Gluten Free Engineer - Making Gluten Free Easy

The Gluten-Free Foods I Always Keep In My Kitchen

• Carrie Saunders • Episode 49

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If you’ve ever stood in your kitchen thinking, ‘Okay… what can I actually eat that’s gluten-free, easy, and satisfying?’ it’s something I used to do every day. 

Today, I’m sharing the gluten-free foods I always keep in my kitchen. These are my everyday staples — the things that help me stay safe, make quick meals, and avoid that panic when I’m hungry and tired. 

And stick around until the end, because I’ll share the one pantry item that has saved me from so many last-minute food crises.


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Carrie Saunders:

Quick reminder before we get started on this episode. This podcast is based on my personal experiences and isn't medical advice. If you've ever stood in your kitchen thinking, okay, what can I actually eat that's gluten-free, easy, and satisfying? It's something I used to do every day before our whole kitchen went gluten-free. So today I'm sharing the gluten-free foods that I love to keep around in my kitchen that are quick and easy and that can help you avoid that panic when you're hungry and tired. And stick around to the end because I'll share the one pantry item that saved me from so many last-minute fruit crises. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Gluten Free Engineer Podcast. I'm your host, Carrie Saunders. In 2011, I was diagnosed with celiac disease, a moment that changed everything. But I was determined not to let it hold me back. With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer the gluten-free lifestyle, breaking down recipes, safety tips, travel hacks, and everything in between to rebuild a life I love. Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance, or simply choose to live gluten-free, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we simplify the gluten-free lifestyle, make it fun, and prove that you don't have to miss out on anything. Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about the gluten-free foods I always keep in my kitchen to help you have some quick and safe and easy things for you to eat. So, one of the things is I like to have a decent amount of protein in my kitchen. I am a my body tends to prefer to have protein as my main fuel source. And so I try to keep something easy and fast when I'm in a hurry. So, first off, one of the favorite things that I love to eat anymore is Belinski's chicken sausage. That's usually what I have for my breakfast. It is a quick, easy chicken sausage. It probably takes me less than maybe four minutes to make it because it is already pre-cooked. I just stick it in a hot pan, put a lid on it, rotate it once, and boom, it's done for breakfast. So I am not a morning person and it helps me get out the door faster. So I have to get up not as early. Um, because that's kind of my main goal in the morning, is I try to get up as late as possible to make it to where I want to be at the time I want to be. So Belinski's chicken sausage has minimal ingredients. It's very um minimally processed and high in protein, low in fat, and um, it fills me up for the morning. But again, I don't eat much for breakfast anyway. And then we also love to keep steak and ground beef around. We like to keep ground beef in the freezer. That's a really quick go-to meal. We can just start the thaw in the microwave, finish the thaw on the stovetop, and then turn it into whatever dish we want, whether that's our cream beef rice, whether it's spaghetti, whether it's taco meat, um, we can use that pretty quickly to make a pretty fast 30-minute or less meal. And then steak is one of my go-to favorites. It's just one of my favorite um types of meat. So we usually keep frozen steak from butcher box in our um freezer. And then as long as we get it out like a day or two ahead, we're good to go and it's solid for us and ready to go. Now, another thing I like to do is get it chicken thighs, skinless, boneless chicken thighs, and chicken breasts. Now, both of these are really great for um cooking quickly because they don't have the bone in them, and then you can also do so many things with these. So you can use chicken thighs or chicken breasts in um chicken fried rice. You can use it and you can just simply fry it up and pan fry it. You could um bake it with some seasoning. Um, another thing I like to do is sometimes I will get um reduced chicken or you know, at the store that's about to expire, but still good and still a brand that's safe for me. And um, I'll cook it up when I get home and cut it up after it's cooked and rested, and then put it in Ziploc baggies and freeze it. And so you can have pre-cooked uh chicken for you ready in the freezer. And then what you can do with that is you can toss it in a pan to warm it back up and put it on some gluten-free tortillas, add some cheese and veggies, and you've got yourself some quesadillas right away, some chicken quesadillas pretty quickly. That makes a great snack or a great lunch. Um, you can toss it into soups, you could toss it into so many things. And then another thing I like to keep around is um portioned salmon or white fish. Uh, we tend to