I have a friend who’s breastfeeding her infant, and the kid is showing signs of allergies. The docs are trying to rule stuff out, and in the meantime have told her not to consume any milk or soy.
That really sucks for her, because she’s grown to like soy products after living with a vegetarian roommate. And apparently there’s milk in a lot of common things - unless you buy vegan stuff, which usually has soy!
Obviously she can eat all the meat, fruits and veggies she wants. But still she’s pretty bummed.
Also, I am having a party this weekend and would like to have a snack or two that she can eat. And hopefully others will eat it too. My previous plan was pizza, chips and dip but uh…not now!
So, I need recommendations for 1) daily meals with no milk or soy 2) party snacks with no milk or soy.
You can find rice milk, almond milk, hemp milk, coconut milk and other variations at any natural foods store or similar section of a large supermarket. There are lots and lots of choices today. Which ones she might like I can’t possibly predict, of course.
Is it just milk, or all dairy (meaning, no cheese?)
Chips & salsa are dairy free.
Nuts are good & yummy and easy.
Guacamole, properly made, has no dairy (mash avocados, garlic, lime juice. Throw some salsa in if you want to get crazy. Eat with a spoon before your guests show up. Oh wait, you wanted something that you could serve…)
Meatballs & BBQ (or other) sauce are easy enough. Pretty sure you can buy packages of frozen meatballs. If you want to make your own, I can dig around and find a recipe.
Trader Joe’s has good frozen chinese dumpling things. Bake 'em and serve with Trader Joe’s Chinese Dumpling Things Dipping sauces.
If you want something more hearty, chili is dairy free and good party food.
Veggy tray with salsa for dipping. Or mayo-based dips, if she can have eggs.
I’ll second the rice milk suggestion. I know a lot of people who prefer it to soy milk. Or they did, 15 years ago, when I lived in a place where I knew people who would drink either.
Cheese is absolutely contraindicated for a suspected allergy. The allergy is caused by dairy proteins, which are likely to be found in any product made with or from dairy. And cheese is mostly protein.
Hummus with pita chips or veggie sticks is a good option for a snack, as is baba ganouj, which is basically the same thing as hummus but made with eggplant instead of chickpeas. Even the massively unadventurous eaters we hang out with will eat their own weight in either option. Really, any kind of bean you can imagine can be pureed into a nommy dip–dig around on the intarwebs for all sorts of recipes.
Something else that goes over really well is a take and bake pizza crust smeared lightly with olive oil, rosemary, and some coarse salt and baked up.
For meals, you can go with all sorts of stuff. Pasta with red sauce, or with oil, garlic and herbs is still good without parmesan. Fish dipped in honey mustard and bread crumbs and baked, with some oven sweet potato fries is one of my all-time favorite meals. If she can still have eggs, there’s always fritatta–fried taters, scrambled egg, and whatever else she wants. I’m very fond using sweet corn, pickled peppers, and onions in ours, but the possibilities are endless. Chicken soup with peanut butter sandwiches is prime comfort food. I like to dip my sammich in my soup till it gets mooshy but not quite falling apart.
Pizza base with fresh pesto minus the cheese is a delicious snack along the lines of the olive oil/rosemary suggestion. And of course, since she can have meat, can’t go wrong with meat onna stick for party foods.
My mom came up with hummus, guacamole and salsa. Good calls, guys. I took a quick peek at some crackers and chips today while running through the store (will go back for real shopping tomorrow) and you’d be surprised how much stuff has SOY in it. That’s the big kicker here, soy.
Does anyone know if soy allergy = no soybean oil? I assume so, but if that was not the case there are a lot of products with just soybean oil and not soy products.
Good call on the pesto minus cheese, Idlewild. My mom also suggested home-made pizza dough but we couldn’t figure out what to put on it. Olive, rosemary and garlic is good too.
Nuts, that’s good. Perfect for game night. As long as they’re not roasted in soy bean oil
Mayo-based dips have no milk dairy? Huh. That’s pretty awesome. I wonder if French Onion Soup poured into mayo tastes as a dip? (that probably has soy. seriously!)
I guess I’ll just have to scour the cracker and chip aisles to find ones with no soy anything. Lucky for me, most products (if not all) put big “CONTAINS MILK, SOY, WHEAT, GLUTEN…” etc notices right on their packaging.
I’m sort of wondering about rice, because I know they told Mom not to feed Baby rice cereal (he was juuuust moving on to solids). She didn’t mention a ban on rice to me, so I’m not sure. However, almond milk and coconut milk are good suggestions as well.
