going gluten free

last week we made the decision to go gluten free.

for those of you who don't know, Ryan has Chron's Disease. a while ago, his GI doctor suggested he try the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. which to us, seemed a bit extreme since it doesn't allow glutens, starches, or sugars. Ryan is a typical Irish guy - his diet consists mostly of meat and potatoes. how on earth was he (and I, since I live with him) going to be able to do this diet?

we never really pursued the SCD. I think it was just too overwhelming and we didn't know where to start. the only thing that we cut out of our diets at that point was anything heavily processed or containing HFCS (which Ryan still can't stay away from - Moxie doesn't come in a natural sugar version)...

lately I've had more and more (online and real life) acquaintances switch to a gluten free diet. I did some research and the benefits for Ryan would include some possible relief of the digestive issues he has from the Chron's. benefits for both of us would be gaining more energy and potential weight loss. gaining energy would be a huge help - the Chron's disease makes Ryan feel tired, and my stupid job makes me feel tired.

so after talking about it, we figured why not? can't hurt and the outcomes could really help both of us (but I'm hoping it'll help him a lot more than me).

today was my first baking venture into the GF world. I made cupcakes from a mix that we bought at our local grocery store (we'll probably make our own from here on out, but the xanthan gum we ordered online won't arrive for a few more days).

batter taste: cornmeal-y texture. didn't taste chocolatey. got a slight zing from the aftertaste due to the cayenne.

batter viscosity: once it was mixed, it looked, stirred, and poured like a normal cake mix would.

cupcake taste (the important part!): not too bad. I was still getting a cornmeal-ish texture. I mentioned it to Ryan and he said he wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't pointed it out. I think next time if we buy a mix again, I'd get the one without cayenne in it.

I'm horrible at updating this.

Quickly since the last update:
1. sold my new sewing machine - didn't like it. especially the reverse button.
2. old trustworthy machine is broken - need to take it somewhere to be serviced.
3. got engaged... officially, I guess. the jerk bought me a ring too - even though I told him not to :P
4. we're trying to move up to the Burlington, VT area. right now we're applying for jobs without too much luck... well, I'm not having too much luck. Ryan pretty much has a job once the employer has more money roll in with some anticipated contracts.

ok, and now since I'm bored:

Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings-JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series- J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Ubervilles-Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner-Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi-Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities-Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (though I'm not sure if it was the abridged version or not)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I read the French version!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down -Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A real post.

I suppose instead of just posting a link so you can use me as an Artfire referral... I could post a real update. Sort of.

I've been sitting on my ass for the past two weeks. I had surgery. Again. The last surgery was successful, but another problem came up as a result of that first surgery. Soooo I had another plate and a screw added. I think my left foot/ankle is around 75% bionic now. :D I'll try to see if I can get a copy of the xray I'm having next week or a print-out of it to post on my Flickr. The last one was pretty neat. :)

Christmas was nice, but too short. We went to Mary Jane's on Christmas Eve to visit with her, Claire, and Paul.

Christmas Day we drove to my parents' house and spent the night. My dad was actually home on Christmas - my mom wasn't sure if he would be since he was still working crazy amounts of hours to restore power to people who were still out from either the ice storm or the snow storm that came a week after the ice.

Ryan was too nice to me for Christmas and gave me a serger. :) This one, specifically:


Other than having surgery, nothing much has been happening with me. Guess there wasn't too much to update after all.

FOOD.

We're cooking Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday for my other half's mother, grandmother, and grandmother's friend.

Here are some of the recipes we're trying this year:


Carmel-pumpkin-gingersnap cheesecake. Mmmm.


Whiskey-glazed carrots. I don't like carrots, so I won't be eating these.


Crockpot stuffing. Won't be as good as my dad's, but I'm hoping it'll still be tasty.

I'll be washing all this down with my new favorite alcoholic beverage:



In addition to these yummy-looking dishes, we'll have the usual turkey, mashed potatoes, winter squash, rolls, cranberry sauce, and apple pie. Yay for stuffing ourselves with way too much food! :P

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

2 of 2 Croteau sisters agree...

