There's Nothing Scary About A Gluten-Free Halloween!

Well, well, well... Look who finally decided to show up. Yeah, it's me. The past two weeks have been jam-packed with laptop malfunctions, so my after-hours productivity has mostly ground to a screeching halt. The gabillionth trip to the Apple store has me feeling optimistic that it was the final trip. After all, we are running out of parts to replace. 

Let me take a moment to give MOUNDS OF PRAISE to the kind folks at the Apple Genius Bar. Unlike my customer service experiences with Windows products, the people at Apple have been nice and helpful and have been willing to try to solve my problems ASAP rather than routing me through a phone tree that leads to hell. They believe me when I tell them that I've already restarted my computer twice and it didn't fix things. They give me little troubleshooting tips so I can learn to fix things on my own. They've even tried to figure out what the problem is before checking to see if I'm still under warranty. It is great to see my customer service/repair person in person and watch them try to fix my compu-beast, and to see them bump me up to the front of the line because I've been there recently. But this isn't a post about my love for Apple. This isn't even a post about my love for apples, even though I've gone apple picking twice in the past three weeks. This is a post about the opposite of apples. Instead of keeping doctors away, today we're going to talk about keeping your dentist in business. 

Admittedly, holidays in which it is customary for other people to give me food make me nervous as a glutard. I can never REALLY be certain that the people (who always mean well) didn't do something to accidentally poison me. Halloween is great, though, because treats typically come packaged. While each individual snack-size piece of candy may not have ingredients on it, the treats tend to be easily Google-able. Clearly, glutards want to avoid anything like Kit-Kats, Twix, or Take5's, which clearly contain cookies/pretzels and therefore are unsafe. There are tons of great glutard-friendly candies, though, so you won't even miss the mess that Twix make if you happen to sit on one that you left on your chair. For your Halloween-candy-binge convenience, I am linking to this list of Gluten Free Halloween candies. As always, I make absolutely no promises about the accuracy of the contents of this list. And as always, I am going to implore you to check every label of every food before you put it in your candy-hole. So don't sue me. But this list is a great place to start if you're looking for ideas. My personal favorite Halloween treats include Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (although if the special pumpkin-shaped ones are anything like the heart-shaped ones, keep your eyes peeled for wheat flour ::shrugs in disgust::), Almond Joys, Swedish Fish, and Hot Tamales. If you have higher-end Halloween tastes, Ghiradelli chocolates tend to be glutard-friendly, but beware that Lindor Truffes and Godiva chocolates usually are not. If you're a health nut, fresh fruits and veggies are gluten-free but not particularly exciting. At least not as exciting as candy websites try to be. 

Happy Halloween!