Following from the success of the three day course I delivered in March at the Edinburgh School of Food & Wine, we’re planning a more comprehensive series of specialist courses.

See the smart new section on the main site for details.

I’ve got an article in this month’s Foods Matter magazine. I particularly like the picture of the kittens on the front:

Awww……

My article is on the tricky topic of making decent gluten-free bread. For any of you who have experience of this, the phrase “decent gluten-free bread” is about as close to the perfect oxymoron that you are going to get. My recipe - I hope you will agree - changes that.

Foods Matter don’t publish full articles on the web, but Alisa Fleming has picked this up and has reprinted it with their permission: see it variously at Go Dairy Free and Just Baking.

The irrepressible Lucy at the Free From blog gives an invaluable and exhaustive list of gluten free Easter Eggs.There is great consternation that Cadbury’s Mini Eggs are no longer gluten-free. From our perspective, these have never been on the list as we need our Easter Eggs to be more dairy-free than gluten-free.Obviously, there is such a thing as a plain chocolate Easter Egg, but they tend not to view children as their “target market”. Our staple solution has been the Lindt Gold Bunny, which they have historically done in both milk and plain chocolate. For those who tend their lenten abstinence - and subsequent fall from grace - seriously, there is even a 1kg version.

 One of the key topics covered in the book is how to cope with food allergies when you are out and about generally and particularly when you are eating out at restaurants. It struck me when I was writing this section that it would help enormously if the catering industry were more aware of these issues and possibly even trained to deal with them.

Although, in our experience, most restaurant staff are generally very accommodating when given simple solutions to the problems posed, it can’t be a bad thing to have staff trained up so that they aren’t reliant on the savviness of their punters.

With this in mind, I’ve teamed up with the Edinburgh School of Food and Wine to deliver a three day specialist course as part of their diploma course. I’ll be covering as much of the Part II stuff on substitution techniques and methods as I can in the time, with the primary focus being on Wheat/Gluten and Egg, as these are the most complex both in terms of their roles in food and the changes to methods needed. There’ll be a primer in substituting for dairy, soy and nuts as well.

If you are interested in this course, you know where to find me.

It all seems rather a long time ago now: this article for Waitrose Food Illustrated was submitted in November. It was a slightly peculiar time of year to be eating Spring Lamb and Vegetable Pie, but needs must.

In general we rather like WFI, not least because it was this magazine that ran the survey that listed the Techniques Bible amongst its top 10 timelessly indepensible cookbooks, but there is just one little fly in the ointment…

The Good News: the editors have put this article as the main item on the cover:

The bad news: It’s always tricky to get everything you want to say into the space you have available, and there was one section that didn’t make the cut - the difference between “wheat-free” and “gluten-free”.

Here’s the section from the draft:

It is worth noting that intolerance to wheat is not the same as intolerance to gluten. People who are intolerant to wheat are usually sensitive to the protein gluten, present in wheat but are not affected by similar binding proteins found in barley, rye and oats. People intolerant to gluten must avoid it entirely, whether it comes from wheat or from grains closely related to it – for example rye, barley and oats – and have to rely on gluten free flour alternatives for cooking and baking.