Customer Reviews

The Autism Cookbook: 101 Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Recipes

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

First of all, I've been baking gluten/casein/egg free for almost 3 years now so I'm pretty familiar with the process. I'm always excited to try new recipes and usually consider cookbooks like this one a great starting off point for developing new recipes. I'm usually a pretty good judge of whether or not a GF recipe will even work before I try it so I generally read through a book like this one before getting started.

Within minutes of browsing this cookbook I found myself with questions. The two biggest ones- Did anyone bother to proofread this at all? and Why are the pictures next to each recipe obviously NOT real pictures of the completed recipe? For example, the yummy looking chicken nuggets pictured obviously have gluten in them. And a quick google search for "chicken nuggets and fries" reveals that this picture is simply a stock picture available for purchase.

Almost every recipe in this cookbook has glaring errors. The brownie recipe does not list any flour, but instructions say "combine flour, cocoa, baking powder" etc. Several recipes say things like "bake for 30 minutes" but give no temp in the instructions. The turkey turnovers say to cut dough into "2 inch squares" but later you are supposed to put filling on those squares, fold over, and crimp edges. Let me be the first to tell you, that isn't going to happen with a 2 inch square. After you suffer through that frustration you are supposed to bake your itty bitty turnovers for 20-30 minutes at an unspecified temperature. All this is assuming that you even managed to turn out a gluten-free dough using only one flour (buckwheat) and kneading it for 5 minutes (no, I didn't try it, but I can tell you what will happen if you do).

I did try the cocoa cookies as all the ingredients appeared to be listed and an oven temp was given. They were not inedible, but not great either. And they look quite different from the picture given.

Even with the bad instructions, I am most angered by the misleading pictures. Some of them look quite good and I'd like to know how to make them, but when a soup shows celery and rice in it, but neither appears on the ingredient list, I have to question why the picture is even there in the first place.

My son was terribly excited by the big cupcake on the cover, but I guess that's just there as an example of food in general, because there's no recipe for chocolate cupcakes in this book.

This cookbook is almost impossible to use, and the pictures are at best a let-down and at worst a fraud. Save your money!

I agree with a previous poster that this book must have not been proof read. For example~


Brownie Bites~ Does not call for flour of any kind in the ingredients list but does in the instructions.
Hamburger Pie~ Has no oven temp.
Maple-Glazed Chicken Legs~ Has no oven temp
Meatballs with sweet glaze~ Has no oven temp
Pumpkin Seed &Apple Stuffed Chicken ~ No oven temp
Sweet Potato fries~ has no oven temp
Cardamom Zucchini bread~has no oven temp
Chocolate Chip scones~No oven temp
Crusty Apple Cake~ No oven temp+ The instructions leave out a lot and are all over the place.
Deep Dish Apple or Peach Crisp~ Calls for cinnamon in the crumb topping in the instructions but not in the Ingrediants list.
Old Fashioned Shortbread cookies~No oven temp
Rocky trail mix bars~ No oven temp
Velvet Pudding~ Recipe does not match instructions or ingredients. It's a recipe for cupcakes not pudding.

Several of the pictures do not match the recipes either.

My son has autism and we've been GFCF for over 3 years. I am well educated in the area of nutrition for children with autism and am very good at creating new dishes and baked goods that fit the GFCF diet. I'm always excited to try new recipes but this book was a huge disappointment.

First of all, there are many typos, missing information such as oven temps or ingredients and there is even a recipe under the wrong title and picture. There appears to have been no editing done.

The pictures in the book are very clearly not pictures of the actual recipes. There is a picture of a cupcake with "blueberry" frosting that is supposed to have been coloured with fresh blueberries. But the picture is very obviously of frosting coloured with food dye, there is no way there is one blueberry in that frosting picture. And there is no way those Chocolate Chip Scones in the picture were made with buckwheat flour. The fact that the author is using gluten and dairy filled stock photos is very deceptive because what you create from the recipe won't even come to close to resembling the picture. It's offensive that she is deceiving parents into thinking their end product will look like the photos.

