Pie Monologues – Cathy Salustri

Everglades Breakfast Pizza

Gotta frittata? You betcha!

Ever heard of Everglades tomatoes? They’re a teeny-tiny tomato perfectly suited to Florida’s growing season (read: all year) and taste like candy. They also make a perfectly delicious breakfast pizza, but because it sounds unhealthy to call it “breakfast pizza” I’m going with “Everglades breakfast frittata.” Recipe first, then we’ll chat about the tomatoes (your scroll finger can thank me later).

Everglades tomatoes ripe on a vine with a whisky barrel in the background. — I can’t get enough of these Everglades tomatoes – so much so that there’s rarely enough on the vine for a frittata, because I eat them as they turn red.

Ingredients

8 eggs, beaten

16 pcs. canned and quartered artichoke hearts, rinsed

3 oz. low-moisture, part-skim mozzarella, shredded

1 c. Everglades tomatoes or, absent those, grape or cherry tomatoes

Instructions

Coat a cast iron skillet with cooking spray and pre-heat oven to 400º.
Whisk eggs in a bowl, then pour into skillet. Turn flame on low.
For Everglades tomatoes: smush them over the skillet (so juices run onto the eggs) and drop them in the eggs at equal distances (you want a tomato in every bite). For grape or cherry tomatoes: Pierce each tomato with a knife over the eggs, then pull into pieces and scatter across the eggs in the same manner as above.
Sprinkle the artichokes over the eggs. If you don’t like ‘chokes, don’t use ’em. Think pizza toppings here: If you like it on a pizza, throw it in.
Sprinkle cheese over the eggs. The aesthetic is a pizza with an egg-type crust.
Cook over low flame until edges set, then transfer to oven for 15 minutes. When you remove it from the oven, it will be slightly puffier than you’d expect, but if you’re not eating the whole thing, it’ll settle down by the time it cools and is ready to store.
Cut like a pizza. Sprinkle with garlic salt and red pepper flakes. Layer slices with wax paper to store. Reheat for one minute in microwave.

OK, so now that you have the recipe, WTF are Everglades tomatoes? Scientifically, they’re Solanum pimpinellifolium, but that doesn’t really tell you much, does it? Some people call them currant tomatoes, but none of those people are here, and also, they’re wrong. They’re not currants; they’re tomatoes. They’re just… teeny. And tasty.

Our friend and neighbor, Bob, gave us a great wedding gift a few years ago; he called it a “salad a day” barrel. It was a half-whiskey barrel planted with lettuce, radishes, carrots, and other salad makings growing in it, and extra seeds. The idea was that as we picked enough for a salad, we added more seeds, and we’d have salad forever. We live in Florida, so forget having greens year-round, but every winter a few lettuce varieties pop back up, which is nice.

Bob also included Everglades tomatoes in that barrel, and a few years later I added some more seeds, and every year they keep giving us more tomatoes. In South Florida, they grow pretty much all year, but here in Central Florida, there’s a few ~~months~~ weeks where the vine almost – almost – dies, but then they’re back.

As for their taste, they’re almost candy-like, but not too sweet. They have almost no acid, at least not that I can taste, and they’re gorgeous on the vine. They’re small enough they won’t make a mess when you bite them, and while you’ll never get enough to make a spaghetti dinner (well, OK, maybe those of you with the wherewithal to not eat them as you pick them will, but I am not that person), they’re perfect in frittatas and other dishes. I’d caution against using them in stews or soups, because it’s a shame to share the flavor with other veggies, but in simple dishes, they really shine.

Here’s more info on my favorite Florida tomato ever, and if you want to get some, here’s where I order my seeds (although, again, the tomatoes simply keep coming back, which is nice, but maybe also an argument for container gardening.) They’re heat-happy and drought-tolerant, which I know because since we installed drip irrigation, anything in a container has to live or die by its own merits, despite my best intentions.

The rarest type of celiac

Update on the KAN-101 drug trial and why it’s no fun to be unusual sometimes.

