About

Our Story

Nearly six  years ago I became a wife and a gluten-free cook. My husband had been diagnosed with celiac during our freshman year of college, but had not been on a strict gluten free diet while we were in school. In fact we didn’t even realize that he should be until after we graduated.

Once we learned more about celiac disease and the long term complications, I knew that I would need to start cooking gluten free after we made married.  Even though I had been cooking since I was able to hold a spoon, it was not an easy transition. Cream of mushroom soup had been a staple ingredient in my mom and grandmom’s kitchen!

Luckily I received Joy of Cooking and a breadmaker as wedding gifts and I began to figure this whole gluten-free thing out. Joy of Cooking taught me new, basic recipes and cooking techniques and the bread machine made it feasible to cook bread every week even though we were both working. We purged our pantry, experimented with gluten-free breads, and learned to cook without most processed foods. Slowly we began to appreciate our new (healthier)diet.

Fast forward six years and the two have become  four. Shortly after John and I welcomed our first son into the world, I was diagnosed with IBS. I’ve never really liked to take medicine, so I decided to see if I could handle the symptoms with dietary changes. The obvious place to start was with gluten, since I was already at least 50% gluten-free. Within days my symptoms were gone. Now that I had to be gluten-free (you see, there’s really no going back once you know how painful gluten can be), I truly realized how tough a true gluten free diet was.  And now I had an even great motivation to continue making our favorite recipes gluten free.

Now that our eldest is almost three, we’ve started feeding him wheat in anticipation of a celiac blood test in July. We’re also going to try to do genetic test to determine if he may have problems in the future. It’s very strange having wheat back in the house. I’ve limited it to whole wheat bread since I don’t want to contaminate our cookware, but still it’s strange that it’s here at all =)

About Gluten Free Cooking School

About a year after I went gluten free, I decided to start this blog so that I could share the recipes that I developed and also share some of the “how-tos” of cooking. The blog has grown faster than I would have ever thought and I’ve even branched out to gluten free menu plans.

While the blog is technically a hobby, I do make money from the site. In additional to selling the menu plans, I also receive a commission from any Amazon products that you buy after you’ve clicked through to Amazon from my site. And there are Google Ads on most pages. The site doesn’t currently make a ton of money; but it’s enough to make it fun. I have to say though, I’d still do this blog without the money just because it’s so handy to be able to search for my recipes =)

I try to update the blog regularly, but sometimes I get sidetracked with work, other projects, and housekeeping. I also try to respond to comments, but it may take me a week or two. Just keep your eye on the “Recent Comments” section of the sidebar – if you see a bunch of comments from Mary Frances then you’ll know I’ve been catching up on comments. Feel free to ask questions in the comments, but you can also feel free to respond to other people’s questions. If you email me with questions, I may or may not respond – your best bet is to ask questions here and hope that I or someone else answers.

If you have a recipe that you would like to share with the other readers, just email it to me (maryfrances at glutenfreecookingschool dot com) along with a picture (without a flash is best) and I’ll post it on the site eventually.

If you would like to use my recipe for my recipe, feel free to do that offline as long as you give me credit. You are also free to blog about any of my recipes that you try, but please do not repost the recipe.

About Me

My name is Mary Frances Pickett, and I and my family live in Birmingham, Alabama.  Most of my days are spent working on other peoples taxes; I’m a CPA and work for a large local firm here in town. That means that nothing much happens on the blog from January 1 – April 15th unless I’ve done some prior planning.

Other random facts:

• I love spending time with my husband and boys
• I love to read and am so thankful we live near a great library
• I wish I had a sunny spot for a garden
• I have no will power and will eat sugar, chocolate and gluten if it is in my presence.
• I am a believer in Christ, but not quite sure whether and which church I want to be affiliated with
• We’re seriously considering home-schooling our children
• If everyone else is doing something, I consider that a very good reason to do something else

My Food Philosophy

Our house is completely gluten free (with the exception of this little test that we’re running on David) and vegetarian. Other than that, the most basic rule is that food must taste good!  I tend to cook by intuition; there is very little chance that I’ll follow someone else’s recipe exactly unless I’m running experiments and need a baseline to compare to.

Speaking of experiments, we do a lot of them around here. By the time I post a recipe, we’ve probably eaten the food at least two times in its final form and probably a few more times while I was testing/playing with the recipe. Since it takes so long to get the recipe right, it’s very unlikely that I’ll continue experimenting with a recipe (especially a bread recipe) to come up with versions that address food issues other than gluten. I am happy to try to point you in the right direction for your own experiments though.

We also try to avoid processed foods, which means that I don’t buy very many packaged gluten free products. Even baking mixes. I developed my own flour mixes several years ago and I tend to use them exclusively , even when I’m cooking other people’s recipes.  Why? I like them, and the flours are mostly inexpensive.

(to be continued…)