Gazpacho

When the last weeks of summer bring ripe delicious tomatoes, it is time for Gazpacho.  Sharpen your knives and get out the blender; here we go!

A typical gazpacho recipe will start with tomato and cucumber.  The cucumber is the balancing cool to the heated ingredients of gazpacho.  The following recipe will appeal to those of you who might not care for cucumber.  (Fortunately, not an allergy issue, but Brooke does not care for cukes.)

Ingredients are listed from most to least.  Don't forget: It is always easier to add more than it is to remove any.  

Ingredients:

Vine-ripened tomatoes (Ripened on the vine on the farm, not on the vine in a truck.) Peeled seeded and chopped.

Fresh Pears, peeled, cored and chopped.

Red Bell Pepper, peeled and chopped fine.

Orange Bell Pepper, peeled and chopped fine.

Red Onion, diced.

Jalapeno, seeded and minced.

Garlic clove, minced.  (The garlic at your megamart and the garlic at your farmers market are two completely different edibles.)

EVOO

Lime juice

Balsamic vinegar

Worcester shooster shiester sauce (What's this here sauce)*

Cumin, toasted or not 

Salt, Kosher or Penzey's Shallot Salt

Freshly ground black pepper (optional)**

Fresh basil leaves, chiffonade (added at service)

Directions:  Boil water to peel tomatoes.  Cut an X on the bottom of the tomatoes and put them in boiling water for 20-30 seconds.  Remove and put them in an ice bath.  After cooling, peel, core and seed.  Use a strainer to catch the juice when seeding.  Tomato water is culinary gold.

Gazpacho should have a wonderful texture and the temperature must be just right. 

After mixing all of the ingredients (except the basil) put some of the mixed ingredients in a food processor or blender and puree.  Adjust until you have the texture and consistancy desired for your Gazpacho.  Chill (overnight if possible) and add the freshly chiffonade basil when serving.

* Three Stooges reference.  Don't feel bad if you didn't get it.  You are old if you did get it.

**  Penzey's is one of my favorite suppliers, but... Penzey's sells freshly ground pepper - in jars.  Does freshly gound pepper come out of a jar?  or a pepper grinder?    

M, E, P, S, N, Se, F 

Delicious and completely free of most-likely allergens. 

Key: M, E, P, S, N, Se, F

Milk-free, Egg-free, Wheat-free, Peanut-free, Soy-free, Nut-free, Sesame-free, Fish-free, Shellfish-free


Always Read Labels

     

Apple wood smoked Jerusalem Artichokes (sunchokes)

We haven't yet decided what we will concoct with these tasty tubers.  We are going to try not to eat them all while we work on the recipe.

Best French Fries

 Steak Frites

Kenji Alt-Lopez has a posted recipe on SeriousEats.com for French Fries that, if you make real French Fries at home, will change the way you make them. It might make you change the way you make them in a commercial kitchen as well.  While Kenji has a preference for peanut oil, those of us dealing with peanut allergies might want to stick with Canola or Vegetable oils. 

Properly refined peanut oil will not contain any of the proteins that would cause a reaction with a peanut allergic consumer.  So...is it ok for someone with peanut allergies to eat foods fried in peanut oil?  Well, technically it is, but considering the number of oils with similar and higher smoke points, why not avoid the potential allergen.  

Email replies

Researching allergy-friendly food sources is best done at the source, but that is not always feasible so sometimes we make a phone call or two or write emails and sometimes we rely on the product itself including our assessment of the packaging and the product itself when making recommendations.

During the decade or so that we have been managing food allergies, there have been many changes. We have a stack of older email replies from company PR and Marketing folks with a primary message of “we cannot guarantee [anything].” More recently, companies are posting food allergy information on their websites, but occasionally we still email queries to smaller companies with food allergy related questions. There are companies producing products with vague labeling such as “proprietary blend of spices” which makes the product unusable to someone with an allergy to a spice. We are not interested in the ratios of ingredients. We simply want to know all of the ingredients if we are going to use or recommend products for use by the growing number of people with food allergies.

Over the years, many of our emails have gone unanswered. Some have been answered by people who expressed genuine concern. Interestingly, we received a personalized reply to an email from Planters (a subsidiary of Kraft Foods®) that stands out as one of the most thoughtful, helpful emails in the stack. We also have rambling email responses from people who clearly should not be allowed access to company computers. When we queried one small company in Maine via email, their reply, in so many words, was, “go fly a kite.”

It is often tempting to post the exchanges with companies that reply with ignorant or downright stupid replies to food allergy questions.

We have decided for the time being to not include a not recommended list. If a company is not on the recommended list, they are not recommended.

Please tell us if you know of a food allergy friendly supplier that should be recommended. We will check them out and post accordingly.



One absolute truth is that things change. A company that does everything the right way for years might be sold to a company that doesn’t do anything the right way and the packaging looks almost the same. Always read labels.

Mmm...mmm...not good

Fifteen million pounds of Campbell Soup Company SpagettiOs were recalled in a Class I recall.  Class I is the most serious of the three class (I, II, III) categories of recall. 

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News_&_Events/Recall_035_2010_Release/index.asp

This is serious even if you do not eat SpagettiOs.

Best test yet!

Sometimes the tests, despite a reputation for unreliable results, are accurate.

Let's go back a few years...shortly before Brooke was tested for peanut allergies at the age of two, she ate scrambled eggs for the first time.  Moments later she threw them up.  We thought nothing of it at the time.  Toddlers throw up from time to time. We have learned a lot in a decade.  At the time, food allergies were not yet widely acknowledged as an issue for our children.  We didn't know. 

We know a little bit more now, but I digress! 

Why do we test?  We test for negative results.

Today we skin tested for the usual suspects with phenomenal results.

Peanut still produced an obvious weal, but everything else was negative! 

Egg whites and Egg yolks were tested seperately.  Both were negative.

Brooke can eat eggs!

Avoiding peanuts and treenuts is still mandatory, but peanuts and treenuts are not the center of the culinary universe; eggs are.

Cake, cookies, brownies, soft boiled, hard boiled, scrambled, quiche, cupcakes, custard, omelet, egg salad, mayonaise, salad dressing, fried, poached, pancakes, batter, breads...did I mention cake?

It is a new world today.  Eggs are on the ingredients list.

Our allergist approved a food challenge.  Brooke has eaten eggs and eggs are BrookeOK.

Time to stop mocking food allergies

Link to article by Gwen Smith, editor at Allergic Living Magazine

Bravo Ms. Smith!  Well said.