Carol Fenster PhD, Gluten-Free Cookbook Author on the Alternative Cook DVDs

"The thing I like about the DVDs by the Alternative Cook is that they are so beautifully and visually appealing to watch. It is like having a gluten-free, dairy-free, low cholesterol cook in the kitchen right with you. It is fun. You can see what the food looks like, you can see it being processed and put together and what the final product looks like and even wonderful ideas about how to display the food on your plate. We all eat with our eyes, so when we see beautiful food, we are even more enticed to want to eat it. Foods demonstrated in these DVDs are gorgeous to look at and they are visually stunning and they make you want to make them right away. They are extraordinarily healthy and I love the creativity that goes into the ingredients. For example, in one of the DVDs, called Kids Meals', we actually make ice cream from cashews, and while you might not have thought of cashews as an ingredient for ice cream, it makes a wonderful, creamy texture, very much like cream. It is this innovation and creativity that I think these DVDs bring to people who only thought in terms of the realm of wheat, eggs, milk, sugar, the typical things that we Americans cook with which many of us cannot have any more for various reasons. These DVDs show us how to work with many other healthy ingredients that work just as well, taste just as good and look just as gorgeous.

Lots of different groups of folks will benefit from these DVDS. First we have people who simply cannot eat gluten such as someone with Celiac disease, which is the nation's most common inherited genetic disorder. Or, someone with wheat allergies who has to avoid wheat, and therefore gluten is part of that. Or someone like me, who has a gluten sensitivity but I am not a Celiac, and I am not allergic, I just get ill when I eat gluten. People who cannot eat dairy products will benefit from these DVDs too. Often having to avoid dairy goes hand-in-hand with gluten intolerance. Children with Autism also have to avoid gluten and casein because we know they are not able to process those proteins. Recently, we have learned that nursing mothers might do well to avoid gluten and casein because it might help in reducing the extent of colic in their baby.

I would definitely recommend that people buy the DVDs especially if they are people who like to see pictures and photos of what they need to do. And even if you have a lot of other gluten free cookbooks in your kitchen, I think that you can benefit from using these DVDs as a refresher and a way to sharpen your own cooking skills, but also as important is learning some new tricks and techniques and how to use new ingredients that are healthy, that you might not have thought about before, but can add a greater variety to what you are eating, so you are not eating the same things over and over."

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