Family recipes can bring back great memories, comfort sickness, carry tradition and reunite loved ones across the miles. They are magical. When your body rebels and you find yourself or your child unable to tolerate a given ingredient, the annoyance of missing out on something like gluten is compounded that much more when it’s Aunt Susie’s Pot Pie.
Over at the Udi’s Gluten Free Community, a thread on gluten free comfort foods has really opened my eyes to the wide range of foods available, even when you are gluten free. Soups and stews, vegetables and salads are all among the naturally gluten free options. So, if you or a family member find yourselves avoiding gluten, don’t despair- you can probably convert your family recipes to be gluten free more easily than you realize.
Consider Pre-Packaged Gluten Free Mixes and Replacements
Especially if you are new to gluten free cooking or unfamiliar with it, your best bet could be to find something in a package. Pre-made bread for that stuffing, muffins for cake pops. There are plenty of mixes out there, too, for everything from pancakes to brownies to general baking mixes. Be sure you have the right mix for the situation, though. Gluten free cooking requires certain elements to actually work, and if the mix isn’t up to the challenge, your recipe won’t hold up, either.
Borrow From Tried and True Gluten Free Recipes
Believe me, gluten free baking can be super intimidating. It’s more than just switching out flours. The people who make these recipes know what they are doing. There is no need to try to start from scratch when converting a cake recipe to be gluten free. You can find a wealth of gluten free blogs and websites online that probably have a similar recipe already. Take that as your base, and then add Gramma’s secret seasoning trick to it.
If All Else Fails – Eliminate the Gluten Rather than Replace It
There are so many great foods out there that are naturally gluten free. Anything in your garden is more than safe, for example. Take a step back and see how that recipe might turn out if you just eliminated the gluten factor. Lettuce wraps instead of burritos come to mind. The sky’s the limit, and the closer you get to foods in their natural state, the more likely you are to find gluten free options.
Family recipes are often nostalgic because of their flavors, smells, and memories. Those things can’t be quantified or replaced, but they don’t have to be lost, either. You can take the gluten free recipes and products already out there and modify them to have the familiar flavors that you have grown to love. What a great gift it would make to modify family recipes for a loved one who is gluten free!
How have you modified family recipes to accommodate an allergy or intolerance? What is your biggest struggle when modifying a recipe? Swing by the Udi’s Community – you might find the help you are looking for!
Love you tips and find them helpful as a celiac. I just started a blog about gluten /allergen free living.