Three things my husband adores: banging on his computer, the Atlanta Braves, and large quantities of cheesecake. He spends most of his time banging on the computer regardless of what I do, and the Braves have had a pretty lousy offseason, so naturally I've decided to make him an enormous cheesecake for Valentine's Day. Which got me thinking about cookbooks.
Setting aside the case where you're cooking something that has no possible relationship to your allergies (for example, you've got a fish allergy and you're making vegetable soup), you've got three options when you need to find a recipe for something you don't know how to cook. First, you can look in a cookbook that's written for food allergies. Second, you can look online, whether on this site, a recipe search engine, or on an allergy-friendly recipe site like Cooking Allergy Free or Eating With Food Allergies.
The $64 question is, what's the best option? To me -- and I'm sure folks will have a variety of opinions on this -- the answer is, it depends on what you're cooking. My rule of thumb is that the more places the recipe relies on ingredients I have to avoid, the more likely I am to turn to a tested allergy-safe recipe. In my case, that's baking, and doubly so because I was a lousy baker before I was diagnosed. The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread is the only way I roll. (Okay, that was a terrible pun. Forgive me.)
For most recipes, though, I'm inclined to grab general-use cookbooks so long as they stick to mainly fresh, unprocessed ingredients. I find that the more processed a food is, the more opportunities for problems -- which is doubly important since we often find ourselves cooking for multiple special diets when we entertain. Alice Waters, Madeleine Kamman, and Mark Bittman are just a few authors whose cookbooks have a lot of recipes I've found adaptable, but I'm well aware that I'm not trying to avoid as many allergens as some people need to. When you want to try something new, or want to try your hand at recreating something old, how do you go about it?
