Monthly Archives: March 2009

Thanks to The Australian for this news! This April in Australia 40 volunteers with celiac disease will be tested with a new vaccine for 11 months in a preliminary study meant to determine whether or not the vaccine will harm them. If it doesn’t harm them, phase II will test whether the treatment is effective. Volunteers treated with the vaccine will eat foods with gluten while their immune and intestinal systems are examined.

“The therapy involves repeatedly injecting solutions of gluten at increasing concentrations. The aim is to desensitise the subjects slowly, in a similar way to hay fever and dust allergy desensitisation treatments.”

If this vaccine works, it will be the first time a person with celiac disease will be able to develop a tolerance to gluten.  Clearly it will be years before the results of these experiments could possibly affect anyone in the States.

Triumph Dining is on Twitter! (Actually, we’ve been there for about a month, but we wanted to work the kinks out before we told you.)  We’re closing in 100 tweets and 500 followers. Click below to see our twitter page and to join the conversation. Follow us to get the latest info on gluten free products, restaurants, and what we’re doing for fun.  And, let us know your Twitter ID, so we can follow you in return.

Here’s the link: www.twitter.com/TriumphDining

Most people never get to enjoy homemade cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven. A comforting scent warms the home before the doughy, sticky spirals land gooey and hot on your plate. These rolls are the ultimate in luxury breakfast foods, and gluten-free bloggers have been absolutely determined to share in that luxury. They have experimented and photographed and asked for suggestions. Then, triumphant, they have shared their successful recipes with everyone, making the world a sweeter place.  Here are some of our favorite suggestions for gluten free cinnamon rolls:

• Steve of I Hate Wheat worked with his mother on her Sweet Roll recipe. They used Jules Shepherd’s All Purpose Flour from Nearly Normal to make their gluten free cinnamon rolls.
• Gluten Free Steve has step by step pictures of his “sure fire, never miss” gluten free cinnamon rolls. They have white rice flour, potato starch, tapioca flour, baking powder, and xantham gum.
• The Gluten-Free Homemaker modified Roben Ryberg’s recipe (which everyone in the GF blogosphere is raving about) to make healthier gluten free cinnamon rolls (pictured above) for Christmas, and her family didn’t notice. She used sorghum flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, and xantham gum. To support Ryberg’s excellent work and find more GF recipes winning rave reviews, buy her cookbook, The Gluten Free Kitchen.
• Jay of The Gluten Free Post reports that if you don’t feel up to making cinnamon rolls entirely by yourself, the folks at Chebe make a mix. It contains tapioca flour and tapioca starch, and you add egg or egg substitute, oil, milk, gluten-free baking powder (optional), and unsweetened applesauce. The glaze is not included, but there is a recipe for it on their site with brown sugar, slivered almonds, and butter.

You can also find gluten-free cinnamon rolls, gluten-free muffins, and other gluten-free treats at bakeries like those listed in the Restaurant Guide. Which gluten free cinnamon rolls are you going to try?

Mike Eberhart wears many hats. He is the CEO of SureTalent Books; together with his wife he creates gorgeous GF dessert cookbooks; and he maintains a Gluten Free Blog, a Gluten Free Recipes Library, and a Gluten Free News Blog Roundup. On his blog you can find several detailed and useful GF product reviews, book reviews, cooking discussions, and mouthwatering recipes accompanied by artistic photographs. The Recipes Library contains a diverse array of appetizers, breakfasts, entrees, and sides, but I was especially impressed by 3 different waffle recipes I wanted to make immediately: Blueberry Buckwheat Teff Buttermilk, Banana Walnut, and Buttermilk Millet Flax. Mike also freely shares with us 5 different gluten-free cake recipes, the kind you wouldn’t be embarrassed to present on Valentine’s Day, and as a double bonus, some are casein-free.

All this activity already positions Mike as a leader in the online gluten-free community. Now he and his wife are taking a further and laudatory step: they are donating all the money they receive from sales of their GF dessert cookbook in 2009 (except for shipping charges) to food banks and homeless shelters. They are intelligently combining something they need to do (promoting their book) with something they want to do (helping the needy). And if you are one of the people hit hard by the economy and don’t feel that you can purchase a book at this time, Mike and his wife regularly post new GF recipes online on the Gluten Free Blog. These online recipes are not from their rigorously tested dessert cookbook but they seem quite tasty nonetheless.

This Thursday, March 26th at 6:30 p.m., you can attend a $20 cooking class at Buehler’s Fresh Foods in Wooster, Ohio. Call (330) 345-5908. The class, Living a Gluten Free Life, will be taught by Executive Chef J. Larkin and Ellen Homlong, a board certified diabetes instructor and Registered Dietician at the Samaritan Hospital in Ashland, Ohio.

Here you can read some of Chef Larkin’s recipes.

The address of Buehler’s Fresh Foods is 3540 Burbank Road, Wooster, OH 44691.

The Intestinal Health Institute is hosting its 4th annual “Get on a Mission of Nutrition” Family Camp. From June 28th to July 3rd at Camp Shaver in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, you can attend a camp with your entire family and not have to worry about special meal preparation. All meals will be organic and gluten-free, with dairy-free, soy-free, egg-free, and yeast-free options.

