Monthly Archives: April 2008

Gluten Free School Trips

You may remember my discussing the need to explain to school about the requirements of the gluten free diet, to make it easier for my daughter to go on school trips – or other trips without me.

I thought I’d provide the letter that I sent before her most recent school trip, in case it is useful to anyone else. I wanted to explain to school not only what she could and couldn’t eat, but also what the likely effects would be.

Do feel free to download, cut and paste and generally reuse for your own purposes, but bear in mind that this was written for the UK, so you might need to double-check some of the detail.

Letter explaining what a coeliac can eat

I’ve stripped out her name and our contact details, for obvious reasons.

By |April 30th, 2008|Gluten Free Child, Living Gluten Free|6 Comments
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Upgraded …

… I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5.1. Please let me know if you see anything unusual going on!

Thanks

Lucy

By |April 26th, 2008|Living Gluten Free|0 Comments
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The perfect recipe for gluten free waffles?

Sorry: this isn’t it, but I know one of you out there has it …

wafflesOnce again, I spent 20 minutes scouring the kitchen to find the tiny scrap of paper that came with our waffle-maker 10 years ago, because coeliac daughter decided she fancied waffles this morning.

It happens every time – this piece of paper enjoys playing hide-and-seek. So I’m documenting the recipe here, for my own benefit, really (you have no idea how many times I’ve had to print off the recipe for chocolate brownie from my own site).

My preferred ready-made gluten free flour mix here in the UK is the Wellfoods version. No doubt you’ll have your own preferred blend – perhaps even specially for waffles – and I’d be really interested to know what blend you use for waffles. The problem I have is that although the waffles puff up nicely while hot, they deflate sadly once they start to cool. I’m sure the ones my mother used to make when I was small (using non-gluten-free flour and a proper heat-on-the-hob American waffle iron, imported by her from the days when we lived in America) didn’t do this.

What am I doing wrong?

I wonder if its the electric waffle iron, not the flour mix or the recipe?

Recipe

6 oz plain flour
2 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsps sugar
2 eggs (separated)
8 fl.oz milk
3 oz melted butter

Method

Combine the dry ingredients.

Mix the egg yolks and milk, then add the melted butter. Beat well, and then add to the dry ingredients. Beat again.

Whisk the egg whites, and fold into the other ingredients.

Add dollops to the wafflemaker and cook until golden brown.

Eat with proper maple […]

By |April 19th, 2008|Living Gluten Free, Recipes|8 Comments
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Hello, this is the BBC

microphoneIf you were quick, and just happened to be listening to BBC Three Counties at 11:55 last Friday, you would have heard me on the radio, talking about coeliac disease and prescriptions.

The thing that is most exciting for me about this (apart from the phone call saying ‘hello, this is the BBC here’, which will probably never happen again) is that they found this blog via a Google search. I was just thrilled by this – imagine, the BBC searching the net and ending up here?

I was talking about how likely it is that the NHS will have to abandon its policy of providing gluten free food on prescription.

The reason for this is, I think, that if 1 in 100 people in the UK do turn out to be coeliac, and if over 80% of prescriptions are provided free of charge (as they are – read more about getting your prescriptions for free or at a reduced rate), then this will prove to be prohibitively expensive for the NHS.

Yes, I know that the reason for providing the basics of a gluten free diet on prescription is an attempt to ensure that people comply with the gluten free diet, reducing the likely expenditure for the NHS in the future if people go off-diet and develop health issues (which you would). But with the increasing availability of a variety of flours, as well as of purpose-made gluten free goods, in the supermarket, I think the NHS might reasonably argue that a gluten free diet could be achieved without too much extra expense.

How much is too much more expense? Well, I heard an estimate that (allegedly) came from Coeliac […]

By |April 15th, 2008|Living Gluten Free|10 Comments
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Blog Naked Day – sorry, forgot to warn you all!

This is Blog Naked Day!

Well, not quite – its CSS Naked Day, the day when the CSS files (that’s the stuff that makes blogs look pretty) can be ‘hidden’ so that only the pure HTML is visible.

The idea is that by removing the make-it-look-pretty code, we are recognising the hard work of the designer that made it look pretty in the first place.

I completely forgot that I’d set this up to happen today, and was only reminded by Richard at the Gluten Free Network, who was alarmed by the new look of my blog, and contacted me to tell me it looks horrid.

Sorry … I should have said something to warn you. It should all be back to normal tomorrow. If it isn’t, please let me know!

By |April 9th, 2008|Living Gluten Free|1 Comment
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