Tag: Gluten free product review

Product Review: Ilumi Noodle Pots

I was very kindly sent some of the new Ilumi Noodle Pots to test out. Hubby and I have had fun sampling them over the last couple of days and my cooking time has been much reduced!

Asian flavoured noodle pots seem all the rage these days, and as rice noodles really lend themselves to gluten free recipes, for once us coeliacs don’t have to miss out.

The noodle pots are super convenient for when you haven’t got time to make lunch, or need a light meal in a rush. You only need to boil the kettle and wait four minutes for the noodles to cook and the sauce to thicken. You can eat them straight out of the pot, but as we were at home, we had ours in a bowl.

Ilumi have created 4 flavours: Tom Yum Gai, Singapore Style, Vietnamese Style Beef Pho and Sweet Chilli. All are given a “one chilli” spice rating, except for the Sweet Chilli pot, which has a “2 chilli rating”, so it is a bit spicier, but don’t be put off by that – it won’t blow your head off.

On the left, you can see the Beef Pho at the top of the picture and the Singapore at the bottom. The portion of noodles is very generous and nicely filling.

My favourite was the Singapore Style, as it had a nice, spicy oriental curry broth with it, that had thickened and coated the noodles slightly. Hubby preferred the Beef Pho, which had a strong beefy broth.

These noodles are very competitively priced at £1.75 in Asda, compared to the Kabuto and Itsu noodles, which retail closer to the £2 mark.

One thought – Perhaps Ilumi could make these a bit more eco friendly and swap the plastic inner tub for a more sturdy cardboard one?

October 14, 2015
Product review: Garofalo gluten free pasta

I had a wrangle with myself this evening. We have 3 courgettes freshly cut from our garden (one of the few things I’m capable of growing!) but I made such a lovely pasta sauce, I didn’t think courgetti justified it! So I decided to break out some gluten free pasta…

I’ve tried a few brands of gluten free pasta and in general, been disappointed: too slimy, weird taste, wrong texture. And so I normally stick with the courgetti. However, my dietitian, the lovely Nick Trott, at the Hallamshire hospital, pointed me in the direction of this high end gluten free pasta, made by Garofalo. I only know of it being available at Waitrose (although I can’t find it on their website) and Ocado – as you can see, it’s very posh pasta! It’s a bit more expensive than the other gluten free brands (£2.99 for 500g, although it’s sometimes discounted) but I think it’s much better than the other brands. It’s made from a combination of corn flour, rice flour, quinoa and corn starch, and as with traditional pasta, it’s pressed through a bronze cast to give it a good texture for holding the sauce: “trafilata al bronzo”. The packet is reassuringly Italian, with Italian text on it, but it also displays the trustworthy crossed grain symbol. What more can you want?

So the pasta sauce: I chopped a large butternut squash into 1/2 cm cubes and roasted them with a couple of large garlic cloves (skins on) and a drizzle of olive oil, at 200 C, until the started to caramelise and the garlic became suitably squishy (that happened first so I took them out while the squash finished off).

Meanwhile, I chopped a large onion and sweated it in some more olive oil, adding some finely chopped sage. I blended everything together (onion, sage, garlic & squash) in batches in my mini whizzer, using a bit of water to loosen the sauce. And I saved a few bits of squash to sprinkle on the top.

I stirred the sauce into the cooked, drained pasta, and finished it with the extra squash, plenty of grated Parmesan and black pepper. It was divine! As close to real pasta as you can get, I think.

The courgettes will have to wait…

August 12, 2015
Product Review: Kallo Belgian Dark Chocolate Organic Rice Cake Thins

You’ll have to excuse my photography. This post was a bit of a last minute idea and this is just a quick snap from my phone.

Sometimes, I think rice cakes are the devil’s work. Those times are generally when some well meaning soul gives me two or three plain rice cakes and calls them ‘gluten free bread’, as happened to me this weekend. I was in France for a wedding, and having suffered watching my friends tuck into delicious pastries and croissants for breakfast each morning, I get given plain rice cakes with my meal with the texture of polystyrene packing chips and nothing to put on them. Depressing, to say the least. Not that there isn’t an abundance of lovely bread-less gluten free food available in Bordeaux, it’s just that I had to have ‘that conversation’ before every meal in what remains of my A-level French. (Thankfully, only a very minor cross contamination occurred over the weekend, and I came away largely unscathed.)

For me, rice cakes signify disappointing gluten free food and are always a last resort… Unless they’re covered in chocolate, it turns out. A very strange transformation occurs to a rice cake when it is coated in chocolate.

I was in a motorway services a few weeks ago when I came across a small pack of dark chocolate coated rice cakes. I’ll be honest – they were on one of those racks of goodies that you have to meander past whilst waiting for the checkout. I figured I deserved a snack as the rest of the family were eating biscuits, so I succumbed. Not the sort of thing I’d usually buy, but I have to say, I was rather pleasantly surprised.

These Kallo rice cakes in the picture are not the motorway services ones, but some I picked up in Sainsbury’s on Monday. These lured me by the cute owl and the promise of Belgian dark chocolate (their branding is really nicely done). There are 8 squares of rice cakes, with rounded corners, and a thin topping of rather good quality dark chocolate. The clever thing is that the rice cakes are thin enough that you don’t feel you’ve got a mouth full of polystyrene but it gives a nice crunch when you bite into it. And the chocolate is spread just the right thickness (for me) so I enjoy it without feeling guilty.

I try to be very careful with sugar, but a bit of dark chocolate here and there seems reasonable to me! Each rice cake contains 2.6g of sugar, which is quite tiny compared with a biscuit or a raw food bar. Well done Kallo!

The only problem now, is that the packet is open downstairs, and it’s calling to me.

July 15, 2015