I don’t qualify for the KAN-101 celiac drug trial. Since traveling to Miami to undergo the screening, I waited for confirmation of my Sept. 8 infusion appointment, 21 days after which I would, in theory, be able to eat gluten (bread!) with no ill effects for an as-of-yet-undetermined mount of time. When I saw the doctor’s cell number on my list of missed calls, I got excited. Very. Excited.

Dr. Saltzman’s voicemail, however, gave me pause: “I need to talk to you about your bloodwork.” No one wants that call from a doctor. I called him back and he gave me the not-great news: While otherwise healthy, I have the wrong celiac antigen in my blood and do not qualify for the trial. Which also means if and when this drug gets approval, it probably won’t work for me. The conversation went something like this:

Doctor: No one is more disappointed about this than I am.

Me: Oh, I highly doubt that.

Then I hung up the phone and cried. The Gabber office is about as big as a closet, so my staff had already figured it out. And yes, I know people have far worse health problems than “can’t eat bread,” but that does little to help my particular disappointment.

The wrong antigen — HLA-DQ8 — is uncommon in people with celiac. Really uncommon. My friend, colleague, and scientist-by-training Jen Ring explained it all to me in gentle, no scientist terms. The long and short of it is this: Five percent of celiacs have HLA-DQ8. As only one percent of the population has actual celiac, that means I have something that impacts five percent of one percent of the population, or: one-half person per thousand has the same genetic makeup of celiac and antigens.

This should have shocked me. Years ago, I learned I didn’t have the same RH factor as either of my parents. Rare, but not impossible. This, incidentally, prevented me from getting a specific treatment for an immune disorder (doctors now believe my undiagnosed celiac may have triggered that disorder) so instead of getting drug therapy, doctors removed my spleen.

And *why* did my celiac go undiagnosed? Because, friends, I have silent celiac, which — you guessed it — doesn’t happen that often. I didn’t have traditional symptoms.

The moral of this story? I really should look into PowerBall as a career strategy.

Alligator Pie

No alligators were harmed in the making of this pie.

As have so many people, cooking and baking is part of my quarantine routine. Perhaps not so much like many people, I’ve been sifting through my grandma’s recipes. These are recipes I saved in my 20s, before she died but after she was able to talk to me about them. One by one I’ve made them and decided whether or not to keep them, alter them, or get rid of them.

Some of the recipes weren’t hers, per se, but ones she’d trimmed from one of her many magazines. Alligator Pie is one such recipe, although that’s the name I gave it. No, Grandma Rae saved the not-as-creatively named Ricotta Spinach Pie recipe. After I made the crust, I had some pastry left over, so I improvised with an alligator cookie cutter (hey, spinach is green, so it kind of hangs together!)

Below, find the recipe with my modifications.

2 Tbsp. butter
1/4 cup chopped shallot
1 package (10 oz.) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
1 container (15 oz.) ricotta cheese
4 eggs
1/2 c. grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 c. finely chopped prosciutto
Dash teaspoon salt
Dash pepper
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1 c. sherry
Pastry for 9-inch double-crust pie (I made a gluten-free one but you shouldn’t if you don’t have to)

Preheat oven to 425º

In medium skillet melt butter. Add shallots and saute until translucent; cool slightly. Add spinach and sherry ; cook until all butter is absorbed and the sherry has cooked down. In separate bowl combine ricotta, spinach and prosciutto. Add eggs, Parmesan, prosciutto, salt, pepper and nutmeg; mix well.

Roll out half the pastry and line a 9-inch pie plate. Bake 12 minutes.

Remove from oven and add filling.

Roll out remaining pastry and place over filling; seal edges. Cut several slits in top. I used an alligator cookie cutter to fashion the remaining pastry into alligators. With oven rack on lowest position, bake 20 min-
utes. Reduce temperature to 350°F and bake 20 more minutes. Serve warm.

#BecauseGluten: A drug to treat celiac?

I’m part of the first clinical trial for a drug that will treat celiac and let celiacs eat gluten

Ever since my December 2016 celiac diagnosis, I’ve longed for the day I could eat gluten again. If you’ve slogged through this gluten-free journey from the beginning, you realize that getting a celiac diagnosis changed my life.