get ours from Wild Alaskan. We love their uh brand and how it's all wild caught. And so they have, and when they ship it to you, it's in a single portion, which is kind of nice. So the salmon or whitefish, actually, we can thaw it in our air fryer and then proceed to bake it in the air fryer. Now that take does take about uh 30 minutes, 20-30 minutes um from frozen, but you can also plan ahead, put it in your refrigerator the night before, and it's a really quick lunch, really quick dinner. Um, you can pre-cook it and toss it onto a salad. It's a really great, nice, easy uh protein to have around. And then bacon. Who doesn't love bacon? I think most people love bacon. What we like to do is have some really nice uh thick cut bacon, and many times what we'll do is we'll pre-cook the whole thing of bacon and then put it back in the fridge. That makes a nice quick um go-to snack, a breakfast item, add it to your salad for a little extra flavor. So we really like doing that. And then if you're in a super hurry, um, we have Aldi around us, and they have a uh grilled pre-cooked chicken um that's in there, and it's actually really tasty. The only downside to it is it's a little bit salty, which is why I kind of like to do this myself, but it is something nice and quick, and when you're in a hurry, when you don't already have that pre-prepped frozen cooked chicken of your own. So these are my top main um must-have proteins that we keep stocked. Um, obviously, you can also have beans and lentils if you tolerate those. Some people with celiac and gluten intolerance also don't tolerate beans and lentils. It's not something I focus on eating a whole lot of because if I have too much of it, it does mess up my digestive system. Um, but if I do have beans and lentils, I will tell you one of the tips that I've gotten lately, and from reading the plant paradox, is that we need to treat these like we treated them back in the old days, which is soaking, you start from dry, soak them overnight, rinse that water, pressure cook them, and then put them in your dish. So all of that helps minimize the lectins in them, which can be a stomach upset. So if you're doing uh lentils and beans, that's probably the best way to be cooking them from all the research I've done as far as making it easy on your digestive system. And then next, let's go into the gluten-free grains and starches. So for fast family-friendly dinners, I love to keep around bazamati rice. That one is easiest on my stomach. So do experiment. If you do have some trouble with some rice, try to figure out which you know version of rice doesn't give you stomach aches. Like brown rice is absolutely no for me. That just tears up my stomach so much. It's just it's too harsh on me. It's got too many lactins in it, probably is the reason. So bazamati rice is really gentle on my stomach. That's what we use when we're making that Korean uh beef that I talked about. The recipe is on the glutenfreeengineer.com. And um we also use it in our chicken fried rice or maybe even just as a simple side dish. Now we also love to have potatoes in the pantry, um, whether it's white potatoes or yellow Yukon potatoes or sometimes red potatoes. We love to have those in the pantry. Those can be really quick and easy in your microwave. You can just microwave them for depends on how big the potato is, but for about six minutes or so, and you're gonna have a nice fluffy um baked potato. Obviously, in the oven is much tastier, I will say. Um, it takes about an hour though in the oven. Another thing you can do quickly with those potatoes is you can dice them up and chop them up, and maybe you want to put them in some sort of Asian dish, or maybe you want to um fry them in a pan or make oven fries with them. So potatoes can really be a great versatile um extra side dish. And sweet potatoes are even better because you have the orange color of the vegetables. So mix them some sweet potatoes if you like sweet potatoes too. And then we love our gluten-free pasta. Um, I tend to get the Kossava uh version of gluten-free pasta, the one that's made from Kossava flour, because that's the easiest on my stomach, or uh maybe a white rice flour type of pasta. Annie Chun's has some really great Asian style noodles that um are made from just white rice and water. Those are the only two ingredients in it. And then Jovial has um gluten-free Kossava flour um uh spaghetti style pasta. They also have some really excellent other brown rice pastas. I have to limit how much I eat of those because brown rice does bother me, even in a pasta form. But they are some really great, good gluten-free pastas out there. Borilla and um Monzoni are also other really great brands. Those uh combine like a corn, quinoa, white, and brown rice in them. So as long as you tolerate those other grains, those are really good um texture-wise pasta, they're really great. Um, and then we love to have our cossava or almond flour tortillas from siete. Um, that is a great go-to uh grain or starch to have around. And we can we use those in tacos, quesadillas, um, we use those in quite a few things. And then they also have a hard shell uh that's made from cossava flour. Um, the siete brand does if corn bothers you. But you could also get