Holiday Candy Round-up

I was hoping to go shopping for holiday candy ideas before today, but as usual, life had other plans. The human whirlwind is on the couch with a sore throat, I hosted one party Saturday night, I’m hosting a party tonight, I have family coming into town on Wednesday (not staying here – staying at my parents’, but we’ll still spend most of our time together)… you know how crazy things get this time of year.

So I didn’t get a chance to do much in the way of candy shopping. So I’m going to list a few things here that I found, but I’m hoping the wonderful readers of this blog will post other “finds” so that we can all save some trips and some brain cells looking for those last-minute treats.

One great member of UFAN wrote to tell me this good news: “I found candy canes at Walmart by Spangler Candy Company that say ‘This product does not contain peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, wheat or gluten. It has been manufactured on dedicated equipment.’” I LOVE it when manufacturers go the extra mile to be proactive. So if you’re hunting for candy canes, support this company! Their website says the equipment contains a trace amount of soy oil, but that the oil is processed to be free of proteins, so read the allergen statement on the website for the exact wording and make your own decision accordingly if you're soy-allergic: Spangler Candy Company Candy Canes.

If you’re not fond of peppermint, I’ve also found that some of the fruit-flavored candy canes are safe, so check labels carefully and you may find some that tickle your fancy.

If you’re looking for chocolate, try the great online vendors that make our allergic lives a little sweeter, like:
Vermont Nut Free
Divvies
AllerNeeds.com
Amanda’s Own Confections
Chocolate Emporium (This site has both Christmas and Hanukkah chocolates)

I also heard that Walmart in Layton is now carrying the complete line of Enjoy Life! Foods, including the Choco Choco Boom chocolate bars. (They have crisped rice in them, so they’re like Nestle’s Crunch bars). Enjoy Life! Foods are free of the top 8 allergens, and I haven’t found these chocolate bars anywhere else, so this is good news! I haven’t been to Walmart to check it out myself, though, so let me know if you find them there.

If you’re only avoiding nuts, some Hershey’s kisses are safe this year, but some of the flavored ones aren’t – check the packaging carefully. I’ve bought the caramel, the dark, and the cherry cordial flavored kisses, but the peppermint and some others aren’t safe because they’re made in a different factory.

Looking for one of those fun ornaments filled with candy? My son received a “Smarties Chewies” tin ornament ball that doesn’t contain any of the Top 8. A Nerds Rope is fun for a stocking stuffer, as are the usual standbys like Starbursts and Skittles.

Okay, that’s my starter list. Anyone have any great finds that are fun, different, unexpected, or holiday-themed? Share with us!

And one last thing… Since candy tends to be everywhere this time of year, especially in little bowls on the service desks of just about everywhere you go, including dentists, car repair shops, and boutiques, you might tuck a few safe candies in your purse or coat pocket to stave off a temper tantrum when your little one gets offered a treat and you have to decline. You’ll be the coolest parent around if you can whip out a safe treat to offer instead. Yeah, I know, candy isn’t a healthy treat, but it’s the holiday season, right?

Mandarin Orange Upside-Down Cake

I’ve gotten used to cooking for a certain set of food allergies and issues within my normal circle of friends. No milk, eggs, nuts, seafood, sesame seeds, raw tomatoes, or raw peaches, and some of the adults in the group have some other food preference issues we work around. After ten years, it’s become second nature to cook around those restrictions.

Friday night, I got to explore a completely different set of restrictions, and it was a stretch, but it was also fun.

I was getting together with five other friends for dinner at one’s house. We usually eat at restaurants, which lets everyone order their own food with their own particular restrictions. This time, it was a potluck. Here were my new parameters: No gluten, dairy, chocolate, nuts, fruit (except for citrus – lemons, limes, grapefruit, or orange are okay), and as little refined sugar as possible.