See, I didn’t exhibit the typical signs of celiac. When I ate bread, my stomach was fine. I didn’t have what we celiacs politely refer to as “gastrointestinal distress” and also, in a kick in the ass from karma, I loudly and proudly scorned the gluten-free movement sweeping America.

I did have severe anemia and osteoporosis, and my doctors found that peculiar and alarming for an otherwise-healthy 43-year-old. My regular doctor referred me to a hematologist who referred me to Dr. Abithitch Patil, a gastroenterologist who exhibited far more patience with me than I deserved. Five days before I turned 44, Dr. Patil diagnosed me with celiac.

Happy birthday to me.

I stopped eating gluten on January 1, 2017. While I’m grateful to Dr. Patil for his diagnosis — I do have more energy and my bones aren’t crumbling to dust anymore, which by and large makes me happy — not a day goes by that I don’t resent my gluten-free bread and pasta. Yes, food chemistry’s come a long way but trust me, not far enough.

I have coped in various ways, not all of them healthy. I’ve gained almost 60 pounds I cannot seem to shake. I will smell bread when it comes to the table at a restaurant. Going out to eat is actively stressful. I have many thoughts about the ways the gluten-free movement has helped and hurt celiacs. I have investigated almost every gluten-free product available (see: gaining 60 pounds.) I’ve created workarounds for baking without gluten. I scour the celiac.org website in search of news about treatments on the horizon. I’ve signed up for every trial I’ve seen in the past almost-four years and have qualified for none of them.

Until now.

Kanyos Bio, a biotech company that has found a way to fidget with T-cells, has a drug that’s progressed to trials on humans. When Dr. Saltzman called me to tell me I’d been approved for the study, I had cautious optimism. It took me a few weeks to decide to try it, and after much deliberation, I decided to proceed. Monday I traveled to Miami for a screening to ensure I checked all the boxes. Here’s what I learned about the KAN-101-01 study.

After a few phone conversations with Dr. Saltzman about the study, we reviewed everything in person. He took my medical history, and his staff drew blood, took urine, and did an EKG. We’re waiting on my medical records from my gastro to proceed, but I have the infusion date tentatively set for Sept. 8.

Here’s what I learned, in no particular order:

1. While I am either the first or second celiac in the study to get the infusion, they have given this to non-celiac adults in much higher dosages. One person (I believe) had slight gastrointestinal distress, but, again, this is at much higher doses than what I’ll get. Non-human primates tolerated the drug well, overall.

2. My phase — Phase A — is what they call “open-label,” which means no one gets a placebo.

3. The drug will alter the part of a celiac’s T-cells that cause the reaction that takes place when we consume gluten. The rest of the T-cell remains intact.4. The infusion itself should take no more than 30 minutes. I will spend the night at the facility and they’ll take my blood an insane number of times and make sure I’m not having any reactions. This is the only infusion I will receive.

5. I’ll return once a week over the following 21 days. Day 1 is a 24-hour stay. Days 4, 7, and 21 are shorter visits not unlike a doctor’s visit.

6. On Day 22, I am released from the study and should be able to resume a normal diet, gluten and all. They do not know how long the efficacy of the drug will last; indications point to anywhere from 6-12 months.

They have several sites around the country; I am one of three celiac patients in Phase 1A at this location. They need more celiacs; getting people to travel to sites during COVID-19 has slowed the trial.

The study still needs volunteers who have a celiac diagnosis via biopsy and blood. Here’s more information.

Finally, I’ll chronicle how it goes as I go through the trial — and what it’s like afterwards. Search this blog for #becausegluten to find more entries about my journey with celiac.

#BecauseGluten: Pizza!

It’s not the same when gluten-free, but still pretty damn good.

While writing this, I’m sitting in a place called V Pizza in Jacksonville Beach, eating a delicious gluten-free margherita pizza and chatting with the owner about why we cannot abide New York (guess where we were both born?).

Too rude, too cold, too busy, too crowded… the list goes on and on.

And yet, New York has one food item we don’t: real pizza. Even as I type that, my mouth remembers Sal’s Pizza in Mamaroneck, where my mother — who has a pathological aversion to returning to her homeland — insisted I dine when I made a voyage north three years ago. That was, of course, pre-celiac diagnosis. A quick check of the menu confirms what I suspect — Sal’s doesn’t make a gluten-free pizza crust. Though the restaurant is able to ship a pizza anywhere in America, alas, that does me no good.

In all the ways that having celiac has made me bitter (hey, acceptance doesn’t mean not bitter), pizza has, oddly, not been one of them — because pizza hasn’t been the big deal I thought it’d be for me. It helps, I think, that, aside from a doomed-from-the-start love affair with Pizza Hut’s Priazzo, I was always a thin ‘n’ crispy gal rather than a pan pizza type. I blame New York, again; with pizza, I’m used to disappointment.

Eating GF pizza, you see, after a lifetime of eating Florida pizza is about the same as eating Florida pizza after a lifetime of eating New York pizza. No, it’s not the same, but what the fuck, man? It’s pizza, and it’s still pretty damn good.

I’ve been blessed, too, by the GF craze sweeping across the country. I live in a society where you can buy the most ironic ingredient ever — gluten-free flour. Suck on that, Alannis. I can go to Westshore Pizza or Craft Kafé in St. Petersburg. I may hate — and I’m using the word hate here — Trader Joe’s for discontinuing the “good” pizza crust (pro tip: cauliflower is not the same), but I can continue to make the drive to Palm Harbor’s Ozona Pizza and get a truly fine GF pie.

In Tampa, the options are vast (well, not exactly — calling GF pizza options “vast” is akin to calling your grandma “old” when the earth itself is billions and billions of years older). Gourmet Pizza Company brags about its GF pies in South Tampa (I’ve yet to try it), and the Channel District location of Precinct Pizza delivers to our offices in Ybor City; when I made Ray and Meaghan taste Precinct’s variety at work, they didn’t even wince.

So, yes, I can suck it up and piss and moan my way through an Udi’s crust if I have to. Luckily, however, I don’t.

We have decent gluten-free pizza here.

The key, I suspect, is in the other ingredients. Fuck cauliflower. Seriously, y’all. It’s yummy in a salad and OK as a rice substitute, but as a pizza crust it’s like watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time on VH1 — ain’t nobody gonna be throwing toast at your ass at 1 a.m. Get some buffalo mozzarella, juicy plum tomatoes and the extra-ist of extra virgin olive oils and 12 minutes later you’ve forgotten that the dough isn’t made with wheat.

I guess what I’m saying is: GF pizza isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Bad gluten-free pizza is.

Thankfully, I’ve yet to find it in the Bay area.

This article initially appeared in Creative Loafing.

#BecauseGluten: A hearty thank you

Locally, there are a few gluten-free standouts that deserve my gratitude.

This week, CL Managing/Online Editor Scott Harrell has inspired us to be vocally thankful. And, locally, there are a few standouts — from a gluten-free point of view — that deserve my gratitude.

By now, you probably know that Craft Kafé, where everything is gluten-free, is my safe haven. Teddy Skiadiotis and his crew are the absolute best, and they create quite possibly the best quiche I’ve ever eaten — with a flaky, GF crust. They also did an exceptionally tasty brunch for us the day after our wedding, making all who suffer from what my family calls “The Salustri Stomach” rest a little easier.

Almost any Mexican place worth its margarita salt has plenty of GF offerings, but Nueva Cantina‘s Paul Daubert knows his protocols. Before we knew he was the chef, a friend suggested him for our wedding. He outdid himself with a huge seafood boil that was GF (because clams, shrimp, corn and potatoes don’t have gluten anyway, I don’t know that our guests felt they were suffering because of my stomach’s failings).

I sing the praises of Pia’s Trattoria so much I should be embarrassed. Notice the word “should.” I’m proud to say the owners reacted to my diagnosis by coaching me on what to say and ask at a restaurant, and also added a gluten-free version of their sour orange pie to the menu (they, too, outdid themselves with a GF and gluten-intense dessert table at our wedding).

