Allergy-Free Frozen Treat Recipes

By Kelley Lindberg

Hot, hot, hot. Sun, sun, sun. And did I mention hot?

You know what’s really good when it’s this hot outside? Frozen treats! So here a few frozen treat recipes I’ve found that look really good, and they are all free from the Top 8 allergens. I’m going to give some of them a try this week!

Martha Stewart's Melon Sorbet

• Frozen Chocolatey“Nana-‘Nutters”: From Enjoy Life Foods, this recipe for frozen banana slices topped with Sunbutter and dipped in melted Enjoy Life Foods chocolate chips looks amazing. (And you can leave out the Sunbutter and just coat the banana slices in chocolate!)
• Frozen Melon Sorbet: Martha Stewart offers this super-easy recipe that calls for fresh melon that you cut into cubes and freeze. Then when you want to make your sorbet, you use a little water, a little sugar, and a food processor.
• Strawberry Sorbet: VeganBaking.net has this good-looking recipe for strawberry sorbet that uses a bag of frozen strawberries, water, sugar, and lemon juice. You use an ice-cream maker to make it that perfect consistency! (Substitute a bag of frozen raspberries for the strawberries to make raspberry sorbet.)
• Banana Faux “Ice Cream”: Frozen banana chunks, blended with a little fruit juice and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, makes a frozen treat that actually looks like ice cream, but without the dairy! It sounds fantastic, and it says you can add other frozen fruits to flavor the banana however you want.
• Frozen Fruit Cups: This recipe from CookEatShare.com has 4 ingredients: strawberries, pineapple, banana, and orange soda. Sounds perfect for kids! You can make these in a cup with e popsicle stick, or if you have popsicle molds, use those. (You can also try kiwi and watermelon.)
• Strawberry Lemonade Ice Pops: One can of frozen lemonade concentrate, a bag of frozen strawberries, 3 cups of cold water, and your popsicle molds… voila! Summer on a stick!
• Root Beer Float: If you’ve got a favorite brand of ice cream that is safe for your family, don’t forget to pick up some root beer to make this time-honored summer favorite! Just scoop some of the ice cream into a glass, then slowly add the root beer. (It’s also fun to swap out the root beer for orange soda, Dr. Pepper, Cherry Coke, or other favorite soda.)

Stay cool, stay safe, stay happy!

 

 

Allergy-Safe Frozen Treat Outings

by Kelley Lindberg


(Updated 5/14/12 to add another location) One of the great things about belonging to the Utah Food Allergy Network’s email forum (which is free, by the way, so join by going to the UFAN website) is the recommendations that our members share with each other.

Over the last couple of weeks, the hot topic (now that the days are getting warmer!) is where to go to find allergy-safe frozen treats like sorbet or smoothies. I grew up spending Saturday nights with my family at the local ice-cream shop, and I’ve missed doing that with my son. But now there are starting to be several places where we can enjoy that family tradition once again.

Here are some of the places UFAN members recommended, where they serve at least one type of dairy-free frozen treat and will accommodate allergy needs by using clean utensils, etc. (but ALWAYS remind them to use new utensils and get toppings from uncontaminated containers – cross-contamination can still occur, so stay vigilant!). If you have a favorite place for safe frozen treats that isn’t on this list, please share it with us!

• Maggie Moo’s (Sugar House and Cedar City) has sorbet and mix-ins. (Thanks, Michelle & Esther)
• Cakewalk Baking Co. (Salt Lake City) may have soy soft-serve (Thanks, Lynn)
• City Cakes & Cafe (Salt Lake City) has soy soft serve in dedicated machine, and dairy-free fruit smoothies. (Thanks, Lynn)
• Sub Zero Ice Cream (Ogden, Layton, West Jordan, Centerville, Salt Lake City, Murray, Sandy, Pleasant Grove, Provo, Spanish Fork) can use rice or soy milk as a base to freeze your ice cream on the spot, and they will even let you bring in your own toppings and mix-in items. (Thanks, Janel and Michelle)
• Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt (Layton, Salt Lake City, South Jordan, Orem, St. George) has a couple of flavors of diary-free sorbet and they will work with you to find safe toppings.
• Thanksgiving Point serves Blue Bunny Lemon Sorbet that has no dairy, eggs, nuts, soy, corn, rice, oats, wheat. (But they say they can’t guarantee that a scoop hasn’t been used in another flavor). (Thanks, Marie)
• Jamba Juice (lots of locations in Utah) says any of their smoothies can be made dairy free. All of their fresh juices, shots, and All Fruit smoothies are non-dairy. (Thanks, Lynn)
• Snow cone stands – one of the first signs of summer is snow-cone stands popping up in parking lots everywhere you look. Ask for ingredients and you may find some stands that don’t use ingredients you’re allergic to. Michelle says she’s found some that don’t use corn syrup, so if you’re allergic to corn, snow cone stands might be an option, but be sure to ask first!
• Orange Leaf Frozen Yogurt (Bountiful, Farmington, Highland) contains milk, but most of their products are free from the other Top 8 allergens. Says Lynn: "We avoid the toppings bar (bring our own in a baggie), and they do have a peanut butter yogurt, but they keep it in the same machine and we avoid the other flavor in the same machine." (Thanks, Lynn)

Junior High Ice Cream (-Free) Social

by Kelley Lindberg


Junior high has brought a whole new level of social events into my son’s school experience. There have been dances, after school events, soccer games, and the all-important “just hanging out.”

