It Started Long Ago

This is Cook for Allergies first post, and hopefully not last! My goal of this blog is to record the amount of time and energy I spend cooking for my children whom have various allergy needs, to document recipes I love and want to use again, but most of all Cooking for Allergies is here to support those of us striving to do everything we possible can to help our children with allergies thrive and grow. Cooking healthy is something we should all do because we deserve it, but there are often too many unhealthy shortcuts standing in our way of succeeding in this effort. Fortunately for myself we have our muse.

Liam was born a healthy, screaming, brutish 9 lb boy. Fast forward to 2 1/2 years of screaming, vomiting, rashes, weight loss, reflux disease diagnosis, medications, food intolerance's, testing, specialists, lack of sleep, chronic diarrhea, hives and overall discomfort, we were against a wall. If you're a mom like me, or grandparent/caregiver, then you know what it is like to be awake in the middle of the night with a sickly child. I spent hours every day (night) researching what could be wrong with our cute son, and something was indeed wrong. After doing some elimination dieting (google this), and a new pediatric gastric-enterologist, our son's condition was diagnosed as the result of "unknown food allergies".



How do we FEED our child, but yet limit so many foods? How do I cook with so many restrictions? What should I feed him, and what on earth are these 34 different ingredients in a package? How we do control for the food term "flavorings"? Can we even trust the foods in our supermarket? Will my entire family eat the allergy friendly food? Can we afford it?



After a million or more questions, heartache, and confusion, somehow along the way we opened up to determination. Going all ORGANIC seemed to be an answer that was staring us in the face. I've always wanted to go "crunchy", if not a true "hippy", but I wouldn't allow myself to go there, for various reasons. Here was a child whose whole existence is yelling at me to follow my dreams, to do what I want, and to live the way I think we SHOULD.



Is it possible to get results over night? YES! After years of questions and strife, finally we had answers. We still don't know what our "smoking gun" is, but we do know we see a drastic remarkable change in our son. Sleep, happiness, eating, no medication, and healthy growing boy again is worth it in uncountable ways. Going all organic worked. Cooking from scratch was totally doable. And shedding our life of unnecessary things happened along the way.



So lets get to it.



Here you'll find pictures, recipes, ideas, stories, failures, successes, networking, substitutions, shopping tips, meal plannning, whole house greening, gardening, sharing, teaching, learning, and hopefully inspiration through 3 allergy-minded meals a day 3 snacks a day and all in between. Please note that I am not a dietitian and this blog is of opinion, as I am not a doctor but just mom who cares for the feeding of her family.



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