Seasonal Gluten Free Treats
My Third Gluten Free Christmas
Jan
05
With my tasty dime bar cake
Chilli and nibbles
Christmas 2011 was my third one as a celiac ( how time has flown!). It was also my third completely gluten free Christmas. I’m extremely lucky that my family and friends are so understanding. They know what it means to live with celiac disease and how careful they must be when cooking for me. I had nothing to worry about where festive gluten free eating was concerned. I hope all of you had a fantastic gluten free christmas too whether it was your first or your 51st. (more…)
Avoid Gluten Free Christmas Pitfalls
Dec
23
Merry Christmas
We all have foods we can’t imagine going without on Christmas day but luckily for celiacs most of the traditional Christmas meal is naturally gluten free. This however does not mean that we can stop being careful. Making a gluten free christmas meal is simple but we still must be aware of hidden sources of gluten which could result in not such a merry christmas for our gluten free loved ones. (more…)
Gluten Free Pumpkin Rice Pudding
Dec
05
Creamy pumpkin rice pudding
We spent Thanksgiving this year at a friend’s house. It was a fun and relaxing day. The best part was the amazing gluten free rice pudding that Kelly made for us. It was sweet and creamy and the pumpkin gave it the perfect festive touch! I plan to steal her recipe and make lots of this stuff for my family over the Christmas period. For an alternative, substitute pumpkin for sweet potato! (more…)
Gluten Free Haggis
Jan
26
Rabbie Burns
It’s Burns night and you’re probably itching for a big plate of haggis, neeps and tatties, right?Possibly even with some whisky gravy and a can of Irn Bru just to make it really Scottish! So the question is…where can you find a gluten free haggis? (more…)
Gluten Free Christmas dinner (US style)
Jan
03
Blue Bunny Cinnamon ice cream
My tasty Christmas meal
This year I spent the festive season (and my second gluten free Christmas) with my boyfriend and his family in Iowa. Christmas Ham was on the menu for Christmas lunch and I was pretty excited about this. Cooked Ham isn’t really something we eat a lot of in the UK (and never at Christmas time) so the only thing I could picture was the delicious gammon steaks I used to get from the chippy when I was a kid. (more…)
Cadbury’s Creme Eggs Gluten Free
Mar
30
Creme Eggs
According to Cadbury’s website…yes they are and as you would expect the mini creme eggs are too!
If you’re wondering whether Creme Eggs in the US are gluten free you’ll want to check out Hershey’s as they are the ones who make Cadbury’s products in the US and therefore whether they are gluten free or not is up to them and their manufacturing processes.
Gluten Free Easter Eggs
Mar
28
Easter eggs
Thornton's Nutritional Info
Easter is fast approaching and chocolate eggs are everywhere to be found on UK supermarket shelves. The question is…which of these eggy delights are gluten free? For those of you unfamiliar with these easter eggs, the majority are a hollow egg along with your choice of chocolate bar. If you buy a Creme Egg, Twirl or Dairy Milk egg for example, expect to get a hollow cadbury’s chocolate egg and the cadbury’s chocolate bars of your choosing. (more…)
Gluten Free Christmas Day
Jan
06
Roast beef & sweet potato
Christmas 2009 was my first gluten free Christmas. Dinner was at my mum’s house with her husband, my brother and his wife and my boyfriend John. As my mum was in charge of preparing dinner she decided that everything would be gluten free. There was no point, she felt, in risking contamination and almost everything could be prepared gluten free anyway. I didn’t like the idea that anyone may be missing out on their favourite Christmas dinner treats because they wouldn’t be suitable for me but I soon realised that no one had any objections at all to staying 100 percent gluten free and were happy to eat whatever I could eat…safely.
On looking around a variety of different supermarkets on the lead up to Christmas it looked as though almost everything contained gluten. Anything prepacked at least. Most of the turkeys were basted with in many cases something glutenous or in others something which could be and lots of turkeys were stuffed with various flavours of stuffing that I would definitely not be able to eat. Luckily I don’t tend to be someone who buys prepacked foods anyway (especially when it comes to veg) and would much prefer something fresh to prepare myself rather than something already cut up and covered in glutenous sauce or gravy so it was fairly easy to stay away from these things. There were however, all those Christmassy nibbles that the festive season tends to bring. Things like mini sausages wrapped in bacon, breaded mozarella sticks and sausage rolls grinned their wheaty grins at me from the shelves and freezers of supermarkets and there was no way I could eat these.
