Bridget Morton - A Curious Cook: Life Beyond the Free From Aisle

So, you have been diagnosed with coeliac disease and everything is awful and dreadful and life isnt fair. Well, yes. And then again, no. Alright, youre fed up that you have to check every label very carefully unlike your non-coeliac friends and family who reach so carelessly for that lovely sourdough loaf (okay, that bit really isnt fair). But you now have an opportunity to explore culinary highways and byways you would not otherwise have gone down. A whole new world of lovely food awaits you. No, its not the same food, but it is just as delicious.

If you are excluding gluten from your diet because you think it makes you feel better but dont have any sort of diagnosis, please do seek medical advice. It may just be masking another condition which should be treated.

You can over-complicate cooking. Freshly foraged larks breath served on a bed of pretension, which takes twenty chefs using tweezers to assemble, is all very fine and large for expensive and exclusive restaurants, but mere mortals want food that is nourishing, comforting, and above all enjoyable to prepare and to eat. When I was first diagnosed with coeliac disease I was determined that I wasnt going to be exiled to the supermarket free from aisle, full of unappetising packages of expensive food which looks and tastes like cardboard. To misquote that well known philosopher and bon viveur Crocodile Dundee, you can eat it (just about) but you wouldnt want to live on it.

I bought a couple of recipe books. They encouraged me to buy a plethora of flours and use them in a rainbow of combinations, and none of it quite worked. Maybe it was because the writers were not coeliacs. They dont have to cook and eat these recipes on a daily or weekly basis, and indeed store twelve different kinds of flour in their kitchen. Time to simplify. After a little experimentation I settled on using four flours: brown rice, chickpea, polenta and tapioca. Theres a lot you can do with these simple ingredients.

I would encourage you to use local independent shops where you can. You build up a relationship with the shop owners. They will often order things specifically for you or, if you buy something in bulk quantities, reduce the price. The wonderful Il Principe on the Cowley Road where we buy Barilla gluten free pasta (the best brand I have come across) knocks 10% off when we order a whole box at a time. Thats ten to twelve packets depending on the type of pasta. You need somewhere to store it of course, but if you can, it makes it more affordable.

It is actually quite hard to produce inedible cooking, even if you make a mistake, unless that mistake is adding 200 g of salt to a cake mix thinking that its sugar. Most mistakes teach you something, like not to make them again, but also about flavour and texture. I think what I am saying is, as Douglas Adams put it in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, dont panic. If you dont like a particular ingredient, or cant get hold of it, substitute something else. Try doing the same dish but using a different vegetable, or pulse or fruit. There is no right and wrong unless you are doing classic French cooking, and we most definitely are not. Cooking should be fun, almost as much fun as eating.

I am not a vegetarian. So why are you writing a vegetarian cookbook I hear you ask. Good question. I was a vegetarian for about fifteen years. This was not because I think eating meat is wrong. We are omnivores. I see nothing morally problematic in eating meat as long as we do it ethically: good husbandry, eat meat in moderation, nose to tail eating. I became a vegetarian in the wake of the food scandals of the 1980s. You may well be too young to remember this, and many of those who were there at the time forget. It wasnt just Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). It was the revelation that farmers were routinely adding growth promoters, including antibiotics, to animal feed. It was also the time of the domination of food shopping by big supermarkets, often out of town, and labelling was in its infancy. I had no idea what was in the meat I was buying, so I stopped buying it and became a vegetarian. Being in my early twenties when this happened meant that my formative years as a cook were also as a vegetarian. It is still my comfort zone. I do cook with meat but it tends to be in a supporting role to vegetables and pulses. I like meat, but I really cant eat a lot of it.

The second reason for writing a vegetarian cookbook is that I think if you are a meat eating coeliac, whilst there are problems, you can relatively easily construct a meat and two veg meal avoiding gluten. If you are a vegetarian it is more problematic. Pastry dishes are a problem and also many recipes for what I will cautiously call burgers, include breadcrumbs. Fear not, there are alternatives.

Veganism is becoming very popular, and many of these recipes contain no dairy or egg. These are labelled with the code (Vg). Others could be adapted to suit vegans by substituting one or more ingredients with suitable alternatives. If you are a vegan who has recently been diagnosed with coeliac disease, or a coeliac who is considering becoming vegan, I would urge you to seek advice from a dietician or GP to ensure you are getting all the nutrients you need.

My partner Roy is a scientist by training so we live in a fully metricated house. Well, almost. We have a set of imperial weights, as well as the metric ones, which came with the second hand set of scales from the local market. Most measuring jugs come with both metric and imperial measures. But its always helpful to have a ready reckoner.

Whilst researching conversion tables I discovered that they are not exact. In order to avoid having silly fractions in the measurements, they are approximate. It is important therefore that when following a recipe you do not mix metric and imperial measurements, but stick to one or the other.