Phil Vickery is a celebrity chef from the UK who has written a number of gluten free cookbooks. He is the food ambassador for Coeliac UK, so you can be sure these recipes will be safe for people with coeliac or gluten intolerances.Gluten-free Cooking for Kids is a great starter for families with kids with gluten allergies or intolerances.
I’m liking
There is a great range of recipes in this book, from first foods for baby’s to meals to teach your teenagers so they don’t live on chicken nuggets when they leave home. It has a wider variety of meals than most other GF cookbooks I’ve read with many that would particularly appeal to kids, like frozen fruit pops. A lot of GF recipes use lots of butter and sugar to make it taste ok, so I appreciated that Phil had a focus on healthier foods for children. All his meals are suitable for the whole family, which is great for busy cooks. For example, the baby purees can be used as side dishes for adults with just a small portion reserved and pureed for baby. He also has a great selection of homemade snacks, such as tortilla chips and plantain chips, which sound really interesting.
The recipes I have made have been delicious, and have stood up to critical review even from gluten eaters. These aren’t the sort of recipes where you feel you have to explain that it’s gluten free!
Things that made me go hmmmm
Some of the ingredients used made me go hmmm! Because the book is British, there are some ingredients we might be hard pressed to find. I haven’t read his other books, but I wondered if maybe they had recipes for some of the items needed in this book: GF teacakes, GF pitta bread, and pastry for example. If so, a note saying where these could be found would have been great, as I’ve never seen these things in shops.
Surprisingly, with his emphasis on healthy foods, I found his baking recipes quite sweet. I could easily reduce the sugar to 2/3 or even 1/2 and it was still plenty sweet enough for me.
A few of the recipes I thought were a bit unnecessary. Do you really need a recipe for pasta salad when the only difference is buying gluten free pasta? I would have liked to see a chapter that went along the lines of: you can make your usual recipes, just use gf pasta/pastry/bread etc and substitute the … for it’s gf alternative (eg tamari instead of soy sauce). That would have left more room for some of the things that are harder to make gluten free and that he does so well.
I liked the focus on snacks and lunchboxes, and would have loved a chapter on breakfast – what do you eat besides sugary gf cereal or cardboardy toast?
The conclusion
I’d recommend this for any families who are starting out on a gluten free lifestyle, or who will need to cater for some who is gluten free and wants a good range of meal ideas. It would be particularly good if you have gluten intolerances in the family and are wanting to be careful about introducing your baby to gluten.