There are a few good recipes in the main dishes and side dishes but otherwise they're very disappointing. Not to mention there are many that aren't even close to healthy. Many recipes are very heavy on oil. 1/2 a cup of oil in a broccoli salad seems excessive. And 1 1/2 cups of oil in a cupcake recipe is ridiculous. I know cupcakes are a treat but that much oil is just wrong.

Ms. Delaine also uses agave in almost everything and as another poster pointed out, the benefits of agave are suspect. The other option she uses is evaporated cane juice. Although marginally better than regular sugar as far as processing goes, it's still sugar and it's expensive sugar at that. Why not use a good quality honey? It's still sugar but at least there are other health benefits to it.

I would not recommend this book to others and will be returning it. I'm beginning to wonder if the positive reviews are from Ms. Delaine's friends.

Excited by the beautiful cover, but the reality was sad. I agree with the reviewer who said the pictures don't look like the actual recipes! Also, why so much buckwheat flour, especially by itself? Tried 2 of the "baking" recipes with very bad results. The banana bread was a disaster. No matter how long I baked it, it refused to set up in the middle.

And why does she use so much Agave Nectar? I've read so many articles lately about the dangerous levels of fructose (higher than high fructose corn syrup!) and the stress on the liver to metabolize it. It causes mineral depletion, liver inflammation, hardening of the arteries, insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. It's actually a highly processed ingredient that should not be in the diet of a food-sensitive child!

I thought that such a beautiful book, published in 2010 nontheless, would have more integrity with the food itself. I did make the sausage recipe on page 2 with good results, but it only called for dark meat poultry, sage, apple, and molasses. How can you go wrong with that?

Basically, I'm not cooking out of it again because the ingredients are expensive. I don't have time to wonder if something is actually going to work. Ignore the pictures! They look nothing like the food in the actual recipe. I guess I'm kind of mad.

By the way, I am GF, CF, SF, but we do not avoid eggs.

Don't waste your money.

If I could have given this cookbook zero stars, I would have. Unfortunately, one was as low as I could go. I too have to wonder not only if anyone edited this cookbook for typos, but if anyone actually tried to make the recipes as listed before publishing. In the cookbook industry, recipes should be tested by several cooks in several kitchens as listed in the book to see if they even work. I highly doubt this was done.

I was drawn in by the beautiful pictures, only to notice upon flipping through that there is no way the finished product would look remotely close. We have been cooking GF for a while now and were anxious to try some new recipes. We started our cooking with the pancake recipe, which was nothing more than an inedible watery mess. I am completely unsure why the recipe would call for adding so much lukewarm water. I ended up pouring it all down the drain and going with a completely different GF recipe from another source. Then, my kids noticed the apple bread recipe and asked to make it. Knowing that the pancakes were a watery mess, I decided to cut back on some of the liquid she listed in the recipe. However, after 40-50 minutes in the oven (which seems to be added as an afterthought), the crust was completely burned, while the inside was, once again, a watery mess. Completely inedible. We are done with this cookbook and will be weary of anything put out by this "author" in the future.

Bottom line: FIND A DIFFERENT GF COOKBOOK!

I was very excited to try the recipes in this cookbook. I do not have autism but I have food intolerances and enjoy learning to bake with new gluten free/dairy free recipes. So far, every recipe in here has been a fail. One example is the Cardamom Zucchini bread. I had everything prepped and ready to go into the oven and...there was no oven temp listed! I guessed 400 degrees since that was what many of the recipes called for.
I made the Banana Bread this morning. The cookbook said to bake for 40-50 minutes. I checked the bread at 30 minutes and the top was burning! I waited by the oven while it continued to burn and finally took it out at 50 minutes. Since the top was a loss, I cut it off, only to discover that the rest of the "bread" was a soupy mess! I mean, totally soupy.
Dont waste your money on this one. Pick another cookbook!

