Ah, remember the good ol’ days? Nervously waiting to be asked for i.d. Hoping you looked “old enough”… Call me vain, but I’d pay 100 bucks to have someone card me today! However, snickering while they looked at the birth year on my license would definitely forfeit the Ben Franklin.
I’m actually writing about cards of a different sort… Gluten Free Dining Cards. These wallet sized “cheat sheets” are given to your server/chef when dining out. Until the end of August, Triumph Dining is supporting those with Celiac Disease by offering FREE Dining Cards. Better yet, once 15,000 people sign up for these complimentary cards, Triumph Dining will make a $10,000 donation to a national celiac awareness campaign. How fantastic is that?!
Kelly from the Triumph Gluten-Free! blog sent me this exciting message:
I’m writing you today to let you know about Triumph Dining’s new give-away that we’re doing in August to raise money for Celiac Disease awareness, called the $10k Challenge. I hope this is something you would like to share with your readers.
Triumph Dining is giving away FREE American Dining Cards until the end of August. There’s absolutely no purchase necessary. Your readers can simply visit http://www.triumphdining.com/freediningcard.aspx to participate and get a free dining card.
The purpose of this give-away is to raise money for Celiac Disease Awareness. If 15,000 people to sign up for free dining cards, Triumph Dining will make a $10,000 donation in support of a national celiac disease awareness campaign. When we hit our goal, we’ll ask you and the gluten free community to help us decide which non-profit(s) receives the donation.
We’re trying to build awareness on two fronts: With 15,000 more dining cards on the street, we’ll be educating more restaurants about the gluten free diet faster. And, with $10,000 funding behind a national campaign, we can diagnose and educate more Celiacs.
I hope you’ll tell your readers about this promotion.
Thanks and keep blogging,
Kelly
Triumph Dining
Recently, our grocery store had a coupon for a whole seedless watermelon at the low, low price of $3.99! Now realistically, how much watermelon can one family eat? But $3.99 was just too darn good a price to pass up. After purchasing my 14 pound watermelon (I made sure to get the biggest one possible), I knew I had to come up with some creative ways to ingest all of this melon before it became a hairy science project.
Jell-o No Bake Real Cheesecake Dessert. While making the first Jell-o recipe, I had used all of my Health Valley Rice Bran crackers. So, what to do for a crust bottom? I had a moment of spontaneity and (holy crap!) improvised. After melting five squares of Baker’s Semi-Sweet Baking Chocolate, I drizzled enough chocolate to cover the bottom of all 24 mini-cupcake wrappers. Again, the Filling Mix was gluten free, so I prepared that per the directions. During this time, I popped the chocolate-bottomed cupcake wrappers into the fridge to harden. After adding the cheesecake filling, I topped these with fresh blueberries. The result — these were tasty but really messy! The cheesecake filling was light and airy, not dense like your “typical” NY style cheesecake. I think a cookie crust would work much better. Unfortunately, the chocolate base melted as soon as you took the cheesecake out of the wrapper. Despite refrigerating the cheesecakes per the instructions (and even putting them in the freezer as well!), they were very gooey. On a positive note, the mini-cupcake wrappers worked perfectly for this recipe as you were able to delicately shove the entire thing in your mouth in one fell swoop (classy, huh?). I would like to try making this again (they were a huge hit with my family!), possibly using a pie plate instead of the mini cups.
My best friend Kelly is an amazing person who serves as my confidant (and, ahem, part time shrink), my shopping partner, and my co-conspirator to surviving life here in good ol’ suburbia. In addition to all of that, Kelly is a fantabulous baker. Now, I know you jaded Celiacs are thinking, “Bully for Kelly. Let her bake a ton of delicious delights that we can only drool over.” But, on the contrary, one of the reasons I am so lucky is Kelly bakes GLUTEN FREE for me!
During one of our afternoon get togethers, I was ooh-ing over Kelly’s fresh-outta-the-oven batch of cookies when her son asked me if I wanted to eat one. I then explained to him that “Aunt Mo” can’t eat certain foods because it will make me sick. Blah, blah, blah – you’ve heard the story. Well, her darling son exclaims, “Mom, you’ve gotta make some cookies that Aunt Mo can eat!” Bless his little gluten eating heart.
A day later, Kelly arrives at my front door with a huge tray of sugar cookies! She altered her recipe to be gluten free and baked lil ol’ me a batch of the prettiest gluten free cookies EVER. I wanted to cry as I hadn’t had a sugar cookie for three years. Wow – it was like Christmas in July!!! So, after recovering from the fact that I had a tray full of gluten free cookies, I asked Kelly if she’d share her recipe for my blog. Her answer was a resounding “Yes! No one should have to live without baked goods!” Amen sista!
