dairy?

Hi Ruth,

I was in your shoes about a year ago. I cut out dairy, choclate, soda, sugar, caffeine… you name I couldn’t eat it. However you can get creative, and lose lots o baby weight in the meantime. I would grill chicken tenders marinated in herbs and oil and keep them in the fridge, then I would make a salad for lunch everyday. I stuck to toast, eggs or bagels for breakfast. And well… dinner is easy, meat, veggie, starch… the usual. It is also amazing what can be turned into a burrito. Zatarain’s makes a dirty rice mix that you can make with ground turkey in it. Roll it up with some lettuce and tomato in a tortilla and voila, insta meal. The jumbalaya and seafood gumbo for the same company are also very tasty. Shrimp marinated in oil, thyme and lemon for 45 minutes and grilled is also wonderful with some rice pilaf and a salad. Also another I stuck with is a small amount of chopped garlic sauteed in a pan with olive oil. Add tuna fish and lime juice with some salt and paprika and toss over pasta of your choice. This one obviously you want to limit once every so often as the mercury content in tuna can pass through your milk. They say one can per week is ok. I hit the cookbooks for new things pretty often. Low fat cookbooks usually work well since they don’t use a lot of cream or cheese in the recipes.

Breakfast turned out to the be the hardest. I started taking decaf hazelnut coffee with non dairy creamer and just a touch of sugar. There are some box mixes of coffee cake and muffins that aren’t made with dairy or whey and use only egg and water or oil to mix up. I also have a great recipe for banana bread and blueberry muffins that are dairy free, super quick easy and tasty. These saved me as I have the largest sweet tooth on the planet. I also eat a lot of the sweeter veggies like peas and corn. For drinks, because water gets old, I get minute maid juice or ocean spray and dilute it with water so there is not as much sugar in each glass. I also drink gatorade, but as of lately that have been giving me heartburn so be careful with that one.

Let me know and I can send you some recipes that have worked for me. Obviously all these things were ok with Michael as he didn’t have any problems when I eat them. Good luck and like I said, let me know and I can share recipes.

1/2 cup butter flavored crisco shortening
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup canned pumpkin
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
1 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional)
Spice Glaze (see below)

Preheat the oven to 350 and grease a cookie sheet
Combine the shortening and sugar and cream them together, then add the
egg and vanilla, and beat until light and fluffy. Beat in the
pumpkin. Stir together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon,
nutmeg, and cloves. Add to the first mixture and beat until the dough
is completely mixed. Stir in the nuts and raisins.
Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls about 1 inch apart onto the prepared
cookie sheets. Bake for about 10 minutes, until lightly browned
around the edges. Brush the hot cookies with the glaze, then transfer
the cookies to racks to cool.

Spice Glaze
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons wter
1/4 tsp cinnamon
combine all ingredients until smooth

Hi;

You can use rice milk and rice cheese as a substitute and it really tastes similar. Healthfood stores offer dairy free foods. Homemade foods will help too. Visit http://www.hacres.com for some healthy dairy free recipees. We don’t do milk here. They even sell rice dream icecream, dairy free and it is good. Trust me my taste buds are sensitive.

Be careful with the rice cheese. We’ve looked at several varieties and haven’t found one yet that didn’t have some form of milk in the ingredients. Usually it’s skim milk proteins or whey. It’s been making me crazy. I’ll get all excited thinking that maybe we’ve finally found another cheese alternative for Kaelyn and then I’ll end up really disappointed when I read the ingredients.