PJ’s St. Pete Beach, Noble Crust and New World Brewery (hurry up with the new place, please!) all have GF beer that’s not the tastes-like-kitten-tears Redbridge — and Noble Crust also has a tasty gluten-free pizza crust. I’m still exploring — and trying to take off the 30 pounds I gained while feeling sorry for myself and eating crap-packed GF food — but these guys have all made my year infinitely easier.

Gluten-free pancakes. Photo by Cathy Salustri. — Oh, pancakes, how I’ve missed you. Photo by Cathy Salustri

And then there’s all of you. I don’t know how new diagnoses get through the early stages of going GF without a cadre of readers who have been, quite honestly, amazing.

Earlier this month, I spoke at the Festival of Reading. My book has nothing to do with gluten or the lack of it in my life, but I was pleasantly surprised to meet more than a few of you who knew me from this column. One reader gave me some amazing tea, and another — whom I met some years back while researching my book — brought me a recipe for clementine cake, a dessert I’ll make this week (and report back).

Yes, I’m staying GF for Thanksgiving, which is only the second time I’ve baked in 2017. It’s because of you that I’m willing to try. Your suggestions and reassurance have helped me find the best “flours” (shout-out to our food critic, Jon Palmer Claridge) and ways to bake.

For someone who admits she was a total dick about gluten-free people pre-celiac, y’all have come through in amazing way. I am thankful.

This post appeared originally in Creative Loafing Tampa.

#BecauseGluten: A return to baking

It’s a weird holiday, and an ugly cake, but I baked for the first time this year — sans gluten.

Food gluten free Peep O Ween cake Cathy Salustri — *The power of cake compels you. Photo by Cathy Salustri.*

If you’ve never attended a Peep-O-Ween — and I’d wager almost no one reading this has — you’re likely looking at that picture and thinking (or, perhaps, actually saying), “what the actual fuck am I looking at?”

What you’re looking at is my first foray into baking without gluten.

When I threw out all my “good” flour on New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t imagine baking again. I’d yet to try a gluten-free baked good I found tasty, and I had no interest in making any of my friends my guinea pigs. I remember thinking, too, that as much as I loved baking, I wasn’t good enough at it to succeed where others had failed in making a GF cake or bread that didn’t actively make people chew for far too long before swallowing hard and assuring me, “no, no — I’m just not that hungry right now.”

The 2016 homage to *Ouija* and my first successful foray into fondant. This, incidentally, is probably the best a PeepOWeen cake has ever looked. *Photo by Cathy Salustri.*

But then Peep-O-Ween came around this year. My friends and I have this bizarre tradition that started with a poorly decorated cake that tasted awful, and an even worse movie. That first year, my mom and I decorated it with marshmallows, but that next year, we graduated to Peeps — yes, those Easter-centric mallow chicks that people either love or hate. Part of the “tradition” is that she and I make the cake, she bitches about what a stupid tradition it is, we laugh a lot, and she refuses to come to the party with me. The scene atop the cake must be from a horror movie, and if anyone can tell what it is, I have failed. Past cakes have included Psycho, Poltergeist (complete with a pool made of blue gelatin), Jaws, Alien (that was the year Amanda was about to give birth; it was made in her honor), Plan Nine From Outer Space, Ouija and, this year, The Exorcist. The horror movie we watch, selected by Stacey, must be so bad that if, at any point we start to care about the characters in the film, she has failed (the best so far was Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive — yes, that Peter Jackson). Leah orders pizza from Cappy’s; Dan picks it up. Calypso wears a costume she hates (she hated I Dream of Weenie the most). Dan outdoes himself with the decor (one year there was a moving alien tentacle emerging from a spaceship crash-landed in their front yard, complete with smoke and flashing lights, making them the envy of Broadwater).

It’s every bit as awful as it looks, and totally worth it.

