Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a fun and food safe Thanksgiving! This Thanksgiving I was beyond thankful that my son could have a normal holiday dinner with the rest of the family and not feel like he was being left out. I told my mom (the host) that as long as he had a few things he could eat like the rolls I was bringing and some turkey-that would be great. Instead, she insisted on cooking everything from the gravy, stuffing, turkey, ham and all of the side dishes with dairy free ingredients so that he could eat all of it. Not very many people would set aside their butter fetishes on Thanksgiving and do this! For that I'm really thankful!

Food Allergy Testing

Since I don't ever talk about my sons food allergies on my family blog, and this is my dairy free blog- I guess I get to give his updates on here!

Last year we had high hopes for our son's food allergies improving. Going into the testing he had dairy and egg allergies, and when we got him tested he had outgrown the egg allergies, but still tested positive for dairy, as well as soy and baker's yeast. I tried giving my son bread that contained no yeast and he had sandwiches made with tortillas instead of bread. I did this for about 2 months and then gave up after lots of tears and headache. I decided I wasn't going to eliminate a food that he didn't show any outward effects to, so I didn't. I did however switch my son to rice milk, and rice yogurt, etc.

This years testing was a lot different. I now realize that he may not ever outgrow these food allergies, and that's okay. All that I really hope for is to see some improvement. I also switched to an allergist that was more child friendly since I wasn't at all impressed with the first. He agreed with me about the yeast. If it wasn't showing any effects on him when he ate it, then it was most likely a false positive. (Such a different attitude than the allergist that testing him positive and said absolutely no yeast whatsoever, not even in saltine crackers). The results this time showed that he was positive to milk, but negative to soy. I'm so excited about that because in my local grocery stores rice products are impossible to find. I have to pay 2.50 at a natural foods store if I want to treat my son with a rice yogurt. Soy yogurts are like .89 cents at Smiths- so yeah to that! :)

As far as the milk allergies go, we had to also get a blood test taken since the first allergist didn't measure in a number the skin test and there was nothing to compare with. So we got his blood test taken to compare with the one he got taken at 18 months old. At 18 months he scored a 21 (anything over a 3 is a positive reaction). Well now at 3 1/2 years old he scored an 80. We are really bummed that it has gotten so much worse, but there's not much else we can do besides keep going strong doing what we are doing! The allergist reminded me that 1 in every 10 kids don't outgrow their allergies. I have to keep positive and remember that there are a lot of kids who have multiple food allergies, and that there we are lucky there are still a lot of really yummy foods he can eat

New Cooking Blog!

I have been playing around with the idea of starting a food blog for a while now because cooking has always been a passion of mine, and I now love the challenge of cooking every meal without dairy ingredients.
Let me tell you my story, as I haven't always loved the challenge!

We found out our son was extremely allergic to dairy at 10 months old when we heard a hoarse and unusual cry from his room. We took him out of his crib to find that his lips were trippled in size. We traced the culprit to a drinking glass that he was playing with around his mouth before bedtime that had milk in it previously. That was the start of our journey to avoiding dairy. When he was about 18 months old he was hospitalized for 3 days from an asthma attack and so they ran blood tests for allergies. That's when we really found out it was a lot more serious than we thought and that's when I had to become an ingredient reading maniac!

At first my husband and I continued to eat our usual cuisines, and I would fix our son a seperate plate with something I knew he could eat. Then I realized that he was going to get use to the specialized treatment and maybe think he can always do what he wants to do. That's when I took up the challenge to eat "dairy free" as an entire family. I had no idea the challenge I was undertaking and use to cry over the lack of recipes I could find. Then I met several moms out there through the blog world who are dealing with the same stresses I do on a daily basis, some of them so much more complex, and realized that 1-I'm not alone and 2-It could be a lot worse. So with the inspiration those moms gave me (one in particular and she'll know who she is) I've been given the creativity and patience to now find my recipe box filled with yummy dinners my whole family can eat.

I know you can buy cookbooks and google search for dairy free recipes out there, but who's to know which ones are good and which are garbag? Welcome to "Dairy Free- Tried and True" where from one mom to another, you'll know they're good!