Monthly Archives: February 2009

Those of you with Southern U.S. heritage probably crave Southern food for breakfast now and then. Luckily, those with celiac disease can still eat eggs, sausage, and delicious grits, but biscuits pose more of a problem. In homage to the best of Southern breakfast cooking, we bring you a round-up of some tasty recipes for gluten free biscuits from our gluten-free blogging friends. Some of these recipes are mind-bogglingly creative!

• Mary Frances of Gluten Free [Cooking School] ran out of soy flour one day, substituted corn starch, and ended up with “fluffy” and “tender” gluten-free biscuits. Their current incarnation includes brown rice flour, corn starch, soy or sorghum flour, baking powder, baking soda, and the ever-present xantham gum.
• Shauna James Ahern, the Gluten-Free Girl, makes buttermilk biscuits with sorghum flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, sweet rice flour, baking powder, and xantham gum. Shauna notes that the egg whites in her recipe replace the protein that gluten would provide.
• Scott Adams from Celiac.com has a great-looking recipe for gluten-free Chocolate Biscuits. You wouldn’t eat them for breakfast, would you? They have potato flour, rice flour, chickpea flour, and ground almonds.
• Sheltie Girl at Gluten a Go Go admits that as a Southerner she’s always on the lookout for gluten-free biscuit recipes. That’s why she offers us two: Angel Biscuits and Sweet Potato Biscuits. The Angel Biscuits contain brown rice flour, sorghum flour, sweet potato flour, sweet rice flour, chia seed meal, cream of tartar, and baking soda. The Sweet Potato Biscuits have whipping cream in them! and also brown rice flour, oat flour, arrowroot starch, sweet rice flour, almond meal, baking powder, baking soda and kudzu powder.

Which gluten-free biscuit recipe are you going to try?

For those of our readers who live in the Chicagoland area, this is a great opportunity to meet other gluten-free people and find up-to-date information about celiac disease and food allergies. April 18th and 19th at Chicago’s McCormick Place you can go to the Thrive Allery Expo, the only allergy and gluten-free expo in North America. SBWire reports, “Twinject, Allegra, University of Chicago’s Celiac Disease Center, American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, Medic Alert Foundation, Inflammatory Skin Disease Institute, The American Lung Association, The National Psoriasis Foundation, The National Eczema Association and the Gluten Intolerance Group are among the participants and speakers in this effort to disseminate information and educate the public.”

The official website lists events such as 2 days of gluten- and allergen- free baking hosted by Jules Shepard, free lung screenings, “cutting edge information on Celiac detection” by the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center, a funny talking robot, the latest allergy specific books displayed by Borders, free MedicAlert bracelets for school age children, sample products, and exhibitor demonstrations. There will also be several speakers.

Adults are $10 or $15 for a 2 day pass and children under 12 are free. For more information please call 866-617-EXPO or log onto the website at http://www.thriveallergyexpo.com. McCormick Place is located at 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL.

The Gluten Free Travel Site was started in 2007 by Karen Broussard, who was traveling at that time with her gluten-free son in the Caribbean. While they had a good experience with the kitchen staff at their resort, she felt that if she wrote about her experiences it would make it easier for others to travel in the Caribbean gluten-free. On the Travel Site people write about their experiences traveling gluten-free all over the world. It’s easy to search for reviews in the area to which you’re traveling. I looked up Illinois and found a lot of information about GF deep dish pizza options. They also have a featured, more extensive review of places, like Yosemite National Park, that you might not have considered easy for celiacs. One pleasant surprise was reviews that I found of cruise ships that go to specific places. When I searched Australia, I found a review of the Clipper Odyssey cruise ship to Australia and New Zealand. There was even a useful review of the entire country of Papua New Guinea!

If you wish to submit a review, registration is free and easy. I’m sure many of our readers have some valuable travel insights to share.

Broussard also maintains a helpful page on tips for GF travel and a blog to keep you up to date on GF travel news. This site is a very welcome addition to the GF online community.