Last week, there was an ice cream social after school for the junior high students.

Ice cream. Oh joy.

There was a day when my son and his dairy-allergic friend would have been just fine skipping an ice cream social and going someplace else to play together. But those days are gone. Now the social aspect of events like this trump any food concerns (for the boys, not necessarily for their moms!). For previous after-school events this year, like dances, the other boy’s mom (Kim) and I have been able to suggest safe treats to serve, and the planning committee has been great at accommodating their allergic classmates and serving only safe treats for the entire event. But this time, we knew that to change ice cream to a safe alternative for 300 kids would be challenging and very expensive. So we got permission to bring a safe alternative just for our boys, and we chose to trust our boys to stay safe around all that dairy.

For the safe alternative, we ran to Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt. There, I talked to the woman running the store, and not only did she assure me that the dairy-free sorbet was always served from a dedicated dairy-free machine, but she told me she’s allergic to nuts herself, so she knows why I needed to be so careful. While I filled 2 cups with Orange Burst Sorbet (which had the texture and appearance of soft-serve ice cream – yum!), she got some toppings out of a new container, put them in a clean bowl, and handed me a clean spoon to dish them out. Perfect! I drove to the school, handed the treat to the boys, and heard lots of “Wow, Menchie’s! You’re so lucky!” from the other kids as I left.

I guess being allergic doesn’t have to be a drag all the time.

To be honest, our boys are old enough that they wouldn’t have minded skipping the “ice cream” completely, just as long as they could stay and socialize. I think it was more Kim’s and my worry that we wanted them to be able to participate fully in the event, and to us, that meant finding a safe substitute for the ice cream. One of these days we’ll probably be able to let go a little more, and realize that we don’t have to try quite so hard to make sure they “fit in” – they are fitting in just fine on their own, with or without snacks.

When did they get to be so grown up? Sigh. But for now, they still know their moms love them. I guess that’s good enough for me and Kim.

In a funny coincidence, the UFAN email forum is currently lighting up with suggestions for safe places to get frozen treats, now that it looks like summer really is on its way. So next week I will collect all the recommendations and post them here so they will all be in one place and easy to find and research. If you have your own recommendations you'd like for me to include, post a comment to let me know. See you next week!

Watching Him Grow Up with Food Allergies

by Kelley Lindberg


My son is growing up.

While there are a lot of things about that statement that scare the heck out of me, there are a few things about it that make me happy. Like the fact that we are finding movies and television shows we can watch together now that don’t involve animation. And he’s old enough to mow the lawn. That sort of thing.

Another thing that’s good about him being 11 is that he’s becoming more and more responsible about taking care of his food allergies. The other day he went to a friend’s house to play. The mom knows about his food allergies, and she promised to take good care of him. Turns out, she took them to a grocery store to get an ice cream cone for a snack. I didn’t know that was part of the plan for the day, or I’d have worried and given him all sorts of instructions, and I probably would have told him to just skip the ice cream cone because it’s too scary to think I wouldn’t be there to check for nut contamination.

But I wasn’t there. So what did he do? He asked the person at the counter about peanuts and nuts, and then asked to read the ingredients on the package of cones. They handed it to him, he read it, discovered that the only common allergens listed were wheat and soy – no nut contamination. Then he verified that the soft-serve vanilla ice cream bin only contained vanilla, and he made sure they didn’t mix it with anything else.

In other words, he did everything I would have done, had I been there. And, of course he had his EpiPens with him.

So he ordered the ice cream cone, ate it with confidence, paid attention for any signs of reaction (he didn’t have any), and was just fine. He was so confident, in fact, that he didn’t even remember to tell me about it until the next day. He’s grown up watching me go through this routine at restaurants, of course, so it didn’t even occur to him that this was momentous at all. (Okay, so maybe it was momentous to only one of us.)

As trial runs go, it went well. I’d have been happier if I’d known about it before-hand, but what would I have done differently? Tell him to do all the things he did? Worry more?

It’s hard watching him grow up. But it’s wonderful to realize that as he does, he’s growing more responsible, too.

After all, that’s what every parent wants for their kids, right?

By the way, we’re going to go see a movie today. The animated kind. I can’t wait.

