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Allergy Cooking with Ease

Table of Contents

Foreword.......................................................................................................... Introduction to the Third Edition..................................................................... About This Book.............................................................................................. Our Family's Pandemic Experience................................................................. Boost Your Immunity NOW............................................................................ Practical Pandemic Preparedness.................................................................... How To Live With Food Allergies................................................................... Know Your Ingredients.................................................................................... Muffins, Crackers, Breakfast Foods, and Breads Made Without Yeast........... Yeast-Leavened Breads, Rolls, and Treats....................................................... Main Dishes..................................................................................................... Pasta and Ethnic Dishes................................................................................... Vegetables, Side Dishes, and Soups................................................................. Salads and Dressings........................................................................................ Cookies............................................................................................................. Cakes and Frostings......................................................................................... Ice Creams, Sorbets, Cones, and Sauces.......................................................... Pastry, Fruit Desserts, and Puddings................................................................ This ‘n That: Beverages, Condiments, Snacks, and Tips................................. Ultimate Peace................................................................................................. References........................................................................................................ Appendix A: What Happened to Wheat?........................................................ Appendix B: The Wheat Problem................................................................... Appendix C: How Allergy Baking is Unique................................................. Appendix D: Treating Food Allergies: Drugs, Diet, Desensitization.............. Appendix E: Understanding Food Labels....................................................... Appendix F: Table of Measurements............................................................... Sources of Special Foods and Products........................................................... Index of the Recipes by Major Grain or Grain Alternative............................. General Index...................................................................................................

7 8 11 14 20 27 34 39 49 74 91 112 129 139 150 169 185 195 214 223 227 229 231 233 238 241 249 250 260 262

Foreword

During the past 35 years I’ve helped thousands of patients with food allergies and other types of food sensitivities. I’ve accomplished this by putting people on one week trial elimination diets. If and when the person’s symptoms improved (as they usually did), the eliminated foods were eaten again one food per day and reactions were noted.

Using this program, many of my patients found that they were sensitive to milk, wheat, corn, egg, and other of their favorite foods.

So, they would come back to me and say, “What can I eat and how can I prepare foods for my family?” In responding to these questions over the years, I have used and recommended many different recipes and many books. Yet, I’m always keeping my mind and eyes open in my search to help my patients.

Then, in the summer of 1991, I received the manuscript of Nickie Dumke’s Allergy Cooking with Ease. I reviewed this book and liked it. Because I don’t claim to be a cook, I passed it along to my allergy colleague, Nell Sellers, who has worked with me and prepared recipes for my patients during the past 30 years. Here are Nell’s comments:

“Allergy Cooking with Ease is a gem of a book. It incorporates all of the key points I’ve been telling our patients for years! She even includes starting the rotation diet day at dinner so you’ll have food for breakfast and lunch the next day. Her book includes something for everybody. She agrees that the diet has to be livable or people won’t follow it for long.”

Features of this book include:

Other tips in this book include stocking up so as to always have permissible foods on hand to lessen the chances of cheating and making big batches of baked foods and storing them in the freezer for later rotation.

A final word: Nickie Dumke’s book isn’t only a recipe book. It encourages people to enjoy family, friends, work, and recreation. She says in effect, “Be good to yourself. Don’t worry if you fall off your diet now and then. You can always pick yourself up and go at it again.”

If you or members of your family are troubled by food allergies or sensitivity intolerances, you’ll value this book as a treasured friend!

William G. Crook, M.D.
Author of The Yeast Connection

 

Introduction to The Third Edition of
Allergy Cooking with Ease

Allergy Cooking with Ease originally grew from keeping my son Joel happy on a restricted diet. He was allergic to wheat and eggs in early childhood, and when he was four, we learned that he was also allergic to milk, corn, soy, peanuts, chocolate, and rice. After eliminating all of his problem foods for six months, he was able to eat some of them in rotation, but he still had to strictly avoid wheat and eggs.

