Karina calls herself a “gluten-free goddess,” and it’s not hard to see why. The experienced chef and visual artist from New Mexico maintains a visually stunning recipe blog and has published three successful cookbooks. Her recipes look beautiful and sound amazing: vegan pumpkin pie with a buckwheat crust, agave and lime salmon, pineapple salsa chicken enchilandas, etc. And if you don’t have the time or willpower to cook, Karina also gives a lot of informative tips on food options. A blog post on the different types of sugar she uses inspired a spirited discussion in the comments section about whether Splenda is an artificial sweetener or not (it is) and where the ultra-sweet herb Stevia tastes best (in coffee).

From a gluten-free blog reader’s perspective, however, the ultimate usefulness of the site is its lengthy list describing dozens of gluten-free blogs by the bloggers themselves.

Are you torn between your love for ice cream and healthy eating? GaGa’s gluten-free Sherbetter may be just your thing. Sherbetter contains more butterfat than sherbet but less than ice cream, leading to a smooth texture, intense  flavor… and less calories. Triumph Dining tasters loved lemon Sherbetter, which GaGa reports outsold every flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream at Whole Foods one year.  You can find GaGa mostly on the East Coast in high-end stores for $4.70 a pint.

An interesting sidenote: the Providence Journal reports that GaGa founder John King recently turned down an order request from an Atlanta-based convenience store chain because the chain’s own research showed that its customers “don’t care about all-natural products.”

In honor of our new grocery guide, Triumph Dining is pleased to announce a great deal for you, our readers. Through November 10th, if you order the Triumph Dining grocery or restaurant guides from Amazon, we will throw in a free set of six Triumph Dining Cards. That’s $11.95 in savings! All you have to do after ordering the books on Amazon is forward your confirmation e-mail to jennifer@triumphdining.com. The cards will ship separately from your order and arrive in about a week. Enjoy!

For a long time, parents have been worried about the food children collect while trick-or-treating. Everything must be hermetically sealed in a familiar brand-name package so that parents can be sure it doesn’t have razors in it! But what about candy that’s safe for celiacs? Well, we at Triumph Dining would like to give a grateful shout-out to Alison at Sure Foods Living for her concise and up-to-date gluten free and allergen free candy list. Now, all you have to suffer the day after Hallowe’en is a couple of cavities. Bon Appetit!

Well, we didn’t reach our goal, but we made a decent showing. We gave away $1000 to charities, including the Celiac Disease Foundation, the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America, and the Celiac Sprue Association. Thank you to everyone who supported our efforts. It’s good to make a difference.

My father-in-law doesn’t eat gluten and hates cooking. Although he buys tasty gluten-free  bread, he’s not too charmed by its propensity to crumble in his hands. Enter the fuzzy logic rice cooker. He just measures rice into the removable bowl, rinses it a few times, fills the bowl with water or broth, and punches the “Cook Rice” button. That’s it. Now he wakes up every morning to hot fresh rice. It’s easy to make perfect rice, and the nonstick surface makes washing a snap. Furthermore, he thinks switching to rice has helped him lose weight; nothing goes better with a bowl of rice than a heap of steamed vegetables.

An extra bonus: You can also make quinoa, polenta, and other gluten-free grains in the rice cooker. But be forewarned: anything with oatmeal or egg in it tends to get pretty messy.

Pizza Fusion is a chain pizza parlor for everyone. They serve gluten-free, certified organic, lactose-free, whole wheat, and vegan pizzas. As a bonus for celiac tipplers, Pizza Fusion serves gluten-free beer made with sorghum. They have franchises all over the U.S and are opening a hundred more in the next five years. There just might be one near you; to find it, go to Pizza Fusion.

The Organic Bistro has come out with several gluten-free entrees you can find in the freezer section of your local supermarket. Triumph Dining taste-tested six of these products and found them all unusually filling, nutritious, and high in quality. The delightfully flaky Wild Salmon Meal includes a cut of salmon with a rosemary orange glaze, broccoli with walnuts, and a mound of cranberry brown rice pilaf for the reasonable price of $30 per six meals. Kay’s personal favorite, the juicy Sockeye Salmon Cakes meal, is low-sodium with 600 calories, 1 gram of Omega 3 fats, and 34 grams of protein. If your supermarket doesn’t carry Organic Bistro, you can order the meals online.

Alright, we’re back to food combos. If you recall my past entry on the bakery, Simply Gluten-Free, I am adamantly against fried candy bars, but pretty positive about the rest of the food combinations that are out there. I came across Lundberg’s Buttery Caramel Rice Cakes in Whole Foods the other day and was intrigued.

I really liked Lundberg’s Purely Organic Hot’n Creamy Rice Cereal that I wrote on previously, but what stood out most to me when first noticing this snack was the ‘buttery caramel’ flavor. Butter and caramel are not two things I’d necessarily choose to put together. Then again, it reminds me, in theory, of kettle corn’s salty and sweet flavoring: two distinct and very different tastes that usually are kept separate but when put together with popcorn is actually very good. So I thought Lundberg had done me well in the past, I might as well give it a go and see if I could place it in the column of good food combinations.

What ironically stands out about these rice cakes is their subtly. Kettle corn, or at least the types I’ve tried, is a snack of intense saltiness and sweetness that when you eat too much is like a taste explosion in your mouth. These rice cakes, however, have just a hint of caramel flavoring. (So I guess my kettle corn analogy wasn’t so great.) I didn’t notice the butter, but perhaps this means the combination was correctly blended together to make one noticeable taste. While I’m usually all about loud, intense flavors, I think these rice cakes have a pleasant, delicate flavor that many will enjoy. Rice cakes are light to begin with, and a light flavoring seems appropriate.

What’s good for the celiacs out there with other dietary needs, is that it is also both diary-free and vegan. And for calorie counters, 80 calories per rice cake seems pretty good to me.

Great news! The All New 2nd Edition of The Essential Gluten Free Grocery Guide is just back from the printer and is now available for purchase from Triumph Dining. The new guide features over 30,000 gluten free food products in a 240-page, full-color guide. We invested countless of hours in research - contacting thousands of companies, editing, and fact checking - to make this the most thorough and accurate gluten free grocery guide on the market.  For more information, please visit www.triumphdining.com or www.triumphdining.com/glutenfreefood.aspx.