About Us
Hello and welcome to Cooking With Allerg-ease!
My wife and I have been plagued with anaphylactic allergies from early childhood. We both began having symptoms of digestive disorders in our late teens and by our mid-twenties we had spiraling health issues and constant digestive problems. We went out to eat a lot. Frequent dinner dates, while delicious, were constantly exposing us to allergens and other foods we had become intolerant to. The damage was taking its toll and we had to get a handle on our symptoms.
We analyzed situations, compared the similarities, consulted our allergists, worked with a dietician, and determined changes to our lifestyle would have to be made. We decided the following:
- We must stop eating out, it is a near guarantee of allergy exposure.
- We must begin individual elimination diets and use food journals to find any intolerances.
- We must learn to cook better.
Cravings don’t necessarily stop just because a particular food is bad for you. Learning how to make our favorite restaurant dishes at home was crucial.
The first step was learning to cook on par with professionals using only foods from our new diet. It took a while but I learned something with every meal I made. The results were not always pretty, you must be willing to be bad at something before you can become great. Over time my technique became more refined and my understanding of flavor grew. Adapting our favorite recipes taught me how to substitute ingredients properly based on what function that food provides for the end product. Now I can make nearly any recipe allergy safe and make all sorts of delicious foods I never would have dreamed possible before. I then began collecting our recipes in a large binder, and our cookbook was born.
My mission is to help others struggling with allergies, autoimmune diseases, intolerances, and digestive disorders to eat better, tastier, healthier food.
General Cooking Tips
In this section we will discuss the general tips that apply to most cooking scenarios. You will want to keep these in mind while making the recipes on this site.
Tip # 1- Patience
Rushing things leads to carelessness, carelessness leads to mistakes, and in this case mistakes taste bad, and more often than not makes cleaning up much harder. For example-most sauces that require heat must be cooked slowly over a low heat for a long time. Turning the heat up does not necessarily result in your sauce being done faster, but it does mean your sauce will splatter and burn. It is better to spend 30 minutes cooking a sauce and 5 minutes cleaning up than to spend 15 minutes burning your sauce and 30 minutes scraping it off your cookware. 35 minutes of patient work leads to deliciousness, 15 minutes of impatience leads to icky burned sauce and 45 minutes of wasted time.
Tip # 2- Know Acceptable Substitutes
This was almost tip # 1. Learning how to work around missing ingredients is essential. Whether you must omit an ingredient due to dietary restriction or simply being out of that particular ingredient, the show must go on! In many cases the ingredients in the mixing bowl are committed to that recipe and cannot be returned to their previous containers. If you know what to use in lieu of what, this becomes a minor issue on the path to flavor town.
Common Alternatives-
For thickening, you can replace flour (gluten free or otherwise) with cornstarch, potato starch, or tapioca starch and vice-versa. Mirin and Sake are roughly interchangeable in many sauces. The powdered or dehydrated versions of fresh things such as ginger, garlic, and onion will work when fresh is not available. However, the quantities will need to be adjusted.
Tip # 3- Know Unacceptable Substitutes
Sometimes things work in one scenario but not in another. For instance- Bob’s Red Mill egg replacer makes a great binder when baking, but it does not make an omelet when cooking. Additionally, there are some things that are so easy, the convenience version should not exist. A few examples- Instant rice, Instant mashed potatoes, Pre-scrambled eggs in cartons, Microwave popcorn. These things generally cost more, have unnecessary additives, and don’t taste as good as the originals.
Tip # 4- Take Notes
Each time you make something, whether it turns out good or bad, take notes. If it was good you’ll want to be able to recreate it. If it was bad you’ll want to avoid the same mistakes. Cooking is a learned art, this is one of the ways it is learned. I personally recommend keeping a pen and a pad of sticky notes on hand in the kitchen so you can make notes in your cookbook on the fly.
Tip # 5- Know your Staple Ingredients and Keep them on Hand
We’ve all been in this situation- it’s late in the evening, your afternoon was busy, and now you’re really hungry and realize you neglected to make dinner plans. Have a shortlist of recipes that you can make quickly, and whose ingredients you always have on hand. One of my go-to recipes is Shoyu Ramen. It is best to plan these around ingredients that are common in many of the dishes you make. The last part of this tip- keep your spice cabinet well stocked.
Tip # 6- Don’t be Afraid to make Modifications
Sometimes it is okay to omit things. I am not crazy about parsley, and often go light or skip it altogether if I do not feel like including it. Don’t force yourself to eat things you do not like. Remember tip # 4, don’t forget to write down your modifications.
Tip #7- It is okay to Make Extra Food
If you find a recipe here you like you can make a large batch of it and store it in the fridge or freezer. I like to keep many of my sauces on hand. My wife and I keep our freezer stocked with homemade hash browns that can be heated in the toaster oven or air fryer. We also stock a variety of cooked leftovers in vacuum sealed bags. These can be thawed, reheated, and enjoyed.
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