That the following is the best email ever received by one N. Croteau:

Last night Dad worked all night, but I left the outside lights on because I didn't know when he'd get in.  So, at 4:50 AM I decided to get up.  Knowing that the paper would be in the box I started out the back door when I spotted a cat sitting at the bottom of the steps.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  The cat had an ace bandage wrapped around its body.  I could see those little metal clips that holds the bandage on and everything.  I couldn't stop staring because I just couldn't believe it.  The cat must of thought that  I was holding the door for him because he started up the stairs.  I closed the door fast.  I went through the cellar to get the paper and the cat was sitting next to the back steps as I came up the driveway.  When I got in front of the garage door he decided to try to approach me again.  Not a chance.  It kind of freaked me out, who puts an ace bandage around a cat and then lets it out all night.  Dad wanted to know if it was Calvin.  I have never seen this cat before, it was multi-colored and very fluffy.  I turned all the lights off and when Dad came home at 6:30 he was gone.  I don't know if having the lights on all night attracked the cat or what.

...

I'm bad at actually updating this thing.

I went on a vacation with two cousins during 4th of July week - Amy and I flew down to West Palm Beach, FL to spend some time with our cousin, Mike.

Here we are at Juno Beach - hours before Amy and I got back on the plane to Manchvegas.

The rest of the pictures from the trip can be seen here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/kcroteau/sets/72157606028187686/

Other than that, not too much has been happening. Ryan hasn't been feeling well at all so I haven't been sleeping much lately. But hopefully he'll be feeling better this week.

Last night we went to see the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Dropkick Murphys at McCoy Stadium with my cousin Amy and Ryan's friend Dennis. It was a good show. Ryan and I went up into the seats after the Bosstones so we could sit - neither one of us were in any condition to stand for the rest of the show but Dennis and Amy stayed down on the lawn for the whole thing. Oh, and Dropkick was making a CD last night, so I'll definitely have to get that one when it comes out. :)

I haven't done any sewing lately. :( Besides altering clothes for a friend. I need to finish the pillow shams I'm working on for someone - I need to experiment with my ruffler foot first, though.

oh! AND yesterday before meeting friends for Indian food, (I'm a busy girl) I went down to Thompson, CT to pick up an old sewing machine and its cabinet. It's still in my truck because I can't get it out myself and Ryan can't help me right now, so I'll take pictures later. I got it mostly for the cabinet, but the woman said the machine still works fine - and it has paper bobbins. Word.

Before I left for Florida, I was at my parents' house for a few hours and was bored so I took some pictures of wall quilts my mom has in the house and some more pictures of her gardens.

Cousins.

On my dad's side of the family, there are 17 grandchildren including myself and my siblings and there are 3 great-grandchildren.

A few weeks ago Crap. Almost a month ago now, my Pepere died. His memorial service was the first time ever that all the cousins were together in the same room at the same time.


This picture, unfortunately, doesn't have everyone. The only person missing is our cousin Cathy. She left a little early...

And it doesn't have the great-grandchildren... but there we are. Then my Auntie Di wanted us to line up by age so after we figured out who was older than who, this was the result:

It was also the first time in a loooooong time where all the siblings (my aunt & uncles & my dad) were in the same room at the same time. Here they are with their mother (my Memere):

That night a few of us went out to Jillian's in Manchvegas:

The next day we had some more fun before 2 of the cousins had to fly back home to Florida - I dragged Ryan back up to NH with me this time and we went to hang out with a couple of my uncles at Hampton beach.

We played minature golf:

And us cousins stood in the frigid New England ocean:

In less than 2 weeks now, Amy and I will be flying down to Florida to visit our cousin Mike. All of us are really excited and it should be a good time. :)

New interesting post coming soon

Just waiting for my cousin to send me the pictures from this weekend...

Plus I have a few pictures I should take of the pillow shams I'm working on.