• 2 cups pureed pumpkin (you can use canned)
• 1 cup oat milk
• ½+ cup honey
• ¼ cup cornstarch
• ½ Tablespoon molasses (to taste)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger (I never actually measure spices other than ginger, clove, and cardamom)

Directions:

Mix all ingredients until smooth. Pour into crust.

Bake 10 minutes at 425F, 50 minutes at 350F (until filling is set). Cool.

IMPORTANT: Refrigerate overnight before serving. This is how you get that firm pumpkin pie without egg or milk.

Here is a link to the general list of our allergies.

Chips and Dip

• Corn chips and salsa or guacamole
• (make sure the guacamole has no egg, mayonnaise, or milk ingredients).
• No sour cream
• 7-layer dip has beans and cheese and sour cream so is out, out, out!
• Potato Chips – no dip
• Most dips for potato chips are cheese or sour cream or ranch dressing – all bad
• Check the potato chips – do not get ones cooked in peanut oil (like Tim’s)
• No “sour cream and onion” or “cheese-this, cheese-that” flavored chips
• Most flavored chips have milk powder in them … so plain or simply salted is best.

Veggies and Dip

Fruit

Most fruits are safe for us to be around.

• Apples
• Oranges
• Pears
• Peaches
• Plums
• Melons
• Pomegranate
• Grapes
• Avocado

• All the tropical fruits are not safe for us to eat (Mango, Guava, Kiwi … Starfruit) we can be around these fruits though.
• Bananas and strawberries carry their own histamine. Alice can eat both, Jason can carefully eat a de-seeded strawberry or two. Safe to be around
• Alice is skittish about eating pineapple. It is safe to be around though.

Sandwiches

You’re going to have a hard time finding safe bread, but as long as the bread has no direct milk or egg ingredients, we’ll be fine around it. Go for sub-style sandwiches with enough toppings that people won’t miss the cheese

• No cheese, butter, or mayonnaise
• No balsamic vinegar
• No peanut butter
• Lettuce and all its relatives are fine
• Cold cuts are fine – though we usually won’t eat them unless we can confirm they have calcium phosphate instead of calcium lactate.
• Veggies as seen above are fine
• Olives are fine, as are bell peppers and hot peppers
• Pickles are yummy!
• Mustard is safe – usually. watch those fancy mustards for odd ingredients.
• Olive oil and vinegar (malt, white, red wine, cider etc) are great on subs – no balsamic.

Crackers and ______

Again, it is tough to find safe crackers, but we can be around them as long as they have no milk, egg, nut, cheese, or butter direct ingredients.

• Cold cuts or smoked salmon
• Pate – watch for secondary ingredients. We can be around all meats, but if this is made fancy with cheeses, or if they use egg or milk as a binder, then it is not okay!
• Remember, no cheese
• Tapenade – or grind up your favorite olives in a blender with some garlic and drain to make your own tapenade
• Baby pizza toppings – Make up a dish of tomato paste and spices, and another few dishes of non-cheese favorite pizza toppings. People can build their own mini pizzas on crackers
• Sausage/Hot dogs cut up small
• Diced and/or caramelized onions
• Diced bell pepper
• Olives
• Pineapple
• Ham

Toothpick Food

• Olives
• Pickles
• Cold cuts
• Tentacular Carrot Appetizers

Allergy-Free Cookies/Etc

• Enjoy Life makes cookies we can eat: Snickerdoodles and Lemon Zest. These can be bought locally at PCC.
• No chocolate!
• Little Rae’s bakery uses milk and eggs, so they’re not safe for us.
• Lucy’s Cookies use a garbanzo-bean based flour, so they’re not safe for us.
• Most “allergy free” food is not free of all of our allergens, but you can always check with us about a specific brand!

Baking

Notes to the host:

If you really want us or your friends with food allergies to eat something, leave it sealed in the package until we arrive. Let us check the package ingredients, and then take what we want. Then put it on a plate for everyone else – this allows us to be in control of any cross-contamination.

Please don’t be offended if we or your friends choose not to eat food your provide, especially if you worked really hard for it to be safe. Eating is so much more than an enjoyable activity, or something we do to be polite to the host. For us, ingesting food is always a life safety issue, and sometimes we just don’t want to take any risks at all. We’ll be gracious about declining, appreciate the effort, be incredibly thankful we can be in the room with the food without worrying, and just not partake. You can help by being gracious about our choice not to. Thanks!

Mix Together

• ¼ Cup Flour
• 1 tsp Dark Brown Sugar
• a couple shakes of cinnamon

Stir Together

• 1 Tbsp Vegetable Oil, Melted Margarine, or Other Butter Substitute
• 1 tsp Cornstarch
• ½ Cup Oat/Soy/Rice Milk
• a dash of vanilla extract

Cut into Strips (if you want strips, I haven’t tried this with whole slices)

• 4 slices sandwich-sized bread

Directions:

Mix liquid and dry ingredients in a plate. Coat (do not soak) only as many strips of bread at a time as will fit into your skillet. In cooking words I would say “dredge” the bread strips in the goop.

