Udi’s Makes Eating Gluten-Free Easier & A Less Daunting Option for Us {Plus, A Giveaway}

Udi's Chocolate Muffins at BlogHer '11. Photo credit to Jo-Lynne from Musings of a Housewife

For years, I’ve been hearing my friends Kelly and Jo-Lynne talk about eating gluten-free.  I’ve listened curiously but without much personal attachment to the subject.

Then a couple of weeks ago, my vegan sister told me that she had gone gluten-free.  And that she’s lost 30 lbs doing it and all of her skin problems (bad eczema she’s had since childhood) are gone.

Meanwhile, Nate (7 years) has been complaining a lot this summer of having a stomach ache.  We can’t seem to find any rhyme or reason to the times he complains.  It’s been sort of on and off all summer and definitely seems related to food.  Someone suggested that maybe he has a wheat intolerance and that we try first eliminating that as an experiment to see what happens.

The idea of going gluten-free in our house is totally daunting to me.  But I decided I owed it to Nate to give it a try – a little at a time.  I’ve been slowly weaning us all from gluten, which hasn’t been as hard as I thought.  (Rice for pasta.  Corn tortillas instead of my usual wheat ones.)

In the meantime, I was already familiar with Udi’s Gluten-Free as I had visited their tent at a party at BlogHer just this past summer.  I was scarfing down these brownies like they were going out of style and I could not tell the difference between one of these chocolate muffins and a regular chocolate muffin that has gluten.  Truly.

Which is really awesome because I’m thinking that I can try some of the bread and other products for Nate’s lunchbox for back to school this fall.  He certainly won’t know the difference and it’s great to know that there is an option for gluten-free that is so readily available and that they have tons of products available that I would normally put in his lunchbox (packs of cookies, bagels, etc.).

Udi’s makes hamburger buns too, which I’m pretty psyched about too as I typically make Nate’s turkey sandwiches for his lunchbox on hamburger buns so I figure I can just switch to the Udi’s ones without much of an issue.  (I love easy!)

Time will tell how this goes for us and I’m still pretty intimidated by the whole thing but it’s nice to know there is a brand out there that’s readily available in my grocery store that will help us ease into this experiment without too much of a change.

Check out all of Udi’s Gluten Free Food offerings on their website and while you’re at it, Like Udi’s on Facebook!

Giveaway: $50 worth of Udi’s products (hamburger and hot dog buns, granola samples, and muffins).  Comment to enter.  Maybe give me a tip or two on gluten-free options as I endevour to cut down our gluten intake even more?  Tips are appreciated but not required of course.

One winner will be selected at random after Thursday, September 1st.

You can get an extra entry for tweeting me @WhitneyMWS with the link to this post.

Disclaimer:  I was compensated for writing this post but as always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.