The easiest go-to was pasta with sauce. Farmers market staple Copper Pot Food Company is my go-to for both. Owner Stefano Frigerio buys surplus fruit and vegetables from local farms and turns them into jams, pasta sauces, and other products.

Copper Pot's gnocchi

His pasta sauces (think late harvest tomato or smoky bacon and Parmesan) taste like their ingredients without fillers and corn syrup. I usually go through them pretty quickly, but mostly because I eat it with a spoon if I’m not ladling it over entrees.

He’s also a masterful pasta-maker, producing spaghetti, black truffle linguine and tons of filled pastas using local meats. Frigerio experiments with gluten-free flours and makes a wicked gnocchi using quinoa flour.

Gnocchi has been pretty tough for me to track down in gluten-free form–the consistency is tough to nail without gluten– but this gnocchi is hearty and spot-on with the added bonus of a really earthy nuttiness from the quinoa flour.

You can Frigerio at the winter Dupont Circle market, but it’s best to place special orders in advance to ensure that he will have GF products in stock. He is also willing to produce GF spaghetti and other pastas, so order wisely. We may not have another snowmageddon, but the pantry beckons.

Not the most adept at languages, I figured my best bet might be traveling with a suitcase full of snacks (oh, the melodrama).

There are some solid (often free) resources for help when traveling with allergies.

Selectwisely.com has a very intensive list of cards available for purchase. You can select a single allergy or dietary need – vegetarian and vegan cards are available – then translate the need into one of several languages. The words are bold and printed with a corresponding picture.

Celiactravel.com is a donation-based site specifically for gluten intolerance. The site has PDFs of celiac restaurant cards in 48 languages and welcomes translations for other languages. It’s a bit more DIY than the laminated card, but has a better range of languages.

Glutenfreepassport.com also has free, printable cards for several languages.

New pet peeve: When I end up with ice cream, pudding, or sorbet in lieu of cake.

I know: It’s not fair to expect people to come up with a gluten-free cake just because I can’t eat the regular cake, but I propose a solution.

Cherry Blossom Cakes (written up in DailyCandy).

Owner Molly Evans self-taught herself the art of delicious, light cakes and cupcakes. She bakes with almond and coconut milks, brown rice flour, tapioca and potato starch, and a few other ingredients. She’ll do casein-free, dairy-free, corn-free, and soy-free products.

My favorites were the coffee buttercream with chocolate base and the sour cream chocolate frosting on any muffin. She’ll also create gingerbread houses, Christmas cookie samplers, and any cupcake you want. Her decorations are precious, too.

courtesy of buzz

Since I worship chocolate, eat enough peanut butter to be considered part of the Jiff family, and dream about bacon, this cupcake was meant for me.

Only it wasn’t available to those of us who can’t have muffins. But wait no longer: tomorrow (Friday, Aug. 21), Buzz will have the little darlings ready for the gluten-impaired. Flecks of bacon, heaps of peanut butter, and a chocolate muffin will be mine, all mine.

I’m astounded by the high prices of gluten-free ingredients. The alternative of eliminating starch-based foods means a healthier, but also costly diet of proteins and vegetables. Sure, you’ll spend $12 on a package of xanthan gum, but here are my main gripes:

1 – To create a product that most tastes and feels like wheat, you’ll most likely need several flours. So in place of one bulk bag of wheat flour, try sorghum, brown rice, and garbanzo. They’ll take more space and cost. Nut flours will drive that even higher.

2 – I praise restaurants for gluten-free options, but let’s face it: Typically, the gluten-free choices are more costly with smaller portions. To wit: Pete’s New Haven-Style Apizza in Columbia Heights. I love their pie, but a 12-incher won’t satisfy two people, so the price really adds up when you start doubling and tripling the order (gone are the days of just getting an extra-large pie to suit a larger party).

3 – These things are perishable, so ordering specialty products by mail means overnight shipping and special freezer packs. It may preserve the integrity of the product, but it ends up costing a fortune.

I noticed the strain most recently when baking out of the Babycakes cookbook. The results are killer, but the ingredients are costly, difficult to find, and used in large amounts. Coconut oil, for example, costs about $10 per jar and I could only get two recipes out of each jar. That said, those recipes are well worth the expense.

Diner’s Journal at nytimes.com blogged yesterday about Betty Crocker’s new gluten-free mixes. They haven’t shown up on any shelves near me, but soon?

When I went gluten-free, I felt somewhat glad to get away from the boxed mixes, which I’d grown up loving. Those mixes were the easy route and I knew I could do better making them from scratch, but I am tickled by the idea of the ease (and yes, I loved canned frosting, too).

