![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
I know some of those reading this journal cook, and some have food issues, and I'm hoping you can help me. One of my relatives must now avoid both wheat gluten and dairy products. She's lived her whole life cooking for a normal diet without these restrictions, and she's trying to find alternatives and good recipes.
Anyone have any good recipes, especially ones that substitute for things like bread/pasta/etc.? I'm sure I could do a search and turn up tons of recipes, but I would have no clue whether they were good or not.
Anyone have any good recipes, especially ones that substitute for things like bread/pasta/etc.? I'm sure I could do a search and turn up tons of recipes, but I would have no clue whether they were good or not.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Only thing I can think of off the top of my head. . . I don't know how soy or rice milk reacts in cooking.
no subject
no subject
no subject
I recently read someone's comparison of going on a gluten-free diet as being similar to having a new baby in the house: At first new parents are often scared to give the baby a bath, but with practice it stops being a big deal and becomes second nature.
I have a collection of my favorite recipes already in my computer, and I'd be happy to e-mail it to you. If you're interested, send me email. You can reach me at any address you care to invent that ends in @unixmama.com.
The usual recommendation for someone new to a gluten-free diet is to eat a lot of whole foods from the produce department. The idea is that it's much easier to be sure a food is gluten-free if it is a potato or broccoli, rather than a processed food with 27 different ingredients. Over time, as your body heals, you can do more experimenting with other gluten-free foods.
I still make all of my old flour-containing recipes (except yeasted bread, which I hadn't gotten around to tackling before I figured out that I'm allergic to yeast... sigh....). To do that, I replace the flour with an equal amount of Bob's Red Mill GF All Purpose Flour Mix plus about 1/3 teaspoon of xanthan gum per cup of flour. (My local food-allergy-aware grocery store carries both of these items, and lots of other gluten-free flour too. But lately even Meijer carries a surprising amount of gluten-free flour -- it is pretty cool.) I've used this in quickbreads (that is, banana-bread types of breads), pancakes, cookies, cakes, and it works fine in all of those. Just make sure you stir the xanthan gum into the flour before you mix the flour with everything else, so that the xanthan gum doesn't clump up.
Pamela's Baking Mix is also a good gluten-free flour substitute, but be aware that it is not dairy-free. (Also it contains nuts, if that's a concern.)
(Currently I like to replace flour with 3/4 Bob's Red Mill baking mix and 1/4 teff flour, plus the xanthan gum as mentioned above. I think the teff makes the finished baked goods taste better, plus it also adds fiber and lots of nutrients.)
Some other gluten-free things we like are: Tinkyada brand pasta (tastes much more like "real" pasta than any other brand we've tried), Kennickinick frozen bread, chebe pizza mix, Amy's frozen TV dinners (look on the package for the words "gluten free" and "dairy free"), Amy's soups (many say "gluten free" on the can), and Mesa Sunrise breakfast cereal. My kooky local grocery store carries all of these things.
For being dairy free, the single thing that helped the most was a recipe for a "cheese replacer" sauce recipe that I found on the Internet. It's made of nuts and water, ground together in the blender. It *doesn't* taste the same as cheese, but even though it tastes different it works okay in recipes as a cheese substitute. I bought a used blender for about $4 at the local re-use center and used that to make quart-sized batches of the sauce. The original recipe says to bake it, but it's also good just plain on pasta. Anyway, here's the recipe:
This sauce makes a good dairy-free soy-free substitute for cheese. I like it plain on pasta, or substituted for cheese in recipes such as lasagna. It doesn’t taste identical to cheese, but the flavor works well as a cheese replacer. For a while I was so into this recipe that I would mix up a double-batch of it and store it in the refrigerator for a couple of days, using it frequently.
Cheeseless Sauce
1 cup water
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup cashews
1/4 cup lemon juice or cider vinegar or red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
optional: add 1 tablespoon tahini
Mix all ingredients in blender until smooth. Use as a topping for pizza, lasagna, or other baked pasta dishes or rice. Bake until golden brown on top.
Continued in part 2....
no subject
I'm going to send her a link to this post so that she can read the comments and all; I'm not sure yet if she'll want more recipes, but if she does, one of us will email. Right now I'm just so very glad for all the information you and everyone else has shared.
I knew enough to know that if I asked, there were answers - but that was about it, and I'm no kind of cook. She is, and hopefully all of the responses and information will be very helpful to her.
