The joy of recombinant cooking

Looks gross but isn't - Boxed gluten-free Mac'n'Cheese and a can of split pea soup turned into 

two surprisingly tasty lunches.

“Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient." - Neal Stephenson, from Reamde

Recombinant cooking is a luxury that people with food allergies often can't indulge in but it is so prevalent in the US that almost everyone has a favorite recombinant dish - green bean casserole, rice krispy treats, or something from a crock pot. My favorite used to be something that my aunt had named "Wet Dog Chicken" in a fit of pique - Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, chicken breasts, and sour cream served over Uncle Ben's chicken rice, all cooked together in a crock pot for several hours until it smells faintly but unmistakably like a wet dog. Poor man's stroganoff, basically. Recombinant cooking is so popular that allergy cookbooks include recipes for home made versions of things like condensed soup and bouillon cubes so that you can get the out-of-the-box flavor with the made-from-scratch effort (basically the worst of both worlds).

Out of sheer boredom I recently started playing with the very few pre-made foods that I can eat and was pleasantly surprised with some of the tasty combinations that I found. Boxed Mac'n'cheese mixes very well with canned split pea soup to make a creamy, salty, and filling lunch. Canned vodka sauce can be poured over frozen haricots vert to make a savory side dish. Rice cakes, sunflower seed butter, and cranberry relish can be combined to make a reasonable simulacrum of a PB&J. Rice thins can have allergy safe chocolate chips melted on them to make a terrible parody of an oreo.

There aren't a lot of breaks for the food-allergic. We get left out at parties, thwarted by restaurants, and frustrated by the grocery store. On top of all of that it's not cheap to purchase allergy safe food, especially when you're dealing with something as basic as grain; I can get Kraft Mac'n'Cheese for a dollar a box but I have yet to find Annie's Gluten Free Shells and White Cheddar for less than $3.50, five pounds of all-purpose white flour sells for around $2.00 while 1lb of rice flour has a hefty price-tag in the the neighborhood of $4.00, Campbell's condensed soups are around $1.00 apiece but I have to pay $2.00 for 16oz of watery split pea soup - it's twice the price for half the food.

Because of the ridiculous prices for my food I don't like to throw any of it out. I'll freeze 3/4 of a jar of pasta sauce so that it won't go bad before I finish it. If I have less than a cup of rice pasta shells I'll throw them into a soup or casserole that I'm making. I've been eating cranberry relish with peanut butter for weeks now because I couldn't bring myself to throw out the relish left over from Thanksgiving when it cost $5.00 for a 18oz tub.

And now, largely because of boredom with my limited food options, I've started mixing odds and ends before they become odds and ends. A whole box of expensive mac'n'cheese got mixed with a whole can of expensive soup (as illustrated in the photo at the top of the post) just so that I could have something for lunch this week that wasn't exactly the same as what I have every week.

There are no ground rules when you have food allergies. I have yet to find a definitive set of practices to cook without wheat and corn and sesame while including eggs and tree nuts and milk. A lot of allergy-safe food is constructed to be all-or-nothing when it comes to the top 10 allergens so you end up with vegan food when you aren't a vegan, or nut free when you have no nut allergies. Because of this variance, I can't tell you what to mix together in your kitchen that will work with your allergies or diet or food philosophy, but I can tell you this: playing with your food is awesome. I had no idea, until just a few months ago, that chicken tikka masala mixes perfectly with leftover mashed potatoes. Just last weekend I ate an omelet with eggs, bacon, cheese, salsa, and more of that slowly dwindling cranberry relish - it sounds terrible and tastes great.

So play with your food; mix the store bought cans and boxes that you can have just to see what you can come up with, see if you can make some kind of Frankenlunch out of two night's worth of leftovers,
and try to cobble together a recipe for cookies out of what you have in your cabinets. Not all of your experiments will be successful, but they will teach you more about the properties and flexibility of the food that you're buying and successful or not it's important to have a break in the monotony when your diet is limited by your physiology.

Eat and Experiment Happy,
Cheers,
     - Alli

The Importance of Being (or having) an Advocate

When we were kids we played "the floor is lava." As a person with allergies I get to play "the food is lava."

Like most people with food allergies, I have a love/hate relationship with eating out. It's wonderful to have other people cook for you, to sit in a clean, well lighted place and have a friendly face bring you food and cater to your needs. It is also a tremendous, festering pain in the butt to always worry that your food has picked up some cross contamination, or that lovely lighting is creating unexpected glare that prevents you from carefully examining a potentially unsafe sauce, or that the friendly waiter didn't hear you right and wrote down "extra sesame seeds" instead of "no sesame seeds" on his sheet.

On top of the normal fears of a food-allergic person, I worked in food service for eight years. My time in the industry has left me with a deep and abiding desire to never, ever bother or in any way irritate any server, barista, bartender, cashier, baker, busser, or dishwasher ever again. I'm not worried about my food and the possibility of intentional tampering; I'm worried that I'm the one extra question, the one "Excuse me, Miss," that means another table in the section doesn't get their drink refill on time, doesn't tip the server, complains to the manager, gets the server written up, and eventually leads to cut hours and therefore a cut in pay (if this sounds paranoid to you then I'm a little jealous that you've never had to work a service job).

I don't want to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and after getting yelled at by customers (so many of them yell) for eight years I know that sometimes all it takes is one "Excuse me, Miss" to go from a great day at work to preparing to set the kitchen on fire so you'll have a valid reason to escape.

