> From:    Elizabeth Pollard-Grayson <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: dairy and soy allergies
>
> Hi.  I have 15 month old twins who I am finally realizing are allergic
> to milk and soy.
<stuff delected>
> What I am looking for is help with grocery shopping.

Hi!  I'm the mother of 26-month-old twins, one of whom is allergic to
milk, beef, eggs and peanuts (although he's never eaten any...).  It
helped a little that my sister has Celiac's disease and there's a
history of family food allergies in helping me get a handle on the
cooking.  However, trying to get dinner on with twins that age is
challenging enough without adding the allergies into the mix.

I'm having a little trouble remembering what my kids could or could not
eat at that point in time.  Mine weaned at 15 months.  Let me tell you
how we handled cooking/shopping and maybe it will help.  I hope the list
will forgive me if some of this stuff is somewhat small child/twin
oriented, but it actually is more of an efficiency issue.  If you can
see a way to streamline the system further with regards to the
allergies, please point it out.

If at all possible, make a grocery run once without your kids to your
preferred store and read labels then write down the brand names.  Even
now if I take too long readying a label someone will fish out a box of
pasta from the cart to either open it or bash his brother in the head
with it.

I buy at least one large chunk of meat each weekend that will make the
majority of our meals for the week - roast, chicken, turkey, etc.  Until
the kids got older, we simply ate that with supplemental items for our
older son as needed.

Pasta in all shapes - once again, cook a huge batch and reheat it with a
dusting of water during the week.  Japanese style sushi rice reheats
well and forms small rice balls the kids can eat when old enough (using
a sandwich bag on your hand to make the balls).  The twins won't eat
boiled potatoes, but my oldest lived on them.

Frozen vegetables are your friends when time is short.  My kids lived on
peas and now they prefer them frozen, which is even faster.  Actually,
they'd live on frozen blueberries if I'd let them.  I knew life was
getting calmer when we started having time to make green salads again.

I guess the bottom line with twins and food allergies is that we dropped
our standards of acceptable dinners way down as far as variety and taste
went.  The kids didn't care.  Our oldest was thrilled not to be being
fed "weird" food.  Simple meals and cooking in bulk on the weekend was
the key.

I did periodically ransack cookbooks (baby food and other) for non-milk
recipes that I would try out of guilt that I was depriving my child.  My
non-allergic kids would eat whatever I made and my allergic child
wouldn't eat any of it.  Go figure.  I finally gave up.

Good luck.  E-mail me off the list if you want as well if I can be of
help.

Kathryn