When he was in elementary school, I tried to make sure what he took in his lunch looked normal and tasted as good as what the other children had so he would not feel deprived. For school parties and friends’ birthday parties, I brought look-alike party foods. I cooked family meals that he could and would enjoy. When Joel’s younger brother, John, began eating his first solid foods, he ate them on a rotation diet that eliminated all major food allergens just in case he might also be prone to developing food allergies.

Every evening my mother and I spoke on the phone. She always wanted to hear what I had been cooking that day and advised me to write a cookbook so other mothers would not have to develop recipes. At first I said, ‘Naah!’ Eventually I decided to do what she said.

As time went by, Joel’s food allergies got better and mine got worse. I wrote a book for people with severe food allergies. The new book, The Ultimate Food Allergy Cookbook and Survival Guide, contains medical information, tables of about 800 foods and their place in the classification of food families, a rotation diet that eliminates all major food allergens, rotates all other foods and can be personalized to fit your family’s allergies, and recipes that fit the diet. These recipes run the gamut from near-normal to extremely exotic (rare foods). When people called for help with their food allergies at that time, I told them that the newer book contained everything I knew and that if they wished to purchase only one book, the new book was the one to get. However, Allergy Cooking with Ease remained my bestseller.

About This Book

The purpose of this book is to provide a wide variety of recipes for multiple food allergies to meet a broad range of dietary and social needs and, whenever possible, to save you food preparation time.

Because of the scope of allergies addressed by the recipes in this book, not all of the recipes will fit each individual’s specific dietary needs. There are grain-free recipes for those who are sensitive to all grains and recipes using a large variety of different and non-grain alternatives for those who rotate several grain-type foods. There are cracker, muffin, and baking-soda-raised bread recipes for those who cannot tolerate yeast and yeast bread recipes for those who can.

There are dessert and cookie recipes sweetened with fruit and fruit juices for those who can tolerate fruit sweeteners and recipes sweetened with stevia and/or monk fruit for those with blood sugar and yeast problems. Some recipes offer several sweetening options including a choice of non-sugar sweeteners such as coconut sugar as substitute for cane sugar. Coconut sugar works well in most recipes that called for cane sugar in the first edition of this book and is very low-glycemic. A very few rare recipes include an option for using cane sugar for kids, young and old, who can occasionally tolerate some sugar and may feel deprived without it in some social situations.

This edition contains new recipes such as more vegetables and side dishes that were not in the previous editions. The new main dish recipes include some made with game meat for those allergic to ordinary meats, vegetarian recipes, and recipes that can be made with meats usually found in your grocery store. Rather than concentrating on the recipes that you cannot use (possibly the majority of them), be positive and use those that you can use. ‘Avoid chronic negativity at all costs,’ said the late Marge Jones, RN in her Mastering Food Allergies newsletter.

Although the first edition of Allergy Cooking With Ease was written before the epidemic of celiac disease and gluten-intolerance began, all editions of this book contain gluten-free baking recipes made with sorghum, amaranth, quinoa, teff, garbanzo, cassava or almond flour, as well as gluten-free versions of main and side dish recipes that sometimes are made with wheat- or gluten-containing products such as thickeners or pasta.

If you are on a gluten-free diet, DO NOT ASSUME THAT ALL RECIPES IN THIS BOOK ARE GLUTEN-FREE. It is unwise for anyone to restrict their diet more than is individually necessary because a wide variety of foods in one’s diet improves nutrition and also reduces the risk of developing new allergies. Individuals who are allergic to wheat but not non-grain alternatives and non-grains should cook for themselves rather than eating only commercially made gluten-free products. Replacing the wheat in your diet with one grain, such as rice which is in most commercially made gluten-free foods, can lead to developing an allergy to the ‘replacement’ grain. Every reader needs to pick and choose recipes that are right for himself or herself and/or family. The ‘Index of Recipes by Grain or Grain Alternative’ beginning on page 260 will help with this task.

