By Karen Blue

I have long been impressed with the allergy guide at Swiss Chalet so I decided to find out how other restaurants owned by the same company compared. Swiss Chalet is owned by Cara Operations Limited, a Canadian company also owns Restaurant chains Harvey's, Kelsey's Milestones and Montana's Cookhouse. Cara decided to discontinue using peanut free ice creams, and have gained mixed reviews from people with allergies.

This section covers the important topic of how to eat out at restaurants or as a guest at friends houses when you have food allergies.

This is a challenging topic. It is much easier to eat at home, and that is hard enough at first!

When you eat at a friend's house, you have to cope with your friend's understating of both food and your allergy, as well as the social situation. It seems like an imposition to dictate what you can and can not eat. Still, it has to be done. At least your friends truly care about your health (if they don't, then they are not really your friends).

This is a very fast and easy gluten-free pie filling. It takes almost no time and is very tasty.

If you use frozen blue berries, you will find this to be pretty inexpensive. It will taste much better though with fresh blue berries.

Ingredients

• 2 Cups Blue berries

• 2 Tbs Maple syrup

Directions

1. Make one of the gluten-free pie crusts.
2. Add the blue berries to the shell.

This section contains a variety of pie fillings, all suitable for dessert.

There are flavours for all tastes, and fruit for all seasons.

Often, you can use frozen fruit instead of fresh, which pretty good results, but fresh fruit is always better.

I don't recommend canned fruit. The taste is generally not as good, there is almost always too much liquid and generally too much sugar. Still, if none of that bothers you, you could use canned ingredients. Occasionally I might point out where I've used canned ingredients with success, but you will find this to be rare.

Pies make such excellent desserts that they deserve a whole section on their own.

They are versatile. Come to think of it, there can be savoury pies for the main course, but that will go in a separate section if ever such a section appears on this website.

Making a yeast-free pie is easy. Pies don't need to have milk either.

The challenge is in making a gluten-free pie. Typical pie crusts use wheat. With the unique characteristics of wheat gluten, it is hard to replace the crust with a wheat-free version that has the same characteristics.

This section contains several different recipes for gluten-free, wheat-free pie crust.

There is nothing like a great pie, and noting as disappointing as a pie that looks good but tastes like cardboard.

Some of these recipes have been tested in the Allergy-Details Gluten-free diet lab, making them wheat-free as well.

Gluten-free pie crusts can be formulated in different ways, and can be made with a variety of different flours.

It is also possible to make pie crusts without flour, for example with crushed nuts.

I recently noticed that a surprizing number of people have found this site by googling "mini wheats and intolerance". Actually, almost any number is surprzing, given that this website ranks at 51 in Google for that particular term. That is a lot of websites to explore, none of which provide an answer.

So I guess I owe it to those of you who are searching to write an article specific to this subject. No one should have to sift through that many search results to get an answer to this question!

Here are a few facts about Mini Wheats:

• They contain wheat

A Wheat allergy is specifically an allergy or hypersensitivity to one of several proteins in wheat.

This is different from a gluten allergy, which is an allergy to the specific protein gluten - found in wheat as well as oats, barley and rye.

Do not confuse a wheat allergy with celiac. Although you must avoid wheat in either case, these two health problems are fundamentally different in two ways. One is the underlying problem. Celiac is an autoimmune disorder, not an allergy.

For years I avoided bread because of my allergy to wheat. The gluten-free bread on the market was expensive and not very good. Some of that has changed - it is now possible to get excellent gluten-free bread, although it is still expensive.

A great alternative is rice paper. Traditionally, it is used to make spring rolls (a Vietnamese dish), but you can wrap almost anything in rice paper.

The pros of using rice paper to make a gluten-free meal is that it is versatile and inexpensive.

The cons of using rice paper is that you have to prepare it (easy to do, but this makes it less portable) and it does not keep well, making it hard to pack a lunch.

Does sharing a meal with people who do not understand your gluten-free/wheat-free diet make you nervous?

Since a bread crumb or two could ruin my week, I can't relax when I am at a table that includes bread made from wheat.

I generally deal with this by taking my share of food first and putting it on my plate, and keeping my gluten-free bread well away from regular bread, or anything else made of wheat.

This Christmas though, I took it one step further.

Everyone had the same gluten-free bread as I did.