Cookbook Review: Go Dairy Free

 

Pre-food allergies, almost all of my favorite recipes came from magazines. For years I have been collecting recipes from Cooking Light and Real Simple- making notes on the ones I liked and keeping them in a spiral notebook. But as the food allergens piled on, most of favorite recipes just didn’t quite work anymore. There are some replacements that are easy to make- a recipe calls for a couple of cloves of garlic? Ok. No problem. I’ll leave those out. Trying to make a frittata without eggs? Well, that’s going to take a miracle.

And, searching randomly online for vegan recipes- you just never know what you are going to get.  I haven’t had very much luck with recipes from random blogs from people with no official qualifications (Pot? Yes, hi, it’s me, Kettle.)

So, instead of sadly flipping through my favorite recipes that I can no longer have, or blindly trying recipes online, I went on the lookout for cookbooks that I could use. Cookbooks that presumably have had somebody other than the author test the recipes and they turned out okay. And cookbooks that have recipes that are already okay for my kid’s food allergies. Go Dairy Free by Alisa Fleming was one of the first ones (and one of the best ones!) I’ve gotten. It’s got hundreds of recipes from breakfast to sides to meals to desserts. Best of all, it’s not a healthy vegan book trying to sell you on a lifestyle where you don’t need cheese. It is perfectly aware that cheese IS delicious and unfortunately there are just times when you CAN’T PHYSICALLY eat it. Before the recipes it’s got chapters on just how to start living a dairy free life which I found very helpful. Some the advice?

• Get an ice cream maker. Yep, did that. Feel great about it.
• The longer you go without cheese, the better the alternatives taste. Seriously. That’s true. Also true for pretty much everything else- the longer I go without eating peanut butter, the better that sun butter tastes.
• Which kinds of restaurants to avoid (I see you Italian and all your cheesy, creamy, deliciousness) and things to do to try to make sure the restaurants you do go to are safe if you are allergic to milk

She's also got an entire website with good information if you are trying to ditch dairy.

Okay so are the recipes good?

No milk. No eggs. Still looks like a cake to me!

Yes! I have made all of my birthday cakes from this book for the past year. The first attempt stuck to the pan a lot and wasn’t the prettiest. One of the icing recipes never fluffed up but you know what? They’ve all been delicious. There are these avocado filled enchiladas that when eating them I never once thought “You know what this needs? Cheese.” Talk about magic. The wholesome pillowy pancakes my son eats at least 8 at a time and then has to lay down because he ate too much. Waffles? Yes. Cookies? Yes. Pasta? Yes. Pizza? Ehh…. The one recipe I have made from this book that my wife said maybe let’s not make this again was a pizza with a “cheese sauce” on it. It was weird. We still ate it though!

It's never good when you show somebody a photo of what you baked and they say ".... what is that?"

Is it good for people with food allergies?

Well, obviously it’s good for people who are allergic to dairy milk. But it also has a handy index with what allergens are in each recipe and it has easy swaps on most recipes if you are vegan or avoiding certain foods. A lot of the cheese alternatives use nuts so I can’t say if the cashew cheese wheel or the pine nut parma sprinkles are good… but the tofu ricotta made a delicious lasagna.

All in all, if you are forced to go dairy free, then this is the book for you.