A nightmare on wheat street

UGH. I'm feeling exasperated.

See, I've been trying to eat healthy for about 5 years now. While I'm at home, it's relatively easy to cook healthy: I know exactly what ingredients to avoid, I know the staple foods that nourish me, and I know how to build meals from the ground up (I use recipes as a guideline). For example, curries have always been easy for me to make and I find they almost always end up very flavourful regardless of how much time is spent toiling over them. I rarely mess them up.

Tonight is Nuit Blanche. And I'm going with a bunch of strangers; really, I only know 1 person, whom I only met for a couple hours at a peer support group this week. For some folk, this could be a stressful experience, and I would be lying if I didn't say I felt a little apprehensive at the thought of hanging out with total strangers. But I have a pretty good sense of what kind of strangers I can trust, and my instincts say to go out and HAVE FUN! And a Chinese astrologer would say: "Well, you're born on the year of the Horse. You have an innate ability to steer clear out of trouble. Trust your instincts, and go with the flow."

Speaking of the Chinese... the plan is to go eat some Chinese food to warm ourselves up during what is sure to be a brisk October night. Sounds great, right? Well, it is! Minus the fact that just about every dish on a Chinese restaurant's menu either has soy sauce, or other gluten-containing ingredients. So, I'm taking a bit of time to look at the online menu of the Chinese place we're slated to go to. On the one hand, everything looks incredibly tasty! On the other, I'm basically trying to get a meal that has a good portion of meat & veggies with a bunch of spices added in (or mixed into a sauce that's not filled with processed junk/gluten).

The difficult part isn't knowing what I can and cannot (or rather, do not want to) eat. It's how to effectively communicate my dietary restrictions to the server or, more importantly, the chef that I find troublesome. And, no, eating gluten will not kill me. But I know from experience that I won't feel all that great after the meal if it's loaded with these things that my body does not react well to. There's MSG, and rancid oils that I definitely want to avoid; and to people who don't eat paleo, I know it seems kinda crazy to be so obsessed with all the ingredients that go into a meal, but it's an important thing and I wish it wasn't so damned difficult to just... eat natural foods. The kind of foods that humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years.

So I wrote down a few dishes that are likely to be safe or at least, much safer than things like... oh, I don't know... General Tso's chicken with super-sugary-gluteny sauce.

How the hell do you tell a Chinese chef NOT to use soy sauce because it contains wheat? It'd be like someone telling me NOT to add curry powder to my curries.

Yeah, I don't eat out much. Good on the wallet, though.