I was debating for a while whether or not San Francisco cookbook author Heidi Swanson could be considered a gluten-free blogger because her visually breathtaking, mouthwatering blog is not entirely gluten-free and she herself is not a celiac. She labels herself a healthy vegetarian with sweets thrown in. But when I returned for the fifth time this week to ogle a recipe for shiitake mushroom noodle salad with tamarind dipping sauce, I realized that the battle was already lost, and Heidi had won.

Before you start protesting that gluten-free bloggers of the month should only be celiacs, consider that Heidi’s blog, 101 Cookbooks, has 78 gluten-free recipes on it—more recipes than found on many entirely gluten-free blogs. Each of these recipes is accompanied by an absolutely gorgeous photograph because Heidi is a professional photographer. This site has won all sorts of awards and garnered tons of praise. I think you will find it an excellent resource.

Some recipes you may enjoy:

• Hummus en Fuego
• Zucchini Ricotta Cheesecake
• Coco Choco Clusters
• Curried Egg Salad
• Rosewater Plum Compote
• Lentil Almond Stir Fry

Dear readers, we have already made so much progress toward being able to eat whatever we want. I’m sure many of you have bread machines and shelves lined with GF bread machine bread mix. That is an easy, satisfying route to take for fresh, delicious GF bread. But sometimes you want to get your hands dirty. Sometimes you want the satisfaction of kneading and punching that dough yourself and of watching that oddly-shapped boule rise gloriously golden in the oven. If that’s the case, read on. Gluten-free bloggers around the Web have worked their hearts out to find the ultimate gluten-free bread recipe, and they have graciously shared their findings with the rest of us. Here you can find a comprehensive list of GF bread experiments:

• Natalie from Gluten Free Mommy came up with a loaf of brown rice flour, GF oat flour (or quinoa flour), millet flour, tapioca flour, arrowroot flour (or cornstarch), and xantham gum.
• Mary Frances of Gluten Free [Cooking School] has photographs comparing her bread coming out of the bread machine or coming out of the oven. Her sandwich bread contains brown rice flour, cornstarch, xantham gum, sorghum flour, and masa harina or corn flour.
• Looks Good in Polka Dots makes gluten-free casein-free Amish Friendship bread with sorghum flour, cornstarch, white rice flour, tapioca flour, and xantham gum.
• Cheryl at Gluten Free Goodness devised a beautiful breakfast bread, Black Sesame Whole Grain Bread, with unusual ingredients: rice bran, almond meal, sorghum flour, amaranth, millet, arrowroot starch, potato starch, tapioca starch, and chia seeds.
• Kate of Gluten Free Gobsmacked presents Gluten Free Pepita Powered Bread, which includes raw pumpkin seeds, flax seed meal, millet flour, GF oats or quinoa flakes, tapioca flour, and xantham gum.
• Elizabeth Barbone of Easy Gluten-Free Baking invented a pretty simple recipe containing little more than brown rice flour, cornstarch, and xantham gum. As a bonus, she gives us a cinnamon raisin variation!
• Karina of Karina’s Kitchen just came out with a Gluten-Free Rye Bread! She graciously includes instructions for bread machine or by hand. The rye has sorghum flour, millet flour, xantham gum, and potato starch.

I’ve heard from Julie Luse, the editor and publisher of Delight, trying to clarify about the sort of people that Delight serves. All recipes are gluten-free, as the name suggests, but most of the recipes are also dairy-free and egg-free. Recipes that are not dairy free usually have suggestions for substitutions. This magazine is mainly targeted at the GFCF community. For those who suffer from further food allergies and intolerances, Delight includes recipes that are soy-free, rice-free, nut-free, and vegan. There is something for everybody and a helpful index in the back to help you quickly find the recipes that suit your needs.  Julie would also like to add that this magazine is quite focused on cooking, with somewhat less of an emphasis on other aspects of the gluten-free, casein-free lifestyle.

We’ve already mentioned the free online GF magazine, Easy Eats, and the classic ‘zine on the shelves, Living Without. Now we have the pleasure of adding a new, glossy magazine to the list of GF reading options: Delight gluten free Magazine. One of our GF blog friends, Delightfully Gluten Free, is involved in the creation of this visually appealing publication, so you have the opportunity to support the online community by taking a peek. If you are one of the first 200 people to subscribe, you receive the first issue free. It’s $14 per year for all four issues of Delight, one for each season.

