Cookbook Review: The Everyday Allergy Free Cookbook

 

This cookbook was a gift from one of our friends after my kid was first diagnosed with allergies and it has a fair number of recipes the avoid not only the top eight allergens, but also spices and fruits. Spice and fruit? Yes. It eliminates dairy, gluten (yes gluten not wheat), soy, eggs, fish, shellfish, nuts (and peanuts though a peanut is not actually a nut), fruits, and spices. That’s like the whole food pyramid. What’s left? Veggies. Rice. And some chicken. Not all of the recipes eliminate all of those things (I mean, how could they? literally what could you make without all of those things?), but it's pretty impressive what Tiffany Shelton tried to do.

Good things about the book? It’s got cooking time for each recipe! *confetti explosion* On the other hand, it’s not completely accurate. Not in like a, oh add 10 minutes to each recipe because clearly they had a sous chef helping them chop and prepare everything. No, it’s in a, if I add up all of the times in the steps it's mathematically impossible and I'm going to need a time turner to get dinner on the table in time.

This was a recipe called the "Lentil Burger" but I think I would have gone for a "Lentil Sloppy Jo". She's not a looker but she tasted pretty good. 

Okay, so are the recipes actually good?

Well, none of them are necessarily ground breaking. A lot of them are pretty simple- carrots cooked in vegan butter with sugar, cauliflower roasted with nutritional yeast, a standard salsa recipe, and one that is just hilariously melting chocolate chips and putting it in molds (the ingredient list had one ingredient on it [chocolate chips]). Plus, most of the recipes in the desserts and snacks section are pretty typical vegan recipes with “gluten free flour.” But, and this cannot be said enough, it is so nice to have a cookbook that actually has considered food allergies. While it doesn’t have a whole lot of main courses, it has a lot of good ideas for desserts and baked goods.

So, is it good for people with allergies?

Yes? On the one hand, it does have a lot of recipes that are safe for my kid. On the other hand, some of the recipes that are supposed to be safe aren’t. Like, the frittata that is egg free? I couldn’t wait to see this. How do you make a frittata egg free? It seems impossible! So, I eagerly flipped to that page and under the ingredients it says “8 eggs (if you are allergic to eggs, you can use just the yolk)”. Well. Okay. I get it. Technically the egg protein is in the egg white BUT if you are really allergic to eggs (and my kid is) then you aren’t supposed to eat any part of the egg (because without some sort of magic you cannot completely separate the egg yolk from the egg white). I guess the answer to how do you make a frittata without eggs is… you can’t.

And while not all of the recipes in the book are completely free from all of the top 8 allergens and fruits and spices; almost all of them do avoid the top 8 allergens. That’s pretty impressive! Because the top 8 allergens are in a LOT of things (if this blog teaches you nothing else, it should teach you this: there's at least one top allergen in almost everything people without allergies mindless consume each day. Allergens have started haunting me. THEY ARE EVERYWHERE!).

Overall, it’s a cookbook specifically for people with allergies! And there aren’t a whole of those out there. It’s so easy to feel left out flipping through magazines and seeing delicious recipes that have no thought to people with food allergies. So, it's nice that there’s at least one book out there dedicated to eating with such limitations, even if it does bite off a little more than it can chew, so to speak.