Place immediately into low-heat lightly-greased skillet, cook till done – a couple minutes on each side. Hopefully you can get to a point on side 1 where the bread seems to be drying a little on the top before you flip, and then the bottom side that you flip up will be golden-brown.

I’ve been searching for a good, functional egg-free French Toast recipe for years. Thank goodness for Jennifer and Alyce on the WA-FEAST listserv who turned me on to the idea of making a very thin pancake batter, and using that. It is very close to exactly what I need. There’s one more recipe through them that I need to try – it relies on Xanthan Gum. The recipes on the vegan websites that use bananas, egg-replacer, or cornstarch never turn out for me. I wonder if I’m using the wrong bread.

This recipe is also shared with other allergy-friendly recipes at Cybele Pascal’s website.

Shoo-fly pie
Image © 2011 Jason Gift Enevoldsen

Bottom:

• ½ cup dark Karo syrup
• ½ cup maple syrup
• ½ cup boiling water
• ½ tsp baking soda

Top (you can make a little less than this):

• 1 ½ cups flour
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup palm oil (or your favorite Butter substitute)

Directions:

Make pie crust, put in pie dish. Place pie dish on a non-stick cookie sheet (you’ll thank me later).

Make top crumbs by mixing flour and brown sugar, then cutting in palm oil until it loosely clumps together.

Measure Karo and maple syrup in 2 cup glass measuring cup (to get a more barrel molasses-y flavor put in more Karo, less maple syrup, and a tablespoon or so of Grandma’s molasses. Do not use blackstrap molasses).  In 1 cup measuring cup, boil water.  Add baking soda to hot water.  Add water to molasses measuring cup and mix thoroughly.

Assemble pie by alternating layers of the liquid and the top crumbs – about 3 layers of each.

Bake at 375F for 35 minutes. (Don’t forget to have that non-stick cookie sheet under your pie, it will save you from any boil-over burning on the oven elements)

Shoo-fly pie
Image © 2011 Jason Gift Enevoldsen

I’ve taken up the Gift family torch to pass on the cult of loving shoo-fly pie to as many as possible. So far I have at least a dozen converts.

When it is described to you – “pie made with innards of brown sugar and molasses” – you have no idea what this will be like. You picture some sort of candy in a pie crust. Tasty sure, but how do you eat it? You’re completely wrong. It is a bit like cake in a pie-crust. But that doesn’t do it justice.

A note on ingredients:

This should be made with barrel molasses instead of Karo and maple syrup. Sometimes this is called Dutch barrel syrup (as in Pennsylvania Dutch – i.e. German). If you have access to this ingredient, first send me some, then make the pie with it instead. For the rest of us, the last sighting of barrel molasses was at a little Mom & Pop style general store in New Jersey. You had to bring your own containers.

You’d think molasses would be a better substitute than corn syrup, but after many, many trials I’ve determined that the closest flavor is dark Karo. There is no bite to barrel molasses, though it has a depth of flavor lacking in Karo, which is why I put in half maple syrup also. The barrel molasses is aged in barrels – giving it the name and the flavor.

Clockwise from top: Gingersnaps, Star Shortbread, Powdered-Sugar Lemon, Oatmeal, Oatmeal with Craisins, and (middle) Lemon-Flower Tarts
Image ©2010 Jason Gift Enevoldsen

Cookies for the Holidays

I baked 5 batches of cookies this week. Yum!

If you think holiday baking is harder with allergies, well, I don’t think it is. What’s hard is store-bought safe food. Here are some of my favorite recipes for the holidays.

Above

Gingersnaps
Shortbread
Powdered-Sugar Lemon Cookies
Oatmeal Cookies (add craisins for festivity)
Lemon-Flower Tarts

Not Pictured

Julekake
Sugar Cookies
Joulupiparkakut – Gingerbread
Powdered-Sugar Mints (wheat free!)
Blondies
Pumpkin Bread
And don’t forget about pie with the filling of your choice

Have a safe and yummy holiday season!

• 2 Sticks Margarine or Butter of your choice
• 1 Cup Sugar
• ½ Tsp Baking soda
• ½ Tsp Vinegar
• 1 ½ Cup Flour

Directions:

Cream the margarine and sugar

Add other ingredients

Form into balls

Roll in sugar

Bake on ungreased cookie sheet

300 degrees – 30 minutes

Julekake
Image © 2010 Jason Gift Enevoldsen

• 1 Cup Oat Milk or Milk of your choice.
• ½ Cup Sugar
• ¼ Cup Lard and Oil or butter substitute of your choice
• 1 Dash Salt
• ¼ Cup Warm water
• 2 packets 1 Pkg. active dry yeast (~1.5 Tbsp)
• ¾ Tsp Cardamom
• 3.5 Cups Flour
• ¼ Cup Raisins
• ¾ Cup Mixed candied fruit

New Directions:

Heat the milk until warm, but not hot – 130F max.