Thanks, all! More suggestions are welcome, since she’s pretty down in the dumps about it (nobody likes it when their baby poops blood, especially if they are a fan of House). Not being able to eat anything makes her sad too.
I know what a pain it is. I went soy free over summer to deal with seasonal migraines. That stuff is in everything. Look out for things that have an unspecified ‘lecithin’ in them, too, because that can be soy as well.
Check ingredients carefully, most processed meat stuff like meatballs have a binder and bulking ingredient that may be either textured soy or a grain product, and beware that most premade chinese products are flavored with soy.
They’re actually not that bad. Heck, I think I microwaved them when I lived near a Trader Joe’s. Not as good as real steamed or fried potstickers, but when I have a bunch of people coming to my house, I’d rather not be stuck in the kitchen frying potstickers, and I’m assuming ZipperJJ feels the same.
It’s at least possible. Mayo is eggs & oil; no milk or cream at all. But DOH! Looking at the Kraft and Hellman’s web site, they’re made with SOYBEAN oil. Damn. Maybe you can find some non-soybean mayo locally.
Mayo is also pretty darn easy to make in a blender, and then you’d have full control over what goes in it, but I’m not sure you want to go that far. It does make divine dips, though. Fresh mayo tastes about a gazillion times better than jarred.
If you check the organic section or go to a natural food store you can get a version of pretty much anything with no dairy, and a lot with no soy. It’s common enough that there’s decent money in scheming up alternatives, so you can get cookies, brownies, ice cream, anything. I’ve tried a lot of it, even though I can tolerate dairy, and some of it’s terrible, but a lot of it isn’t. Like you said, it’s all quite possible to make without dairy or soy as a main ingredient, so all it takes is for somebody to make the effort.
Just an update…I was able to very easily find tortilla chips that were nothing but corn and corn oil, pita chips with no soy or dairy, and hummus with no soy or dairy. I also bought a tray of dried fruit (holy shit do you know how expensive dried fruit is?!)
The one can of nuts I picked up said “may contain traces of cottonseed, sunflower or soybean oil” so I just didn’t bother. I suspect most nuts would processed in plants that don’t eliminate soybean oil, so if I did want nuts I’d have to just look harder.
Jimmy Chitwood I do realize there’s tons of stuff out there for people with lactose allergies, but when you get into organic you tend to get into vegetarian, and vegetarians get most of their protein from soy so soy is added in a lot of stuff. It’s definitely harder to find stuff without both.
Thanks again everyone for the hints. My game night went well, and I will be having another one in 2 weeks. Since I spent $40 on pizza this week I might actually COOK for the next game night (people expect more than snax I guess) and I’ll be able to make something my friend will be able to eat. Maybe spaghetti!
Definitely harder, yes. The ones that have soy allergies don’t get their protein from soy, though, obviously, and it’s for them that the specialty stuff exists. My girlfriend for several years couldn’t handle dairy or soy but I promise, she eats a varied and enjoyable diet and has a whole stable of brands and stores that she relies on. Problem is, it’s all to some degree specialty stuff, which is why I’d recommend a natural food store (depending on where you are this might be either no problem or a slight hassle, but I don’t think a huge one).
You start to recognize the brands that cater to your needs after a while, and many of them do something like this to make it easier to find what is and what isn’t suitable. I’m not sure which of them are national and which are just local brands, though, so I don’t know how much help my recommendations might be.
I eat a pretty typical and let’s say unselective kind of diet, and I never felt like I was missing out completely when I ate her food. She eats store-bought cookies, brownies, cobblers, and like I said, even ice cream; it’s pretty amazing how much they can do without dairy or soy. Most of the time I probably wouldn’t even have noticed, although sometimes I certainly did. And, of course, she makes a lot of food for herself – she just substitutes vanilla almond milk and Earth Balance for the dairy ingredients in regular recipes. Again, the recipes don’t suffer that much, and even I can now break off a passable batch of muffins or whatever without soy or dairy. Not that I do.
exercise the search function, we have had a number of threads on snack suggestions.
My contribution: yeggs
take small red potatoes, steam or nuke until done, wrap a slice of bacon around each one securing it with a toothpick, bake until the bacon gets crispy but not too crispy, you dont want it to shatter when they are eaten. You can cut the potatoes in halves to make them more bitesized.
Just wanted to answer your question about soybean oil and lecithin…my baby was recently diagnosed with milk soy protein intolerance too and the pediatrician said that they’re OKAY since they don’t contain soy protein. Your friend may way to check out ‘the MSPI Culinary Guide’ or ‘the MSPI cookbook’. Both have a lot of recipes and make this change much easier!!
(that probably has soy. seriously!)