Gluten-y on the Bounty?

The Family is coming for Christmas.

Providing the whole place doesn't burn down or whatevs. But yes, Christmas, family, cooking, have house clean and shoo the spiders out prior to Jesus' non-birthday birthday. Oddly, I found two big black spiders in the kitchen on Saturday (in the wee hours of the morning), which was rather random.

I think big black spiders love me or something. I don't love them, so they died. Probably painfully. Not that everything I don't love dies, just to clear that up before y'all get suspicious :-p

Anyways. The Family. Christmas. Food. Presents. Food. Dammit, food!

That's the problem, the food thing. Mum's just gotten results back that confirm her as being a full-blown coeliac. This means Christmas without the gluten. I'm a girl who likes a challenge, so this will just have to be one of the many I've taken on, I suppose. It's just fortunate that gluten-free things are not quite as revolting as they used to be.

The Woolworths gluten-free chocolate cake mix is delicious (performed a trial-run of it last Thursday), Orgran's pizza and pastry mix is fantastic (use it all the time), their lemon and poppy seed muffin mix isn't too bad and I've got gluten-free SR and plain flour of theirs to try out, as well as a bread mix. Oh, and some of their buckweat pancake mix.

I'm hoping to be able to make a gluten-free version of my amazing tastebud-orgasmic pizza. And hopefully gluten-free paforte or panatone, which would take care of the Christmas pudding thing. May even ponder making gluten-free pasta, although that's probably more work than I can be bothered with.

The major thing I've discovered with gluten-free so far is that it's often best to make things yourself if possible. This comes after extensive research combined with excessive optimism meets gluten-free pasta and some particularly vile cookies. My tastebuds still shudder at the memory. Even the birds at home wouldn't eat the stupid cookies.