Gluten free recipes, gluten free soup, celiac diet

Looking for celiac recipes? Try some chinese soups.

A visitor called Steven commented that some of my chinese soup recipes are great for celiacs who practically must live on rice.

Another visitor, looking for gluten free recipes, commented that my website looks promising and suggested that I label some of my soup recipes as gluten free.

At that time I did not know that these 2 comments were related. But a suggestion from a visitor is valuable. So I started researching about what gluten-free and celiac mean.

And this is what I found ...

Gluten free food refer to food that do not contain gluten. According to Professor Peter Howdle, author of "Your guide to coeliac disease", gluten is "the protein in the wheat seed which provides amino acids for the growing plant, or for a human being when used as food. It provides much of the texture of flour when cooked."

Prof Howdle is Head of General Surgery, Medicine and Anaesthesia Unit and Consultant Gastroenterologist at St James's University Hospital in the UK. He is also a media consultant for coeliac disease and an advisor to the medical board of Coeliac UK.

He wrote that celiacs suffer from coeliac disease which is a medical condition caused by gluten in the diet. The symptoms can be quite serious. Celiacs cannot eat gluten because it can make them very sick.

Celiac disease is a permanent condition and can only be treated with a gluten free diet. From what I read, coeliac disease is not easy to diagnose and the symptoms can be misread as mere digestive complaints like heartburn, bloatedness, acid reflux and more.

Professor Howdle also mentioned that some people are not celiac but could be gluten intolerant. Symptoms are not as serious as celiac disease but health seems to improve when they switched to a gluten free diet.

The book contains a wealth of information about coeliac disease, especially its manifestation and treatment in the UK. Although it provides guidelines and tips for a gluten-free diet, it lacks gluten-free recipes.

The more I read about the symptoms and the encounters of celiacs, the more I feel for them. Seriously, it is not easy to avoid gluten. It seems to be everywhere and there is a dire of gluten free recipes.

During my research, I also came across a sort of celebrity in the gluten-free world. Her name is Shauna James Ahern and she is the author of Gluten-free girl: how I found the food that loves me back...& how you can, too.

When Shauna found out she has coeliac disease, she went gluten-free and started a blog to share her stories, photos of her food and recipes. Her book is a candid look at her gluten-free life. It included her life story, gluten-free recipes and tips about living gluten-free. It was a wonderful read even for people who do not have coeliac disease

For fun, I tried for a couple of days to avoid gluten in my diet and it was near impossible. I can see how important gluten free recipes are to celiacs and people who are gluten-intolerant.

Thus, I am quite happy to discover that the rice congee recipes I posted are celiac recipes (or coeliac recipes) except if soy sauce has been listed as an ingredient. I just found out myself that soy sauce contain gluten. However, that is easily resolved by substituting with salt or use a gluten free soy sauce.

Some of my other soup recipes are also gluten free recipes. I'll start to add the recipe links on this page. It may take a while as there are a lot of recipes and ingredient lists to look through.

In the meantime, you might want to take a look at the recipe index yourselves and determine which are gluten free recipes, especially if you are familiar with the gluten free diet.

I'm new to the celiac diet, so if you discover errors in my labeling (that is, some of my recipes I labeled as gluten-free contain ingredients that have gluten) let me know immediately so that I can make corrections.

Thanks and happy souping!