Who Ate All The Kedgeree?
This board in the Fox pub on Paul Street by Old Street Tube station tells a tale.
Who Ate All The Kedgeree?
But who ate all the very nice kedgeree?
I did. And very nice it was too!
A Big Hole
This isn’t typical, but I did find this hole in a slice of Genius gluten-free bread.
A Big Hole
It was nice bread though.
The Only Four Fishcake Recipes You’ll Ever Need
I’m pointing to these recipes on the Times web site, so that I don’t have to keep the paper.
You’ll have to be a subscriber like me to read them. Three of the four recipes are gluten free and one would be if you had gluten-free breadcrumbs.
Coeliacs With West African Roots
One of the big differences about London, after coming back to live after forty years, is that now everybody tends to talk to each other a lot more. A black lady and myself had a big laugh about it, after we’d walked up the road talking about our ailments and remarking that twenty years before we’d have been on opposite sides of the road.
One thing that has surprised me is the number of coeliacs, I’ve come across with West African roots. I have written about the chef in my local pub from Sierra Leone, who is a coeliac, but several times, I’ve been asked in the supermarket about the gluten-free food in my basket, by shop staff and others, who are coeliac and have some roots in West Africa.
If it was just once or twice, I’d put it down to a random chance, but it is more common than that! Remember though that gluten has little part in the traditional West African diet, which is based on sorghum.
Hopefully the diagnosis of Michael Obiora; the actor, who was born to Nigerian parents, with coeliac disease, will help spread awareness of the disease.
Hospital Food
I’ve had a bit of that in the last few years and as a coeliac, it’s general been rather poor.
But perhaps I was lucky compared to the lady with coeliac disease in this story. This is an extract.
When she was in hospital a few years ago, she was shocked by the food she was served.
“I was offered toast, but I can’t eat that. I need gluten-free bread. They didn’t have the porridge oats which I can eat, so I ended up with a boiled egg.”
And the subsequent meals did not improve either, despite the fact Kathleen had confirmed she was coeliac when she was first admitted.
“Lunch was fish fingers, which I couldn’t eat because of the breadcrumbs. They asked me why I couldn’t just pick them off.
“At dinner time they put gravy on my dinner and a Yorkshire pudding on the plate too. Because of the contamination risk, I couldn’t eat any of it.”
A friend, who used to work in a hospital always said that the most likely place to get ill, is a hospital.
Carluccio’s Winter Warmer
It was a bit damp and cold in Brighton yesterday and it made me get back on the soup.
Carluccio’s Winter Warmer
Their minestrone soup is gluten-free, if you have oatcakes instead of bread and really warms you up.
It’s almost a complete lunch in itself.
Problems
Looking at the weather over the last few days, I suspect that coeliac disease and my stroke are small problems compared to what some are enduring.
At least I’m snug in a newish warm house in Central London, with buses everywhere. I’ve even got a cafe opposite and a pub next door.
I also think of the problems I don’t have, like a car, a smart phone, and wondering where my money is coming from.
Problems are relative!
A Thought About Coeliac Disease
After reading yet again, about a coeliac in hospital, where they really weren’t too professional about what he could eat, I’ve had this thought.
Is coeliac disease the most common disease, that can be cured by diet alone?
To take this further, am I right to think, that this fact gets up the average medic’s craw, as it means the disease can’t be cured by the two most common treatment methods; drugs or surgery?
Does A Gluten-Free Diet Help Your Hair?
My last hairdresser always said that my hair grew very fast and in fact for a sixty-five-year-old man, I have a pretty good head of hair.
But what got me thinking was that yesterday The Times showed a list of the best dressed older people. What stood out was their compliments for Katherine, the Duchess of Kent. They said of her that potentially she has the best hair in the Royal Family (including Kate Middleton’s, yes).
And she is 79! It is well-known that she is a coeliac, so it can be assumed that like me she sticks to her gluten-free diet.
I posted this on a coeliac list on the Internet and others said that there could be a connection from personal experience.
Over the past forty years, I’ve had a lot to do with flat race jockeys.
Obviously, to keep their weight down, they eat frugally and the typical gluten-rich snacks, beloved of the general population, are probably never eaten. I remember one meal with Michael Roberts, where he ate baked salmon and peas, followed by some fruit.
But you’ll rarely find a flat race jockey, without a full head of hair! And many are riding well into their forties. The best hair on the current crop of top jockeys must be on Hayley Turner. But then she’s a woman. And a coeliac!
And then we could look at people like Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and others, whose diet is mainly rice-based. They generally seem to my untrained eye to have better hair as they get older, than the average Caucasian.
I do wonder if there is a serious link here. It probably isn’t to coeliac disease, but the diet may be the key. After all, Nottingham University have shown that coeliacs, who stick to the gluten-free diet, have a twenty-five percent less chance of getting cancer. Why this is, no-one knows, but it could just be that a healthy diet, which looks after your gut, gets the maximum amount of good vitamins and minerals into your body.
The Anonymous Widower 