The Gluten-Free Gourmet Cooks Fast and Healthy: Wheat-Free and Gluten-Free with Less Fuss and Less Fat

Bette Hagman fills the essential book full of recipes, quick mixes like DIY Rice-a-Roni, Bisquick , pudding, cake mixes, multiple GF flour blends. If bean flour is your preference she has lots of recipes to use it as well as, bread machine recipes. Great resource!!

The author has celiac disease and this might be a very good cookbook if you do too. She devotes considerable space to discussing how you can adjust.I was disappointed to find her gluten-free flour mix is 6 cups white rice flour and 3 cups starches - this makes the fluffiest breads to be sure and is easy to digest, but absolutely no whole grains here at all. Her bean flours are 2/3 starches and 1/3 whole bean flour, and starch is "empty" calories with absolutely zero vitamins. Her cookbook is healthy for many of the other added ingredients in her recipes, but definitely not for the flours (except whole bean flour). Two GF baking cookbooks by Annalise Roberts were even less nutritious. All fluffy but empty breads using starches and white rice flour with all the whole-grain nutrients removed. Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine   Gluten-Free Baking Classics  If you're used to fluffy white bread these might be the GF cookbooks for you.Unfortunately, some people avoid wheat because they're fructan-intolerant, not because they have celiac disease or are gluten intolerant. Bean flours are nutritious but high in indigestible galactans which can be no better than fructans. A lot of the most significant research measuring fructans, galactans, excess fructose and other FODMAPS in food has been done in Australia in the last 5-10 years while this cookbook was first published in 1996, so there's no possible way Bette Hagman could have known this. It's probably not an issue for her anyway.Half the yeast bread recipes here are rice-free. Maybe rice is a problem for many with celiac disease or the author? Rice is not one of the more common food allergies or intolerances, and is one of the easiest grains for most people to digest and is the most free of fructans and galactans.I bought Gluten Free Gourmet Cooks Fast and Healthy because I could see the index had five muffin recipes and other quick breads. Unfortunately her fresh apple muffins, Boston brown bread muffins, and high-fiber (beanflour) muffins sound good but are all high in fructans, galactans, or excess fructose, and I probably wouldn't fix her cornmeal muffins and shredded carrot (vegetable garden) muffins much.I highly recommend Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking 2nd ed (2012) by Kelli and Peter Bronski Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking: 275 Great-Tasting, From-Scratch Recipes from Around the World, Perfect for Every Meal and for Anyone on a Gluten-Free Diet - and Even Those Who Aren't . I was looking for another cookbook like it to add more variety when I bought bought Bette Hagman's `Fast and Healthy" cookbook. The Bronski's use a flour blend with 5 cups brown rice, 3 cups sorghum flour, close to 3 cups cornstarch and 1 cup potato starch in a 12-cup batch. This is a much more nutritious flour blend using only the easier-to-find gluten free flours/starches. I've substituted it directly for wheat flour (a bit extra) in my favorite ordinary recipes with just a little extra xanthan gum and baking soda with amazing results (I made a wheat batch and a wheat-free batch and could not tell the difference). Their pumpkin muffins are fantastic. They have a whole cookbook full of cupcakes and I have to check that out.  Artisanal Gluten-Free Cupcakes: From-Scratch Recipes to Delight Every Cupcake Devotee - Gluten-Free and Otherwise [Paperback ]If you want a cookbook for a bread machine using whole-grain flours (not all starch and white rice flour) I highly recommend Donna Washburn and Heather Butt's 125 Best Gluten Free Bread Machine Recipes (2010). 125 Best Gluten-Free Bread Machine Recipes  Unlike many GF cookbooks, it does NOT have one or two standardized flour blends for convenience and shorter prep times. However it's great if you want to experiment with sorghum, brown rice, amaranth, bean flour, pea flour, oat flour, quinoa, flaxmeal, buckwheat, and find which flours you like (a couple with millet and teff too). Most recipes use only one-fourth to one-third starches and the rest is whole grain flours, so the loaves come out with relatively flat tops, not fluffy and rounded. If you care more about whole-grain taste and nutrition than what the loaf looks like, this is the bread cookbook for you. Variety is the spice of life!

I have celiac disease, which is essentially an allergy to wheat protein, and I've been GF for 5 years now. (Why does that sound like I'm at an AA meeting?) Bette Hagman's books are the first couple of books that I got, and they're pretty good. *GFG-Fast & Healthy* is one of my favorites because it has some great recipes in it. However, I have no idea why she called it what she did. Maybe she lightened up some of the recipes compared to her 1950's style of cooking in the original GFG book, but after doing Ornish (*Eat More, Weigh Less*, Dean Ornish) for a couple years before I was diagnosed (familial high cholesterol), I can't imagine how anyone thinks that using this much butter, cheese, margarine, or butter-flavored Crisco (!!!) could be in any way labeled "healthy." Including recipes for salmon, curried shrimp, or mulligatawny soup was just silly. You can get those recipes in GF form anywhere. Maybe the title was wishful thinking.However, some of my favorite recipes are in this book:Pizza crust - p242 - 5 ingredients. Only 5! Tastes great, too. Husband prefers it to regular.Spicy corn muffins - p103 - fantastic!Banana bread - p98 - My first successful GF baked product.Veggie muffins - p101 - tasty and good.Salem crumpets as pizza crust - p95 - tasty for a change, but I like p242 better.TK KenyonAuthor of  Rabid: A Novel  and  Callous : A Novel

This cookbook was recommended to me by my niece. She has been cooking gluten free for several years now. I like what I've seen so far. I've read thru the book and skimmed a lot of the recipes. I needed to reform my pantry before I really started doing very much of this GF cooking as it is going back to more than scratch methods. Because of the very nature of the flours used, foods will be different--texture, cooking/baking time, some ingredients, and taste. We want them to be as close to before as possible. Not everything is but it is good. This book looks like I will be very happy using it for a very long time. I know from my niece's experience that the recipies are good, and most are pretty easy. Now that my pantry is stocked, I can begin to eat well again. I'm very happy!

I have several other GF cookbooks and this is the one I couldn't live without. Others have suggested that the recipes aren't exactly healthy due to use of sugars, etc., but there are reasonable substitutions and I've easily reduced the amount of sugar in recipes with good results and this assessment really only applies to the baked goods, which we all know are things that should be limited in a healthy diet. I found the suggestions for mixes and other sauces to be quite useful, as it's very difficult to find those commercially prepared and they're very easy and inexpensive to make at home. Having the mixes/sauces on hand is where the "Easy" part comes in. Also, the vegetarian section is excellent and indeed "Healthy"! My favorite recipe is the bean flour crepes, in particular with a chicken/spinach filling.

very useful lots of good recipes

I have my own copy of this book, and find it great for recipes. The Amazon copy was a gift to someone with health issues. It arrived promptly, and she's pleased with it. She commented that some grains she thought were gluten free according to her Canadian information, might not be ok according to this American cook book. This is helpful advice, and she'll follow up.

A great foundational gluten-free cookbook.

A great book for anyone wanting to get away from gluten & wheat. Very informative, with a number of recommendations for substituting various flours in order to get the desired results.