Because of kidney damage, my father has to follow a very restrictive diet, which among other things involves eating low-protein bread. My mother has been trying to make this bread from low-protein flour (which apparently has the consistency of cornflour -- it is in fact mainly starch, so that is not surprising).

The results haven't been brilliant. So I wonder if anybody reading this has experience with handling low-protein (or gluten-free) flour for baking. If any of you does, would you mind letting me know, and then I could ask for some tips?

Thanks!

For a while now, I've noticed that I can only wear my earrings for a couple of hours before they start annoying me. I thought it was because I only wear them rarely and my holes aren't used to having stuff actually inserted. But in the past couple of days I've worn a pair of earrings almost continuously, no problem. So I suspect this is because I'm stuffed with antihystamines for hayfever, and therefore the problem is allergy.

Almost all of my earrings are silver or baser metals. Anti-allergic earrings don't tend to come in shapes I like, plus I'm really into Indian jewelry that comes in silver only.

So I wonder: does anybody know of something that can be done to make silver (or other) earrings anallergic? Some special varnish maybe, or some special trick? It would be great, now that I know what the problem is...

I thought they were more into abolishing them...

In the biographical introduction to Alexandra David-Néel (a fascinating woman, by the way), Donald Lopez, who is generally fairly clued-in, says among other things: "[She] was educated in a Calvinist convent before studying Indian and Chinese philosophy at the Sorbonne [...]"

An (admittedly brief) web search didn't turn up anything except stuff about abolishing monasteries and one photo of a "Calvinist convent" in Smarhon' in Belarus, with no other details, and the online information I found on David-Néel doesn't mention her early education.

Does anybody have a theory, either about the existence of Calvinist convents, or about what Lopez actually meant? (It's not like I'm researching this stuff -- I'm just curious.)