Our Gluten-Free blog is back and so is Miss Roben's!

I'm enjoying the cycle of the seasons now as I watch leaves skitter through the air and land in the multi-colored congregation on the deck outside my window.


At Gluten-Free Living we cycle through the year, too, following a pattern pinned to the production of four magazines annually. As we come close to finishing each issue, it becomes all consuming for myself, Ann, the editor and publisher, Kendall, the advertising manager, and Vicki, who proves herself to be the most committed designer each time we ask her to do the impossible with no time to spare.


We just put out our last issue of 2009, our first ever "Best Of" collection. We've culled all the articles that have drawn the most reader attention and updated them for you in one place. That's why we've been absent from this blog so much in the past few weeks. So we hope you are glad we're back. We know we are.


And speaking of glad they are back, I just heard from Glenn Molin, new owner of Miss Roben's/The Allergy Grocer who let me know that the company's new web site, http://www.allergygrocer.com/ is up and running.


You'll find a wide variety of products, including 62 Miss Roben's brand mixes. You can shop by allergen, checking off all those you have to avoid, and you'll get a list that meets all your needs. For example, we checked No to gluten, casein, corn and dairy and got a list of 180 items.


If you have celiac disease or gluten intolerance and other allergies and have been wondering what to do since Miss Roben's closed earlier this year, rebirth of the company will be welcome news.


Which brings us back to the cycle of the seasons, where each year we are lucky enough to see the splendor of fall lead to the brisk snap of winter, then the rebirth of spring and the warmth of summer.


At Gluten-Free Living each of these comes with a new magazine, our own way of marking off the calendar year. Our new "Best Of" issue will be mailed to subscribers in the coming weeks and will be available in December at bookstores nationwide.



Amy

A Rainy Friday in July

It’s 4:15pm on Friday and it is raining AGAIN. We have had a fairly gorgeous July, but we were supposed to go to a luau tonight on the beach for cocktails, BBQ and fireworks. So the rain out, coupled with the new dishwasher sitting in my living room to be installed on Monday because the old one went KA-PUT and the fact that I discovered my refrigerator leaking water this morning is making me exceedingly cranky.

However, today I was working on New for You, the section in our magazine that features new products to market for the gluten-free consumer and I’ve got to say that I am so pumped by what is new! Several times, as I read press releases, tasted samples or browsed through the websites, I found myself saying “that is a really cool idea.”

There are so many new things out there that we here at Gluten-Free Living have to break things down into new categories like—food, services, travel, books and more.

So since it is all hellfire and brimstone outside, maybe I’ll just sit on my computer and keep discovering new things in celiac-land. Come to think of it, it’s 5pm somewhere, maybe I’ll just crack open a bottle of gluten-free beer too. I have four different beers to choose from in my leaky fridge.

Kendall Egan

Gluten-free, cookie-dough ice cream, Part 2

Good news!
I found the gluten-free cookie-dough "ice cream" mentioned in my last blog when I went to my local supermarket.
Turtle Mountain's Purely Decadent cookie-dough flavor was right there in the frozen food case near all the other ice cream.
We had it for dessert that same day.
Amanda said she thought it was good. She never had ice cream with gluten-containing cookie dough so she couldn't compare the two. And she was a little perplexed as to exactly what the cookie dough was made of (the ingredients label says rice, potato and tapioca flours among other things).
Regardless, she thought the cookie-dough chunks were good and wished there were more of them in the ice cream. She said it's a flavor she would buy again, but it doesn't replace her favorite -- Ben and Jerry's Phish Food.
I also tasted it and thought it was a very good copy of the "regular" version. It was a little sweeter, but who can really quibble over sweetness when talking about cookie-dough ice cream!

Amy