Sure, there are plenty of GF mixes out there, but they don’t feel nearly as cheap as the mass market products. Gluten-free products used to seem more healthy. Not anymore! But I am definitely not above testing a batch to see if from-scratch prevails.

Here’s hoping the cheapie make-and-bake coffee cakes are next?

Gluteneer and I ambled into New Paltz for the night. My urban side dreamed of a country afternoon spent wading through the river, but really we just hung out with wine and relived college days with a room in the local hostel. (Yes, really.)

There are two notable food perks for this area.

1 – The proximity to the Hyde Park CIA campus (it’s about a 25-min drive) means that despite cuisine, location, or cost, most restaurants offer culinary embellishments and food styling that would make any cooking instructor proud.

2 – The hippie nature of New Paltz means lots of vegan and gluten-free options. And it wasn’t that it was there, it’s that it was advertised. That town is proud to ditch the gluten.

We breakfasted at Karma Road, a vegetarian deli with kicking smoothies (mine had young coconut juice) and delicious gluten-free baked goods and deli salads. We loaded up on sweets and granola for the drive.

I busted over to the Old Town Whole Foods in search of some new treasures. Wandering the frozen aisle in search of treats, I noticed some packages from Moondance Heavenly Desserts.

The Ohio-based company bakes gluten-free products that don’t hold back on the other goodness.

These little treats are stuffed with dairy, butter, and richness.

I first noticed a boxed cheesecake with a butter toffee topping, covered in chocolate drizzles and party-ready, but was dissuaded by the nutritionals (1/6 of the cake has over 30g fat). That said, if you’ve had a bad day, this is the ultimate remedy.

I opted for the walnut brownie, which tempted me with its moderately more sensible 15g for 1/3 of a gooey, fudgified rectangle. I didn’t even need to nuke it before savoring.

The company makes a blondie, a classic brownie, and several other cheesecakes, including a lemon curd that has my name written all over it. You can follow my trail to the OT WF or hit the gluten-free mall.

My favorite beer is the Green’s. The bottles are each a half-liter, so they take a bit of commitment (in appetite and wallet), but are totally worth it.

My favorites are the Quest (a Tripel blonde) and the Endeavor (a Dubbel).

You can try it at Rustico, special order it at Arrowine or find it on the shelves at Roots.

I think the competition has a long way to go to reach Green’s heights.

So, let’s take a tour of the many opportunities this year to test the options (store-bought and homemade) available to the gluten-free.

Hint: My inner kid has a party hat on.

For this, my second gluten-free birthday, I outsourced the job, asking genius Josh Short at Buzz Bakery to design my cake. I gave him free license to bake whatever came to him with fingers crossed that I would get a real cake. Seriously, all I wanted was something good enough to eat as breakfast leftovers in following days. Home run. Short made me a gluten-free chocolate cake filled with Illy espresso buttercream and English toffee encased with chocolate buttercream. It looked and tasted like the ultimate cake. The toffee bits in the filling added a good crunch. Short works a lot with almond flour, creating brownies, cupcakes, and custom cakes to suit gluten-avoiders, so he knows the drill.

Onto my other experiences with birthday cakes: For my first birthday sans gluten, Gluteneer made me a romantic dinner at home. The grand finale was a decadent chocolate layer cake with peanut butter frosting. (To qualify as a birthday cake in the Gluten Freebird world, chocolate is usually required.) This cake was adapted from a Boston Globe recipe. He used a mix of rice and sorghum flours, which created a dense and delicious cake. [Sidenote: We've found that, in GF baking, chocolate cakes work better than white cakes because the chocolate adds texture to the batter and masks the flavor of the alternative flours.] I was swiping pb frosting with my finger for nearly a week.

For his birthday, I hauled out 1000 Gluten-Free Recipes and made a Boston cream pie.  The book is a bible for preparing different baked goods. The recipes rely on a few variations of all-purpose baking flour mixes (usually using sorghum and tapioca). I like it for the pies, cakes, and muffins, but have yet to use it for any savory recipes. The Boston cream pie wasn’t the towering chocolate behemoth I’d require, but the New Englander enjoyed it. Custard + chocolate sauce made for two good masks to any glutenless flour flavors.

As an alternative (a good option for a special cake, but not necessarily a birthday cake), Praline Bakery in Bethesda makes a decadent gluten-free macaroon cake that I’ve been meaning to write up for months. It comes in an array of flavors, but hazelnut was my choice. Leave it to the French to concoct two desserts in one, with macaroons lining each piece. It’s a very light cake, but full of mousse with good crunch from the macaroons. It was more like art than food.

So I guess that’s like two presents in one.