My hope is to encourage you with tasty and good-for-you foods that accommodate numerous food allergies along with easy to follow recipes.
How did our story start?
About 15 years ago, we had a sweet baby boy. Six weeks after his birth, we noticed that he was digging his itty-bitty fingers into his scalp which was very odd. And by his three month checkup, our new little boy had rashes all over his body. We were so grateful to have a wonderful pediatrician, who realized that this was unusual and scheduled him with a children’s allergy specialist. Two months later the allergy specialist declared, “He is the youngest baby I’ve ever seen”. You never want to hear things like that. But, he recommended that we have a RAST test administered. The results? Out of approximately 20 foods tested, our little one was allergic to all but three. The allergist then sent us back to try secondary foods. When the tests were done, our baby had 27 foods he could eat and 13 main food categories he could not eat (the main ones being eggs, dairy, wheat, corn, soy, beef, yeast, shellfish, all nuts, and etc). Wow! Blew away almost every single thing I knew how to cook and bake.
Huge Learning Curve
So, where did we go from there? We were years before there were all kinds of good recipes on the internet and before box grocery stores stocked any allergy free foods. I’d go to our local library and pull out 12-15 cookbooks and any allergy related books that I could find. I’d take notes and look for recipes that might be good candidates to modify. It still left us with surprisingly few options! I knew then I was in for a huge learning curve!
You know what I learned? I went through all the good cooks that I knew in my sphere of influence (i.e., parents, grandparents, relatives, friends) and took their best recipes and started modifying those first – Then, I would tweak, tweak and tweak some more.
Fast forward 15 or so years, add three more children, throw in a few gray hairs and some new wrinkles, and I’ve had chances to cook for my own hungry crowd, and have learned how “allergy friendly” food works. I have finally created food my family is willing to eat while being allergy friendly. (If you have ever had “allergy friendly food” and it makes you gag, then you understand (grin)).
Hope and Recipes
The goal of this website is to give you hope and recipes. I want your food allergy mealtimes to be less stressful, with more recipes to choose from and filled with more flavor than you might have experienced before.