My husband, however, has never worked in food service and so he has no problem with stopping a server (it doesn't have to be our server - he doesn't discriminate) and politely interrogating them about what kind of oil the fries are cooked in, if the chickpea flour is really only chickpeas, if the ice cream has "natural flavors" in it, and whether butter or margarine is used on the grill. Sometimes I cringe a little bit as he holds these impromptu conferences with the waitstaff, but I know it's for my sake and I know how necessary it is.

A few months ago my husband and I went out for sushi. I got a tuna hand roll and was surprised to see it delivered to our table with a garnish of sesame seeds. I wanted to just pick them out. He insisted that we send it back. The next plate came with a garnish of tempura flakes. I didn't tell him about the flakes, tried to pick them off, ate the sushi and was sick for days.

Coping with food allergies in a public setting is a unique way to feel broken. If you don't tell people you've got allergies you run the risk of contamination. If you do tell people about your allergies you're admitting vulnerability. I know it's stupid, but that's how it feels.

There's a burger joint in the Southwestern United States called In-N-Out. If you've got food allergies you can tell them to do an "allergy grill" and they'll deliver a burger that is safe to eat. This is a great idea in practice, but when you're looking at a growing line behind your vehicle, watching frustrated patrons inside, and being repeatedly told by the cashier "it'll just take another minute, it always takes a little longer to do an allergy grill" you feel like a jerk. Everyone is waiting for you to be gone so that they can eat. The employees are working harder and the line is building up because your stupid gut can't handle it if there are some crumbs on the grill or some spread on the spatula.

So when I used to go to In-N-Out by myself, I didn't usually bother to ask for any special treatment. I just got a patty and some tomato slices and hoped for the best. Sometimes I was okay, sometimes I wasn't, but at least I wasn't in anybody's way.

I'm not around a lot of people with food allergies, for the most part, and the people I do know with food allergies generally deal with foods that are easier to avoid. Everyone knows that peanuts are dangerous to some people, so there are lots of peanut-free foods and ways to ask for peanut-free foods. But it's incredibly hard to ask for corn-free foods because almost everything processed has corn in it under 30 different names that only corn-allergic people bother to learn. And I don't know any other corn-allergic people (I've heard of them, and even chatted with one online, but trying to find one to meet up with is like deciding to have tea with a unicorn) so I have no support group for this.

I didn't expect my big, strong, non-allergic husband to fill the role of a disability support group, but he did.

The conversation we had was very simple. He said to me: "You are a person. You have a right to be around other people, and you have a right to be healthy and safe when you're out of your house." I hemmed and hawed a bit, saying I didn't want to be a bother and it wasn't a big deal, and he went a little further. "If you were in a wheelchair do you think people would be bothered by the fact that you need a ramp instead of stairs? If you were blind do you think a waiter would be angry about having to describe the dessert cart to you instead of showing it to you? When you were a server did it frustrate you if a deaf customer needed you to write notes instead of speaking? Did it bother you when someone asked you to check if the sorbet had eggs because her baby was allergic?"

I didn't even remember the incident with the eggs until he asked me that question. I was working at a coffee shop, we had about eight varieties of ice cream, a sherbert, and a sorbet. A lovely couple with an adorable baby daughter came in on a busy night, immediately disregarded the ice creams and asked me what I knew about the other options. I lifted the ice cream tubs out of the freezer and checked for ingredients lists, I went to our storage freezer in the back of the shop and tried to find the box the tubs came in, I checked online, and when none of those things helped I called the manufacturer to ask over the phone; it was too late in the day and I felt awful that I couldn't get these nice people and their little girl a solid answer. I wasn't angry at them, I didn't feel like they were taking up too much time, and though the line was getting long I didn't want to shrug them off with an "I don't know" and let it be their problem. But more than all I didn't want to be the one to say "it's alright" and serve a little girl ice cream that would make her sick, and if her parents hadn't asked about the eggs that's exactly what would have happened.

Most people are not awful. They don't want to hurt others, they don't want to steal, they don't want to break things. And if most people find out that their actions could harm someone else, they'll change their actions.

I'm getting better about being my own allergy advocate. There are several places local to me where I know what is safe and what is not, and if I'm not sure I can ask. I've even been forceful when I've discovered that my requests were ignored or forgotten (which is a huge step for me; I once traded entrees with a friend rather than letting her send food back to the kitchen because it was too spicy - it was too spicy for me too, but I didn't want her to bother the waiter). When I go to a new restaurant I always let the server know that I have food allergies and will probably have a lot of questions or I call ahead of time to ask about oils and fillers and flours. I'm still not perfect, and my husband picks up a lot of slack when I'm feeling anxious, but I'm getting better. I've become an assertion pro at grocery shopping, and will ignore anyone who tries to "ahem" me for reading a label too thoroughly (on that note, here's an open request to Trader Joe's: please make your aisles wider, as I have no place to read labels that is not in someone else's way).

This is something I need to get better at, something I need to be pro at, something that no one else can do for me all of the time and is the only barrier between me feeling great and me getting sick. If I don't ask about ingredients, if I don't make my allergies known, I am the only reason that I will get sick - no one else is to blame and no one else should be. I have to be my own advocate, to take charge of my well-being, because I am the only one who should be responsible for me, and to act otherwise is a much worse way of mistreating the people I was trying so hard not to bother.