When I first started eating gluten-free, I was very frustrated to be able to find nothing that talked about eating gluten-free but still whole.  All of the gluten-free recipes I could find, and all of the gluten-free cookbooks I could find include lots of processed foods and white starches.  At best, recipes generally use 2/3 flour – the other 1/3 is always some form of white starch (potato starch, cornstarch, tapioca starch, etc.)  I felt like I was being given the option to either be unhealthy one way or to be unhealthy another way.  I didn’t want to trade in my whole wheat for potato starch!

I finally gave up on finding anything that included what I wanted, and just started substituting rice flour for wheat flour in my regular recipes.  When things worked, I wrote them down.  When they didn’t, I tweaked them.  Eventually, I included my recipes in one of my Kindle books* (Whole and Gluten-Free).  Ironically, in the process of looking up my book to check on it, I discovered a gluten-free whole foods cookbook!

Found one!

I’m not sure how I didn’t find this before, because I have two of Kim’s earlier books.  Everyday Gluten-Free uses all whole foods – no junk.  It also happens to be vegan (thus dairy-free and egg-free) and soy-free, and many recipes are free of oats and corn.  This does not attempt to be an all-purpose cookbook; rather, it focuses on breads and such that are not typically gluten-free.  (If you want dinner recipes, for instance, you’ll have to look elsewhere.)

I appreciate that Kim’s philosophy on gluten-free breads seems to be like mine.  I don’t necessarily need a “bread substitute” that tries to imitate whole wheat yeast bread.  When you try that, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops and add all kinds of weird things to try to get a similar texture.  All I really need is something I can spread peanut butter on!  Kim seems to agree, emphasizing pancakes and similar breads in her book so she can stick with wholesome ingredients.

I do not advocate a vegan diet, long-term – I don’t believe it’s healthy – however, it’s very easy to add eggs and milk to a vegan recipe if you like, while it’s harder to adjust things the other way around.  (And you can certainly incorporate your animals foods in other ways if you want to, like using these breads for toast to go with your eggs at breakfast.)

My only disappointment with this book is its size.  Because I already have Everyday Wholesome Eating and Everyday Wholesome Eating…in the Raw, I expected this to be similar.  It’s actually less than half as thick as those books.  (The page numbers are listed, so they didn’t trick me or anything.  I just didn’t pay attention to the numbers.)  However, all of the books are apparently (mostly) gluten-free, so if I’d realized beforehand (which I didn’t, because I wasn’t gluten-free when I first got those books), I would have known that I could cook anything from those, and that multiplies the number of recipes available.

*Did you know that you can read a Kindle book without a Kindle?  Download the free app for PC or Mac.  (There are apps for smartphones and tablets, too.)