Gluten-free Cooking for Kids

We celebrated Marc's birthday yesterday at The Crazy Bear in Stadhampton.  For those of you unfamiliar with this wonderful place, I urge you to visit.  They have two menus, English food and Thai food and if you sit out in the garden (as we did) you can enjoy both.  Do not be tempted to mess with their rather weird indoor policy, which stipulates that you can only have Thai food downstairs or English food upstairs. I always get very annoyed with stupid rules and can't quite understand what the problem is.  Anyway, I am digressing.  It was a beautiful sunny

Yesterday we visited the MacGregor clan whist they were staying at Manor Farm for a week. Manor Farm in Hampshire is part of an innovative idea for providing a sort of "camping for softies" for families on a working farm. 

We made a huge discovery yesterday in finding Fratellis on Cowley Road Oxford - a pizzeria that makes hand made GF and non GF pizza that tastes just like pizza in Italy! Not only that, but they serve GF pasta in all the sauces as well. Ruthie was so inspired that she ordered a GF Margherita AND a half portion of GF pasta with  tomatoes and herbs. 

I was recently invited to do a Q and A session at the UK's first ever Children's Food Festival with chef Raymond Blanc and food writer Sophie Grigson keanly supportive of the whole event.  It was one of those beautiful English summer days, in an idyliic setting near Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire. You can see from the thumbnail photo that Ruthie was my expert guide (sitting on the hay bails to my left and Lucia championing her sister from the audience.

We were recently holidaying on the Isle of WIght and were amazed by the number of people who were Coeliac, everyone from the lovely lady selling her homemade icecreams from a retro yellow ice cream van to the waitress in Lugleys, Cowes to the Chocolate shop lady to the barman in Saltys in Yarmouth. That's quite a lot of random people who were all fully upto date on the issues. Sauteed potatoes, fresh lobster and rocket and vine tomatoes were a huge hit for Ruthie as was the pure dairy ice creams (two a day).

So here we are on the eve of the glutenfree4kids website going live. My dream is for this website to become a living site with lots of useful and uptodate content for people to use in their daily lives.