I assumed the Gluten Free Oreos I used in my Cookies & Cream Vegan Frozen Dessert made Tony sick because of the explanation I gave in that linked post: the oat flour used in the cookies was produced from at least one of the specific oat varieties that are problematic for people with celiac disease (PWCD). And that actually may have been the case. But I wanted to raise another possibility I just became aware of: Nabisco isn’t disclosing how it ensures its ingredients for the cookies are GF, and two gluten-free watchdogs, including the one named Gluten Free Watchdog, are advising PWCD to be cautious about consuming this product because they’re not convinced every package will be GF.
Here is Gluten Free Watchdog’s statement on the cookies. And here is a post from Gluten Dude about Nabisco’s lack of transparency. (I think it’s a trustworthy article even though, I feel I need to point out, because it’s so highly visible, Gluten Dude’s first, declarative sentence has a question mark at the end. I appreciate the dude’s healthy skepticism when it comes to matters that involve my husband’s—and other PWCD’s—health.)
I also want to note that in the post linked to in my first sentence above, I neglected to mention a second way oats can become certified as GF. I had written that a certain, small percentage of oats are purposefully kept separate from wheat so they don’t get contaminated with that grain. But some (probably most) certified GF oats are produced by removing other grains from the oats until the resulting product has a small enough percentage of those contaminants to be considered GF. (Gluten Dude’s post does a good job of showing with individual grains of oat, wheat, and barley how that process works.) Understandably, PWCD are more comfortable consuming oats that were never tainted with wheat or barley.
In my earlier post, I also ignored the possibility that two or more of those three grains may be grown and harvested together and so are commingled right on the farm that produced them.
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I was able to buy fresh rhubarb at Sprouts the other day, so I made my Strawberry-Rhubarb Vegan Frozen Dessert again. And this time, I made a double batch.
I also discovered Sprouts sells 12-ounce bags of both frozen rhubarb and frozen strawberries. Those are exactly the amounts I need to produce a double batch, so I’ll no doubt be making that VFD using frozen fruit before too long.
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I’ve never been as emotionally invested in the ending of a novel as I was while finishing Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo. Stuart, who won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, tells his follow-up story on two separate timelines roughly four months apart; the pages that introduce the parallel threads say “THE MAY AFTER” and “THE JANUARY BEFORE.” By the time the January thread caught up to the May thread and the May thread revealed what comes next/last for the 15-year-old title protagonist, I was an emotional wreck. But I loved this book so very much and ordered a copy to devour again someday. (I had read a hardcover from my local library.)
YM is a romance and a crime thriller, but most of all, it’s a family drama, as Mungo deals with his narcissistic and alcoholic mother (whom he adores anyway, despite their poisonous relationship) and his violent older brother, who heads a gang of young thugs. Mungo’s intelligent and kind sister, Jodie, looks out for him and keeps the house running, even though she’s not much older than he is.
All of these characters—and Mungo’s boyfriend, James—are fully realized people, as are even relatively minor characters like Mrs. Campbell and Chickie Calhoun, both of whom live in the same building as Mungo’s family. Stuart has a wonderful gift for metaphor, and he reels out his twin plotlines perfectly, but it’s his skill at characterization that made me eager to read each new chapter.
I hope the Young in the title indicates Stuart is at least open to the possibility of writing multiple Mungo novels—and maybe Jodie at University too.