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]

...continued from part 1...

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...