Being the adventurous (and masochistic) type, I volunteered for dessert. I considered dessert ideas for several days, making a phone call or email here and there to double-check problem foods. Finally, I hit on making a pineapple upside-down cake, except without the pineapple (a problem food), and using mandarin oranges instead. Never mind that I’ve never made a pineapple upside-down cake before, never cooked gluten-free, and didn’t know if mandarin oranges would work instead of pineapple. See what I mean by masochistic?

Because I’m completely unfamiliar with gluten-free baking and I didn’t have time to do a lot of experimenting with gluten-free flours (I’ll get around to it someday, but not this week!), I went looking for a Cherrybrook Kitchen gluten-free yellow cake mix. The stores I usually haunt didn’t have it, but I discovered a new Betty Crocker gluten-free yellow cake mix! I was surprised and delighted to discover a mainstream brand is finally joining the fight against food allergies/diseases!

The cake turned out beautifully, although it took about twice as long to bake as the instructions said. Here’s what I did:

Put 4 T of melted dairy-free margarine in the bottom of a 9-inch round cake pan. Sprinkle with ½ c. brown sugar. Drain a can of mandarin orange slices, reserving the liquid, then arrange the slices in a round pattern on the bottom of the pan.

Next, make the cake batter according to the box’s recipe, although I substituted the reserved liquid from the oranges for the water that the recipe called for, and I replaced half of the gluten-free vanilla extract with orange extract, and I added the zest from half an orange. (Okay, I know, I’m one of those people who always have to mess with recipes. I’m sorry.)

Pour the batter over the oranges, and bake at 350 for … hmm… it was probably close to an hour, even though the instructions had said about 30 minutes. About half-way through, the top of the cake was starting to look way too brown, so I covered the outer edge of it with a long strip of foil, like you do on pies to keep the crust from getting too brown. When a toothpick finally came clean in the center of the cake, I removed it from the oven and let it cool for about ten minutes. Then I turned it out onto a cutting board, and it was perfect!

Frankly, I was shocked.

Although I like to experiment with baking, I throw away a LOT of disasters. A LOT. Like two-thirds of everything I try. I was so convinced that this would flop, I actually had also bought some dairy-free Italian Ice from my neighborhood Zeppe’s (great place, very aware of allergies!) and baked some gluten-free cookies from a Cherrybrook Kitchen mix.

So I ended up with not just one dessert, but three. I took them all, and they were all a hit, even with the non-allergic women, who couldn’t believe the cake and cookies were gluten-free.

Wow. I don’t know what I did to deserve such good luck on my first gluten-free baking adventure. Of course, given my baking karma, that probably ensured that the next ten things I try will fail in horribly creative ways. But that’s okay. The one friend with the most restrictions was thrilled to actually get to eat a dessert at a party, so that made it worth the worry.

It seems like it should work well with a regular cake mix, too, so I’m going to give it another try this weekend, using a nut-free, dairy-free, egg-free mix with regular flour. If you try it, let me know.

Here’s to more adventures in baking!

Positively Red Robin

Last night, my husband, son, mother-in-law and I went to Red Robin for dinner. We’ve eaten there before, but usually my son has eaten off the kid’s menu, and we’ve asked about nuts and peanuts in the alfredo sauce and the chicken fingers, and we’ve been fine.

Now that he’s getting older (he’s eleven now!), he’s getting more adventurous and he wants to order things off the regular menu. My friend Kim had told me that Red Robin has an extensive list for allergic customers of what to order and how to order it, broken down by the eight common food allergens. Of course, we didn’t go by the house before deciding to get dinner, so I couldn’t check the list she’d emailed me.

When we got to the restaurant, I asked the waitress about “the list” and she told me she’d go check. In a minute, the manager was at my table asking about our needs. I told him, and he ran off to get the list, printed it off, and brought it right back to me. He told me it looked like my son could order the burger he wanted, just without the Red Robin Seasoning on the patty or on the steak fries.

So that’s what we ordered. In a few minutes, the waitress brought our food out, and said the manager was making sure my son’s burger was cooked correctly. Sure enough, in about thirty seconds, the manager walked out with my son’s plate. Then, several times during the meal, the manager and waitress both stopped by to check on us.

