{"id":332,"date":"2007-11-19T19:17:09","date_gmt":"2007-11-19T18:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/?p=332"},"modified":"2017-05-20T12:19:33","modified_gmt":"2017-05-20T11:19:33","slug":"review-lets-eat-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/review-lets-eat-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Let&#8217;s Eat Out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src='http:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-content\/letseatout.jpg' alt='Let\u2019s Eat Out!' vspace=\"10px\" hspace=\"10px\" align=\"right\"\/>A few weeks ago, I received a copy of <em>Let&#8217;s Eat Out! Your Passport to Living Gluten and Allergy Free<\/em>, together with some pocket-sized books from the same series intended to go out and about with you.  The idea was that I should review these for you &#8211; and I was thrilled to receive the pack.  It&#8217;s glossy, well-produced and has deservedly been nominated for many awards (and won lots!).<\/p>\n<p>I have been intending to review these.  I have, honestly!  But I have found it extremely difficult to know what to say.<\/p>\n<p>Not because I don&#8217;t think this is an extraordinary piece of research, or a very valuable asset to eating out, because I do.  This is clearly a very detailed inventory of cuisines, with some very helpful advice on what to think about before eating out &#8211; and what questions to ask.  <\/p>\n<p>And I know that many people find it difficult to eat out, because they lack confidence in the restaurateurs, and don&#8217;t want to be ill &#8211; understandably!  So I think this may prove to be a huge help to a great many people.<\/p>\n<p>So why am I struggling to review it?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Partly, possibly, simply because there is just so much material, so densely packed.  This book deals with 10 different allergens, most of which aren&#8217;t relevant to my family (though will clearly be relevant to somebody else), and so identifying which paragraphs are appropriate is a bit of a chore.\n<li>\nPartly, perhaps, because the countries I&#8217;m interested in haven&#8217;t yet been included.  Not surprisingly, Let&#8217;s Eat Out have focused on the most familiar cuisines.  I would have too!  But I&#8217;d like to see sections on eating Greek and Turkish, and I&#8217;m very interested in eating gluten free in Finland at the moment (because my coeliac daughter really does want to go to Finland) &#8211; so there&#8217;s lots of scope for expansion!   <\/li>\n<li>\nAnd, of course, much of the advice in each section is similar to those in other sections, (such as discussion of stocks, sauces, cooking oil and coatings) and so there is a degree of repetition.  But as the authors point out, this book is not to be read cover to cover, but dipped into at need &#8211; so these things do need to be repeated in each section.  Just in case you only ever read the section on Italian cooking, say.  And it doesn&#8217;t hurt to have these things reiterated &#8230; It is easy, sometimes, to forget that what is very familiar to me may be brand new information to someone who&#8217;s only just been diagnosed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One way that this company could resolve this would be to enable a pick and mix approach, so that people could create their own allergy-pack by picking and choosing elements to be incorporated into their personalised book.  That way, if you couldn&#8217;t eat gluten or dairy, you could have just the relevant pages; if you couldn&#8217;t eat eggs or dairy, you&#8217;d have a different set; and if you just wanted pages relevant to nut allergies, that&#8217;s all you&#8217;d get.  If you only wanted to know about eating gluten free in a Thai restaurant, that&#8217;s all you&#8217;d buy, but if you wanted to know about eating dairy free in French, Italian and Indian restaurants, you&#8217;d buy a different set.  (See my very recent post on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/?p=330\">creating your own cookbook<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>The parts of the main book that I&#8217;d like to point out as particularly useful are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the section on ingredient and preparation techniques, broken down by allergen, and explaining why, for instance, you should be careful about mashed potato in North America<\/li>\n<li>the sections on breakfast, and on snacks &#8211; with a wide range of options listed under each<\/li>\n<li>the section on allergy-free drinks<\/li>\n<li>the appendices &#8211; books, websites for support groups by country, websites for allergy-free shopping, by country<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And I like the small handbooks &#8211; though a guide to pronunciation might have been helpful. <\/p>\n<p>I found the quick reference charts unhelpful, as so many of the items &#8216;could&#8217; contain gluten that looking at the list was quite demoralising &#8211; and weakened the authority of the book.  How could orange juice or mineral water contain gluten?  Also, of course, these things vary from country to country: pork sausages in the UK will almost certainly contain gluten in the form of breadcrumb or rusk (you have to look quite hard to find those that don&#8217;t) while in France the butcher will probably look at you in horror at the very thought of bulking out his sausages with this kind of filler. <\/p>\n<p>Overall, though, this series is just astonishing in the depth of information available.  And if I were taking a holiday in, say, Italy, I&#8217;d definitely pack the multi-lingual phrase passport.  I&#8217;m really looking forward to seeing the expansion of this series into a wider range of national cuisines.<\/p>\n<p>Have you bought this?  I know its been out for at least a year now, because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/?p=64\">I commented on it back in October 06<\/a>, so chances are you&#8217;ve seen it &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago, I received a copy of Let&#8217;s Eat Out! Your Passport to Living Gluten and Allergy Free, together with some pocket-sized books from the same series intended to go out and about with you. The idea was that I should review these for you &#8211; and I was thrilled to receive the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-332","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-read-gluten-free","7":"category-living-gluten-free","8":"entry","9":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free-from.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}