This blog has a list of recipes, product and restaurant reviews. I love baking, and, when I had to give up work because I was so ill, the only thing I still felt able to do was bake. It is a pity that the reason I was ill is that the gluten was destroying my body, and here I was playing with wheat flour every day.
Within two weeks of giving up gluten completely I started feeling transformed. The first thing I noticed was that the black bags under my eyes were vanishing - these show in pictures of me as a toddler, but had lately become so dark that I wore navy eyeshadow to try to compensate! My joints started to recover. From not being able to squeeze toothpaste out of a tube unless I used my forearm to press it out as my grip was so poor I was able to get a canoeing certificate a couple of years later. My PMS and periods went from unbearable to minimal. My migraines vanished. I could sleep on a guest bed without having to pile duvets underneath me to try to stop the aches. I could wear clothes with a fixed waist rather than having to wear everything elasticated and baggy. My psoriasis almost vanished. My recurrent and chronic chest and sinus infections stopped.
I can't say I am as fit as I would like to be but I feel well. I enjoy my days and sleep at night. I haven't gone back to running a consultancy business, but I have had a go at running a food business, learning a lot in the process, and am focused on helping others eat well, reducing discrimination against people with food intolerances and raising awareness of the socially devastating effect these food intolerances can have when restaurants and catering staff continue to be ignorant and sometimes obnoxious about specific needs.
I want people to be able to eat well, share food with their friends, join in celebrations. Having a food intolerance can make people feel isolated and scared. It can lead them to believe that they can only eat foods labelled as 'free from' and not bake for themselves. The gf community seems to fall into two groups, those like me that experiment continuously and enjoy the challenge, and those who feel it is too scary to try.
The middle ground of home baking, filled by most people who are not gluten intolerant, is where people make a cake for a birthday, bake cookies with the kids on a rainy day, make an apple crumble for friends coming for a meal. It is my hope that with the recipes I develop and a good flour available in the stores, more people can feel able to feel confident in their skills and the ingredients.