Lemon Gelato – A Scoop of Italian Heaven

by Kelley Lindberg

Buon giorno! (Good day!)

I’m back from my trip to Italy (with a brief stop in Paris), and I have eight million photos to prove it! Lucky for you, I won’t post them all. Maybe just a couple…

Our trip was, of course, fantastic in every way. We spent a day and a half in Paris seeing the usual sites (Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Arc de Triomphe).

 

Then we spent ten days in a 100-year-old villa in the tiny historic town of Positano, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast (just south of Naples).

We spent our days wandering up and down the Amalfi Coast, visiting places like Pompeii and Herculaneum – both cities were buried under so much ash from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that the houses, buildings, streets, and other structures were incredibly well preserved. Today you can stroll through Roman-era houses with painted frescoes still on the wall, mosaic floors still brilliantly colored and intricate, public bars with their terra cotta wine vats still intact, and even gardens still boasting their reflecting pools, columns, and statues.

It was an incredible experience for my son, too. It’s one thing to read about history in a book. It’s quite another to wander through an ancient, excavated Pompeiian shop and see the containers that held Roman “fast food” and signs still painted on the walls advertising everything from politics to wine prices. 

My son loved every minute of it – even if it seemed at first that he was destined not to indulge in any Italian gelato. He was really looking forward to Italian gelato. (My fault: I’ve been telling him for years that Italian ice cream is the best in the world!) But most of the gelaterias we encountered were cross-contamination nightmares. All the flavors were in small bins very close to each other, and the fanciest places piled their bins high with the frozen treat, topping them with real pistachios, hazelnuts, and other hazards.

Eventually, though, we did manage to find two or three gelaterias where my son could indulge. Fortunately, his favorite flavor is lemon, and lemon doesn’t get double-dipped with nutty flavors very often. So when we found a gelateria close to our villa where the proprietor made an effort to serve him an uncontaminated scoop of lemon gelato, we quickly found ourselves making repeat visits there (sometimes twice a day!). We also found a place in Amalfi that served nothing but lemon flavors of gelato. The owner claimed he used lemons from his own trees (the Amalfi Coast is famous for its lemons) and promised there were no nuts in the whole place. My son was in heaven!

Here’s a photo of him enjoying his very first gelato limone.

Next week, I’ll tell you about our experience finding safe breads and pastas. (Sneak preview: I’m still not certain how wide-spread the use of lupin flour is!)

Ciao!

Summer Nights at the Ice Cream Stand

My childhood memories of summer include lots and lots of hot, muggy nights driving to the ice cream stand with my parents and my younger brother. My dad loves ice cream with a passion other men might reserve for things like women or NASCAR racing. So when the temperatures rose to somewhere around “blistering,” we’d be in the car headed for a favorite ice cream haunt.

Where we went depended on where we lived. When I was very young, we lived in upstate New York, and our favorite place was a stand that served fresh peach ice cream. I remember driving there in the dark with the car windows down, the smell of lilacs streaming by in the night, then standing around the parking lot waiting with other patrons for our hand-dipped treat. There were probably fireflies and the sound of crickets. There was sometimes heat lightening. I know there was giggling, and drips we tried to catch before they fell from our cones onto the hot pavement.

In other places, our stand-by was Dairy Queen or Baskin-Robbins. You can’t go wrong with 31 flavors.

When my son was born, I looked forward to keeping our ice-cream-stand summer evenings going. But then we discovered his nut allergies.

Baskin-Robbins went right out the window. Can’t trust all those scoops in the same murky dishwater, moving from the Rocky Road to the Mango Sorbet. Dairy Queen has a big sign on the door saying everything they sell may be contaminated with nuts.

So, our ice cream evenings changed. We buy safe ice cream at the store and serve it at home on the patio. It’s nice, but somehow it’s just not the same thing as piling in the car, headed for a delectable treat, noise, and other good-natured ice cream lovers. But it’s just not something that was in the cards for us and our allergic son. It was easy to let go, because he’s more important than a hot fudge sundae (most days), but still, it was sort of sad.

But guess what? There’s a new place in town! Zeppe’s has opened up on Main Street in Layton, and they serve Italian Ice (gelato – kind of like sorbet, in wonderfully rich fruit flavors). I had some of their Italian ice last week at a birthday party, and it was delicious. So I stopped by there this weekend while out running errands and checked out the place, and sure enough, they have a few tables, a couple of chairs on the sidewalk, and a whole array of luscious-sounding flavors.

The best part is this: because their Italian ices are nut-, egg-, and dairy-free, my son’s best friend can also eat there.

Suddenly, I foresee a Friday night in my future that involves all of us – and my son’s best friend – piling into the car and heading out for a frozen treat, just like I did when I was a kid. I’m so ready for my long-lost summer tradition!

Now if only Utah had fireflies…