Carol Fenster Offers New Gluten-Free Cookbook for Beginners
(PRWEB) December 09, 2013 -- Carol Fenster, well-known expert in gluten-free cooking, offers a new cookbook — Gluten-Free 101: The Essential Beginner’s Guide to Easy Gluten-Free Cooking (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) — that makes it easy for beginners to prepare their favorite gluten-free meals.
Fenster believes that living a gluten-free lifestyle can be fun, delicious, and easy. But it wasn’t always that way for her. Like other beginners, she was baffled by unfamiliar ingredients and new cooking techniques when she first adopted a gluten-free diet.
“Given my own experience, I recognized the need for a cookbook that makes it easy for beginners to make a simple and positive transition to cooking gluten-free meals,” says Fenster. So, her cookbook explains how to select and work with the best gluten-free foods from an extensive (and sometimes confusing) product shelf, how to continue eating healthfully, and how to master basic gluten-free cooking techniques, such as baking delicious breads or rolling gluten-free pizza dough—all with easy-to-follow instructions.
“One of the first things newly-diagnosed patients tell me is how much they miss their favorite foods such as pizza, bread, and pasta— and all-American desserts such as brownies, cakes, and cookies,” says Fenster. And they miss childhood favorites such as meatloaf, macaroni-and-cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, and comfort-food casseroles. So the book focuses on familiar dishes, but introduces time-saving, simple shortcuts and tips that are especially helpful to beginners.
For example, using Fenster’s “cold-oven start,” French baguettes bake in only 30 minutes. Pizza crusts can be baked ahead and frozen, ready for topping at a moment’s notice. She shows how to use time-saving appliances such as a slow cooker for beef stew and a food processor to blend cookie dough in seconds. She offers tips for handling sticky gluten-free bread dough and shaping gluten-free pie crust so breads and pies look perfect and taste delicious.
For baking, the book features a versatile sorghum-based flour blend as the base for Fenster’s easy, streamlined recipes. “Sorghum has actually been around for centuries and is a staple in Africa and India,” says Fenster. Sorghum flour is more nutritious than rice flour and is now easily available to consumers after being used in commercial foods such as breakfast cereals, energy bars, and cookies for several years. “It tastes somewhat like wheat, and has a pleasing texture that isn’t gritty like rice flour,” she says. And, “It makes fabulous Red Velvet Cupcakes,” she adds.
The book contains 175 recipes for everyday favorites with more than 25 beautiful photos to show how the finished dish looks, which is especially important to beginners and each recipe also offers nutrient content. Gluten-Free 101: The Essential Beginner’s Guide to Easy Gluten-Free Cooking is Fenster’s 11th cookbook and available for pre-order at Amazon.com. This book joins her award-winning cookbooks — 1,000 Gluten-Free Recipes and 100 Best Gluten-Free Recipes, both from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Carol Fenster, Savory Palate, Inc., http://www.SavoryPalate.com, +1 (303) 741-5408, [email protected]
Share this article