Durham's Gluten Free Network

  Photo by Nicolas Postiglioni from Pexels  Isn't it strange when you read an article from another country and it makes the same points you've been making for (in my case) decades about the safety of a food processing technique...  and it treats those points as if they are perfectly obvious?  Yet when I made those same points when I was younger, the general response was that I was inexperienced and paranoid.  Funny how the worm turns. It's surreal for me to read the article below from the Guardian (a UK news service) and find my words spoken back to me.     https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/14/uk-us-brexit-trade-deal-could-fill-supermarkets-with-cancer-risk-bacon To make a long story short, if bacon or cured meat mentions nitrites or celery, it probably irritates the gut, and people with gut disease should probably be careful not to buy such food.  Other options do exist.  More every day.    Natural bacon is...

  Photo: Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka CC-SA 4.0    Have you ever heard of Ragi ?  It's a type of millet. It's gluten free and very nutritious.  It's widely available and loved, but sort of niche.  The English word for it is Finger Millet. This cute little plant manages to provide a wonderful thickener, baby food, whole grain, and can be made into flatbreads, cookies, almost anything you could want from a  flour.  It can be hidden in other recipes for a boost of nutrition, just swap it for some of the rice flour or tapioca flour.  It behaves a lot like tapioca flour except it's closer to the farm, and less processed.   One of the first pieces of advice you get if you're reading up on it is, "toast (the flour) before use" and I think this is good advice.  There is a bit of a wild, slightly acrid aftertaste if you just use it straight from the bag.  The taste can be masked by strong flavors like chocolate, but toasting the flour bring...