If you're new here, and like what you read, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Have you remembered Mothers Day?

This Sunday, 14 March 2010, is Mothering Sunday here in the UK, and if you’re looking for a last minute gluten free present to send through the post, here’s a suggestion: Letter Box Chocolate.

Letter Box Chocolate will send a box of 16 gluten free Belgian chocolates in a letterbox-sized package with a personal message from you.

The chocolates are all gluten free, though they do contain nuts, milk and soya, and the varieties in the box are:

• milk chocolate and coffee
• dark chocolate and orange
• white chocolate and strawberry
• milk chocolate and praline

Look nice, don’t they?

The idea is that you order online: choose a design for the box, write a personal message, and the Letter Box team put the design, message and chocolates together and post it for you.

Now this seems like a good idea to me: nice and simple, a good range of box designs, the chance to personalise the message – and everyone likes chocolate. Plus: they’re gluten free, and since the box fits through the letter box, there’ll be no need to make a trip to the Post Office to collect a parcel.

The gift costs £8.99, with standard postage in the UK being an extra £1.00, but those of you who don’t live in the UK haven’t been forgotten – the postage will be more, and the delivery times longer, obviously, but you can still send chocolates… even if it isn’t Mothers Day where you live!

And, as a special offer to Free From readers, Letter Box Chocolates are offering a 20% discount:

I’ll be sending my youngest off for a week’s residential with school on Mother’s Day, so we’ll be up and out early – but chocolate might be just the thing to come back to once I’ve taken him off to the coach…

Once again we’re sending our coeliac daughter off to Girl Guide camp – this one just for the weekend.

As you might expect, the quartermaster is unflappable, and wasn’t at all fazed by the addition of a coeliac to the party at late notice.

We’ll send basics (bread, a pizza base, and some cake) and in this case also some gluten free soy sauce, because they’ll be cooking Chinese-style one evening, and will make her a gluten free version of her own.

It’s always reassuring to know that the person catering for your coeliac child has some knowledge of the issues involved. In this case the quartermaster’s father is coeliac. But first hand experience isn’t essential, and a little bit of preparation and (maybe) education is all that’s needed.

If you’re worried about sending your coeliac child away for camp or a school residential, here are my top tips:

• discuss the meal plan with the caterers if possible, and/or with the party leader. Don’t alarm them with visions of a life-threatening reaction, but don’t dismiss it either. it’s not a fad diet, and it’s not optional. Do consider sending the caterers details of the Coeliac UK guidelines for caterers if they sound unsure.
• send a letter with the details to the caterers/party leader. Feel free to download and edit this letter to schools.
• be prepared to send supplies with your child (and don’t forget the snacks-between-meals!)
• try to be calm and relaxed about it in front of your child. It’s natural to be concerned, especially if it’s their first trip away without your supervision. But you do want them to enjoy the trip, and catering details shouldn’t interfere with their fun!

Increasingly, I find, people are aware of the coeliac diet, but just sometimes they might like a little clarification, and the more you can help, the smoother the trip will go for everyone.

What do you eat when you’re feeling ’snacky’? Yes, there’s always the banana, the coeliac’s friend, but sometimes you just want something a little sweeter and stickier, and a little less fruity.

Some people swear by energy bars, but they often contain gluten – usually oats – and you may have decided to avoid them completely, just to be safe. We’ve recently been sent a couple of varieties of these snack-bar things that are gluten free to taste and review.*

Divine Foods sent us some Boomi and Prana Bar samples. Two different varieties (the Coconut Acai Prana bar – 220 calories – and the Apricot Cashew Boomi bar – 190 calories), and we all tried each of them. They are quite sweet and chewy, because of the dates and raisins; the ones we had were amaranth-based, instead of oat-based, which was interesting.

Predictably, we had two wildly divergent views: some people loved one, and some the other. No agreement here – typical!

Goodness Direct sent a box of goodies, including some Eat Natural bars. We tried the ones with brazils, hazelnuts and sultanas, and the comments were ‘tasty.. interesting… big dry chunks of nuts… would eat this again’. Note that though the ones we tried used puffed rice as a base, some Eat Natural bars are oat-based, and so are NOT gluten free.

Overall? I won’t be buying either on a regular basis (not that Boomi/Prana are available over here), though I can see that the Eat Natural bars are a handy stop-gap if we’re out somewhere and need food in a hurry – they’re widely available here in the UK, in train stations, supermarkets and corner shops. The downside to these energy bars that I see is that there’s a lot of calories in a small space. There’s a reason why they’re called ‘energy bars’…

We’re probably not the ideal tasters for this kind of product, as it isn’t something that we’d buy as a rule. But perhaps you are? What snack-bars have you tried recently, that tasted good, and filled that ’snacky’ need?

Me, I’m still sold on the Graze scheme, where they send a regular box of snacks chosen from nuts, seeds, raisins, fruit, olives … I like the surprise element, and receiving a parcel each week. Really, though, I need one a day, because the snack box doesn’t last long enough – or else I’m just greedy…

* Disclosure: we were sent free samples.