{"id":61061,"date":"2016-11-22T00:09:03","date_gmt":"2016-11-22T08:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/?p=61061"},"modified":"2016-11-22T00:09:03","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T08:09:03","slug":"young-cultivators-merit-badge-food-allergy-awareness-intermediate-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/61061","title":{"rendered":"Young Cultivators Merit Badge: Food Allergy Awareness, Intermediate Level"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tThe adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our<\/span> Sisterhood Merit Badge program<\/span><\/span><\/a>, now with\u00a07,200 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far\u201410,226 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Wondering who I am? I\u2019m Merit Badge Awardee Jane (MBA Jane for short). In my <\/span>former life<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

For this week\u2019s Farm Kitchen\/Food Allergy Awareness Intermediate Level Merit Badge<\/u><\/a>, I tackled my newfound knowledge of that lowly, insidious issue of food allergies, and wrestled it into the kitchen.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right. What good is knowing things if you aren\u2019t part of the solution, am I right? Of course I am.<\/p>\n

I set about rewriting three family recipes with a food allergic person in mind. What if, for example, you have a loved one coming over for Thanksgiving dinner and they are gluten free? How will you serve that oh-so important and not to be neglected Turkey Day staple, the stuffing? Or, say your uncle has a craving for a slow-roasted ham, but can\u2019t tolerate any form of sugar in the glaze? (And who doesn\u2019t? Have a craving for slow-roasted ham, that is. I mean, come on. The day I don\u2019t <\/em>have a slow-roasted ham craving is the day you know to bury me six feet under.)\u00a0I mean, it\u2019s a pickle really.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me started on pickle allergies. If there is such a thing then I declare, this is a world I cannot be a part of.<\/p>\n

Anyway. I had no such uncle, nor any gluten-free friends at the moment, so I took a different approach: I pretended.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s me, Jane, the Great Pretender. I pretended I was allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, and dairy.<\/p>\n

But, Janey, you\u2019re saying, peanuts are a nut, you, you NUT! Nope, peanuts are a legume, thank you very much. You can be quite allergic to tree nuts and not to peanuts, and the other way \u2018round.<\/p>\n

\"Bowl_of_peanuts_-_stonesoup\"

photo by jules \/ stonesoup via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Cue the melodious strains of a back-to-school special \u2026 the more you know \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

You\u2019d think, wouldn\u2019t you, that it wouldn\u2019t be that hard to avoid nuts (or legumes), especially if you\u2019re doing your own cooking, but you\u2019d be wrong. Or at least, wrongish. I reached for a bottle of Asian salad dressing as a marinade for my chicken (I was making lettuce wraps) and belatedly read the ingredients. Yep, you guessed it, peanut oil.<\/p>\n

I was glad I hadn\u2019t picked soy as one of my food allergy ingredients to avoid because then I really would have been up a creek without a paddle. I try to avoid soy anyway, but boy do they ever put it in everything (it\u2019s nearly as everywhere as gluten is). My chicken lettuce wraps turned out okay, but they were missing the crunch of a few sprinkled nuts, I must say. I tossed some corn nuts in as a replacement (they were \u2026 weird).<\/p>\n

Next, I whipped up a batch of my world-famous Everything But the Kitchen Sink Cookies, but with variations. I had to take out all the nuts once again (grr!) and not only that, but I had to remove the dairy as well.<\/p>\n

Wait, is butter a dairy?<\/p>\n

\"\"

photo by Armmark via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t wanna do this anymore \u2026<\/p>\n

I substituted coconut oil and applesauce for the butter (if you\u2019re going to tell me coconut is a nut, I\u2019m going to have to slap you with a cookie), and replaced the nuts with some dried fruits and some extra oats for texture.<\/p>\n

They were pretty tasty, although I will probably have to rename them Everything But the Kitchen Sink and Not To Mention Nuts and Butter Cookies. Which makes it a little hard to file in my recipe box, but no matter.<\/p>\n

The third recipe I revamped was a fruit smoothie. I thought it\u2019d be easy, until I realized I couldn\u2019t replace the cow\u2019s milk with almond milk, because … nuts! And I couldn\u2019t replace the almond milk with cow\u2019s milk, because … dairy.<\/p>\n

So I threw some strawberries in a blender and added some tequila and called it a day.<\/p>\n

 \t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with\u00a07,200 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far\u201410,226 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane\u00a0 Wondering who … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gladsome_sisters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}