Essential Snacking

Having allergy-free snacks is essential.  The following are my wife's go-to snacks.

• Plantain (very ripe), just slit lengthwise and nuke for 2 minutes
• Avocado, plain or with salt or add a little lemon
• Sweet potato chips
• Potato Chips, salt or some bbq brands
• Rice cereal, cold or hot, with blueberries, cinnamon, and sugar
• Hot tea with raw sugar and rice milk (vanilla or plain)
• Chicharrone (fried pork rinds)
• Bananas 
• Banana chips (from Trader Joe's)
• Pears
• Apples
• Left-overs (always have on hand!)

Foods I Avoid

My son is allergic to and/or intolerant of, the foods listed below, so these recipes avoid all of them.  Patch testing confirmed a dozen allergies, while intolerances were found via the elimination diet process.

Foods Omitted in All Recipes:

1. Dairy
2. Wheat/Gluten
3. Soy
4. Egg
5. Peanut
6. Tree Nut
7. Corn
8. Oat
9. Beans (including peas)
10. Caffeine
11. Chocolate
12. Salmon
13. Shellfish
14. Acidic fruits

Renovate Your Pantry

This is the most important step in any diet change, renovate your pantry.  Don't keep food around that you cannot eat.  I first removed everything from the kitchen that I couldn't cook with.  It is freeing to look in the fridge and pantry and know everything is an option.  It also highlighted gaps in our nutritional variety.  Below are the main staples of our allergy-free kitchen.

• Capers
  
• Peppers
• Avacado
• Potatoes (Idaho and Sweet)
• Rice (white and brown)
• Rice Pasta
• Plantains
• Onions
• Celery
• Tomatoes
• Artichokes
• Heart of Palm
• Lettuce
• Spinach (including frozen)
• Apples
• Bananas
• Pears
• Roasted Pumpkin Seeds
• Roasted Sesame Seeds
• Meat
• Chicken
• Fish
• Lemons
• Carrots
• Asparagus
• Risotto
• Cilantro
• Parsley
• Garlic
• Goya Adobo
• Cumin
• Balsamic and White Vinegar
• Potato Chips (standard and sweet)
• Tea (decaf)

Elimination Diet Process: Finding food allergies or just intolerances

It's a slow process and requires a lot of patience.  The difficulty in pinpointing the offending foods is that symptoms can occur within the hour or after days and days.  Finding the foods that cause immediate reactions first is easiest; by getting those out of the way it is easier to gauge which foods cause more delayed and subtle reactions.

Starting the process involves several days, up to three weeks, on a completely allergy-free diet.

*TIP for nursing mothers: Extra time = time cleaning out your system, followed by time replacing your breast milk with allergy free milk, then the baby's system getting cleaned out.

1. You stick to a completely allergy-free diet for several days or weeks, until you see a significant reduction in symptoms.  
2. Then you choose what you suspect to be the most offensive food and add it back to your diet and log your reactions, noting times of ingestion and time of onset of symptom.  
3. Between food tests, go back to the allergy-free diet you choose until symptoms are gone for a few days, then introduce the next suspected food.  
4. It's a long process, but results are great!

You can research ways to follow your own allergy-free diet, but we went with the following foods:

a) Turkey breast

b) rice

c) potatoes and other starches like yucca and plantains

d) oatmeal (replaced with plan rice cereal because we later found oatmeal was affecting the baby)

e) soy milk (replaced with rice milk because we later found that he was allergic to soy)

f) fish (only salmon caused a bad reaction - we have no idea why)

g) non-acidic fruits, like bananas

h) tea (decaf)

i) pears

Thing you want to avoid:

a) gassy foods & spices, like onions, beans, garlic, peppers, cumin, etc.

b) eggs

c) nuts

d) candy

e) all processed foods (or anything with more than a few simple ingredients on the label)

f) caffeine and coffee

g) chocolate

h) acidic foods, like orange juice, grapes, etc.

i) wheat/gluten

More info on GI issues and gassy foods: 

• Diet Detective - Food and Gas
  
• Colic Calm - The Cause and Treatment of Infant, Newborn, and Baby Gas Problems
  
• About.com - Food Allergy or Intolerance?