Meeting social needs may be as important as meeting dietary needs, especially for children. Therefore, this book contains cookie press cookie recipes for Christmas, cake recipes for birthdays, and a large variety of cookie recipes for school lunches, and pumpkin pie recipe and a grain-free stuffing recipes for Thanksgiving. Hopefully the many easy cookie recipes will keep children from having no dessert in their lunches and thus reduce the chance of them swapping a nutritious turkey sandwich on yeast-free grain-free bread for a wheat-containing cupcake or OreoTM that they should not eat.

The amount of time that must be spent cooking for an allergy diet can seem overwhelming, so timesaving ingredients and techniques are used in these recipes. The yeast breads are made with quick-rise yeast which can save a little time, but active dry yeast may be used if you have more time for rising. Sources of commercial non-wheat pasta and breads are given as well as recipes for making your own non-yeast and yeast breads and pasta. The recipes include frozen and canned vegetables and fruits to save on time spent washing and chopping. However, when a shortcut method could cause allergy problems, other options are included. For example, canned tomato products can cause problems for individuals who are very sensitive to yeast and mold, so more time-consuming recipes using fresh tomatoes are also provided. Use the timesaving tricks and devices that you can, and think of the time you spend cooking as an investment in good health for yourself and/or your family.

Although the focus of this book is cooking for enjoyable meals and snacks, the third edition has a serious undertone. In the years since the first publication of Allergy Cooking With Ease, my family has faced challenges such as cancer and macular degeneration. The role that sugar plays in cancer and other serious diseases motivated me to add sugar-free options to the few recipes that were formerly sweetened only with sugar as well as to add new sugar-free recipes. Sweeteners which are ‘new’ to most Americans such as agave, coconut sugar, monk fruit, and the more neutral-tasting enzyme treated stevia are featured in this edition. The original versions of the recipes are still here, and the choice of which to sweetener to use is yours. There are still times when a child needs a treat nearly-identical to those of his classmates; the adult psyche may have similar needs on special occasions.

The pandemic has made all of life a more serious for people of all ages, including children. It seems that everyone, especially parents, can benefit from advice on how to make themselves and their children better prepared health-wise for possible future pandemics. Our family may have fared better than many people during the pandemic because of previous nutritional preparation. The naturopath who gave my husband IVs for macular degeneration and my nutrition-aware oncologist gave us nutritional advice that may have made us more ‘pandemic resistant.’ With what you learn in the ‘Boost Your Immunity NOW’ chapter on pages 20 to 26, you also can prepare yourself and your family for future health challenges and may have less trouble with routine minor illnesses such as colds. Keep reading to learn more about eating well for immunity and important nutritional supplements for immunity at every age. Also learn about life-style practices and other ways to increase your ability to resist infections of all kinds and even death from other causes.

Recommended by Experts:

Wonderful! Nickie Dumke has written a truly comprehensive book that will surely make living with food allergies easier for many people. Besides the breads, pancakes, cookies, cakes, and pie crusts made from half a dozen different flours, Nickie offers her readers creative main dishes, some vegetarian, others using less common meats. And she includes many of the little things that make life more pleasant, especially for children. Imagine, wheat-free teething biscuits and homemade candy canes! Clearly, special food can be fun! You can’t read this book without realizing that the author has “been there” herself.

Marjorie Hurt Jones, R.N.
Author of The Allergy Self-Help Cookbook

During the past 35 years I’ve helped thousands of patients with food allergies and other types of food sensitivities….They would say, “What can I eat and how can I prepare foods for my family?” This is a difficult question, so I’m always keeping my mind and eyes open in the search to help my patients…. If you or members of your family are troubled by food allergies or sensitivity intolerances, you’ll value this book as a treasured friend.

Dr. William G. Crook
Author of The Yeast Connection
Detecting Your Hidden Allergies,
and many other books

Allergy Cooking with Ease is a gem of a book. It incorporates all the key points I’ve been telling our patients for years! Her book includes something for everybody. She agrees that the diet has to be livable or people won’t follow it for long.

Nell Sellers, R.N.
Colleague of Dr. William G. Crook

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