For My Gluten Free-Friends

Maybe you already knew this....

I'm an Alton Brown/Good Eats fan. Tonight the Tivo coughed up his episode on ingredient substitutions, and one of the recipes featured was for his Chewy Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Here's the link

I've never had them, but they are alleged by folks I work with to be absolutely delicious.

If you get a chance (the epi name is Sub-Standards) also check out the actual episode on Food TV explaining the science of why the brown rice flour-cornstarch-tapioca flour-xanthan gum makes such an excellent substitution for the gluten-full bread flour used in the original recipe.

Oh, and another thing...

Question for those of you with CPAP experience.

As you might know, Josh started using a CPAP machine back in July. We both have a sort of love-hate relationship with it ... he is certainly less tired, but there hasn't been the dramatic change that we had been led to expect (partly because he still refuses to go to bed at any reasonable hour and still often falls asleep, snoring, on the sofa - where he is right now in fact), partly because when wearing it he sleeps so soundly that at times the baby crying right in the bed with us won't wake him up (which annoys me), and, most recently, because of the cost.

You see, both the insurance company and the doctor's office neglected to tell us that we were actually renting the damn thing - at a copay of $25/month. We only found this out when we got a big "unpaid services - your portion" type bill from the leasing agency. Since I've priced the machines on the web at around $500 - $600 (he has a REMStar Plus M series machine, if that's helpful), it seems like either we or the insurance company could save a ton of money (we could buy it in 24 months of copays) to just purchase the thing outright rather than continue to pay the copay - but maybe there is something here I'm not seeing?

If you (or someone you know) uses a CPAP, did they buy the machine outright, or do you (like we) have ongoing insurance copays on the thing? (I get that with the copay we could get a different machine every six months if that's what we needed.)