I have to tell you, I was impressed. I don’t recall ever getting such gracious attention for my son’s allergies at a restaurant before. They seemed to go out of their way to take us seriously, to do everything they could to help, and to keep checking to make sure we were doing well.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law was even more surprised than I was. Not being around us more than a week or two each year, she is still surprised at how much effort it takes to avoid peanuts and tree nuts. She has seen me order for my son and ask about allergens, but she’s never experienced anything like the service we got last night. When she was raising children, of course, few people had food allergies, and fewer still would have known the first thing about handling them. She’s learned a lot from our experience. And as she watched the manager and waitress cater to us last night, she remarked at how much more aware everyone seems to be now than when we started this odyssey ten years ago.

What a difference a decade makes.

This morning, I sent an email to Red Robin’s comment section on their website complimenting the waitress and manager. I also asked a question that is bothering me. The allergen list that the manager brought me said that for peanut allergies, we should ask for the burger and steak fries without the Red Robin Seasoning. However, the bottle of “Red Robin Seasoning” sitting on the table said nothing about peanut contamination, and listed “Soy” as the only allergen. So I asked if the seasoning on the table is different from the seasoning in the kitchen, or if the bottle on the table should include a peanut warning. I will let you know what I hear from them.

In the meantime, I checked their website for the list of what and how to order for each allergen, and the only one they had online is for wheat and gluten. (See Red Robin's Wheat/Gluten Menu List.) For all other allergens, you must send them an email through the Red Robin General Inquiry contact form. Be specific about which of the 8 common allergens you have, and allow at least a couple of days to get the reply.

If you eat at Red Robin, I hope your experience is as positive as mine was!

Climate Change Increasing Food Allergies

I’ve written before about oral allergy syndrome – the concept that allergen proteins, whether in pollens or in foods, belong to a limited number of protein families, and that many pollen proteins are similar enough in structure to unrelated food proteins that a sensitivity to one can make you susceptible to the other, even though the two plants aren’t technically related. For example, an allergy to birch may make you allergic to peanuts, because some of the proteins found in birch pollen is similar in structure to some of the proteins in peanuts. So even though the two plants aren’t related at all, the birch pollen, which gets into your lungs freely because it’s airborne, can eventually trigger an allergic reaction to peanuts. (See "Regional Differences in Food Allergies.")

I also talked about how this oral allergy syndrome may explain why different foods are the allergic culprits in different parts of the world – because the weeds and trees in England are different from the weeds and trees in Africa, for example, the common food allergies also vary between the two regions.

Now there are starting to be several studies that show this oral allergy syndrome affect is increasing because of global climate change.

In a nutshell, researchers are discovering that with the longer warm seasons and melting ice caps, more land mass is staying warmer longer, producing more and more plants. Ragweed, for example, is thriving for more weeks every year in some parts of America. That means not only a lengthening of hay fever season for pollen sufferers, but also more exposure in expanding areas where people can become susceptible to the corresponding food allergens.

Australian scientist Dr. Paul Beggs was awarded the OSMR Jamkie Callachor Eureka Prize for Medical Research in Australia this year (Australia’s most prestigious science award) for his research on the effect climate change is having on allergens. As explained in the article “Global Allergic Reaction” from the Australian Museum, which awards the Eureka Prize, “Dr. Beggs published the first academic papers on the possible impacts of increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns on asthma; air-based allergens (such as pollen) and plant food allergens such as peanuts.”

Dr. Beggs isn’t the only one researching these links between climate change and allergies. For example, other scientists have shown that people exposed to higher levels of ragweed pollen and ozone together are more likely to suffer from allergies than from either substance alone.

The scientific literature is filled with studies showing direct, distinct correlations between climate change and various elements of human health, and the link between warming temperatures and both airborne and food-borne allergens is astonishing.

Just something to think about the next time we food allergy sufferers have an opportunity to do something proactive for the environment.