Cook With Food Allergies

November 23, 2010

Gatherings with family can be difficult for people who have certain food allergies. Food allergies are on the rise for both children and adults. There has been a 50% increase in food allergies over the past decade in the United States. The most common allergies are milk, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, shellfish, seafood, soy, and wheat.
 
Mid-Continent Public Library has many books, magazines, and electronic resources to assist with food allergy recipes for Thanksgiving and Christmas. For me, it is very hard to find any baked items I can eat because of my egg allergy. I checked out a book called The Divvies Bakery Cookbook: No Nuts, No Eggs, No Dairy, Just Delicious! by Lori Sandler. I baked the vanilla cupcakes from this book. They tasted surprisingly good for not having any eggs, dairy, or nuts.
 
Consumer Health Complete is an electronic database that has recipes. I put food allergy recipes in the search area. The first article in the list was called “Sweet Thanks” from Alive magazine. The recipes in this article included harvest cupcakes, pumpkin pie-spiced rice pudding, and baked autumn apples with caramel clove.
 
Thanks to these books and magazines, I was finally able to eat baked goods again!

April E.
Raytown Branch