Blue Cheese - Gluten Free?

Gluten Free Kay asked me about the blue cheese that I had on Thanksgiving. I served Amablu blue cheese. I emailed Amablu to ask if their cheese was gluten free and received a response in 18 minutes. Here’s what Beth at Amablu said:

“That is a very common question and I’m glad you asked. Our Amablu products, including our blue cheese, gorgonzola and our award winning St. Pete’s Select blue cheese are all gluten free. We are careful to purchase our Penicillium roqueforttii from manufacturers that culture without the use of wheat or rye breads.

We here at Faribault Dairy take pride in making handmade, all natural, award winning cheese and ultimately strive for you, the consumer to have a pleasurable palate experience. Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions or concerns.

I hope you enjoy your blue cheese experience.”

I have a fond connection with Amablu. My grandfather worked in the sand caves in Faribault making blue cheese many years ago. They shut down the caves for a while, and then recently the Faribault Dairy company bought them and began production again.

My sister and I have very thin skin, so you can easily see our veins beneath it. We like to say that we have blue cheese coursing through our veins. When people ask how we can eat moldy cheese, we say, “It’s in our blood!” We follow in the footsteps of our grandpa!

Grocery Trip

Both Tim and I have been down for the count these past few days. My cold hit on Saturday and Tim's came to fruition on Monday.

Now this isn’t just a sniffly nose – sneezy thing. No; in addition to that, there’s the fever, the body aches, the sore throat, and a few other things just for fun. We’ve both been pretty miserable.

Which means... Chinese food delivered for dinner on Monday and leftover Chinese food for dinner on Tuesday.

I actually went to work today, so on my way home I stopped to pick up two movies from the Family Video ("Head Over Heels" and "28 Days"), and I also stopped by the grocery store and got this:


Yup, that’s ice cream, bananas, and a steak. It’s weird what you crave when you’re sick!

Buy Flours?

I still buy my flours at the grocery store (Hy-Vee). Since it's pretty expensive, I'm in the process of shopping around online to find a better deal. A couple websites I'm checking out are The Gluten Free Mall, Amazon, and Bob's Red Mill.

I buy Bob's Red Mill brand right now, and I'm really happy with it. I trust the brand to be contamination free.

Where do you buy your flours? What brands do you use? I'd love to learn from your experiences!

Groceries

We had my Dad visiting this last Sunday through Tuesday, and now we have Tim's parents coming to visit today through Memorial Day. Actually, their arrival is imminent, so I may have to finish this post in a hurry.

I wanted to talk about today's grocery shopping trip. We hit ALDI and then Wal-Mart. Between both stores, we spent $58.11. We had brought along $60, so we just made it. Nine dollars of that sixty were spent on graduation presents (White-Out), so really our grocery bill was closer to $51.

In general, here's how we do our shopping trips: we first stop at ALDI, then Wal-Mart, and then Hy-Vee if needed. We've already made up our menu and shopping list at home, so first we get everything that we can off of the list at ALDI.

At Wal-Mart, we pick up most everything else off of our list, trying to combine sales and coupons as best as we can. Then, if there's any special gluten free item that I need, we'll go to Hy-Vee. They have a wonderful health foods market that is well stocked with gluten free foods.

It usually takes us about 2 hours, but it's worth it to keep our grocery bill down.

Desperate Times

Yes, we're entering desperate times in our household. Well, that might be a bit of an overstatement, but we are running quite low on food stuffs!

I'm going to set the menu and head to the store tonight, but the question came up about what to have for dinner before we go shopping. Tim sweetly suggested having breakfast food since we have bacon, potatoes, and eggs. Unfortunately we had crepes (that had 4 eggs in them) for breakfast, and we each had 2 hard boiled eggs for lunch. So, we've both had 4 eggs today! I'm just not really in the mood for eggs again for dinner!

Also, we're completely out of cheese. I just can't have a bacon egg sandwich without cheese; that would be unheard of! Luckily, we have a $10 off coupon for Lone Star Steakhouse. If we split something cheap, we'll just have to pay tax and tip. That's do-able at this time, so that's what we're going to do!

I'll post a menu later today, or tomorrow perhaps.

Grocery Shopping

Tim and I went grocery shopping tonight. We got food to cover our weekly dinner menu and then a few things we needed for our bag lunches.

We spent about $51.00 at Wal-Mart and about $22.00 at Hy-Vee. That included fixings for S'mores since we're planning on having friends over for a bonfire sometime soon.

Check out this post over at Money Saving Mom for a great deal on organic tomatoes. We got four cans tonight and are planning on stocking up the next few times we go!