One Year Blogiversary And An Invitation

Happy One Year Blogiversary to me and an invitation for you to pop on over here to see how the site make-over is coming along.

No recipe with this post, as most of my energy is towards this site make-over. I just finished some work on the Top Menu Bar. I’m happy to have my ‘General Baking | Substitutions’ and ‘Gluten Free Flours | A to Z’ laid out in an easier to view fashion. If you mouse over either of the titles, you will get drop down lists for various pages I’ve set up.

Under ‘General Baking | Substitutions’ there are substitution ideas for many ingredients commonly used in gluten free cooking and to help make this site as allergy-friendly as possible, I’ve included a list of substitution options to suit many food allergies.

Top Food Allergens

The top eight food allergens in the United States are, soy, milk, eggs, wheat (wish this said gluten…sigh), peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish. The top food allergens in Canada, include all the above plus sulphites and mustard. It may seem like a rather long list but with some research and a little imagination, you can find good substitutes for just about anything.

What is Gluten?

Gluten is the name for the storage proteins found in wheat, rye, barley, spelt and other closely related cereal grains. It acts as a binder and gives lovely structure to breads and baked goods. Some people are either sensitive to gluten, or have celiac disease which means they cannot digest gluten. These conditions are autoimmune responses that cause people to have a toxic reaction to the protein gluten.

Here are links to all the new pages, or if you’re reading this in an email, you can connect to the site, simply mouse over the titles in the Top Menu bar and select the title of the subpage you’re interested in.

General Baking | Substitutions

• Overview
• Measurements General Cooking Baking Terms
• Dairy Substitutions
• Fat Substitutions
• Egg Substitutions
• Nut Substitutions
• Miscellaneous Gluten Free Substitutions
• Gums – Guar and Xanthan
• Chia Seeds
• Flax Seed Meal
• Hemp Hearts

Under ‘Gluten Free Flours | A to Z’ you will find information about many Gluten Free Flours. I’ve also included storage and substitution ideas for those flours and hope to one day add information on the best places to buy different flours.

Alphabetical Listing of Gluten Free Flours plus Volume-Weight Conversions

The A to Z list of Gluten Free Flours may seem long and overwhelming but don’t be afraid to experiment with different ingredients. Through experimentation, you will discover your favourite starch and flour blends.

In my baking, I’ve really cut back on the starches and hardly ever use gums. I prefer to use psyllium husk for its binding properties and beneficial fibre. These days, my favourite (or should I say my gut’s favourite?) flours are coconut and almond.

Gluten Free Flours | A to Z

Getting Started

Before getting started, a few things to watch out for

Gluten Free Flours | A to L

• Almond Flour | Almond Meal
• Amaranth Flour
• Arrowroot Flour | Starch
• Buckwheat Flour
• Chestnut Flour
• Coconut Flour
• Corn Flour (Masa Harina) Cornmeal
• Cornstarch
• Fava Bean Flour
• Garbanzo (chickpea) Flour
• Garfava Flour
• Green Pea Flour and Split Pea Flour

Gluten Free Flours | M to Z

• Millet Flour
• Montina Flour
• Oat Flour (and Oats)
• Potato Flour | Potato Starch
• Quinoa Flour
• Rice Flours
• Romano Bean Flour
• Sorghum Flour
• Soy Flour
• Sweet Potato Flour
• Tapioca Flour | Starch
• Teff Flour
• Wild Rice Flour

All of the information linked here was available before my site overhaul but the pages were long and difficult to navigate, so I never really promoted them.

Overall, I would say this blog’s make-over has been going better than I anticipated. I did lose the ingredient lists on some of my earlier recipe posts but I have backup copies so I can retrieve the info and copy/paste it back in. I also have some picture resizing to do which hopefully will improve page load times and at sometime in the near future, I plan to redesign the logo and header.

I’m liking this new WordPress template so far…would love to hear what you think…