Do you readily throw yourself in and explore the internet and what it has to offer or move more tentatively, familiarising yourself with a particular application, becoming more confident and comfortable with use?
Coeliacs today are very fortunate in having a wealth of information at their keyboard not having to rely on specialised, expensive books to offer recipe suggestions and cooking information.
Many of the mainstream recipe sites produce a mountain of 'gluten free' recipes when you type this term in the search bar.
Some of our favourite sites are:
waitrose.com/home/recipes.html
sainsburys.co.uk/groceries/...
We started off trawling for recipes, spotting one that looked the part, printed it out and set off shopping. These recipes were then stored in some plastic folders and formed our growing library of good to eat meals. This dog eared, food splattered tome took precious space in the kitchen.....until.... we discovered Pinterest.
After receiving an invite from the developers to join in and create our boards and start pinning we took a look. Initially we thought it looked pretty but was just another app that would provoke interest and then go the way of many others.
However with some free time and curiosity we started delving more and playing around and then thought it would be good if we could capture some of the good info we know is out there, put it all in one place and make it easily accessible to other people following a gluten free life.
And that's how it begun.... We now have 65 pin boards and 1000s of pins. The beauty of this Pinterest website is that when you locate a recipe you'd like to try on a web site, you just select Pin and the image immediately goes onto the board you've created and is there until the web page is removed or you delete the pin. No more trying to remember which site was the good one whilst trawling through your bookmarks.
There's also a phone version so when you've pinned your recipes to try you can access these whilst shopping and see what ingredients you need. If the shop doesn't have stock of something then you can easily move to another of your pinned recipes.
Also if you're a keen cook, baker or otherwise and want to share your best bread, soup, supper recipe then just take a snap of your finished efforts and you can upload this and type in your recipe to share with others. Other pinners can also put comments below your pins and this then helps build up the community feel.
Gluten free soup recipes? As many as you like:
pinterest.com/search/pins/?...
If you spot a pin that interests you then just double click on the picture and you'll get taken to the blog, web site or other that the recipe derived from.
If you decide to join Pinterest and create your own interest boards then you can merrily repin any pins that you see and quickly create your resource.
Along the way you'll discover interesting blogs you never knew existed, lovely unusual food sites and much, much more.
It may take you a little while to become familiar with the unknown but there's so much to gain.
How many gluten free sausages are there in mainstream supermarkets? Well we've pinned 38 brands on our GF Sausage board and there are bound to be loads more.
pinterest.com/gfguerrillas/...
There is NO irritating advertising on Pinterest and neither does it collect your details. You sometimes get a small amount of spam e.g. when you click a picture you'll get a message to say the picture doesn't lead to a valid site. But these occurrences are few.
So you can either:
- Have a look around and just use Pinterest to search for fav recipes without the faff of keeping track of web pages
- Sign up and join Pinterest and create boards useful for your interests and create your pins and repin other pins that interest you.
Happy Pinning!
This way to Gluten Free Guerrillas Pinterest boards