This year, I figured I’d make the cake and simply not eat any, but then my friend Sandi brought over two bags of Trader Joe’s all-purpose gluten-free flour. What the hell, I shrugged, the cake’s supposed to taste like crap. And one of you sweet people — who happened to be a former book editor — sent me a copy of The Gluten Free Bible a few months back, so I used the yellow cake recipe from that. The batter didn’t taste horrible, but the real test would come after the cake baked.

Yellow cake gluten free recipe Cathy Salustri — I used butter, not margarine and cow’s milk, not soy or almond, and it was a touch grainy, it tasted more like cake than other GF cake I’ve tasted. *Photo by Cathy Salustri.*

I dumped the cakes on a cooling sheet late the night before Peep-O-Ween. They looked like real cake. As they cooled, I swiped a fingerful of what remained in the pan. To my shock, it tasted good. But it was late; everything tastes good at 11 p.m. The next morning, my mom came over for our annual decorate-the-cake-and-bitch-at-each-other tradition. I did not grow up with “everyone is special” parents; this is a woman who once turned to me and said, “honey, I love you, and you usually are a good cook, but please don’t ever make that again.”

We both ran a finger through the cake left in the pan.

“That’s really good!” she said.

And for the first time in history, the cake didn’t suck at Peep-O-Ween.

In 2015, the PeepOWeen cake honored the best worst movie ever: 'Plan Nine From Outer Space.' That alien Peepship, complete with alien Peep, still sits on my desk at CL. The Peep looks exactly the same as it did two years ago. Photo by Cathy Salustri. — In 2015, the PeepOWeen cake honored the best worst movie ever: *Plan Nine From Outer Space*. That alien Peepship, complete with alien Peep, still sits on my desk at CL. The Peep looks exactly the same as it did two years ago. *Photo by Cathy Salustri.*

Of course, taste itself isn’t the problem with GF baked goods; it’s the texture and cohesiveness. The texture was a bit grainier than real cake, but not so far off that it reminded me of every other GF yellow cake I’d ever tasted. Xanthan gum; who knew?

I called Leah and asked if it would be OK for me to bring over a pizza crust (again, Trader Joe’s makes the best GF pizza crust outside of Ozona Pizza) and she informed me we weren’t eating pizza this year, but brisket, potatoes au gratin and a salad.

“What kind of asshole would I be to invite you over and serve food you can’t eat?” she asked me

“But it’s tradition!” I said. “I don’t expect the world to bend to this celiac thing.”

“It’s six people, Cathy, not 30. We’re having brisket, potatoes au gratin and a salad,” she said. “And explorateur cheese. I couldn’t find any gluten-free crackers, though.”

I grabbed a box on the way out the door that night. No way was I missing that cheese.

Sorry, Cappy’s.

This article initially appeared in Creative Loafing.

#BecauseGluten: Ozona Pizza, I’m in love

This Palm Harbor joint’s garlic knots and pies taste like… real bread. And garlic butter. And cheese.

Just writing about this pie makes me want to go get some. It’s add-90-minutes-to-my-ride-home-to-stop-by-Ozona-Pizza worthy.

As a rule, gluten-free pizza simply isn’t that good. Oh, sure, I’ve had some intimate moments with Trader Joe’s Gluten Free Pizza Crust (which may be the best gluten-free item they sell), and Craft Kafé does a tasty piece of GF pizza. But sometimes I want to sit in a pizzeria with paper napkins and dip some garlic knots in marinara, admiring family photos and kitsch on the walls until my waitress brings out a metal pan with cheese oozing off the crust.

When you have celiac, true pizza parlors — not this noveaux-artisanal-pizza-by-the-foot-what-is-the-provenance-of-your-arugula bullshit — are no less than Dante’s third circle of hell. That’s why when CL photog Jen Ring suggested we meet in Palm Harbor for pizza, I had, to say the least, my doubts. She knew of two places in the area, she wrote in a text, that offered GF pies.

