Suggestions for Gluten-Free Snacks/Meals for a Preschooler?

Cafe Society
1

Can I whine for a minute before I ask for food ideas? Thanks.

WhyBaby’s (she’s 3 now, but the “Baby” part just flows so well) been feeling unwell for almost 4 weeks now. On Wednesday, I took her into the walk-in clinic at her pediatrician’s, where they said it was “probably a stomach bug” and prescribed the BRAT diet with no dairy. “A three week stomach bug?” I asked, and they said yeah, probably, if she doesn’t stop throwing up in a week, bring her back.

She’s not throwing up every day, but every 2 days or so, and almost always between 1:30 and 3:00 AM, whatever that means. The Tuesday before I brought her in was different - she was throwing up all day, and couldn’t even keep water down by evening time. When she’s not being sick, her activity and mood is pretty normal, although she is saying “My tummy hurts” almost constantly. She is not dehydrated or running a fever - I know what those look like, and the doctor confirmed their absence, so that’s good.

While I’m wary of self-diagnosis, everything I can get my hands on points to Gluten Intolerance and/or Celiac Disease. Lack of growth, gut upset with loose stools, hemmorhoids, craving - *intense *craving - for grain products, etc.

I AM going to take her back to the doctor’s early next week, but I thought if I could eliminate gluten for a few days and note any change, that would give her doctor helpful information. So I’m NOT ASKING FOR MEDICAL ADVICE, I’m asking for diet suggestions.

-------------END OF WHINE------------------------

Her usual diet looks something like this:
Breakfast: Cereal (usually Cheerios) with yogurt and milk
Morning snack: granola bar or graham crackers
Lunch: Chicken noodle soup or leftovers. Almost always noodles are involved.
Afternoon snack: Goldfish crackers
Before dinner snack (yes, she’s a snacker!): Applesauce or fruit
Dinner: Protein, starch and veg. Often noodles, sometimes rice.

Her favorite foods, and probably 75% of her diet, are things like graham crackers, goldfish crackers, noodles, granola bars, cereal (dry or with yogurt), Ritz crackers, etc.

This morning instead of her cereal and yogurt, she had applesauce and a Pediasure "milk"shake (actually soy based, not milk at all), 'cause it’s what I had on hand that I could identify as gluten free. But that seems like an awful lot of sugar to keep up with.

Gluten free snacks/meals I can think of:
Apples with peanut butter
Celery with peanut butter
Fruit
Nuts
Popcorn (I think?)
Rice cakes (I think?)

Any other ideas? Or links to websites? Lowfat is not important: the lucky girl inherited her father’s body type, she’s all of 26 pounds at a bit over 3 feet.

Everything I’m googling either wants to sell me allergy elimination diets or gluten-free frankenfoods. And I’m too worn out with all these 2 AM vomiting sessions to be very creative right now. (okay, I little more whine crept through there, sorry.)

2

Um, isn’t all meat gluten free?
-a few slices of turkey as a snack?
-a String cheese or slice of cheese

  • a hard-boiled egg (easy to make ahead and keep in the fridge)
    -As a child I always liked sliced fresh green peppers because they are both crunchy and juicy (or any other snack-sized vegetable – mini carrots, etc.)
3

If she really does need a gluten-free diet, you might want to check out this chebe bread www.chebe.com It’s not a frankenfood, it’s a traditional tapioca-based bread from Brazil that is actually pretty good.

Rice is gluten free, but look at the labels on the cakes because with prepared foods you need to consider all of the ingredients. Rice pudding can be a good gluten-free breakfast or snack. If you make it at home you can be sure it’s gluten free.

Potatoes are another gluten-free starch. Maybe make oven-fries?

4

Yes, meat is gluten free, but she doesn’t eat it much.

I did forget about cheese, actually! I’ve been avoiding dairy on the doctor’s orders, but yes, she does love cheese.

Thanks to you and **Harriet **for the suggestions! I’ll stop at the store and pick up a few things - just to get us through the weekend’s experiment 'till we can get back in with the doctor.

5

Buckwheat and corn are gluten free. You can use corn flakes instead of cereal. Buckwheat makes for good porridge (if your girl is a porridge-eater, it is an acquired taste), and can also be found as breakfast flakes. It works well as a substitute for bulgar wheat or rice in foods, too.

Keeping my fingers crossed it’s something temporary and not gluten intolerance or celiac disease.

6

I’m gluten intolerant.

I wouldn’t remove it from a kids diet except as a last resort. Its in a ton of stuff - and its really hard to eliminate completely. Plus its in a LOT of kid food - noodles, crackers, cookies. I suspect my daughter is gluten intolerant, but there is no way I’m taking her off gluten unless it really impacts her health.

Much cereal is corn or rice based, you are good there.

