I’m baaaack!

After what has seemed like a never-ending hiatus, I am finally back in the land of the blogging. As some of you may know, I was asked to  contribute 10 recipes to an eBook called “A Gluten-free Dinner Party”, which I have now finished and am now patiently waiting for it all to be magically put together by the publishers!

(If you’d like to see all the pictures, please visit my Pinterest board)

It’s been a lot of fun, but has taken a fair bit of work, so apologies for my unannounced absence, although I’m sure you’ve battled through the withdrawal as best you can. And before you ask, OF COURSE I will let you know when it’s out! 😉 It should be quite soon with a bit of luck…

While I was cooking up recipes and photographing delicious meals, I also took the time off blogging to have a think about what I really want to do with my blog. As you may know, I do the gluten-free product reviews for the Can I Eat It? iPhone app, and I often get quite a few requests for reviews on this blog as well (they usually send me the products for free, or send vouchers).

This has led me to feel like I’m working for someone else,  and especially that I “owe” these companies something because they’ve given me stuff for free. I always try to be honest, but when a company has contacted you, sent you products, and communicated with you on a friendly and personal level, writing a terrible review of their products is very, very hard.

Additionally, I am getting rather bored by the same old gluten-free products, wrapped up in fancy new branding. I am getting bored by companies contacting me about their “innovative” new start-up, which seems to offer the same things available in my nearest supermarket’s Free From section. And actually, I feel like I’m not really their target market anymore. On a day to day basis I eat so few “Free From” products because they are such bad value for money and leave me feeling like I’ve been eating junk food. Spending so much time reviewing products that I wouldn’t bother eating seems like a bit of a pointless exercise to me.

So now I’m back to blogging, I think I’ll be changing the way I blog here at The Happy Coeliac. My initial change will be that I will no longer review individual products on this site (I will continue to do so for Can I Eat It? because I believe it’s a very useful tool, as well as the products I have already promised to review). Instead, I will bring in a feature called “Brand Spotlight”, which will look at a brand in its entirety and I will select a few noteworthy products to talk about, as well as assess the brand’s approach to nutritional content, their range/uniqueness, and their place in the Free From sector.

But don’t worry, I’m not just taking stuff away! I want to get more into making videos, developing recipes and promoting a “cooking from scratch” mentality. And of course I would never do away with my rare but fun rants. So once I stop spending so much of my blogging energy on reviewing average or sub par products, I can focus much more on the positive aspects of living with coeliac disease, rather than feeling like a subject of some psychology experiment run by the ghost of Asch, where everyone really wants to say how bad the bread is, but doesn’t want to seem like the only one..