gluten-free corn, um, tortillas, and uh the soft shells as well, if you tolerate corn. And then gluten-free bread, that's great to have around. What we like to do is buy it when it's on sale, and then we stick it in the freezer, and then all you have to do is set it out on the counter about the day before, maybe 12 hours ahead of time, and it'll thaw on its own, or you can force thaw it a little bit in the microwave before you use it. So we like to have some gluten-free bread on hand. Um, my youngest loves to make grilled cheeses with it. Um, we will try sometimes make sandwiches with it, and it's just great to have around French toast. Here, those are that's a nice quick um meal right there. So, gluten, having some gluten-free bread around is a great idea to do. And then we love to have some vegetables and try to keep them stocked. We're trying to get much better at eating vegetables. I will admit, we're not really great at eating our vegetables in our family. So, some of our popular ones we really like that are easier on our stomachs is bell peppers, uh, carrots. Um, sometimes we eat cucumbers. Now, you do have to be careful of the seeds in those. Sometimes that'll upset people's stomachs. Um, green beans, if you tolerate uh lentils, because do remember green beans still have the bean part in it. So they can be a little bit hard on your stomach if you don't tolerate that. Um, but we more popular, we love to have lettuce and salad mixes. So we love to have that as a nice, quick, easy vegetable side as we just simply throw together um a salad. We like to actually pre-cut this on the weekend, and then we have all of our salad materials ready for the whole week. Um, I'm a big fan of cooked mushrooms. I absolutely love mushrooms, so we try to have those at least once a week. And then we always have onions in the pantry as well as garlic in the fridge. So those are some great vegetables and flavorings that you can add to your dishes and that are quick, nice, and go-to. And I've been lately on a kick of eating carrots for a snack. Um, they just kind of provide that crunch you might want in a potato chip, um, but they're a bit better for you. So that's a little tip you can try there. And then some gluten-free pantry staples staples. We always have these usually in our pantry. It's usually a sad day if we find that we're out of one of these. Um, we absolutely love keeping coconut aminos in our um pantry. And we, you know, once it's open, we keep it in the fridge. Um, that is a soy-free, gluten-free alternative to soy sauce. Um, if you tolerate soy, you could also have tamari, the gluten-free soy sauce alternative. That's great when you're making Asian dishes or just want to add a little bit more flavor to a dish. Um, we also stay away from seed oils. So the only oils we have in our house are olive oil and avocado oil. We might occasionally have peanut oil um just for like deep frying. If like I've been on a I will admit, I've been on an onion ring kick and we've been making onion rings in our house from scratch. Oh my gosh, so good. You will never, you will never miss those onion rings from restaurants once you make them from scratch. Back to the oils. We prefer to stick with avocado oil mostly as well as olive oil because the seed oils um just bother our systems, gives us um, you know, kind of like pain and arthritis type of issues, and uh soy gives us digestive digestive issues as well. And then we love to keep a bunch of spices stocked. Um, obviously, we check all of them for gluten. We love we regularly use like garlic powder or oregano. Um, we regularly use Italian seasoning, um, onion powder when we're in a hurry. Um, we also will have basil, paprika, and chili powder around, you know, thyme, rosemary, you know, all of your get all your favorite spices, just make sure they're gluten-free um and have those around to help flavor your food. And then I love to use the not chicken brand um gluten-free chicken bullion, and it's actually vegan as well, so it will work for those that are vegan. It has just the flavorings in it, it kind of makes it taste like chicken broth. I don't know how they do it. There's no chicken in it. Um, and then they also have a beef and a veggie version as well. So if you're making like a beef type of stew or something, you can use a beef one, or if you don't need a beef or a chicken flavor, you can use the veggie one. We use the veggie one actually when we brine our turkey for the holidays. Um, so having those buoyan cubes around is really handy because you don't have to worry about partially opening a gluten-free um box of uh chicken broth. So you can just make it on the fly and only as much as you need. And then I already mentioned the rice noodles from Annie's Chuns. Those are great and quick to cook. That's it, that's one of my staples. I want to go back to that one because when you're in a hurry, you want to make a quick soup or something, you can just toss those in, you know, the boiling broth and it will cook up in five minutes or less. It's really, really fast. Um, and then you can also have salsa in your um pantry if you tolerate tomatoes. Um, I don't tolerate tomatoes at the moment, although my my gut's starting to heal, and I might be able to tolerate those again soon. But