*Put Ozona Pizza on your bucket list. Photo by Jennifer Ring.*

We met at Ozona Pizza, and I cautiously, which is an understatement, ordered GF garlic knots, then helped myself to a Red Bridge out of the cooler. Red Bridge, for those of you with more intestinal integrity than I who can drink “real” beer, is the Keystone Light of GF brews. But, hey, beer and pizza is like Tom and Jerry, or hot dogs and root beer, or Russia and President Trump: They go together.

As I sit down, I realize the woman taking our order is the owner. What the hell, I wonder, am I going to say to her if I hate the food? She’s super friendly and proud of her place and incredibly invested in people liking her food. This could be awkward.

The garlic knots taste like... real bread. Photo by Jennifer Ring. — *The garlic knots taste like… real bread. Photo by Jennifer Ring.*

I bite into a garlic knot, and — oh, holy sweet baby Jesus. I’m in love. They taste like… real bread. And garlic butter. And cheese. As I reach for my third knot, while still chewing the second, I realize Jen and I intended to share these. I push the basket toward her and mumble over bits of doughy goodness that she should have one. Then I order another basket, plus two GF pizzas — one for here and one for home.

I’ll say this about the pizza: I intended to have one slice with Jen and split the second pizza with my fiancé later that night at home. That… devolved… quickly. I ate half the pizza in front of us and decided I didn’t need to eat later.

People, I can’t explain to you how good this pie tasted. Even if you don’t like GF pizza (and by and large I don’t blame you), it’s damn tasty. I started browsing the menu and realized how easy it’d be for our office to eat here (we’re everything from full-on carnivores to paleo vegans), as there are even vegan, dairy-free pizzas available.

Apparently, Ozona Pizza also makes regular pizza, which is its mainstay.

The crust may not look exactly like Cappy's, but it tastes — I feel guilty saying this — better. Photo by Jennifer Ring. — *The crust may not look exactly like Cappy’s, but it tastes — I feel guilty saying this — better. Photo by Jennifer Ring.*

I’m too full to try anything else, but I vow to return and perhaps be somewhat less of a glutton.

Later that night, though, my fiancé opens the pizza box and the smell of a real pizza parlor smacks me in the face.

The pizza is gone by midnight.

This feature initially appeared in Creative Loafing.

#BecauseGluten: Beer me.

The nectar of the gods is not a crisp apple cider.

Anyone who knows me will tell you, straight up, I do not like craft beer. I’ve written about it — here and here, for instance.

When The Amsterdam on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg was a place, one of the owners explained to me that I simply wasn’t educated enough to appreciate it. Call me crazy, but I know what I like, and no amount of education is going to make me appreciate a sour, grapefruit basil-infused porter. When I drink beer, I’m simple. I like porters, stouts and a few maligned beers (Bud Light Lime, Dos Equis and Imperial). Although I like to drink local beers to help local businesses, I won’t drink local beers I don’t like.

And here’s the problem with gluten-free or gluten-removed beer: If celiac sufferers had known in the 1980s they had celiac, we’d have plenty of GF or GR Bud Light Limes in the world. But we didn’t know we had it back then. Most celiacs believed they simply had food allergies or, more recently, IBS, so GF beer is a relatively new thing. As such, brewers tend to try and make it taste like the craft beer so many people buy, which means I don’t like a good number of GR or GF brews, and it’s a small playing field already.

For someone whose favorite beer in the world was Holy City Brewing’s Pluff Mud Porter, the preponderance of IPAs and fruity ales leaves me cold. My go-tos? Daura Damm, Omission Lager, Trader Joe’s NGB and, sometimes, Omission Ultimate Light Golden Ale.

As for picking up some GF or GR beer, hands down, Shep’s has the widest selection. The St. Pete store also sells singles, so I don’t have to commit to an $11 six-pack I may hate. I’m also a fan of a couple other places in Tampa Bay, but two spots in particular — one on either side of the bridge — are worth a stop.

You can either get Daura at the bar from Ybor City’s New World Brewery, where the staff is amazing about my hummus with corn tortillas, please (I don’t even have to tell them anymore). There’s another GF beer on hand, but it’s… well, it’s not my style.

