Chocolate Chip Cookies

Now this was a make it or break it item for me.  When I found out about my daughter's milk allergy and realized I couldn't have milk, I knew that I needed to find out some way to get in my chocolate chip cookie quota or she would be on formula.  Well it was easier than I thought.
The first problem is the chocolate chips:  Nestle- no good contains milk.  However, the semi-sweet versions of Ghirardelli or Guittards chocolate chips don't contain milk.  But a word of caution, they are processed on the same equipment as milk and they might contain traces.  My daughter has a pretty severe milk allergy and she has never had a problem with me eating those kinds of chocolate chips.  The other part is the butter.  Use nucoa margarine spread (milkless) or substitute shortening for the butter.  My sister's mother-in-law always substitutes shortening for butter, she says it makes them better tasting.  The last substitution I make is I use my cornstarch concoction (1TBSP cornstarch+3 TBSP water) for each egg, that way my son can have some cookies as well.  I am very picky with my chocolate chip cookies, and so is my husband.  But guess what, neither of us can tell a difference.  The dough looks different after  adding the cornstarch, but the final product looks and tastes the same.  So here is my recipe for chocolate chip cookies (altered from the Nestle recipe) and you can always put back in 2 eggs, 1 cup butter, and nestle chocolate chips if you don't have a problem with the allergies.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 cup nucoa buttery sticks or shortening

3/4 cups granulated sugar

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 Tbsp cornstarch mixed in a cup with 6 Tbsp water

2 cups Ghirardelli or Guittards semi sweet chocolate chips (may contain traces of milk)

Preheat oven to 375 Degrees.

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in a small bowl.  Beat nucoa (or shortening), granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy.  Add cornstarch/water mixture.  Gradually beat in flour mixture.  Stir in chocolate chips.  Drop by rounded tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheet.

Bake for 7-10 minutes or until golden brown.  Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes, remove to wire racks to cool completely.

Sorry, that's 2 cookie recipes in a row.  I'll add some variety next post.

Did you know that in most baked goods, cornstarch can be substituted for an egg?  It's true!  

1 egg= 1Tbsp cornstarch + 3Tbsp water

An amazing friend told me about this because she said that her mom used to do this when they would run out of eggs on a Sunday and they couldn't go to the store.  I have tried it on pancakes, cakes, cookies, and breads and it has worked perfectly on everything so far.  This is what I made yesterday for some dinner guests.   No eggs and No milk products in this recipe:

Snickerdoodles

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup Nucoa Margarine (a brand of margarine sold in many stores including Albertsons and Ralphs that is milk free)

1/2 cup shortening

2 Tablespoons of cornstarch mixed with 6 Tablespoons of water

2 3/4 cups of flour

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup sugar

2 teaspoons cinnamon

Heat oven to 400 degrees F.  Mix sugar, nucoa margarine, shortening, and cornstarch/water mix in a large bowl.  Stir in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt.  Shape dough into 1 1/4 inch balls.  Mix 1/4 cup of sugar with cinnamon.  Roll balls in cinnamon sugar mixture.  Place 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake 6-10 minutes (baking times vary according to oven and elevation.  Mine usually take about 7 minutes but I always check them after 6 minutes)

Now, if you don't have any allergies and you want this snickerdoodle recipe (there are none better in existence, this once takes the cake so believe me, you want this recipe), you can use 1/2 cup of butter or any kind of margarine instead of the milk free Nucoa, and you can use 2 eggs instead of the water/cornstarch mixture.  Believe me, they are good the milk/egg free way and the milk/egg way.  Our house guests ate 4-6 (milk and egg free) cookies each and my husband and I ate even more than that.  Jif has been asking for them all day today and exclaimed "I love cookies!" during his consumption of it.  

Getting Started- Reese

So I thought that having one kid with allergies was bad enough, I didn't expect it to effect my daughter as well.  Neither my husband or I have any REAL food allergies.  Nothing for my husband, and I am midly allergic to melons and mango, it started when I was pregnant and then I got tested for it and I tested positive for the allergy.  But neither of us had any childhood food allergies.  When Reese was 3 weeks old I started noticing that she would have hives on her like this whenever I breastfed her

I asked the pediatrician about it and she said that Reese probably had irritation from the laundry detergent I was using and that she was too young to have a milk allergy.  I accepted that but still thought it was weird how it showed up after she breastfed, why would laundry detergent do that.  One day we were driving home from Las Vegas and I went to my favorite smoothie place Tropical Smoothie and ordered an extra large smoothie and drank it all on the way home.  It was made of milk, yogurt, strawberries and kiwis.  When we got home I breastfed her and what happened next was not pretty

This picture was taken the next day after the incident. She got a rash and hives from head to toe that lasted for days, she vomited profusely several times, and screamed her head off for hours, her poop looked like liquid urine, she was not a happy baby.  I emailed my doctor and sent her the picture, the doctor said "That baby has a milk allergy, do not eat or drink anything with milk, not even bread that is made with butter".  So from that day on I have not been able to eat or drink anything with dairy.  Now when I cook at home I can't cook with milk, soy, eggs, peanuts, or rice.  When I first found out about my son's allergies and then my new diet I was totally overwhelmed.  Everywhere I looked I couldn't find any good information on how to cook with such an extreme diet.  My new diet felt like torture.  But I have done my research, my nursing background as a Pediatric Registered Nurse has helped me, and now I feel like I have discovered all of the secrets of my new diet and things aren't so bad.  I wanted to make this blog because since this has happened to my family I have had multiple friends come up to me and ask me to give people they know advice on how to have milk free or egg free diets.  If you know anyone who has children who struggle with allergies or who they themselves much embark on a new diet, you can refer them to my blog.  I hope to update it often with recipes, favorite products, opinions, research dealing with appetites amidst allergies.

