Gluten-Free Pasta with Broccoli, Feta and Puttanesca
This recipe is a modified version of one from Waitrose.
I basically changed the pasta for Doves Farm gluten free penne and doubled the quantity, so it served four. It fact, I miscounted as there were five and a half for dinner, but it stretched OK with the addition of a salad.
The ingredients were.
- 100g feta, cubed
- 300g of Doves Farm gluten free penne pasta
- 400g purple sprouting broccoli, cut into short lengths. I actually used broccoli florets cut into small pieces, as I bought the wrong sort. But you can use cauliflowers as well. Perhaps try them mixed.
- 180g jar Waitrose Cooks’ Ingredients Puttanesca Mix
- 50g pine nuts, toasted
- Grated zest of lemon
The method was as follows.
- I cooked the pasta according to the instructions on the packet in a large saucepan, until it was just tender. It was then drained and kept in the pan.
- The broccoli was cooked at the same time. But don’t stew it.
- Add the broccoli, feta, puttanesca mix, pine nuts and lemon zest to the pasta. Toss all together thoroughly and serve on warmed serving plates. I did cook it for perhaps a minute on the low hob of the AGA.
As I said earlier, I served it with a green salad.
I was the only coeliac at the table, but no-one complained about the pasta. So perhaps, gluten-free pasta isn’t always that bad.
I do think though, that of all gluten-free penne works best. After all Carluccio’s serve this type on their gluten-free menu. I think too, that it worked extremely well with the broccoli in this recipe.
Covent Garden Risotto
I bought one a Covent Garden Risotto in Waitrose last week. They seem to be gluten-free.
I had it for lunch today.
Covent Garden Risotto
It tasted one hell of a lot better, than it looked. I’ll try one of the other varieties next time.
Eat Breakfast, Lose Weight
I had my B12 injection on Friday. The nurse took my blood pressure and it was 120/70, which I’m told is good for a man of my age. This chart says that I’m in the right area. But she also said that I looked thin and when she weighed me, I had lost a couple of kilos since August.
Strangely, I am not eating less, but I have changed what I eat. I used to skip breakfast and now I usually eat the same mixture of gluten-free Eat Natural for Breakfast, with yoghurt and two teaspoonfuls of clear honey. I prefer the raisins, almonds, mixed seeds and crispy rice version of Eat Natural.
Eat Natural for Breakfast
Perhaps what they say is right. Eat breakfast and you lose weight. I may be snacking less.
Manor House Inn, Carterway Heads
The other great advantage of the A68 is that it is not a main road and inhabited by crap, boring service areas. There are good pubs everywhere.
I was driving the road around lunchtime and a sign informed me a pub called the Manor House Inn, was coming up. The sign said good food and real ales and as many coeliacs and other allergy sufferers will tell you, real ale pubs are often sympathetic to special diets.
I entered and looked at the special menu on the wall.
Specials Menu, Manor House Inn
I liked the look of the seared venison. I asked the landlord, Neil Oxley, whether it was gluten-free and he said he’d ask the chef. The reply was that the chef would make it so. The pub also had some proper, Weston’s cider. Not as good as my local Aspall, but very safe for coeliacs.
It was one of the best pub lunches I’d had outside of places I know very well in a long time. A lot of coeliacs like their vegetables and I had a choice of five; potatoes, carrots, swede, cabbage and broccoli. All were excellent, as was the venison.
I asked the landlord’s wife, Emma, if everything was local and she said yes.
This is what good pub food should be about. I shall go back again, the next time I’m in the area.
The pub is also a good excuse to burn up the A68. I might even stay there, as the pub has rooms for the night.
Manor House Inn, Carterway Heads
Peebles Hydro
On Sunday, I went for lunch with my friends at Peebles Hydro.
Everything on the menu that was gluten-free was marked as such. All restaurants should follow their example. about half the menu was gluten-free, so I had a lot of choice.
In the end I had melon followed by pork medallions. It was delicious and if you need to a gluten-free meal, then it is definitely a place to try.
They are part of McMillan Hotels. I don’t know if the same policy applies across their five hotels.
Rick Stein
Over the New Year, I went to Rick Stein‘s restaurant in Padstow.
It was expensive, but it was certainly worth it.
Their policy on gluten-free is very simple. They mark up the menu with what is gluten free.
Rick Stein's Gluten Free Menu
Note the detail. They have both normal and gluten-free soy sauce. So they are very prepared for trouble-makers like me.
Although we didn’t try any puddings, there was a good selection for coeliacs too.
The Puddings
Next time I’m in Padstow, I’ll go again. After all it costs a lot to get to Cornwall, so why shouldn’t you indulge.
Cadbury
I’m sad that that iconic British company, Cadbury, is being sold to the Americans.
There are two main reasons and both are selfish.
I buy a lot of Green and Black‘s chocolate because I know it’s provenance and can trust that what they say on the packet. I really don’t trust Kraft to keep the standards of this brand and hope that someone buys it from them.
But the main reason is that Cadbury are very correct about which products are gluten-free and it is just a quick check on the web site. In fact over the last few years, more products have gone that way. Can I trust Kraft, from the country of gluten-in-everything to not put the evil maltodextrin in everything to save money?
I doubt it.
So yet again, coeliacs may well have less and less chance to buy something sensible to eat on the move.
