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Just had a great meal, and I'm as contented as a cat curled up behind the cooker
Oh. Doesn't yours do that? You probably have the wrong kind of cooker, I guess. Ours always used to squeeze into the gap between our Rayburn and the chimney wall. Only in the winter when it was on. We could never work out how she didn't get roasted. But she seemed to love it.
We had the Rayburn because my dad was a chef. Every day he would serve up some great feast, and it was expected that we would heap praise on him for every meal. But it wasn't hard, his food was that good, even on the rare occasions when it all went wrong.
I remember once, he picked up the Christmas turkey to put it on the serving plate and the whole lower half fell off - back into the roasting tin - leaving him with two carving forks holding the top half of the turkey! The language he came out with was classic, but the turkey still tasted brilliant, as usual.
Some manufacturers think "Any old garbage will do. Label it gluten free, they'll pay anything"
As you might guess, I'm pretty picky about food. When I found out I was gluten intolerant, like most people, I wondered what I could eat. Tried a lot of over-priced gluten free products and discovered most of them were just exploitative garbage.
Is that a good thing? Producing stuff that is virtually inedible, slapping a gluten free label and an enormous price tag on and expecting people to suck it up? I don't think so. And I reckon most people are like me and just won't put up with this attitude.
Cooking fundamentals — all gone!
When you first start out gluten free, it's a bit intimidating even for someone like me to start learning all over again how to cook. It's like the foundations have disappeared, and you have to start all over again from scratch.
I'm not exaggerating.
When I was a kid, my dad told me the most important thing for a chef to learn was how to make a sauce. You start with a roux. That's flour and butter.
Now that's gone. It's like "where do I start?"
"Start with what you can eat"
Only certain grains (wheat, rye, barley and a few others) contain gluten. Other food is naturally gluten free before it is processed. Gluten gets added during processing for lots of different reasons I won't go into here.
So I started building a collection of recipes for things I could eat without having to do anything fancy, or buy any special ingredients.
I couldn't use all my "old standards", because most of them had flour in. Some were ok, or only needed a tiny bit of adaptation, so I started with those, and got more adventurous as time went by.
I did some experimenting, and my daughter and I discovered how to make gluten free pancakes (crêpes) that are just great.
So, anyway, to cut a long story short — I ended up with 275 recipes for yummy food, from everyday stuff to celebration delights, and everything in between.
I eat well, gluten free, and I love what I eat.
Maybe other people would like this
There's no doubt that the easiest way to learn anything is to follow an expert. And according to Niels Bohr, the physicist, "An expert is a man [hmm...] who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field".
I've made a few! But now I'm back on top.
Watch out
The last few years I've been online trying to help people in the same situation, and I've seen recipes touted as "gluten free" that definitely aren't.
You have to be careful. Some things you wouldn't guess turn out to be off limits: soy sauce, sea food sticks, low fat yogurt, malt vinegar, and many other things.
Gluten Free-Easy
You could do worse than to start with my book, Gluten Free-Easy — easy recipes that are gluten-free, not taste free.
Easy? For sure. Gluten free? Definitely! Tasty? Absolutely.
I put all 275 recipes into an electronic book. To avoid "download bloat" there are no pictures — but what you want in a cook book is step by step instructions, not artfully contrived pictures (that rarely match what you end up with).
It comes with 5 bonus reports: Gluten Free-Easy Report: Hidden Gluten, Gluten Free-Easy Report: Gluten Substitution and my Quick-Cook Conversion Tables in case you want to use a recipe that you got from somewhere else. The other two bonuses were only
