Going Gluten Free

Hello, my name is Katie, welcome to the Gluten Free Gosherts blog!

This blog will be where I (and randomly my husband) post reviews of all things gluten free that we interact with in our household.

With out any official diagnoses of disease/allergy, I have figured out that my youngest son and husband are unable to tolerate dairy or gluten.  Even items manufactured in a facility that contains wheat and milk will cause them pain and discomfort.  I first discovered this issue in April of 2010.  Almost six months later I am still trying new foods, making mistakes, researching new products, and discovering new possibilities.  While in the gluten free food aisles, I still find myself the recipient of sympathetic glances from those who have been doing this for years.

I have been cooking for my family for 7 years now and wheat and dairy were a vital component of most of my recipes.  After years of perfecting many recipes cooking them was second nature.  A little of this, a little of that, and voila!  But now, those same recipes at best take hours of reading fine print on labels and figuring out substitutions; and at worst are totally off limits.

So what inspired me to start this blog was my recent acquisition of three gluten free cook books.  As I flipped through them I noticed how different they were from one another.  One had recipes that I thought I would never cook; another had some I wanted to try as soon as possible.  All included ingredients that I had never heard of.  The thought of starting all over from scratch was and is still overwhelming.  So in an effort to motivate myself  to finally cook something for my family other than rice and beans or tacos, I am starting this blog.  Maybe one day I might even be able to call myself a gluten free chef, or at least a gluten free short order cook.

Each day I plan to cook a recipe from one of my gluten free cook books.  I will then rate each recipe in the following areas:
*Difficulty
*Time
*Price per serving
*On Hand Availability of Ingredients (*for purposes of this blog, this will be called the OHA)

In the future I also plan to write a review of each cook book after I have tried every recipe in it.  But that will be a little while from now, considering that these cook books have hundreds of recipes in them.

I hope this blog will be a helpful tool to those who come across it, and also be a helpful tool to me, as I navigate though this new world of gluten and dairy free.