They have a section each issue devoted to “indulgent” recipes. In this issue that includes recipes for popovers, bacon-wrapped dates, tiramisu, and mini pavlovas. They also have a section on how to make any meal “healthy and delicious,” so there’s something for every mood. Like Easy Eats, Delight will feature a Travel section devoted to gluten-free finds across the globe. Delight will have a Q&A with a doctor, and you can submit your questions to him/her online. You can also submit your stories about living with celiac disease, and the magazine will feature a different story each issue. Basically the format does not differ so much from that of Living Without, but while Living Without focuses on all sorts of food intolerances and allergies, Delight is just for the gluten-free.

Perhaps the most compelling feature of Delight is the mix of people who produce it: Justina Dean, a wedding photographer; Vanessa Maltin, a GF cookbook author, Director-Manager of a subsection of Health Care for Americans Now, former Director of Programming and Communications for the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, and a former journalist; Kimberly Beattie, a professional baker and chocolatier who co-owns a gluten-free bakery that creates natural desserts for people with special dietary needs; Andrew Beattie, a chocolatier with wife Kimberly at the GF bakery; Emilia Stark, a GF food blogger living in Finland; and Mary Capone, owner of a gluten-free gourmet wholesale bakery, director of the Wheat Free Gourmet Cooking School, and author of a cookbook on GF Italian cookery. These are exactly the sort of people who you would want to create your gluten-free magazine!

Another step has been taken towards educating the public on Celiac Disease. Danna Korn, founder of Raising Our Celiac Kids (ROCK), has written a book called Gluten Free For Dummies. I’m a big fan of the Dummies series; that’s how I learned my way around a Macintosh. Besides giving you a lot of gluten-free recipes from breakfast to dessert, Korn covers all the practical and emotional ins-and-outs of becoming gluten-free. Korn discovered in 1991 that her child had celiac disease, and at that time there were hardly the resources there are today; Korn figured out a lot of information by herself. She has already authored three other books on the gluten-free lifestyle, but GFFD is probably as comprehensive as it gets. You can read the table of contents and the index on Amazon.

That’s right! An ENTIRELY gluten-free grocery store! If you’re lucky enough to live anywhere near Thousand Oaks, CA, you should pop over Tuesday through Saturday to check out Simply Gluten Free. They carry food, books, gift items, and “Just Diagnosed” gift baskets. Every item has a nutritional label. Simply Gluten Free will even special-order products not readily available on the West Coast and deliver items free to residents of the Conejo Valley. The two owners of the store are a celiac and the daughter of a celiac. Check out their online store as well—they have a nice selection of GF Italian ingredients.

There’s no dessert as quintessentially American as a pie, and in my opinion, there is no better way to eat my all-time favorite vegetable, pumpkin. The British frequently prefer meat, pork, or seafood pies…hearty fare indeed.  Whether you like your pies sweet or savory, I’ve tracked down some of the best pie crust recipes from the fabulous gluten-free community for your tasting pleasure. These are not your grandmother’s pie crusts!

• The Pastry Crust for Gluten a Go Go‘s Chicken Pot Pie combines brown rice flour, chestnut flour, arrowroot powder, sweet rice flour, and chia seed meal.
• Artsy-Foodie‘s Dreamy Mocha Pie has a pie crust of tapioca flour, garbanzo flour, sorghum flour, brown rice flour, and xantham gum.
• For the simple pie crust in her Pumpkin Chiffon Pie, Gluten Free Sox Fan used pecans and GF gingerbread cookies.
• M-Elle’s Pot Pie Crust at Cooking & UNcooking features brown rice flour, potato starch, tapioca starch, almond meal, and sweet rice flour.
• The Chocolate Sweet Crust for La Tartine‘s Chocolate and Passion Fruit Tartlets includes white rice flour, quinoa flour, cornstarch, and cocoa powder. And she has gorgeous, gorgeous photographs of this pastry artwork.