When Jenny R. Turner’s two sons were diagnosed with multiple food allergies, the stay-at-home mom quickly became her family’s short-order cook.
Driving herself crazy making three different meals, every meal, every day, Turner figured there had to be a better way to feed her family.
“I couldn’t go on the way it was. It consumed so much of my day, cooking and cleaning up the last meal. It was horrible,” Turner says.
Starting with food she knew everyone in her family liked, she began the trial-and-error process of breaking down the ingredients to strip out allergens and re-creating family favorites that didn’t end with a trip to the ER.
What she ended up with are more than 113 recipes the whole family can enjoy without any of the allergens-no wheat, dairy, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, soy and fish. She now has self-published a cookbook, Harmless Cooking, Convenient Allergen-Free Cuisine, to help the growing number of families with allergy issues realize there can be cake and cookies after diagnosis.
“We had a lot of failures,” says the Chicago mom to sons David, 5, and Daniel, 3. “I wanted to make sure it was mom-tested, kid-approved. That was really important to me.”
Check out the recipes below and for more, order the cookbook on her Web site, www.harmlesscooking.com.