For any Coeliacs out there who do love these kinds of festive nibbles, for most there will be either a gluten free alternative or something similar,which can be made gluten free by missing out certain ingredients and using others instead. In the case of mini sausages wrapped in bacon for example, most prepacked varieties I found did contain gluten but there are sausages and bacon out there that is safe for us so you just need to do a bit of research and prepare these things yourself if you really want them….personally I can quite easily live without them.
Candy sushi
My first gluten free Christmas dinner was home made tomato and lentil soup made with Bouillon stock, roast beef, cooked only in it’s own gluten free juices with roasted sweet potato, carrots and parsnips. We had M&S gluten free Christmas cake for dessert. I had also made lots of rice krispie and marshmallow, sushi shaped treats for snacking on with Kallo puffed rice cereal, Haribo marshmallows, Sainsbury’s fish shaped sweets and Humzingers fruit treats for sushi decoration. There was also lots of lots of tasty vino 
My first gluten free Christmas wasn’t a difficult one. We kept things simple. Everything was delicious and 100% safe for Coeliacs!
Gluten Free Thanksgiving Dinner
Nov
26
Gluten Free Thanksgiving dinner
Today is Thanksgiving (The American one) and I decided to surprise my boyfriend with a tasty Thanksgiving meal on his country’s special day…all gluten free off course! I bought some turkey breast fillets, which I cooked in the oven with mixed herbs, baby potatoes, gluten free stuffing and cranberry sauce.
I was yet to try gluten free stuffing so I bought Kelkin’s gluten free stuffing mix to try. I thought stuffing was basically breadcrumbs and some mixture of herbs and spices so I was pretty surprised when I opened the box of stuffing to find rice flakes! I eat Kelkin’s gluten free porridge for breakfast most mornings and I love it (especially with fruit and cinnamon) but I didn’t imagine that the stuffing I would be eating for Thanksgiving would be almost the same thing, expect with a variety of herbs and spices.
Cooking the stuffing involved putting 100 grams of it into a oven friendly dish, covering it with 660 mls of boiling water and leaving it to soak for 15 minutes. I then put it in the oven for 20 minutes. It looked like the porridge I have for breakfast and the consistency was just like the porridge I have for breakfast but it tasted pretty good…especially with spoonfuls of turkey and cranberry sauce!
My first gluten free Thanksgiving dinner was a success and my American loved it
Cadbury’s Roses
Nov
25
I was at a work meeting this morning and a colleague kindly gave me a cadbury’s rose chocolate to have with my tea. How strange, I thought, that this innocent gesture requires research into the gluten content of this tiny chocolate before I can eat it! So…I googled ‘Cadbury’s roses gluten free’ and came up with a couple of answers…
Coeliac UK provide a list of ‘gluten free’ cadbury’s products. This list was as of July 2009 so whilst things may have changed since then, this was only compiled 4 months ago and is their most recent list. This list says that Roses 150g, 220g, 400g, 700g and 975g are all gluten free as are the Roses mini carton, luxury collection, truffles selection and pouch. It appears that all Cadbury’s roses are safe!
This sounded too good to be true so I looked at cadbury’s own site. I first came across information from 2007 which lists some roses as ‘gluten free’ and others containing ‘trace amounts’. This also didn’t appear to be a complete list of all roses and as I wasn’t sure which chocolate I had been given I wanted more information. More googling and finally I found more up to date information from Cadbury’s …. http://www.cadbury.co.uk/home/Pages/home.aspx
If you click on ’Nutrition’ at the bottom of the page’ then search for ‘Gluten Absent(suitable for Coeliacs)’ you will get a list of products which are safe for us. I was happy to discover that the gluten free status of roses matches the Coeliac UK list…it looks as though Coeliacs can nibble away safely at Cadbury’s roses…in moderation of course 