Thank you again for your response - I am sure it took some time to write out, and it is VERY much appreciated!
no subject
Other things I've learned:
* I like rice milk on breakfast cereal and almond milk for baking. Your preferences may vary. (Note that some rice milk is not gluten-free, so you need to read the labels.)
* This sounds gross, but actually orange juice is pretty good on breakfast cereal. It plumps up raisins nicely.
* For feta cheese, I haven't tried this, but I've read that you can sometimes substitute a mixture of chopped nuts and chopped olives.
* For baking, I've been surprised by how often you can replace butter with oil. I've done this in cakes and cookies and any other old recipe that I loved, and had them come out decently. You can tell that the butter is missing, but the finished baked goods still are okay.
* You can substitute oil for the butter when making a white sauce. You can replace the milk with either almond milk or another alternative milk, but this is sometimes too sweet. You can also replace the milk with veggie broth. I love those quart-sized boxes of vegetable broth and use 'em in all sorts of things.
* The company Sunspire makes dairy-free chocolate chips. I've seen them at Whole Foods and other natural foods stores. Also, the company Enjoy Life makes gluten-free dairy-free soy-free chocolate chips.
* If you can eat soy, that opens up a world of options. Note that most soy cheeses *do* contain dairy, though, because otherwise it doesn't melt properly, so you need to carefully check the ingredients list for casein and other dairy ingredients.
* Natural foods stores are good places to look for products for people with food allergies. We have 3 natural foods stores in my city, and one of them really specializes in having foods for people with food allergies. I'd been to that store many times over the years, but until I had to eat dairy-free I'd never noticed how many of these special foods they have there.
* I bought a lot of vegan cookbooks (cheap on half.com). The ones I liked by far the best were the ones by Ron Pickarski, "Friendly Foods" and "Eco-Cuisine". He's a fascinating guy, a former monk who used to spend all day in the kitchen inventing innovative ways to make really amazing vegan foods, and entering them into international food competitions. Note that if you do a web search for books by him, they sometimes spell his last name "Picarski" and sometimes "Pickarski".
* I've read that if you cut dairy out of your diet for a long time, you should go gradually when adding it back, in case your body has stopped producing the enzymes to digest it.
* I tried lots of calcium options. I'd prefer to get it from food, but that wasn't happening, so I ended up with Pioneer brand calcium, 4-5 tablets a day. They make a couple of calcium options that are gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegetarian. You also want to keep an eye on vitamins A and D, and if you don't eat meat or eggs you need to make sure you have a source of vitamin B12 in your diet, because B12 deficiencies take a long time to occur but may have no symptoms until you already have permanent damage. Many many celiacs are deficient in B12, plus the medical community may have set the "normal range" too low if they test your B12 levels. Symptoms that you need more calcium in your diet are feeling tearful, or muscle cramps.
* I'd be happy to forward my collection of recipes, including lots of main dishes, and chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. (The cake recipe is so good and so much healthier than traditional cake recipes that we kept right on using it as our main cake recipe, even when we went through a phase of eating dairy again.)
... continued in part 3...
no subject
I'm not sure what your reason for not eating dairy is, but if you are lactose intolerant, then there is a good chance that you may be able to eat dairy again someday. The enzyme, lactase, that digests the lactose in dairy products, is produced by the tips of the villi in the small intestine. And the villi are what is damaged by celiac disease. After 6 to 12 months or longer on a gluten-free diet, the villi may well heal enough to produce lactase again, making it possible to eat dairy products. Also, you don't need to wait for that to happen. Some varieties of Lactaid tablets are gluten-free (check their website to find which ones are). If you are lactose intolerant, you can take a couple of Lactaid tablets with a meal and eat dairy just fine. Note that you may need to experiment with the dosage; I found that I needed about twice the labeled dosage in order to be able to eat dairy at a meal.
Here's a website with a lot of good information about celiac disease:
http://brain.hastypastry.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=141
The "stickies" at the top include "the gluten file" -- which is an awesome collection of information about celiac disease and other gluten sensitivity, and one called something like "recipe links to existing threads," which has links to humongous numbers of gluten-free recipes, organized by category, that were posted by real people who liked them.
If your relative is located in Ann Arbor, she is welcome to join the celiac support group that I started. It's still small and new. You can find it on the web at:
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/glutenfreeannarbor/
Here's a good web page about eating dairy-free. It's been updated since I last read through it, but it was an awesome resource then, so hopefully it is still good now:
http://web.mit.edu/kevles/www/nomilk.html
If she's not in Ann Arbor, I recommend that she look up her local celiac support group. Having real people to talk to, who've already been through this, is really a wonderful thing!
