday, started off by day by having something that everyone who knows me knows I have been wanting to try for quite some time. I was waiting for the right moment, and now..I will no longer be able to say during "2 truths and lie" that I've never...had a poptart!! I had one! I tried strawberry. Before eating, I made the mistake of peeping the nutrition facts. 410 calories?! What the heck?? People eat those like those are a casual snack! A chicken mcnugget mighty kids meal is 380 (100 for the kids fry, 280 for the nuggets). I only ate one, and it DID taste good..but I'm sorry...not 410 calories good.
I went to a potluck at work and ate a TON. It was just cool being able to eat whatever I wanted, without worrying about if it touched gluten. I probably took advantage of that a little bit TOO much.
 After that...I went to Olive Garden...gluten Mecca. At first, I really wasn't sure what to order. Everything looked awesome! Do you know how weird it is to go to a restaurant and be able to eat ANYTHING on the menu? I ended up going with the chicken parmesan. I started with the bread sticks which were yummy! Nothing gluten free tastes like that- bread is one of the things that really is different. As you can see though, I did not make much progress- that food is so rich!! I took home three bread sticks and probably half of my meal. The pasta though is also very different from gluten free pasta. It's a completely different texture. I'm not sure I liked the sauce though...It was pretty sweet.
Then, miss Sarah Garfinkel "made" me (with not much convincing needed) try the tiramisu. SO TASTY!!!! Again..couldn't even eat so much of it.  
Anyway..On the way home, I started to get a REALLY bad stomach ache. It ended up being a rough evening of stomach symptoms (I'll spare the details :-) ). It was my second bad reaction since the experiment started...but, I'm pretty sure that ANYONE who slept 3 hours in a night, and then ate a ton of food at a potuck, chicken parm, breadsticks and tiramisu, all before 3pm would have a stomach ache!!  SO I'm writing that one off as not Celiac :)
Last night, I went to a Hanukkah party that was amazing!! It was cool, again, to not worry about what was in all of the dishes. For sure, the highlight of my night was the kugel!!! It..is AMAZING. Probably the best thing I've eaten. Most high fat things I'm turned off by, just because I know that it's bad for me but I did not care in the LEAST that kugel is probably the least healthy thing in the world. A gluten free person today told me that they have had gluten free kugel that tastes the same (shout out to rabbi Daniel!)..I have not. I have had potato kugel that is awesome (hi mom!), but not noodle kugel. I also tried sufganyot (well, sufganya)! Also good!
Thankfully, I have not yet gone up a pants size or anything due to all this craziness. I went to the gym a couple times this week to make sure I don't go too crazy...but I need to be going more if I keep it up! I'm going grocery shopping tonight for my first big grocery shopping trip since I haven't been scared to get too much gluten- I'm very excited to see how little money it will cost me.

Until next time...