You can try switching to rice noodles - most of the rice pastas are horrible, in my opinion, I skip them.

I do a lot of lettuce wrap sandwiches. Salads. Yogurt. Chinese food (but soy sauce isn’t gluten free - I tolerate that much fine. Mexican food with corn torillas. Ice cream is also usually not gluten free, but I also tolerate that fine.

Your coop or health food store might have gluten free mixes/cookies, etc. Nut Thins and rice crackers are both good (might take some effort to find what she’d like).

I hate gluten free breads - there is a gluten free bakery in St. Paul that doesn’t make horrible bread, but its really expensive. And there are some not bad gluten free bread recipes if you have more time than money.

7

If there’s one in your area, Trader Joe’s has a bunch of brown rice pastas (including rotini noodles, which kids love) that are really great. That’s all I buy anymore. I can’t vouch for it because I’ve never tried it myself, but here’s a brown rice pasta on Amazon.

I hope your baby feels better soon!

8

Don’t forget snacky vegetables like green beans, sliced mushrooms, peppers, broccoli, etc.

I also found rice pasta pretty bad, but a bowl of rice with sesame seeds, leftover meat and vegetables makes a great meal, if she’ll eat it. (If she will eat it, and she turns out to be gluten intolerant, rice balls IMO are the perfect school lunch.) There’s also some Chinese noodles that are pretty good - there’s some made from mung beans and the rice threads are fun.

9

Back from the supermarket. Whee!

Most ice cream isn’t gluten free? WTF? :eek: What ingredients should I be looking for in something like that?

I picked up some rice pudding and tapioca pudding. Crispix, which is one of her favorite cereals, thankfully lists only rice and corn for grains, so it looks like she can still have that.

I got some Gluten-Free Rice Cakes (did you know many rice cakes still have flour in them? I do now!) and some hummus to spread on them. She also likes hummus lettuce wraps and carrots dipped in hummus. Gods, I hope chickpeas are gluten free. They’re legumes, not grains…

I did get a couple of specialty “gluten free” products. One is a rice/veggie pasta in tricolor spirals, another a soft chocolate chip cookie that looks like only a 3 year old might fall for it ( :wink: ) and a loaf of Millet bread. No one near me carries the Chebe bread, but the next time I’m in JD Mills when the owner is working, I’ll ask him to order some. It certainly looks better than the rice options, and I’d like something I can make pizza crusts or dinner rolls out of.

Man, I feel really torn - in one sense, I hope this is the answer, just because I want to find some way to make her stop hurting, but this is indeed a pain in the ass as a lifestyle!

10

The Pamela’s cookies are good. Many of the cookies are bitter. If you try any of the Bob’s Red Mill GF mixes, he uses bean flour - which is really bitter unless you cook it - don’t try for soft cookies with bean flour! I’ve switched to meringues and such for cookies. The GF brownie mixes are OK, but the texture is off on most GF products. I like the Pamela’s mixes and the Gluten Free Pantry mixes - and I stay away from the Bob’s Red Mill stuff - no matter how much I bake it I get nasty bean flour bitter - but a lot of my GF girlfriends like it. I prefer the Arrowhead Mills GF pancake mix to any other.

GF bread is best TOASTED.

Chickpeas are fine - wheat is bad and a lot of GF people cannot tolerate oats or barley (I can do both, but then, I can do soy sauce, soups thickened with flour).

Ice cream - you are looking for “food starch” - it may be wheat, it may be corn. But anything with food starch/modified food starch in it MAY have wheat in it. Also anything that is an unspecified “thickener” - once again, manufacturers will swap out corn/wheat depending on whats cheaper so it can be hard to tell - but its likely one or the other. Also, any ice cream with bits of brownie, cookie dough etc. (obviously). Decent ice cream is usually safe (unless its been junked up with cookie dough and brownies), but you’ll read a lot of labels. Here is a list of words that you should think about:

http://home.pmt.org/~lbailey/hidden.html

Note that I handle everything on this list fine, but get crampy over the quantity in bread, pizza, cake or spaghetti. Another of my girlfriends can’t touch any of this at all without consequences. If you really think that this is it (lactose is a more common intolerance), cut it all out for about two weeks, then start introducing it slowly - i.e. the modified food starch.

(It is a pain in the ass lifestyle, so I really hope that your daughter really just does have the flu - wait until its birthday time and you are thinking “cake.” It really isn’t fair to a six year old to send her off to birthday parties where she can’t eat cake. Even as a grownup, I want to throw a tantrum over the lack of cake in my life.)

