No flour OR sugar? You've got to be kidding.

 When I accepted a marriage proposal from a man who had two teenagers, some of my friends and family were a little scared for me. A lot scared, in fact.

"There's a special place in heaven for the step-parents of teenagers," my mother told me, jokingly. However, after teaching high school for 17 years, I was pretty sure I could handle it.

"But they don't go home at the end of the day," one of my friends said to me.

"There won't be 34 of them in the same room, either," was my retort.

I'm only a month into this whole step-mom thing, but so far, the biggest challenge has been cooking. I love to cook, but I am in an unusual situation. My step-daughter, Hannah, who is 15, is gluten-intolerant. For a person who considers her stand-mixer with dough-hook one of her most prized possessions, this was hard for me to take. I didn't realize how often bread and rolls and pasta and tortillas played backdrop to the meals I cook, until they were off limits. And while there are gluten-free alternatives to these items, they are often expensive and a bit questionable in texture. Anyone who has ever substituted a veggie burger for a real hamburger, expecting the same experience, knows what I'm talking about.

But, Hannah loves to cook, and is willing to experiment to find what will work. Last week, she invited a girl friend over to make home-made pizzas for dinner, and while shopping for supplies at the grocery store, she knew exactly which gluten-free pizza dough mix yielded the best results.

Gluten-free cooking often means that instead of pasta or bread, grains and rice provide the new backdrop to our meals, instead. Quinoa and brown rice are becoming my new "go-to" staples, which is probably a whole lot healthier for the entire family.

Add into this mix my step-son, Peter, age 13, who was diagnosed with type one diabetes less than a week after Geoff and I married. The day he was diagnosed, Peter and his dad came home from the hospital with a binder about three inches thick; a how-to manual for managing diabetes. All of the information about testing blood sugar levels, counting the carbohydrates in a meal to calculate the proper insulin dosage, and what and when Peter could eat was absolutely overwhelming. Peter took all of this like a champ, never complaining, and instantly incorporating the numerous blood sugar tests and insulin injections into his routine like it was no big thing. For me, the challenge was to figure out what I could do to make life normal for Peter.

Probably the biggest challenge for Peter was not having to stick himself for his blood tests and injections, but rather that he couldn't eat whenever he felt like it. I don't think any of us realize how much we "graze" during the course of a day, unless we're not allowed to. Peter's doctor told us that he should take an insulin injection before each meal, and before bedtime, to manage his blood sugar. He could not eat unless he took insulin to help him convert the carbohydrates in the food, and he could only take insulin every four hours. So, between meals, there was no snacking.

The doctor did give us a list of "free" foods, meaning they had no carbohydrates, so Peter could eat them without taking an insulin injection. The list read like a manual from those high-protein diets. Hard-boiled eggs, cheese sticks, peanuts and beef sticks were the main items, and all I could think was, "Well that doesn't seem very healthy!" In later weeks, we learned from the diabetes education team at the hospital how to account for other snacks, but at first, things looked pretty dismal.

In the days following Peter's diagnosis, we religiously studied the labels on pre-packaged foods, the nutritional content of different restaurant offerings, and used various internet sites to calculate the nutritional value of different recipes, fresh fruits and vegetables, and we all began to think about the make-up of our food a bit more. Just as Hannah's gluten-intolerance means that everyone in the family is eating a lot less by way of refined flour products, Peter's diabetes will make us all think twice about nutrient-devoid, carbohydrate-heavy food choices.

"What on earth do you cook for them?" one of my friends asked, horrified, when we met for a girls' weekend. In truth, it has been fun modifying some of my old favorite recipes. My most recent success came in the form of gingerbread waffles. I have a recipe in my Harrowsmith cookbook that I have been playing with for years, adding whole wheat, reducing oil, and otherwise trying to improve its nutritional content. The first time I tried a gluten-free version, I used rice flour, but wasn't particularly happy with their grainy texture. This week, I used a mixture of almond meal and gluten-free baking mix, and replaced most of the oil with canned pureed pumpkin. The almond meal certainly changes the protein to carbohydrate ratio for the better, and while there's not enough pumpkin to count as a whole serving of vegetables, I figure that the little bits add up. Besides, they still had that decadent breakfast treat feel to them, which was exactly what I wanted.

Sauteed apples make the perfect topping to my modified gingerbread waffles.

Cooking is one of the ways that I show people I care about them. Making my dad his favorite chocolate chip cookies before he went away for a hunting weekend, baking bacon and ham filled sandwich rolls for my brother to take on the Chicago to Mackinac sailboat race, finding an elegant cheesecake recipe for my mom's birthday are just things that feel natural to me. I am finding that this form of affection is also helping me to navigate the tricky terrain of step-parenthood. Catering to my new family's nutritional needs is one of the most non-threatening ways I have found to show them that I care about them.