Anyway, please feel free to e-mail me if I can be of help. Oh, I'm very good at converting favorite old recipes (except for yeasted breads) to be gluten-free and dairy-free, so if there's anything you'd like converted, let me know and I'd be willing to make an attempt at it.
-Valerie
no subject
Someone mentioned spelt flour here, but unfortunately it is not gluten-free. Spelt is a close relative of wheat, and not safe for someone with celiac disease.
A food I love is soy yogurt. WholeSoy makes single-serving containers in a variety of flavors, and Wildwood makes 24-ounce tubs that are the only soy yogurt I've ever found that isn't overly sweet. The Wildwood soy yogurt works well in all sorts of recipes that other soy yogurt is too sweet for. Both brands say "gluten free" and "vegan" right on the label. (I appreciate any company that labels their gluten-free products instead of making you contact them to ask.) One of those companies also makes a soy yogurt drink that I like as a treat.
When my digestive system is feeling yucky, I find soy yogurt often helps. It's soothing to eat, and it feels to me like the good bacteria in the yogurt help to get my body back into balance.
Some grocery stores have a Gluten-Free Product List and a Dairy Free Product List that you can get at the information desk, just by asking for it. Here in Ann Arbor, you can get this at Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and I think Hillers.
no subject
"Food Allergy Survival Guide" by Vesanto Melina, Dina Aronson, Jo Stepaniak. This book starts out with a chapter for each of a number of common food allergies, including gluten-sensitivity/celiac disease, and dairy allergy. Those chapters discuss where the offending food would usually be found, how to avoid eating it, and how to make sure that you are getting the nutrients that would normally be found in that item. Then the book goes on to recipes. They have a gluten-free flour mix that I like (though it's pretty similar to the Bob's Red Mill one that I mentioned) and an awesome gluten-free pie crust recipe. They have lots of other allergen-free recipes for dinner ideas and other meals, too. The recipe are all vegetarian, though it doesn't say anywhere that it's a vegetarian cookbook.
I also like, "Vegetarian Cooking for People With Allergies" by Rafael Rettner. I really like their nut-based veggie burgers.
Oh, and one more store-bought food I like: EnjoyLife makes a bunch of allergen-free cookies that taste good and are made mostly of healthy ingredients like dates and apples. I think it is very neat that there's a company dedicated to making allergen-free foods that people with food allergies can eat. The boxes hold mostly air with just a few little cookies at the bottom, which bothers me. But the cookies themselves are good, with good ingredients, which helps.
Lara Bars are good too, though a bit expensive. Wow do they have few ingredients!
no subject
My brain isn't working right now but let me think a bit and I'll pull out the gluten-free webpages that do stock the stuff I've been telling you about. And then I'll give you the pizza base tonight, when I'm home from rehearsals. It's even been taste tested - Jenn and Scott loved it in Chicago, and they couldn't tell the difference.
aaargh
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0722540272/103-2480418-5608668?v=glance&n=283155
I hope this translates. Didn't visit tinyurl...
Couple tricks I use. Substitute broth for milk where possible (scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes - except we don't do those, either, on low-carb). Also have found, if you don't mind fat stuff, that crushed fried pork rinds make fairly good breading....
Help the relative, if on-line, to find mailing lists for wheat-allergic and lactose-intolerant. Most will include recipes, or pointers to same.
And finally, nobody can tell you how it tastes until they've tasted it. They may have some experimenting to do.
I AM logged in, but the comment page came up anonymous, and if I check LJ user, it asks for my username and password. Thus, the aaarrrgg - well, however you spell it, and however long you sustain the howl..
Love,
Mom
no subject
One of the sources I use to help her find stuff is All Recipes (http://allrecipes.com/directory/1385.asp). While I can't say that everything there is spectacular, since it's so big, generally I've found that it's got good stuff. As others have said, there's a lot of good dairy-free sites out there, though, especially the vegan ones. There are also a ton of good recipe books for the same. Both gluten intolerance and dairy intolerance affect a fairly significant part of the population, so it's not hard to come by decent recipes.
For specifics, I know that soy cheese melts well and can be used in recipes in place of dairy cheese, and that you can make cream soups with soy milk, that being two things we've discussed. Friend in question has home-made soy cheese pizza regularly.
Whole Foods or the equivalent is definitely a good place to check for both GF and dairy-free items. From what I've seen most of it's a 1:1 equivalency.