While Mangia — a casual, celiac-friendly Gulfport restaurant — carries GF beer, like New World, the prices are designed for eating in-house. A long list of ciders and meads is featured, too — far more than their GF/GR beer menu, but that’s for another column.

At local breweries, I tend to go with local cider or wine, because none of them deals with GR or GF beer, which I get. There are development, brewing, and cross-contamination issues. But what I wouldn’t give for a gluten-free version of Cigar City Brewing’s Puppy’s Breath Porter.

If there’s a local brewery that needs a guinea pig to taste GF/GR beers, I’m your gal.

This article initially appeared in Creative Loafing.

#BecauseGluten: Make me a sandwich

Triumph and heartbreak with Cali-based La Brea Bakery.

“Cathy, I have found your new favorite gluten-free bread!”

Normally, I would delete any email that used my first name in the subject line, but gluten-free bread that tastes good is like ice cream with no calories, wine that won’t get you drunk and a Harrison Ford who isn’t stubbornly in love with Calista Flockhart. I want to believe. Odds are, it isn’t going to happen. Still, there I am, waiting outside his mansion, with my bowl of chocolate ice cream and glass of wine.

The email was from a PR rep for La Brea Bakery, who’d offered to send me some sample loaves to try. Sure, I told them, thinking, “What the hell… we can try in on our podcast and, if — when — it sucks, it’ll be fun capturing people’s reactions.”

When the big box of bread arrived, David and I decided to take a sneak taste, to know what to expect when we made everyone eat it during the podcast recording. So sure were we that it’d taste like crumbly bits of potato, wood fiber and sadness that we hesitantly split a piece.

Now, I have no choice. If I want to eat bread, it must be gluten-free, and I’ll be the first to tell you, gluten-free bread is not, technically bread (everyone saw my last #BecauseGluten column, right?). You need gluten for it to be bread. The whole point of bread is the way the gluten binds the molecules of flavor together — and, apparently, kills the lining of my duodenum. David, though, is a live-on-the-edge kind of guy, by which I mean he eats more than beef, shellfish and lunch meat (work in our office for a day to realize how rare that is, because we are a gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, non-beef-eating, why-would-you-eat-something-with-a-face, I-only-eat-yellow-foods-on-Tuesday, I’m-fasting-until-4-o’-clock, how-can-you-eat-commercially-farmed-vegetables, is-that-kale-dolphin-safe type of office). However, his husband, Larry, does not eat gluten, and so every morning David and Larry feast upon slices of gluten-free cinnamon raisin toast. In short, David knows the pain of bad gluten-free sliced bread, which, really, is most of it.

Watching us eat the La Brea white bread was like watching a commercial. As we chewed, time slowed down. Our eyes met across the counter; we smiled in pleasant surprise.

“This…” David floundered, grasping for words. “This… tastes like real bread.”

And it does. This bread is the best gluten-free bread I’ve ever tasted (and, if memory serves, better than a lot of gluten-filled bread I’ve eaten). The next day, our food editor, Meaghan, made some toast and some happy noises.

“Don’t put the bread away,” she said. “I’m probably going to want to make more toast.”

I sent El Cap to work with some, and he texted me and told me how much he loved the bread.

Almost everyone at the podcast tasting agreed: They would eat this bread. One holdout, our food intern Alex, said she’d eat it, but not on purpose.

Now, the heartbreak. While Publix does sell bread from this California-based bakery, it doesn’t sell the gluten-free variety. No one within 100 miles of the CL offices in Ybor City does, actually. And, unless you have Amazon Fresh in your town (we don’t), you can’t mail order it.

So what do you do? You march into Publix and take advantage of the grocery giant’s generous customer-service policy that allows you to ask them to order it for you. Seriously. It’s about $5 a loaf, more than reasonable for gluten-free bread. I confirmed this with Meaghan, whose family has some sort of shrine to Publix in the living room (everyone in her family works there, I think). All you have to do is go to the customer-service desk and ask them to special-order La Brea Bakery gluten-free bread, and they’ll do it (at least I’m hoping).

You won’t be sorry. Pinky swear.

This article originally appeared in Creative Loafing.