Question about cooking and allergies.

[kyrielle]

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.

Comments

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

Hi, TheRck sent me. My family eats gluten-free dairy-free yeast-free vegetarian, and our diet is varied and yummy.

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....

[kyrielle]

Thank you thank you thank you. I'm sorry it took me so long to reply; this is a wealth of information and it is greatly appreciated!

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!