Day 1: Warming Up

After throwing what was basically a food-avoidance temper tantrum and eating like an idiot for the past two days, today was day one of trying to really avoid dairy, wheat and sulfites, in addition to the soy and nuts I've been staying away from for a couple of weeks. I feel completely like a fish out of water, but I'm learning a few things.

1. Not surprisingly, eating a big lunch before going to a birthday party is a good idea. I met up with my cousin and his family for his daughter's birthday party. Before I went I had a huge bowl of brown rice, eggs, steamed greens and a sweet potato. That made it a lot easier to pick the pineapple out of the fruit salad and not eat everything on the table and wash it down with a glass of wine and half a tray of brownies.

2. I'm probably not ready to eat out. I met up with friends for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. I figured as restaurants go, Asian would be pretty safe in terms of dairy and at least navigable for soy, wheat and nuts. What I didn't think about is that I am not familiar enough with Vietnamese food to know what goes into everything and whether it's going to be a problem. Without thinking, I drank the tea they had on the table before remembering it's on the sulfite no-no list. I ordered a vermicelli soup with duck and shredded cabbage, but when it came, I just ended up really suspicious of all of it. Was the cabbage pickled? Was there soy sauce or something sulfitey in the broth? Were they really rice noodles? I ate it, and felt sort of vaguely guilty about it, like I should have been more careful. I didn't know for sure any of it was out, but if I'm going to do this, it's probably better to take the "guilty until proven innocent" approach to eating. I'm sure the combination of mentally putting my dinner on trial and also not being able to breathe very well made me a fantastic dining companion.

3. There are sulfites in Sriracha. That's messed up.