Gluten-Free on a Shoestring, Quick and Easy: 100 Recipes for the Food You Love -- Fast!

My husband, two young daughters and I have reluctantly transitioned to a gluten-free diet due to health, behavioral, and gluten intolerance issues in our family. I'm not gonna lie: going GF stinks at first. We like to eat healthy but we also love good sandwiches, waffles and occasional treats such as cupcakes and cookies. This book has saved our lives by keeping our favorites within reach and introducing us to new things that we love. Fantastic recipes, author is knowledge and hilarious. Like other reviewers have said, the chocolate cake donut recipe alone is worth triple the price of the book. (Get the Babycakes Donut Baker. I, too, have scoffed at this machine in the past, but since the occasional breakfast treat makes our Sundays even nicer, we sprang for it. Worth it.) They go together in a snap and taste even better than their gluteny cousins. The recipes that require a little planning ahead--mainly the refrigerated bread, pizza, etc. doughs--are fantastic. Once assembled and refrigerated, you can whip out amazingly beautiful, tasty, light GF breads without fussy rising times and temperatures. Need good, "yeasty" dinner rolls for a party? If you make this beautiful and light dough once a week, you can have two dozen beautiful rolls in in 30 minutes TOPS. Same with a beautiful, crusty loaf of artisan-quality boule bread. Wow. Just wow. I would love to see a few changes. The first: so many of the recipes are split between 2 pages and you have to flip a page back and forth between ingredients and directions. I suppose it wouldn't matter if you measure all of your ingredients ahead of time like cooking shows do, but I find that cumbersome, time-consuming, and creates way more dirty dishes than necessary. I also use a cookbook stand that holds the pages open. That has made reading and executing many of these recipes difficult. Poor planning on the publisher's part--I can't fault the author though. Secondly, as many reviewers have pointed out, none of the recipes have nutritional information. My husband has Type I diabetes and keeps his blood sugar under right control by counting carbs. He enjoys these recipes but we have to guess and that has resulted in spikes and dips in his blood sugar count. Overall I could not be happier that I bought this book--and neither could my children. I'm definitely going to buy her other two books once I have mastered a few more of the recipes in this one. If the author published a second edition that kept the recipes on the same page and included nutritional content, I'd literally buy the same book again in a heartbeat. Off to make some chocolate donuts--and sneak some away when my kids aren't looking.

I own both of the Shoestring books, and am a regular reader of the blog. (baking the pretzel rolls from the blog as I type) This book is filled with recipes that are not "good, for gluten free", but simply good, in some cases better than their gluten-y counterparts. The rest of my family can eat gluten, and they love the things I have made. This is not intended to be a health food book, as the doughnut on the cover should indicate. It is a book filled with terrific gluten-free versions of the food those of us who can't eat gluten miss being able to have. The doughnuts on the cover are the best gf doughnuts I have had, and the rest of the book is filled with other great recipes. The back of the book has recipes for several time-saving mixes: cookies, muffins, scones, cakes etc. Packaged gluten-free food is usually very expensive and not very tasty, so many of us bake from scratch, which can be time-consuming. Nicole Hunn solves all of those problems with recipes that are quick and easy to make, inexpensive, and delicious.

I simply can not say enough good things about this cookbook. Hardly a weekend goes by without using one of her recipes. I can honestly say that I do not know what I would do without this book. My husband and daughter both have Celiac disease. When they were first diagnosed, I was lost....how would we eat....what could we eat. I stumbled upon the Gluten Free on a Shoestring blog and I found hope....and donuts...and cookies...and all kinds of tasty items. I own both of her cookbooks and have the next one soon to be released ordered. This is my favorite so far. We don't eat desserts and bread everyday but we want these things every so often. I love the section in the back of the book where she gives you the recipes to make your own mixes. I have baked the brownies and brought them to many pot lucks and nobody every even knew that they were gluten free....they were just gone. We have made the donuts on the cover, the muffins in the mix section, chocolate cupcakes from the mix section, vanilla cupcakes from the mix section, flour tortillas, and the cinnamon rolls just to name a few. Not only are the recipes delicious and easy to follow, Nicole has written the cookbook with pieces of her sense of humor which I love. I would highly recommend this cookbooks for anyone who wants to eat gluten free but still wants to eat good food. Food should not be good for gluten free.....if I am going to serve it to my family it needs to be good and gluten free.