Getting Started-Jif

Both of my kids have aliases related to peanut butter.  It's ironic because we did this before we ever knew that they might never be able to taste it.  My son is Jif he's 2 1/2 years old and my daughter is Reese and she is 7 months.

This is Jif after he had eggs one time, my camera's just the one on my phone but you can see the hives around the lips and on the arm.

Jif was always a healthy baby until he turned 4 months old and we introduced solid food into his diet.  He was exclusively breastfed until then.  Our pediatrician encouraged us to start feeding him rice cereal at 4 months old because at 4 months old he weighed almost 20 ibs and the pediatrician thought it would be a good idea for him to be able to get the calories he needed through solid food. After about 2 feedings of rice cereal I noticed a rash all over Jif's body,  it was eczema.  At first I thought it was from laundry detergent but it ended being caused by the rice.  When we gave him rice he broke out in a rash, when we took it away his skin was fine.  The doctor said that Jif was the second person he had ever heard of who was allergic to rice.  We slowly introduced other foods and Jif was always sick.  He got a lot of cold/flu type things but he also vomited once or twice a week.  At his one year appointment I told the pediatrician about this and she ran an allergy blood test.  It came back showing that Jif was very allergic to peanuts and wheat, moderately allergic to soy and eggs, and slightly allergic to milk.  THe pediatrician said that he wouldn't be able to have anything with peanuts, wheat, eggs, soy or milk for 6 months.  This was pretty hard for me to hear and worried me a lot.  Especially in taking whole milk out of his diet.  How was he going to get the calories that he needed?  And I was worried about him getting good nutrition with such a limited diet.  I decided to go and see an allergist to get a second opinion.  Meanwhile I went back to breastfeeding even though I had weaned him weeks earlier and by some miracle my milk came back and I was able to not make him drink soy or other types of milk.  The allergist tested him with skin tests to verify his allergies.  It turns out that the blood test gives too many false positives, but the skin test gives too many false negatives.  So if you get a positive on both, you know it is fairly likely that there is indeed a food allergy.  Through the skin test and gradually phasing foods back into the diet we determined that Jif probably wasn't allergic to wheat, milk, or soy.  During the time that I took all of this out of his diet his vomiting had stopped so I slowly brought each ingredient back in.  Wheat was fine, no reaction.  Milk was fine, no reaction (thank goodness-those two ingredients were the hardest to avoid in my opinion) and then we brought soy back which was tricky.  Things like soy lethicin didn't seem to bother him, but soy protein would cause vomiting, and to this day I am still not sure if he is allergic to soybean oil.  Sometimes he will eat something and the only ingredient I can find that might be a culprit is the soybean oil, and other foods he never has a problem with when they contain soybean oil.  Well sadly it took me a few months to really figure out that soy was not ok for him to eat and that was making him sick, but once I finally took soy out he stopped vomiting on a weekly basis. We have had a few bad reactions with a few foods.  The first bad reaction was with peanuts.  Jif was being babysat by my in laws and husband and one of his uncles accidentally gave him a bite of peanut butter cookie because he didn't realize he was allergic to peanuts.  We didn't realize we hadn't told the uncle because it felt to us like we had told everyone.  My husband in the other room started to hear him cough and thought to himself, that's weird, he's not sick.  Then it hit him that there were peanut butter cookies in the house and he might have gotten one. It didn't take him too long to realize that that was what had happened.  Then Jif started vomiting and having hives. Unfortunately this was the one time that I had taken Jif's emergency epi pen with me instead of leaving it with the babysitters and I was at a spa getting a massage and not accessible.  My husband and inlaws took him to the pharmacy and bought him some benedryl and gave it to him.  Since it was his first episode and not really severe, that actually worked for him.  What should have been done was Jif should have been stuck with the epi pen and taken to the hospital, but thank goodness the benedryl worked.  The second really bad reaction happened with eggs.  Jif is allergic to the egg white and the allergy is worse when the egg is uncooked.  Most times when he eats something with egg in it he vomits with hives.  We have never had breathing issues when he eats eggs.  One time I was letting Jif help me make cookies and he decided to stick his head into the bowl of cookie dough.  My first thought was "Oh, no raw eggs he could get salmonella" and then suddenly I realized it was much worse than that.  Within a minute he had hives everywhere, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, his eyes and lips started swelling up and he began to vomit.  I quickly gave him benedryl and that seemed to stop it, but that was a close one.  I called my husband to come home in case we had to take him to the hospital.  So my Jif is allergic to the following things in order of severity: Peanuts, Eggs, Soy, Rice,  andTomatoes (give him swelling around the lips).  I actually let him have tomatoes since it seems to be a mild skin reaction that doesn't bother him much.