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Let Gluten Freedom Ring! is a cookzine in the style of old-school zines. It’s a simple photocopied half-size booklet printed black and white. There are no pictures, but there is a good variety of recipes for the beginning GF chef.

I eat gluten, but I know and love people who avoid the stuff. Though it irks me when servers at restaurants think I mean gluten free when I say vegan, I know that the wide world of food sensitivities can be perplexing. And as happy as I am to have vegan food I can (gasp!) actually eat at soirees, I imagine the gluten-free folks are even more stoked. Especially the gluten-free vegans.

Let Gluten Freedom Ring! features recipes from notable northwest vegans, including Kittee Berns (coordinator of Portland’s 2012 World Wide Vegan Bake Sale) and Joshua Ploeg aka The Touring Vegan Chef. Hailing from Olympia, Ploeg travels the nation cooking up vegan feasts. Of all of the contributors, he’s the most qualified to provide recipes. Zine editor Adam Gnade is neither gluten free nor a chef, but he loves his GF friends as much as I love mine. And he secured recipes from Green is the New Red author and activist Will Potter.

The zine has ample space in the middle for writing your own recipes and notes, but the space interrupts one of Ploeg’s recipes. Most dishes in the zine fall between ultra-DIY mania and semi-homemade laziness. They expect you to prepare fresh ingredients yourself, but they don’t venture into homemade GF pasta territory.

This is a tight collection of recipes that skew toward Southern fare: you’ll find recipes for cornbread, greens, mac and cheese, and jalapeno poppers alongside faux pho, carrot cake, and autumnal soups.

Most products that are recommended make sense: Gluten-free flour mixes and staples rather than processed “foods,” though Garnet’s Mac & Cheese is made exclusively of processed foods: brown rice pasta, Follow Your Heart cheddar, Tofutti, soy margarine, and Daiya. That’s 4 dollars for the cheddar, around 5 for the Daiya, another 4 for Tofutti, plus the cost of buying margarine (if you don’t already have it in your fridge) and brown rice pasta. This recipe serves 2-3 people and it costs $14 for the processed fake cheeses alone.

Personally, I like my mac (when I indulge) made from nooch and nuts and kraut. All of that processed cheese gives me the shivers. Kittee Berns comes to the rescue later in the book with a recipe for GF vegan mac made from whole foods.

I set out to test Potter’s lone recipe for skillet cornbread. Luckily, I have a 12” diameter cast-iron skillet, so I lubed it up with oil, heated it in the oven, and got to it.

The only GF substitution that this cornbread calls for is Bob’s Red Mill GF Flour. I snagged a bag for about $4. It’s mostly garbanzo flour, with some fava bean flour and other starches. This is the same GF Flour that Erin McKenna calls for regularly in the first BabyCakes book.

The batter was thinner than the glutinous cornbread I’m used to making, and it didn’t rise much in the oven, but the wedges that came out of the skillet were delicious with Julie Hasson’s chili recipe from Vegan Diner. I’m glad I added the optional jalapenjos: they added interest and a little heat. This bread is denser than cornbread made with wheat flour, and the garbanzo flour in the Bob’s Red Mill mix lends a beany taste. The next day, leftover wedges weren’t as moist, but a trip through the toaster and a generous helping of Earth Balance evening things out. (Full review http://veegmag.tumblr.com/post/23860947727/review-let-gluten-freedom-ring)