Dr. Chris Steele
Dr. Chris Steele is a TV doctor. I’ll admit I’d never heard of him before, as he’s on ITV and I try not to watch any program with adverts.
But he has now been diagnosed with coeliac disease as the Daily Mail reports.
I’ve tried to put a comment on the web site, but I can’t seem to get registered. So I’ll post it here for now.
Dr. Steele’s case is typical. For some reason, doctors miss diagnosing coeliac disease all of the time. I know of a GP with coeliac children, whose husband family have coeliac history, who missed her own coeliac disease. So it is not easy to get right.
In my case, I was not diagnosed until 55, seven years ago. My symptoms were joint pains, chronic dandruff, extreme tiredness, gall stones, migraines, depression, wind, diarrhoea, mood swings etc. etc. But if you trace my family tree and those who probably had coeliac disease, you will notice that no women in the family have had any children. Could it be that the low B12 levels associated with coeliac disease, mean that it is difficult to conceive or carry a baby to full term?
As to eating out, Dr. Steele should try Italy. Just say you are a coeliachai and you get gluten-free pasta in many restaurants. We should follow the Italians and treat the disease very seriously, as how much does the misdiagnosis cost the NHS.
I very pleased of this for two reasons.
- Every celebrity who is diagnosed with coeliac disease helps publicise the disease.
- His experience shows that when you have been diagnosed the cure is simple and you get better pretty quickly.
So my advice would be if you think you have any of the symptoms of coeliac disease, try a gluten-free diet. It might not work, but it wouldn’t do you any harm.
Musings on Gluten-Free Pasta
As a coeliac, I can’t have normal pasta, but there are some fairly good gluten-free ones around.
I do get Dr. Schar‘s pasta on free on prescription (I’m 62, so age does have some advantages!), but I’m not that good at cooking it, so it tends to be a bit hard. As I’ve now got the hang of cooking rice, in either the quick Uncle Ben form or the more traditional one, I tend to avoid cooking pasta.
However, I have got a liking for Carluccio’s the gluten-free pasta on their menu that is suitable for coeliacs. Just click the link on the page indicated. I had some of the Giardiniera today in their caffe in St. Pancras Station and it was excellent. I just wish that they would change the gluten-free menu more often and also do some liver too!
But hey, the pasta is always worth waiting for, even if it takes a few minutes more. Does that explain my hard pasta?
The interesting thing though is that Carluccio’s seem to do only one type of gluten-free pasta with different sauces. And that is penne!
Could it be that gluten-free pasta comes better in the thicker varieties?
Recently, I’ve tried cooking some of the Doves Farm gluten-free penne and that was a lot better. Also a friend has cooked me one her special lasagna using Dr. Schar‘s pasta and that was better than excellent.
I’m no cook and I wonder if anybody has any ideas.
Keeping Your Brain Healthy
Look at any list of symptoms for coeliac disease and you’ll find a lot of them are concerned with brain or mental problems.
- Mild Depression
- Feelings of Inadequacy
- Gait Ataxia/Apraxia
- Lightheadness and Fainting
- Migraine or Persistent Headaches
- Mood Swings
- Sleep Disturbance
I used to suffer from most of these except for sleep disturbance.
Once I went on a gluten-free diet all of these symptoms cleared up. Now I know that I am a special case in that I’m a coeliac, but once the B12 levels were back up to normal, all of the symptoms disappeared. Research at Oxford University has indicated that higher B12 levels may help brain health.
It would be interesting to repeat their experiments with coeliacs. When a hospital diagnoses a coeliac, they should immediately undergo the tests before starting a gluten-free diet. And then they should be tested at intervals after starting the diet. My body actually reacted quite quickly in that my dandruff cleared up after about two weeks.
Now I know several people who have MS. One has sent me a link to an article about a new treatment for the disease called The Liberation Treatment. Here are the first couple of paragraphs.
Amid the centuries-old castles of the ancient city of Ferrara is a doctor who has come upon an entirely new idea about how to treat multiple sclerosis, one that may profoundly change the lives of patients.
Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a former vascular surgeon and professor at the University of Ferrara in northern Italy, began asking questions about the debilitating condition a decade ago, when his wife Elena, now 51, was diagnosed with MS.
He found that in some patients, the blood flow to the head was restricted and by improving this using standard surgical procedures, their health improved. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the article.
One of those patients was Buffalo resident Kevin Lipp. Lipp had MS for over a decade, and as part of the study, discovered he had five blocked veins in his neck. After undergoing the Liberation Treatment 10 months ago, he says he hasn’t had a single new MS attack.
Zamboni emphasizes that the Liberation Treatment does not make people in wheelchairs walk again. Rather, it seems to stop the development of further MS attacks, and in some cases, improves movement and decreases the debilitating fatigue that are the hallmarks of MS.
It may not cure MS, but it is all very interesting.
I tend to look on the body, as an engineer would look on a machine or a car. Machines don’t work well if they don’t have all of the things they need like fuel, electric power, oil, water and all the other necessities.
Is the body any different to my car in that respect?
And now today, it has been reported that those who develop Alzheimer’s are less likely to get cancer.
This would appear to push things in another direction, as research at Nottingham University has shown that coeliacs are less likely to get breast cancer. Diagnosed coeliacs have on the whole healthy brains because they eat well, so this research might show the opposite.
We need to do a lot more research to find all of these links.
The Anonymous Widower 