Finding food to feed an allergy kid is hard work at first. There's no sugar coating that information. Sorry! Once you get used to the products you need, though, you'll get in your groove and be in pretty good shape! I thought I'd share some random cooking and shopping information I've acquired in my journey.
All most all recipes can be easily adapted for the soy, oat, barley free child. You can get to cooking up good stuff in your kitchen with a little dedication and a good cook book. My all-time favorite, go to cookbook is America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook (disclosure: this is a referral link; I make pennies if you buy from this link).
I assure you that you can make almost anything for your child from this book with a little adaptation and creativity.
Barley free flours: Barley's job is to help the yeast work so it's added to most All-Purpose flours on the market. If your child's allergic to Barley you have many options. If you want to still use an All-Purpose flour, I've found the 365 All Purpose flour in the blue bag from Whole Foods. I've never noticed that it rises or tastes different than what I used to use. There is also King Arthur's White Whole Wheat Flour. This flour will give you a slightly hardier flavor than an all purpose flour, but it's very good in all baked goods except cakes, in my experience. I even use it in cookies, muffins, and bars. Of course, you always have your regular whole wheat flour and tons of other random flours: almond, rice, etc. that don't have barley. Don't be afraid to mix flours: half white whole wheat with either half all purpose or half whole wheat, depending on the food you're making.
Soy free: Soy is all over the marketplace. There are all sorts of political and financial reasons for this, but I'm not going to dive into that here. Our biggest problem finding soy-free products was the product being soy-free and other allergen-free. The ones below met our criteria and might be helpful to you.
New Horizon graham crackers,
Enjoy Life products (love, love, love their chocolate chips),
Annie's Bunnies (not all products),
many corn chips (please get organic corn products to avoid buying GMO products - just my opinion),
Trader Joe's (TJ's) chips: pita, organic corn, pita puffs
TJ's Frosted Mini Wheats,
TJ's fruit leathers (the non-fiber added ones),
Haagen Dazs Raspberry Sorbet,
Harris Teeters green container ice cream (and it's awesome ice cream!!!!), many Haagen Dazs ice creams,
Many Nature's Path cereals
Several salsas at TJ's and Whole Foods
Spectrum Canola Oil Mayonnaise
Whole Foods Tuna Fish (yes, most tuna packed in water has soy)
Whole Wheat Pastas
Middle East Pitas and Lavash
Many Challah breads
Tj's fish sticks
Homemade goodies to meet our allergies:
Cookies galore
Cakes galore
Apple bars
Muffins galore
Pizza puffs
Tortillas
Breads
Bagels (see blog post on main site)
Jam
Cream Cheese
Crackers
Smoothies
My hope is to slowly get all of these recipes onto the web site so that you can see some of my favorites! I'll keep working on that as I learn more about this whole website thing!
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