To get an idea of the sort of musical entertainment that your family might experience, check out A Trip Down Intestinal Lane, a 3-D animated video created by Dr. Kenny David Fine, “a Physician-Musician on a Mission.”

Also, your family will have the chance to experience archery, riflery, sports, a climbing wall, hikes, warm springs, swimming in the river, fishing, arts and crafts, and campfires. Housing is in cabins that hold up to 8 people, and restrooms are centrally located. This camp is free for children 4 and under, $250 for children ages 5 through 12, and $300 for everyone else.

For more information, call 972-686-6869 or visit the website.

It was just Purim in my household and that meant cookies—tons and tons of triangular, lekvar-filled cookies. To make lekvar, a Hungarian pastry filling, you just simmer 1 lb. prunes or apricots in juice of 1 lemon and water to cover. Mash it into a thick, lumpy paste, add brown sugar to taste, and run it quickly through the food processor to smooth it out. It’s also delicious on GF toast or biscuits. As you can tell, I’m a little bit obsessed at the moment, so I thought I would bring you along on my wavelength and share the best of the GF blogs: Cookie Recipes!

• From Karina, the Gluten-free Goddess herself, absolutely scrumptious-looking GFCF Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. She employs rice flour or sorghum flour, oat flour, potato or tapioca starch, vanilla rice protein powder, xantham gum, baking soda and baking powder, among other things.
• I Am Gluten Free shares another Jewish cookie recipe, Mandel Bread cookies. She uses Bob’s Red Mill all-purpose GF flour, xantham gum, and baking powder.
• Karen Joy of Only Sometimes Clever likes to make a humongous batch of Sugar Cookies for Christmas. She invented a flour mixture of amaranth flour, potato starch, sweet rice flour, brown rice flour, xantham gum, and baking powder.
• Gluten Free Mommy’s grandfather used to work for M&M Mars, and her family as a result loved to make M&M cookies. After adapting a recipe she found, Sour Cream M&M Cookies were born. They are egg-free and use Pamela’s Baking Mix.
• Aprovechar’s Thumbprint Cookies (pictured above) look like they would be amazing with lekvar! These are vegan and soy-free. She uses teff flour, ground pecans, and pecan butter. Mmmm.
• Gluten Free Gobsmacked graces us with her recipe for another pecan-heavy cookie, Mexican Wedding Cake Cookies. I love these with tea in the winter. And the summer. She uses a sifted mix of tapioca and sorghum flours plus xantham gum and cream cheese.

Thanks to Sure Foods Living for all the great updates! On June 1st, the new gluten-free versions of Corn Chex, Cinnamon Chex, Strawberry Chex and Honey Nut Chex will become officially available. The cereal boxes will be clearly and prominently marked as gluten-free. Rice Chex will not change on June 1st; it will remain gluten-free. General Mills knows which side its gluten-free bread is buttered on: it currently sponsors the Celiac Disease Foundation and the Celiac Sprue Association. If you wish to be more creative than simply pouring milk over your cereal and spooning it into your gullet, the General Mills Chex cereal website has a page devoted to recipes for gluten-free Chex products. See above a picture of the following recipe for Fruiti Sushi:

If you are allergic to soy, peanuts, or casein, check the new ingredient lists because some allergens may have been added.

So many people with celiac disease seem to have other food intolerances and allergies that I thought I should post this exciting news. At last week’s meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, two recent studies presented their findings that some children with peanut allergies can become progressively less allergic to peanuts under medical supervision. 3.3 million people in the U.S. have peanut or tree nut allergies, and nearly half of all U.S. deaths from food allergies are caused by peanuts, so this is a very big deal.

From the NYTimes article:

“The new treatment uses doses of peanuts that start as small as one-thousandth of a peanut and eventually increase to about 15 peanuts a day. In a pilot study at Duke University and Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, 33 children with documented peanut allergy have received the daily therapy, which is given as a powder sprinkled on food. Most of the children are tolerating the therapy without developing allergic reactions, and five stopped the treatment after two and a half years because they could now tolerate peanuts in their regular diet. But four children dropped out because they could not tolerate the treatment.

In a related study of just 18 children, the researchers gave the treatment to 12 children and a placebo powder to 6. After 10 months, the children were given a medically supervised test exposing them to peanuts. In the placebo group, the children developed symptoms after ingesting the equivalent of one and a half peanuts. In the treatment group, the children tolerated 15 peanuts without symptoms.”

All you need to know? Parents should not try this on their own. More studies are needed and this sort of treatment can only be done under close medical supervision because peanut allergies can be really dangerous. But an excellent beginning has been made!

Thanks to Gluten Free in Georgia and Florida for this link! The Gluten Intolerance Group of North America has published safety tips for staying gluten-free in a hospital. Print out about 20 copies of this guide, for you’ll want your family members and all your health care providers to have it.  Some of the excellent suggestions include:

• Request an allergy wristband
• Request a written physician’s order for a gluten-free diet, and make sure it labels you as having an “allergy”
• Bring survival basics from home

Included in this print-out packet are forms to give your Hospital Dietitian, the Pharmacist and Pharmacy Staff, the Nursing Staff, and Health Care Professionals.