salsa is a great alternative. Um, we do have peanut butter, no sugar added if you tolerate uh legumes and peanuts. So that's another great um quick go-to type of snack or meal. And then let's jump into snacks and quick bites. So these are for low energy days or grab-and-go moments. So we love to have fresh fruit like strawberry, apples, um, blackberries. Sometimes we have blueberries. It's most of the family's not a huge fan of blueberries. Um, you can even have these frozen too. So my husband loves to make smoothies every morning. And so we always have bags of frozen strawberries, pineapple, and mixed berries. And so, even though they're frozen, you know what? Those frozen strawberries sometimes taste better than the fresh ones, especially when it's out of season, when it's not um a seasonal time for strawberries locally for you. You all you have to do is put them in a little bowl, warm them up in the microwave for 30 seconds to a minute, depending on how um thawed you want them to be, and just eat them out of the bowl. It's so good. You don't need to put any sugar on them because that warming of them up kind of makes them even sweeter. So that's a really great go-to quick snack. Um, I know my children love string cheese. Um, we also get gluten-free chips or gluten-free pretzels, those are great little go-to snacks. I've been on a really bad kick lately of the Simple Mills Crunchy Cookies or chocolate chip little crunchy cookies are so good. Um, and four is one serving, and it's actually not too many calories. Still not great for you because it's got, you know, some fat and it, you know, a lot of fat, and it depends on what else you're eating in your day. Um, but the simple mills cookies, oh my goodness, those are great little go-to snack. When I come home from work and I'm hungry while I'm cooking, I will tend to eat those. Also, Simple Mills has gluten-free uh crackers that are really good. And they also have um bag things that you can make at home. So, like desserts you can make at home. And then freezer staples. We love to have some backup stuff in the freezer, but when we just come home and we don't want to go out to eat because we just don't want to, and we want something quick. So we like to have some frozen veggies um in our freezer to just be able to toss into whatever we need, whether that's chicken fried rice or whatever we're working on. And like I mentioned before, that frozen chicken is really, really helpful, especially if it's already pre-cooked and cut up. You can just toss it into something and not worry about cooking it. Now, we do also use um raw uh frozen chicken breast sometimes, and we might put that into a soup that we know we're gonna take a little bit longer and it will, you know, cook up and we can shred it while it's in the soup. So we also do that. And then, and then my husband's kind of big on um some pre-made gluten-free frozen meals too that are great, like a quick lunch. Um, sometimes I will dive into those too, but many times I have other foods that I can't tolerate as well either. So, but those backup pre-made gluten-free frozen meals can be a really great way to save yourself whenever you are really in a hurry and hungry. Um, and you it's safer than you know, say going out to eat. And if you haven't already, make sure you sign up to our newsletter. You can find a link for that at the glutenfreeengineer.com. You'll stay up to date whenever we get new recipes out, um, new podcast episodes and other tips that I come up with. It's a great little community of people on our newsletter that we loved to give those extra tips and recipes out to. And then the one pantry item that is really quick and has saved myself and um others in my family to do something really quick with is those gluten-free tortillas. Again, siete brand. We either get the cossava or almond flour ones. We like both of them. They become the quick base for tacos, for wraps, um, breakfast eggs if you like to do that, um, last-minute dinners, and even snack time. So, when in doubt, you can always wrap it in a gluten-free tortilla, and dinner or snack or a meal can be done. And if you love to let us know what your favorite gluten-free staples are, head on over to theglutenfreeengineer.com, join our Facebook group, and let us know. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Gluten Free Engineer. If you found value in this story, please share it with someone who might need encouragement on their own gluten-free journey. For more tips, recipes, resources, and even links to my YouTube channel, head on over to theglutenfreeengineer.com. It's your one-stop hub to make gluten-free living simple, fun, and full of flavor. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss out on an episode. And we will see you next week. The Gluten Free Engineer Podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. I share my personal experiences and stories about living with celiac disease and navigating a gluten free lifestyle. This podcast does not provide medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional for medical questions, concerns, or advice specific to your health.

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Carrie Saunders

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