Introduction

My son has allergies....not that uncommon nowadays. It seems like allergies are everywhere we go and getting worse. My son's allergies are interesting and challenging all at once. He is allergic to the top eight allergies and then some. For those who don't know the top eight are wheat, soy, egg, peanuts, tree nuts, dairy, fish, and shellfish. (In no particular order.) We have known about his allergies since he was 11 months old though we suspected them much earlier than that. Our pediatrician told us that we were wrong. (Always trust your gut, Mamas!) Anyway I have been striving to cook and bake for him for the past 3 plus years. My goal is to make his food as similar as ours. If we go to a birthday party, he has a cupcake. If we go to a Christmas cookie exchange party, he has a variety of cookies (and just skips the exchange). If we go to a pizza party, well you get the idea. It isn't always easy. In fact at times, it is downright difficult and frustrating. Recently, rice became a problem and we had to drop it. Unfortunately rice flour was a staple in my baking and cooking for for the Allergy Wonder. My heart broke the day AW asked for pancakes and I failed. The coconut flour just didn't cut it. He cried, I cried, heck even his twin sister cried. (She by the way has no allergies. Just to make life more interesting!) My friends and family have been saying for a while now that I should write a cookbook for allergies. I usually protest because I don't feel like I really come up with the recipes. I just find recipes to use and then bastardize them with my substitutions. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. (Hence the Pancake disaster of 2012) But in reflecting on the trials and tribulations of having a kid with allergies, I decided that maybe putting the recipes I have used successfully out there might help some other poor allergy kid (and certainly his or her Mama!) So that is what this page is about. A place for me to share recipes and substitutions. Hopefully some of you will find it useful. Maybe some of you won't but it will make you appreciate if you don't have to go through the trouble of substituting food. I don't know. One thing is for sure. It will help me keep track of recipes so I can use them again. As of right now my system is writing the basic recipe on a scrap of paper....adding and changing things as I go. And then later when I want to recreate said item, looking through a billion scraps of paper most of which are unlabelled and untitled, and hoping and praying I first find the right one and second remember what the heck I did. So much fun. I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor :)