Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

@lemonfair--re buying meat once a month--it gets easier. I haven't bought meat in roughly 15 years, and don't miss it.

The soup, whether properly a bisque or a cream soup, sounds wonderful, I've always thought that more garlic is the best winter warm-up.

Frankly, I think organic milk is a shuck, like much of the "organic" industry post-USDA categorizing. It's all about bucks to agribusiness, not supporting small local farmers. In a lot of places it's illegal to buy directly from those farmers, anyway (and don't even get me started about the idiocy of drinking raw milk that's been oustide the cow, sheep, or goat it came from for more than an hour).

Me, I'm lactose intolerant, so I either drink coconut milk, almond milk, or treat whatever milk I buy with lactase drops. The lactase may interfere with the flavor, but if so, I don't notice it. Then again, I literally never drink a plain, unadulterated glass of any kind of milk--neither now nor as a child 50+ years ago.

I hate to have to say this, but--the only rules I know about waiting times and not mixing foods are related to keeping kosher--you have to wait so many hours after a meat meal before eating dairy & vice versa, and can't mix meat and dairy at any time (and it's not even that simple, but I'm going for the basics here). That's not science, that's religion. Same with the rules your naturopath, traditional healers, and Edgar Cayce followers present. They're religion. No basis in science. Same with stuff about alkalizing your diet, magical healing combinations of foods, etc. It's all religion. You're welcome to believe it, but don't ask people unlikely to belong to the same belief system how to follow it.

Science is--there are some vegetables that are more digestible, whose nutrients are more bioavailable, cooked than they are fresh. Many frozen fruits & vegetables are fresher than the imported ones in the produce department in the middle of winter, since they were flash-frozen close to the point of harvest, and not shipped thousands of miles in a container. Not everything organic is better than its cheaper, non-organic counterpart. Get a good scientific nutrition text book to learn about this. Read Consumer Reports investigations of how clean organic foods are (or aren't).

Science is--if you have celiac (there's no s on the end), don't eat anything made with wheat (this includes kamut, spelt, durum, semolina, farina, einkorn, etc.), barley, and rye, or any derivatives of these grains that have not been processed in such a way as to no longer contain gluten. You say you have the celiac gene, but have you been tested (blood tests and/or intestinal biopsy, not the unproven stool tests) for actual signs of celiac disease? If not, get tested before cutting gluten from your diet. Then so to www.celiac.com, read Tricia Thompson's blog on www.diet.com, subscribe to the magazine Gluten-Free Living, subscribe to the celiac listserv on ICORS (link available at celiac.com) (there are a lot of people on the list who believe in all sorts of woo, but there are also a lot of experienced people who understand the basis of the diet and don't follow every fad), get info from a licensed nutritionist or dietician, check out the websites of the Gluten Intolerance Group and the Celiac Disease Federation. These are the places you're likely to get sound, scientifically-valid information.