The Ultimate Gluten-Free Cookie Book

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coconut Macaroons, page 26

Thank you for your feedback on gluten-free foods; for wanting healthier, whole-grain flours; for demanding good taste; and for wanting foods that don’t stale in just one day. Thank you for pushing me to do better simply.

Thank you to the Boonsboro High School cross-country team for eating batch after batch of cookies; to friends who took cookies to bake sales to raise awareness of gluten sensitivity; to Crawford’s diner for testing and sharing my cookies with customers; to other friends and family for fearlessly testing again and again.

Thank you to Sara Boswell for sharing her expertise in food science; to Stacie Nitza, my fellow foodie; to Cassandra Gee for baking, editing, and playing cheerleader; to the gluten-free community, both online and in various states, for supporting my work; to the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland, Inc., for providing samples of their cookies so that I could test my “great fakes” side-by-side with their outstanding cookies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roben and I first met at a national
conference on gluten intolerance sponsored by GIG, the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America (
www.gluten.net
). Like everyone there, we shared a keen interest in everything gluten-free.

Roben has a passion for making gluten-free bread and baked goods. However, she isn’t satisfied with “good” alternatives. She demands that they are as close to the real thing as possible. In a recent conversation where she was describing the painstaking process that she went through to develop one particular cookie, I was impressed with her persistence and her patience. She spent hours coming up with just the right mix of ingredients and techniques to perfectly replicate a traditional cookie. And that was just one of the more than one hundred cookies in this book!

We also share an interest in the significant health benefits of being gluten-free. My passion is in helping people to discover their gluten intolerance. Too many people remain undiagnosed. And many people think that
gluten intolerance and celiac disease are essentially the same thing. But celiac disease only represents a fraction of those who are gluten intolerant.

Celiac disease is caused by an inability to digest gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, (cross-contaminated) oats, and barley. This condition affects about 1 percent of the population, or around 3 million people in the United States. These people develop damage in the small intestine called villous atrophy. However, there are millions more who are suffering from gluten intolerance who do not get this type of damage in the small intestine because it only represents one possible result of a gluten intolerance. These people often get overlooked or misdiagnosed, as do many people who have celiac disease. As a medical community doctors are still only in the early stages of properly recognizing this problem.