Hi my name is Katherine. Mum of children with top 8 allergies.
Welcome to The Allergen Free Kitchen where we are exploring recipes for families, kids, and adults struggling with top 8 food allergies. Our family started a long journey of major food restrictions when one of our 4 children developed an allergic condition known as EoE.
When we knew about the allergies we put all our cooking and baking knowledge into finding things we could all eat safely. We have a passion for cooking and love challenges. Our biggest drives are to make sure our kids never miss out and to share our recipes with you to help you find joy in food.
We are not professionals, but we live these top 8 food allergies and meals everyday.
We are not trained chefs or dieticians. I have worked in commercial kitchens and cook everyday and have a passion for cooking and baking. Figuring out how to make the easiest meals for our family with food restrictions. We thought since we have done a lot of the heavy lifting by developing top 8 allergen safe recipes we should share them with other families because we know how hard this journey can be. Making dinner when you have allergies shouldn't be stressful or contain a ton of ingredients that are hard to find. It should be delicious and comforting.
Finding out one of our four kids had severe top 8 food allergies was life changing.
In addition to anaphylactic allergies our kids have food intolerances and one has a condition called EoE. EoE is an Eosinophilic Disorder where certain foods cause their body to release eosinophilia (white blood cells) that swell and cause the oesophagus to narrow and be inflamed. That means food can easily get stuck requiring it to be removed surgically. That was how we found out about our child’s issues.
It is a different kind of allergy than anaphylaxis and doesn’t show up on skin tests – the only way to figure out the triggers is by eliminating all high risk foods and then re-introducing them when the oesophagus heals. Foods must be re-introduced one food type at a time, with scopes in between to see if their body was releasing eosinophilia. The two basic treatments are to cut the food permanently forever or medicate with acid reducers or steroids forever. Medications only caused other issues in our little one so here we are cutting foods from our lifestyle.
Our Journey
When I started to look at what we could eat I found it really daunting to cut dairy, egg, wheat/gluten, soy, fish/shellfish, nuts, and mustard. I knew we had to do it as it is for our child’s health and I feel strongly that my job as a parent is to help my children live a long, healthy and happy life. A lot of tears were shed and anger lashed out by all of us – this was to be a massive lifestyle change in the middle of a pandemic. How were we going to do this?
I found substitutions that worked for us and recipes similar to what we liked but was finding I was still adapting almost every recipe we used.
I would cobble together vegan and gluten free recipes to come up with something somewhat palatable we could beg four kids to begrudgingly eat. Figuring out where to start with cooking with top 8 allergies is tough. I went back to our favourite recipes, tired of hearing the kids tell us everything they missed, and started to rework our tried and true recipes. If we were substituting I may as well use recipes I knew we liked.
It wasn't long before I started to take our knowledge and develop our own recipes. Those are the ones we are sharing with you, except one or two family recipes we share with their permission.
Shortly after we had other friends that also had massive food changes to make. That was when I realised I wanted to help others in our position, people who want to eat what they love but not spend forever in the kitchen.
If you are a brand or blogger, or anyone that would like to work or collaborate with us. Please contact us. We have food photography, recipe development, and collaboration services available. Here at The Allergen Free Kitchen we would love to work with you. For information on working with us on food photography projects please check out our Photography Portfolio with A Flight of Fancy Food Photography.
We are striving to provide family friendly, easy, quick, and delicious recipes with loads of taste but zero of the top 8 allergens.
Kind regards,
Katherine
TheAllergenFreeKitchen.com
