Monthly Archives: January 2008

Allergy Alert: Morrison’s chicken fillets with bacon and mushroom

I’ve received this alert today:

Morrison’s is recalling its own brand chicken fillets with creamy bacon and mushroom sauce due to undeclared gluten in the allergen advisory box. Due to a labelling error, wheat flour is listed as an ingredient, but not declared in the allergen advisory box.

This alert applies to:

Product name: Morrisons Chicken Fillets with Creamy Bacon & Mushroom Sauce, 380g
Date code: all date codes

Advice: if you’ve bought this in error, don’t eat it, and take it back to the shop. For more information, you can visit the Food Standards Agency.

Just for fun: gluten free knitting

I’ve been bumbling along, reading gluten free blogs, following up links … and gradually realised that I was visiting a lot of knitting blogs. Very interesting. What on earth could the connection be?

knittingNow, I know that knitting blogs are about as big on the web as Facebook (well, they would be if you added them together) so I thought I’d list some gluten free knitting bloggers here, just for fun.

I used to knit, taught by my mother, but found after a few years (OK, decades!) that it just made my hands ache. I haven’t even successfully handed on the skill to my children yet – so perhaps I’d better get on with it before it’s too late, and too many more decades go by.

In no particular order, your list of gluten free knitters for today is:

Coeliac UK is still recruiting …

… a different post this time. That’s three in not very long. I wonder if they have a retention issue, or if the charity is expanding hugely?

This one is for a Deputy Head of Diet and Health, and is worth about £35,000 per year.

It sounds interesting:

“you will contribute to the development of the Charity’s strategy, and provide information on the gluten-free diet and coeliac disease to the public, our members and other healthcare professionals. You will also manage a number of information and research projects.

In addition, you will represent Coeliac UK to various organisations and develop new relationships for the Charity.

An understanding of the health and/or food sectors as well as an ability to interpret scientific research and data is essential.”

If you fancy that, you can find out more at the Coeliac UK website.

The stripper, her nurse’s uniform and coeliac disease

An extraordinary plotline for a UK hospital soap today, announced in The Sun:

Hayley Tamaddon is … stripper Alison who goes to hospital as she is stuck in her skin-tight PVC nurse’s uniform.

An ITV1 spokeswoman said: “Alison’s stomach has swollen mid-act so she’s stuck in her costume! Then she is diagnosed with Coeliac Disease and needs a bowel biopsy.

“But Alison doesn’t want her expensive outfit cut off until her husband – who doesn’t know she’s a stripper – arrives on the scene! But he’s got a secret too!”

Nice to have exposure for coeliac disease, but this seems a most unlikely route to diagnosis to me. For most people it takes months – usually years – to get a diagnosis. I’ve never heard of anyone diagnosed in A&E before. Yes, I do know this is made-up, but it would be nice if it was a bit more realistic. More likely, the stripper would be wasting away gradually – so, skinny arms and legs, bloated belly, bad skin and look terribly tired – and keep having to leave the stage in a hurry to get to the bathroom …

Anybody out there who had to have their clothes cut off for an emergency diagnosis of coeliac disease? (And a ‘bowel biopsy’?)

Another option for gluten free breakfast

We’re still on the hunt for a more interesting gluten free breakfast for my coeliac daughter …

I’ve found another new product (new to me, anyway): Kelkin gluten free porridge, which I found in Tesco. This is an Irish product -which reminds me, an Irish coeliac friend who lives in our small village said that when she was visiting there over Christmas, she found the best gluten free bread she’d ever had – must find out what it was!

Kelkin porridgeThis is a mix of rice and millet flakes, and I can’t help feeling that there must be a typo on the packaging … it said to use 50g of the flakes to 220ml of liquid. When my daughter showed me, I thought that this seemed like a lot of liquid, and I was right – but of course, one tends to trust the packet, and I thought perhaps rice and millet behaved in a different way than oats do. When it had been cooked for the specified time, the flakes had expanded and softened, but there was still a huge amount of liquid unabsorbed. It looked nothing like the picture on the pack, and rather more like a bowl of milk with some flakes floating in it.

We tried again this morning, using the usual proportions I would use for making porridge: 1/2 cup of flakes to 3/4 cup of liquid. This was a lot better – looked more like porridge – but was still oddly liquid.

She tried it with golden syrup this morning, and only managed about half the bowl before deciding she was too full to finish. So that was a […]