I have a 3 year-old who is allergic to wheat/gluten, and I have always been the type to cook and bake rather than buy prepackaged foods, so his diagnosis threw me for a loop. I found her blog and, though not every single recipe is great or seems to turn out as pictured, I have gotten a lot of great things off of it. I decided to buy her cookbook and have been really pleased. I made the donuts this morning, and both my kids loved them (I did, too!). They tasted great, and I did not have to have a multi-ingredient flour mix or weird ingredients around. I cannot stand when I buy gf items and end up throwing them away b/c they taste awful. I have stopped buying mixes and just stick with recipes now. I think she has some great staple recipes in here, especially b/c she has kids and feeds the entire family this way. Where else can I get some of these items he will never be able to eat?! I basically have 3 mixes at my house that I use. I have gluten-free pantry flour (which I think is better than BB and is cheaper) that I use as my all-purpose (it has guar gum in it) and recipes from this author, and I have two other mixes I use for recipes I got in the Gluten-Free Baking Classics by Roberts. I do need to add xanthan gum to that. I use her book for cookies and cakes (so good I fed them to all the people at my son's party and have a gf cookie tray for the holidays, and everyone is amazed how good it all tastes). I do not think there is a perfect one flour mix for everything, but her recipes and the all-purpose flour in those works well for most.

I really liked Nicole Hunn's first gluten-free cookbook (yep, I wrote a review for that one, too), and when I heard she had another cookbook out, I decided to get it as well. These cookbooks are written in a very easy to understand manner, with fairly simple directions and lots of information to give you an ideas of why you're doing something, or what's really important. They're easy for the beginner cook or baker, as well as the person who has tried similar recipes with gluten filled foods (that would be me). When I first started out baking gluten free, I had NO IDEA what I was doing with different types of flours and what I needed to do to make some of the foods that I missed. The ingredients needed for these recipes are fairly easy to find--much can be ordered easily online (I order mine from Amazon), or found in most regular grocery stores. The recipes in this cookbook (and the first one) helped me develop some new skills working with gluten-free flours and getting back on the baking path. There's no need to miss out on your favorite sweets and breads if you're gluten-free--just find a favorite recipe in this book and go from there. Update, March 2013. I've now had this cookbook for several months and I've had an opportunity to try many things from it. First, the donuts (pictured on the front of the book) are evil in how delicious they are. I made a batch, ate half and took the remaining into work where they were tempted my co-workers to behave like animals in their quest to get to them. (And, no, I do not work in a zoo.) Second, the recipes I've tried are very easy, with good directions. I've even halved some of them and they've turned out well. This book was a good investment and if Ms. Hunn does a "Gluten Free on A Shoestring Recipes Forever" (or any other gluten free recipe book), I'll buy that one, too.

As someone who was NOT happy about having to go gluten free (I am a former restaurant owner and baker), I searched through hundreds of cookbooks to find ones that featured "real" food; stuff that looked and tasted like their glutenated counterparts that didn't call for six billion rare and expensive ingredients. I came across Nicole's first book, Gluten-Free on a Shoestring, Quick and Easy: 100 Recipes for the Food You Love--Fast! and it was the answer I had been looking for. Now, with this new book, there are even more great recipes, all of which fooled my family this weekend. Not one of the things I made screamed "gluten free" and my mom just about fainted away when she saw me enjoying the crackers I made for everyone, thinking I had accidentally eaten the "wrong ones". I especially love the recipes for everyday things like Vanilla Wafer cookies, flour tortillas and good dough to have on hand for pizza crusts, cinnamon rolls, etc. And the section for make your own mixes ALONE is worth the price of the book! My son is totally addicted to my "homemade" gluten free banana muffins that I often make with GF vanilla cake mix, at over five bucks a box! With Nicole's tireless experimenting and sourcing the best products to bring things together, I can now make a huge batch of cake mix, cookie mix, brownie mix and MORE and save money while putting in only the things that we know and love. I have already ordered four more copies of the book for my GF friends and relatives and it's going on my permanent must have list for new GF people I coach. Thank you, Nicole, for another fabulous resource for us GFree peeps!!!!

I made the donuts pictured on the cover of this wonderful book and they were delicious. My friend came over with her daughter and she grabbed one and gobbled it up and said it was the best donut that she had ever had. She had no clue that they were gluten free! My teenage GF daughter, who has been craving donuts since going GF one year ago, was so happy! She smiled while she was eating them. This book is unlike other GF cookbooks. There are weekday timesavers which is what I need during my crazy weeks. I love that I can make yeasted pizza dough (in 3 minutes flat) and put it in the fridge to rise and be enjoyed during the week. Same with the refrigerated bread dough. I no longer have to wait for the rise to get the bread in the oven. I made bread dough on Sunday and I am making parmesan breadsticks with the dough tonight. There are plenty of yeast free breads/pizza recipes as well. In addition, there are recipes to make your own "boxed cake" mixes ahead of time so all you need to do is grab the wet ingredients and start baking. Nicole Hunn, through her blog and her cookbooks, is making my life easier (and more delicious) one recipe at a time! EDITED TO ADD (07 NOV 2012): the parmesan bread sticks were so yummy!!!!!! Because I made the dough the night before, they took me 10 minutes to get in the oven. How cool is THAT??? One note with GF breads fresh out of the oven, you must let them cool first! I ate one right away and it was good, but the one I let cool for 10 mins (still warm) was FANTASTIC!

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