Seriously though, do you ever see someone sitting down to a meal in any of the soap operas, sit coms, reality TV etc saying they can’t eat wheat, or checking the meal is gluten free?

In Stargate SG1 did anyone have to risk offending the hospitality of an alien species by asking if it was gluten free?

It’s funny how some things jog your memory and get you reminiscing. My husband is keen to get rid of our Subaru because it’s a money pit. It wouldn’t be so bad if every time we paid for repairs at the local garage they actually fixed the problem, but they take our money, do half the job, and we have to pay again later on to get the repair repaired.

So I’m seriously thinking about getting another motorbike if we go down to just having the truck for motorised transport. Not having ridden for 6 years, and in the meantime having left the UK and settled in Canada I don’t have a bike licence anymore so I’ll have to do training and a re-test.

Anyway bear with me I’ll be getting to the point soon.

I was interested to see that Boston Pizza now offer gluten free pizza in all their restaurants. However, how do you really know that the prep of the pizza is still going to be gluten free?

Why do some food manufacturers make it so difficult to find out nutritional info?

I wanted to buy some chocolate the other day and the wrapper had no nutritional info on it, it simply read “for nutritional information visit our website”.

Montreal, Quebec now boasts a restaurant that many food allergy sufferers are enviously hoping will franchise to their neighbourhood.

Zero8 Resto-Bar provides world cuisine without the eight most common food allergens; fish and seafood, peanuts, nuts, sesame seeds, milk, soya, eggs, wheat or any grain containing gluten (barley, oat, rye and triticale).

Many of you have probably read my blog on just how great Calgary’s only gluten free restaurant, A Tasty Menu, is (read it again). So we were sad to find out recently that it’s for sale due to family circumstances.

It’s been a rare treat for local Albertans with wheat allergy or intolerance, or coeliac disease, to be able to go into a restaurant and choose absolutely anything from the menu, safe in the knowledge that every ingredient is wheat allergy/coeliac friendly.

Having allowed the wheat blog to languish for way too long something so heinous has persuaded me that it’s time to restart blogging the groans, moans and hassles of wheat free life.

This review refers to the pre-publication review copy.

As the creator of wheat-free.org and a super sensitive reactor to wheat I naturally own a very large collection of wheat free and gluten free cookbooks. Most of them follow the same format, a write up about wheat allergy or celiac disease, a list of basic what you can eat and what you can’t, then a selection of recipes.

This book is different.

Personally I think that it’s entirely correct to ban people with food allergies from joining up.

In many areas of deployment there simply aren’t the medical facilities available, or even appropriate foods for people with potentially life threatening food allergies.

We’ve just received a pre-publication copy of The Ice Dream Cookbook by Chef Rachel Albert-Matesz to review.

It’s a healthy sized book full of dairy free ice cream alternatives, gluten free cookies, compotes and sauces. Our initial reaction on a quick scan is “wow, this looks interesting”.

Watch this space for our review coming soon... now where did I put that ice cream maker...

I haven’t had real fries in 10 years... until now.

As you are all aware it's just too risky to have deep fried foods when you are allergic to wheat or have coeliac disease, because if anything containing wheat has been cooked in the same oil it's going to contaminate what you're eating.

So what changed after 10 years of my fries abstinence? Well recently I had the pleasure of eating at Calgary's only 100% gluten free restaurant, A Tasty Menu.

Another wheat free Thanksgiving arrives, and with it the stress and worries that people with wheat or gluten allergies have about eating out or at friends increases exponentially.

May and Flower who got their Presidential pardon yesterday will be happily gobbling away today, but for a lot of North Americans eating out, where they can’t control the wheat or gluten free nature of their meal, it’s not such a happy time.

With my husband currently undergoing very aggressive treatment for cancer I thought that the least I could do would be to do a run in aid of cancer research. So on September 16 I will be running 10km for The Terry Fox Foundation. This is a worldwide run and to date over $400 million dollars has been raised for a really amazing foundation. Read the story of Terry Fox and you can't fail to be amazed and touched, and this is what drives people to all turn out on the same day for a fun run yet with a vitally important purpose.

There seems to be a big thing now with TV advertising promoting the fact that some manufacturers are labelling their products, always junk foods though, as "peanut free". Peanuts are not the only food allergen in the world, though to see the marketing you'd think it was.

I realise that peanut free foods are useful, but there are loads of them about anyway, like fruit, vegetables etc. And making sugary snacks peanut free for school lunch bags is not only a perceived "safety" issue. It's also a gimmick.

IMPORTANT NOTE BEFORE YOU READ THIS BLOG: Please read this blog with a large dose of caution and DO NOT stop taking your medication. If you have a wheat allergy and are injecting blood thinner then DON'T STOP, it's vital that you continue with such an important treatment. Perhaps you might want to ask your doctor or pharmacist to investigate whether it has a wheat base if you are having some strange reactions. But NEVER NEVER STOP taking your medication unless you have discussed it fully first with your doctor, hospital or other registered health professional responsible for your care and they have given their approval.

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Medicines are an interesting issue in relation to wheat content. I've always been conscious of making sure that any medicines I buy over the counter don't contain wheat, but I've had a few problems with doctors prescribing medicines that contain "starch", even though they know I have a problem with wheat. The rule is "if it doesn't identify what type of starch it is, it's wheat".