Introduction
We are excited about this new gluten-free cookbook -- our second. Perhaps your family is already enjoying the recipes from our first gluten-free cookbook, 125 Best Gluten-Free Recipes. We had lots of fun working together (and eating together) on this project, even planning each day's recipe development schedule around lunch. On a typical day, we put a cake in the oven early in the morning, then put a salad dressing in the fridge, mixed muffin batter and simmered soup so all were hot and ready to eat for lunch at one. Our lucky husbands didn't hesitate to share their opinions at dinner.
We continue to bake with sorghum and bean flours, as we are so pleased with the results. Your emails and letters tell us you are sharing the foods you prepare from our baking chapters with the rest of the family. You will notice that we have introduced several new nutritious flours and grains in this book, now that the products are more readily available at grocery and health food stores or through mail order or the web. Quinoa and amaranth -- both the grains and the flours -- and buckwheat flakes are products that will increase the variety and nutritional value of your diet.
Once again, although you may find a specific combination of flours and starches repeated in several recipes, we have not developed recipes around a 'flour mix,' but have developed each on its own to give us the taste and baking qualities we desired. This means you'll need to have a greater variety of flours available in your kitchen, and you'll have two or three more measurements to make, but you tell us it is worth it. We have included three mixes to save you time. The muffin mix has five variations, the cookie mix has six and the pancake mix has four.
We have met so many terrific people as we take our cookbook to celiac conferences and chapter meetings in both the U.S. and Canada. Thank you for sharing your successes, your recipes and your suggestions for recipes with us. We have adapted several, which are in the book: Macaroni and Cheese, an energy bar, an oil-based pastry and 'quick and easy' dinner ideas, just to mention a few. We look forward to meeting you as we travel to introduce this cookbook and share our knowledge and experience at your support group meetings.
Some of our recipes have been inspired by meals we had at restaurants or while traveling. These include a Sticky Date Pudding with Toffee Sauce just like the sticky toffee pudding Donna tasted in a small village in Wales, and a Chocolate Lover's Hazelnut Surprise even better than the volcano cake with a runny chocolate center we shared in a chain restaurant. We have kept up with the latest information on gluten-free ingredients, gluten-free food products and food trends, and we're delighted to pass these tips on to you, along with the easy-to-prepare recipes.
We have tested recipes together for more than ten years, and we still enjoy every bite. As professional home economists, we look at every food from nutritional, food safety and quality angles. We can assure you that every recipe has been tested and tested and tested in our test kitchen. We even researched and purchased new pans, another heavy-duty mixer and several modern kitchen tools, as ours have seen many decades of use and abuse. What a good excuse to re-equip our kitchens!
Celiac friends and focus group members have evaluated the tastes, textures and carrying properties of the baked goods and have prepared the foods to make sure the recipe instructions made sense. We've put the same amount of care and time into this cookbook as we have with our other cookbooks.We hope you enjoy this collection of gluten-free recipes. Let us know how you and your family enjoy them. We created them just for you@.
Donna J. Washburn, PHEc and Heather L. Butt, PHEc
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