Elephant Walk Offers a Gluten Free Cooking Class 1/28/12

I'm excited to see that there are classes out there in GF cooking. It's no surprise to me that Elephant Walk offers one as they are so good with their GF menu's in their restaurants.  I'm hoping to take this class and will report back if I can fit it in. Elephant Walk GF Cooking Class Jan. 28

A couple of links if you think you might have issues with gluten.

Some good information here.  The list of symptoms is endless and the symptoms are common to many health issues.  For me it was important to understand my set of symptoms and what triggered them over time by identifying patterns.  The ultimate clues came when my symptoms were triggered and I later found that I had in fact eaten gluten by accident.

http://gluten-intolerance-symptoms.com/

This is probably the best site I've found for information about gluten related health problems.

http://www.cureceliacdisease.org/

Quick link to Restaurants with Gluten-Free Menus

My blog is brand new! I hope to have lots of useful information on here in the coming weeks and months. For a very first post I have just a simple link that is a simple google search that anyone can do but it is a point of departure.

http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Gluten+Free+Menu&find_loc=Boston%2C+MA#rpp=40

It is a list of restaurants in the Boston area that advertise some sort of a GF menu.  I have eaten at a couple of these places and intend to try them all and let you know about my experiences with them.  Here are a few quick shout-outs for the places I have tried.

Elephant Walk really has it together with their GF menu.  There are great selections and they seem very confident and knowledgeable in their GF awareness. http://www.elephantwalk.com/boston/index.html

The Franklin in South Boston also gets a big shout-out for not just having a GF menu but for having a separate fryolator to avoid cross contamination in fried foods. It's so rare for a restaurant to do this and such a nice treat to be able to safely eat foods like french fries without fear of getting glutenized by shared frying oil.  I'm not sure their South End location does this as it's a much smaller restaurant. [Franklin - How about putting your GF menu online?] http://www.franklincafe.com/

A couple of places I've tried that need to do better:
Geoffrey's Cafe in the South End does have a GF menu, but it is confusing not just to me but clearly to the restaurant staff as well. They could do better by redoing the menu to make it easier to understand and training the staff better about gluten in general. http://www.geoffreyscafebar.com/aboutus.html

The Gallows in the South End  is the big loser so far on the GF front.  Maybe I shouldn't have expected much since they do not have a gluten free menu.  But, when my friends decided that's where we were going, I called in advance to get an idea of what my options would be like.  The person who answered the phone made it sound as though they were very GF friendly and that there would be options.  Once I arrived though the bartender who was the server looked at me like I was crazy for even coming there.  She had few ideas of what could be modified to be served GF and was very unhelpful and discouraging.  Needless to say, I won't return.  No link to their site.  You don't need one.

More to come...