affording special diets

[mama2annabelle]

I just found out that I am severly gluten intolerant and now have to go gluten-free. We also are already on the Feingold diet as a family which has been a huge blessing in restoring sanity to our family.
We used to buy all organic, only raw milk, only grass fed, free range meats. Now we buy conventional store bought crap since that is all we can afford. We don't do much processed foods besides the occasional snacks from the health food store. I cook from scratch. Now adding GF to the mix our food spending is going up because GF breads, pasta, and flours are much more pricey. I have always bought wheat berries in bulk for cheap and milled the flour myself. Now that's out of the question.

Anyone tips for affording special diets? Is it possible to have a low food budget and be gluten free?

BTW, we are a family of 6 and over the last two years got our food spending down from $1000 per month to about $400 to $450 per month. Now it is creeping back up....we probably spent $700 over this last month including all the new supplements DD and I just started on. (They are working and have made a huge difference in both of us, so that extra spending will have to stay).

[Shelsi]

I think the key for GF is learning not to rely on the pre-made GF products out there. Not only are they expensive but they're usually really high in calories/fat. The initial stock up of GF flours can be expensive but once you get your staples I find it's not too horribly expensive to maintain particularly if you buy in bulk. I buy most of my flours from amazon and get free shipping. Vitacost has stuff as well with low cost shipping.

Except for the flours and pasta we still shop mainly at the regular grocery store (small town, it has zero special GF stuff).

For cereal we eat Chex. I wait until it goes on sale and then buy it in bulk. I usually can get it for around $1.99/box if I wait long enough and sometimes I'm lucky enough to have coupons to go along with it.

I make our own GF bread. Not sure if you've tried the Udi's GF bread but I basically tried to replicate the recipe and it came out pretty good! I'm going to have it up on my blog once I get it perfected.

Our dinners have remained largely the same. I make my own GF biscuits, or I just use rice flour as a thickener instead of wheat flour. I don't make many recipes that contain pasta since it's kind of pricey.

Here's a link to my blog. It doesn't have a whole lot on it just yet but I post recipes as I create them: http://recreatinghappiness.blogspot.com/

[amyamanda]

I am GF (the whole family used to be and they still eat almost no gluten except for a small amount of bread and DH's favorite fallback, frozen burritoes) and we are dairy-free and no-cane-sugar and low soy, and we eat mostly organic/local/natural.

I reduce all GF recipes to tapioca flour (cheapest starch) and brown rice flour (cheapest flour) and xanthan gum (used sparingly). I buy tapioca in 10 lb bags and brown rice flour in 25 lb bags. This helps keep our baking cost down.

Brown rice, millet, and quinoa are all good bases for what I call "rice and stuff." I buy them all in bulk. Breakfast is apples and peanut butter, peanut butter on corn thins, or nuts and dried fruit (whatever is cheap). Or I might bake muffins, waffles, pancakes, pannukakkua (baked egg dish). I use the leftover baked stuff to make bread pudding the next day. Rice pudding is also yummy for breakfast.

Lunch is often cut veggies and hummus, or corn chips and refried beans and salsa, cold meat and chips and cut veggies, salad in season, egg salad or avocado used as dip for chips, wrap sandwiches, or leftovers.

We don't buy much in the way of special prepackaged GF food. I do buy brown rice tortillas in bulk when they are on sale, and we do eat organic corn chips (also bulk/sale). And we buy corn thins to use with peanut butter (also bulk/sale). Oh, I do buy brown rice pasta at Trader Joe's, but we don't eat it often. Otherwise we cook mostly from scratch. The usual dinners here: fried rice, soup/stew, frittata, stirfry, salad in season.

When fresh veggies are not in season we eat carrots, cabbage, potatoes, onions, and frozen veggies and fruit. I also grow a few pots of green things over the winter - parsley, chives, rosemary.

We only drink water, a small amount of homemade lemonade, and occasionally tea.

I would say our monthly grocery spending is around $600-700. This is as low as I can comfortably get it with those restrictions and standards. If we ate conventional instead of organic, it would go down more. Also if we ate more beans/lentils it surely would go down also (I won't get into why we don't, but it would certainly reduce the budget if we did.)