| About me | |||||||||||||||
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I've been completely
gluten-free for about six years. I'm also vegetarian and
sensitive to dairy products, so my meals would be quite limited
if I didn't love to cook. Fortunately, cooking resides in my
genes: my parents and grandparents are all known around the
family for their various specializations, and there's even a
distant relative on my mother's side who is reputed to have been
a very creative chef. We also seem to have a lot of librarians
in my family, but that's beside the point. My favorite cuisines are Indian, Mexican, and Caribbean, but I love a great many others and I'm always willing to try a new taste (provided it doesn't involve gluten or meat). Spices, especially, are my best friends in the kitchen. My cupboard overflows. Perhaps you're curious about the name, "Beyond Celery." It found me even before my allergies did. In high school, my creative writing teacher asked us to write a journal entry on "Which vegetable would you be and why." I hate these sorts of writing topics even more than I disliked the teacher, so I picked the weirdest vegetable I could think of comparing myself to: celery. I don't particularly like its taste, I certainly don't like its stringiness, and I've always thought it was one of the oddest-looking vegetables in the produce section. But there are two things I do like: it's green and it's crunchy. So I wrote about going beyond celery in life, as I later went Beyond Celery in food. Another thing you could say about celery: it's gluten-free.
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| About My Rating System | |||||||||||||||
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spoons, because they are the quintessential kitchen utensil. You
can do nearly anything with them: measure, stir, scrape, scoop,
fling, and eat. Everything I rate always has the opportunity to
earn 5 spoons. I'm a hard grader, though, and my 5 spoons mean a
lot to me. I will always rate in two categories for a product: Ease of Use and Taste. These categories will sometimes receive vastly different ratings. If a product's taste is spectacular, but it took me 2 hours to figure out how to use it, I will give it top spoons in Taste and no spoons in Ease of Use. If there is a product you
would like me to rate, please
email me
and give me the manufacturer name, the name of the product, and
ideas on where I might be able to buy it (websites are always
useful). If I rate a product that you've tried and you feel I've
wronged it in some way, please feel free to
email me about it. Who knows? I just
might give it another chance.
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2009. All pictures and text
are copyrighted by Adrienne Lema, unless otherwise noted. Please respect them. |
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