11

She likes fruit, right? How about a some dried fruit-based trail mix? They warn you that it’s fattening, so it could give a beanpole some needed calories. My favorite is a Sam’s Choice kind called Indulgence - it has golden raisins, dried cranberries, cashews, peanuts, almonds, and chocolate/peanut butter/white chocolate chips. There are others that have less candy in them, of course. Welch’s Mixed Fruit is good too, and it has no nuts or candy, just raisins, golden raisins, cranberries, apple and pinapple. Apparently too much dried fruit causes bloating and gas for people, but it’s meant as a snack, so…

12

Thank you! I’ll print that out and leave it in my purse. (Although I have to ask: garlic salt and onion salt? Those don’t sound right…)

That’s good to know too - that it may not be an all-or-nothing deal.

It’s a more common intolerance for the general population, but for pre-adult European/UK descendants, it looks like gluten intolerance may be more prevalent (if underdiagnosed). Even most Asian kids can tolerate lactose, even though 99% of Asian adults can’t - lactose intolerance in a 3 year old would be astonishingly rare, according to the doctor who saw her Wednesday.

Since we’re trying to identify if it’s a problem, my plan is to cut it out entirely for a few days, see what happens and talk to her doctor. If her symptoms go away and stay away for two weeks, then we’ll give her a piece of wheat toast. If her symptoms return, well, then we’ll know. Of course if she’s got a decent tolerance, we may not really know until some time back on gluten, by which time it might mimic the flu again… It seems like it’s going to be some time before we know for sure, however it plays out. I sure wish that blood test was more accurate!

:frowning: I did see one “Yellow Cake” mix in the gluten free aisle of the health food store. I bet it’s only an approximation of real cake though. If this does turn out to be a long-term thing, I’ll do my best to send her to school and parties with the closest approximation to goodies that I can manage. I wonder if in some way it might be easier to be on a restricted diet from a young age, growing a palate accustomed to rice noodles and Millet bread instead of their wheat counterparts…a “you don’t miss what you don’t know” kind of thing. Probably just wishful thinking, huh?

13

There is a great angel food cake on the market - that’s the one I use when I want cake that tastes like cake - on my shelf, let me look - Gluten Free Pantry’s. The other cakes are…weird - texture tends to be gritty, getting things to rise and hold together without gluten is problematic. This one tastes completely like angel food cake.

The spices sometimes use wheat solids as filler.

Oh, MiDel makes a gluten free animal cracker that tastes like an animal cracker (its arrowroot).

A friend of mine has a daughter with two friends - one has the peanut allergy thing going, along with eggs and milk, the other has gluten and something else. She made, for the birthday party, the world’s worst cupcakes - but everyone could eat them. I once made a gluten free VEGAN wedding cake - absolutely disgusting, but the bride appreciated it. One of my girlfiends - who is both lactose and gluten intolerant says “its about expectations.”

Cherrybrook Farms also makes mixes I tend to trust.

One hint it took me a while to figure out. Just take the toppings OFF the pizza and eat them with a fork. Sometimes I scrape them onto some gluten free bread or a gluten free pizza crust, usually, I just eat two slices of toppings. Don’t know if I’d try this trick if I was one of those “my salad is ruined, it touched a crouton!” people, but fortunately, I’m not.

14

I don’t have any problems with gluten (as far as I know!), but I do spend waaaaaay too much time reading food blogs, so I can recommend Gluten-Free Girl to you. I haven’t tried any of her recipes myself, but she is well-regarded in the blogosphere.

Also, she just had a baby who had to spend a bit of time in the PICU, so there’s another thing you can identify with! :slight_smile:

Good luck, and I hope WhyBaby feels better soon, regardless of the cause.

15

UPDATE: Well, we’ve been three nights without throwing up! And yesterday she had her first real solid poop since the middle of July. Whee! Two mornings in a row, she’s grinned when waking and announced that her tummy doesn’t hurt. Yesterday, the pain returned whenever she ate something - anything - but today it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Of course, it could be coincidence - it could be her “stomach bug” resolving itself just as she’s spent 3 days gluten free, but I won’t know that for sure for a while yet.

She’s happy to eat Rice Krispies and Crispix. She was sort of getting tired of Cheerios, anyway. She’s mostly upset about the loss of her ice cream cones. Not the ice cream itself, but the cones. Haven’t found a substitute for that!

The rice noodles I bought are Mrs. Leepers brand, bought at the supermarket, not the health food store. We made them for lunch today. I boiled them in some chicken stock, and the taste and texture is…like noodles. Not smooshy, not sticky, just like noodles. They’re about twice the price of wheat noodles, but they’re a perfectly acceptable substitute. If we have pasta for dinner, I’ll boil hers separately and the rest of us will eat Barilla Plus just due to price and nutrition, but I wouldn’t mind eating hers if it came to that.

The Millet bread is Food For Life, and while it weighs about what a brick does, I toasted it and put a bit of butter on it and she ate it all up. I took one nibble and, well, for someone who honestly likes white bread, it was kinda gross. But as long as she likes it, I’m happy with it.