Mix dry American* plain yeast with 1/4 cup warm water. Add a dash of sugar or honey or something for the yeasties to eat.

Pour milk into the room-temperature mixer mixing bowl. Add fat, sugar, cardamom, salt (yes, I put salt in this time – I never do but I’ve been frustrated at this dough so I decided to follow the recipe more closely in some ways). Mix a little – your fat won’t mix in, don’t worry about it. If the yeast is foamy, add it and 2 cups of flour to the mixing bowl. Mix with dough hook until smooth. You want this dough to be as “loose” as possible, while still holding together as a dough.

Sprinkle your raisins and candied fruit with a generous dose of flour, and toss till all are coated lightly. Add these to the mixer.

Continue to add flour as you’re mixing (but wait in between to see the flour get mixed in, and see how the consistency changes while mixing) until you have dough that holds together as a lump, not sticking to the sides of the bowl too much. You should be mixing for about 7 minutes. You may well not use all the 3.5 cups of flour, but you don’t want sticky dough.

Detach all dough from dough hook, transfer to a greased (IMPORTANT) bowl, cover, and let rise in a cozy, warm place until doubled in size – about an hour. Punch down. Rise again until doubled in size – about 2 hours (IMPORTANT, but maybe you can skip this by doing your first rise for 2 hours, I’m not sure yet). Punch down. Form into round buns on a greased or non-stick baking sheet. Let rise again until half again as big – another hour. Brush liberally with oil, bake at 350F degrees for about 25 minutes. Brush with oil while still hot. Cool. Slice and eat.

I FINALLY GOT IT TO WORK! The texture was light and fluffy and AWESOME. Yay! So, the major changes were doubling the yeast, adding a second double-time rise, and rising the dough in a greased bowl.

*I think American yeast is different than Scandinavian yeast. In all these high-fat, “warm the milk”-first doughs I seem to never be able to get them to rise. I follow the recipe diligently, and where it says “doubled in size” mine always comes out 1.25 times in size. In discussions with a Danish baker, we determined that the directions on her package of yeast were quite different from the directions on mine – always calling for the dry yeast to be mixed in with the flour while still dry. The above directions are a modified version based on what we need to do with American yeast, and what I saw watching a Norwegian video about making Julekake.

This is my first attempt at using a dough hook.

We used to get these all the time at a local Scandinavian bakery. Eventually I started having minor reactions to the cross-contamination, and I wanted to share them with my more-sensitive husband. As they’re an integral part of Christmas for me, I had to learn to bake them myself.

I always struggle with not killing my yeast, and with getting them to rise enough.

• 11 ¼ cups powdered sugar (yes, that’s eleven)
• 6 tsp peppermint extract
• Food colorings as desired
• 2 sticks margarine or butter (softened to room temp)
• Candy molds (seasonal shapes)
• superfine sugar

Directions:

Blend softened margarine and 8 ½ cups powdered sugar.

Add peppermint extract and food colorings (split mixture into portions for multiple colors).

Knead in the remaining powdered sugar until consistency allows you to make a “log roll” shape or small balls without cracks.

Cut slices from the log roll, cut slices in 4 pieces, then roll into small balls. Or scoop out teaspoon sized chunks from the mixture and roll into balls.

Dip candy mold in superfine sugar and tap out excess.

Roll balls in superfine sugar, press into mold, unmold onto waxed paper.

Let dry on waxed paper until candies can be lifted without breaking.

Store in covered container.

1

• 1 ¼ Cup Margarine or your favorite Butter substitute
• ¾ Cup Light brown sugar
• ½  Cups Granulated sugar
• 2-3 Tbsp Barrel molasses
• 3 Cups Oatmeal

2

• 1 ½ Cups Flour
• 1 Tsp Baking soda
• 1 Tsp Baking powder
• 1 Tsp Cinnamon
• ½ Tsp Salt
• ¼ Cup Cold water

Directions:

Preheat oven to 365 degrees F.

Mix 1 until fluffy.

Add molasses to 1.

Stir 2 together, add to 1.

Roll into 2 ½ inch rolls: cut cookies

Bake 11 minutes. If you like soft cookies bake more like 8 minutes, and store in a Ziploc bag as soon as cool.

Let cool a few minutes before removing from the cookie sheet.

Dry

• 2 Cups Sifted all-purpose flour
• ½ tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Ground cloves
• 1 tsp Ground ginger
• 1 tsp Ground cinnamon
• 3 tsp Baking soda
• ½ Cup Canola oil

Wet

• 1 Cup Sugar
• ¼  Cup Light molasses
• 1-2 Tbsp Water
• Granulated sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
2. Sift dry ingredients
3. Cream wet ingredients
4. Stir dry mixture into wet/creamed ingredients
5. Shape dough into 1 ½ in balls.
6. Roll balls in sugar
7. Place on un-greased cookie sheet 3 inches apart and flatten
8. Bake 8-10 minutes (if you want them soft, pull them out while they’re still puffy. If you want them hard wait until they deflate).