Janice Mansfield, the chef and owner of Real Food Made Easy has been active in the food industry since 2008.
Prepping for the MS Fundraiser Dinner
She left a career in public service to help families put real food, made from scratch on the table. She grew up in a household where everything on the table was made from scratch, and canning and preserving were the norm, and became very comfortable experimenting with different cooking styles at an early age.
Very soon after setting up Real Food Made Easy, she began getting an increasing number of requests for good tasting gluten-free baked goods, and began developing recipes that would be as good as, or better than their wheaten counterparts. About the same time, she began transitioning her home kitchen to gluten-free in order to help her husband better manage his Crohn’s symptoms.
Over the course of the last 2-3 years, her business has become increasingly specialized, focussed on helping people with multiple food intolerences and allergies. About the same time, she also began providing gluten-free baked goods to a select number of restaurants in Victoria.
While she herself is not Celiac, she has always endeavoured to provide as safe a gluten-free product as possible for all of her clientele, and early in 2013, she made the move to designate her kitchen as fully gluten-free, for baking, catering, and all home-cooked meals, transitioning all of her existing clients to gluten-free alternatives.
She is active on social media, regularly posting real-life examples of catering menus and gluten-free baking, and conducts online cooking classes using Google+. She hopes to educate people through her posts and recipes that eating gluten-free is a delicious thing. She gets a sense of satisfaction when people drive out of their way to get some of her gluten-free baking~
Janice also puts her palate towards the flavours behind House Made, an artisinal line of cocktail bitters. She created this line of bitters and syrups out of frustration at not being able to find quality products for recreating pre-Prohibition classic cocktails. When she is not cooking, baking or shaking things up, she can be found gardening, knitting or walking her 2 Shiba Inus, Eric and Kimiko.