I purchased this book a few months ago hoping to get some good ideas for some family friendly meals and desserts for my son who has a gluten allergy and was terribly disappointed. I will ask again the question from a previous reviewer - "did anyone even bother to proofread this book?!" We attempted to make the Simple Korean Stew tonight and the ingredient list calls for a peeled, cubed potato. NOWHERE in the cooking instructions does it tell you when or where to add the potato - it just disappeared! Maybe we had peel and cube it for practice? Also, the vanilla cupcakes were inedible. The book calls for 1 1/2 cups of oil and the cupcakes are balls of grease - how is that healthy for anyone? Perhaps with some serious tweaking these recipes may work, but I can't believe how carelessly this book was thrown together especially when you consider the population it is supposed to be serving. Just terrible - don't waste your money!

If you're looking for baked goods get the allergen free bakers handbook. I was so excited when I ordered the autism cookbook and the afore mentioned cookbook together. My son has autism and both he and my daughter have major food intollerances so I am always looking for good cookbooks. The Autism Cookbook has a lot of great pictures but they are not of the actual recipes! If your kids are like mine, they are aversive to the look of things like green or black stuff, all of the baked goods in this cookbook will be black because that is just how buckwheat flour is. I tried I have been cooking gluten free, casien free, soy free for 3 years now and baking with gluten free flours works best when incorporating at least 3 flours usually with a starch of some sort like tapioca or potato starch. I tried a couple of these recipes with buckwheat flour and they are a complete waste of time and money. A lot of the recipes are incomplete, not listing flour at all or listing it twice in some. The velvet pudding (raw) recipe is actually the cupcake recipe from the page before.

On the positive side, there are some good recipes in here, like the quinoa recipes. Those taste great! The rosemary potatoes are easy and taste wonderful. The grilled chicken skewers were good too! I would say that if you get this cookbook, don't use any of the recipes that have buckwheat flour. Most everything else we've tried has come out great and tasted good. And if you like using pictures for reference, pretend there aren't any in this cookbook because they are completely misleading. The resources as well as some of the info for autism are helpful.

I do not have an Autistic child, but I am gluten-intolerant and also avoid dairy. So when I saw this "Gluten Free, Casein Free" cookbook in my local library I was excited to try some new recipes. Unfortunately everything I tried to make out of this book either didn't work, looked nothing like the pictures or tasted BAD. There are recipes that have you mixing just one type of GF flour with water to make a dough, which anyone that has done any amount of GF baking knows does not work. Successful GF baking recipes require multiple types of flour mixes. Other recipes talk about "kneading" the dough, which is also something unnecessary in Gluten free baking--kneading is done to activate gluten and yeast, since none of the recipes have either gluten or yeast it's pointless to try to knead the dough. GF dough becomes stickier as you knead it, requires more GF flour and makes the end product heavy. Not only that, but several of the "recipes" were missing key instructions such as the temperature at which things needed to be baked. A few of the pictures are also very misleading, for instance there is a chicken pot pie recipe that shows a flaky crust under the filling, then when you look at the instructions there is no crust recipe at all! Instead you make a "crumb topping" to sprinkle on top of the filling. If you are already a great GFCF cook and like to look at pictures in cookbooks to just get ideas of what to make this might be okay, but if you need to follow actual recipe directions (which is usually important when making anything gluten free) and want to learn how make things that are edible SAVE YOUR MONEY!!

This is the first time I've ever seen a recipe book use stock photos for more than the occasional farmer's market scene or a bunch of radishes but for the actual recipes themselves. The tipoff was the first recipe I looked at, for frosting, and the pic shows a cupcake with bright blue frosting that looks like it may have been white frosting with blue airbrushed onto the cupcake. The recipe doesn't mention coloring at all and briefly mentions an option to add blueberries for flavor but anyone who's ever worked with blueberries knows there is no way on this earth that it could cause frosting to look sky blue like that. Then I flipped through the rest of the book and saw other pics that similarly just do not match the ingredients listed at all. How bizarre! I'm glad I only checked this out from the library and not actually bought it... It's great to have more gluten-free and dairy free books out there (and I loved seeing the raw vegan recipes), but please try again, author, and definitely commit to creating a high-quality product for your buyers.