Sometimes you have to challenge just to make sure. So look on this as a challenge.
OUr good friend's daugter has coeliac. She was very upset when diagnosed - she walked along the supermarket aisles crying at all the food she could never eat again. Lucky for her, her mother is a great cook and has found some wonderful recipes that are gluten-free. The mum even made her daughter's wedding cake as a gluten-free chocolate cake. Fabulous! She 'auditioned' various recipes until she found one she was happy with. I helped taste the test recipes and got a preview of the winner (as well as got a piece of the wedding cake on the night!).
We eat a lot of Greek salad in our house, we've found we prefer the taste of authentic Greek fetta cheese made with either goat's milk or sheep milk. Also it is the current fashion trend in the boutique restaurants and bistros here in Australia, to use sheep cheese or goat cheese on pizza and in other recipes. Or even buffalo cheese! You can get small white cheeses similar to a mozzarella (like tiny cheeses the size of walnuts) and drop them on whole or halved. Sometimes they will crumble on easily.
Another suggestion for you to try if there is a yogurt they can tolerate - labda. It's also called yogurt cheese and costs a fortune to buy it yet it's so easy (and fun) to make. You just get plain yogurt (you can make your own) and drain it through coffee filters or cheesecloth. It then becomes firmer and not runny like yogurt. You can then either put it in a pot or roll it into balls and store in a jar in the fridge under olive oil. We bought some four years ago in a vineyard in Tasmania, they had two different types they had flavoured. One was flavoured with chili, the other with garlic and rosemary. Fabulous either as a nibbly thing before dinner or a party, spread onto cracker biscuits, or served on melba toast with salad on the side. If you Google "labda recipes" you should find some interesting stuff.
You could make it from a goats milk yogurt and use it as a substitute for cream cheese. I use cream cheese as a spread (instead of butter). It is lovely as a spread for cucumber sandwiches (English tea style). Flavour the labda with a little salt and some chopped dill, spread it onto the bread, add a layer of thinly sliced cucumber then a leaf of lettuce. For English tea, either roll the bread slices with a rolling pin first and remove the crusts, or use frozen bread and work quickly. Cut the sandwiches with a sharp knife and cut while the bread is still frozen (at least partly) so you cna make the cuts really clean and accurate; if you can, cut each sandwich into 4 suwares, then each small square into four again. These should make 16 tiny bite-sized crustless cucumber sandwiches for a classic English afternoon tea. Serve on a Royal Doulton platter with your choice of Twinings in bone china teacups.
Of course you don't have to use standard gluten bread - there are so many alternatives you can use that would work.
Marg
