Category Archives: Allergy friendly recipes

Feast or famine

There are times when recipes, just like buses and blog-posts, can be hard to find and then, just when you think you’re in for the long haul, a whole host of them appear from nowhere and flood your every waking moment. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been desperate to find some more alternatives to plain chicken and rice to tempt M’s taste buds and it is thanks to some canny suggestions from M’s dietitian, a lovely reader and even my hairdresser that this past fortnight has seen me trialling some new inventions of my own.

Today’s recipe is one that might not appeal to everyone, but it has certainly been a huge hit with M: Chicken Liver pâté. Both G and M love pâté and when they were little, I found a quick and easy recipe and regularly used to make my own. I’m not quite sure why it didn’t cross my mind to revisit this recipe in recent months, but thanks to a throwaway comment from our lovely dietitian about the possibility of cooking lamb’s liver and kidneys when M trials lamb, Chicken liver pâté suddenly sprang to mind. I spent a productive hour or so flitting between my computer and my recipe books, searching out traditional recipes as well as some that are dairy-free and quickly came to the conclusion that, with a clever few tweaks and variations of my own, this was definitely something I could cook up for M.

The base ingredients are easy to source: chicken livers, oil, rice flour, rice milk and herbs and seasonings; and I think that the recipe is easy to follow. In my latest batch, I also added the last remaining drops of the “Rice whip” rice cream I had managed to buy months ago, which gave the pâté a creamier texture, but isn’t necessary to make a spread that everyone can enjoy. The pâté has given M another fab alternative to the monotony of his daily meals and he’s currently loving his pâté “sandwiches” (rice cakes with pâté) for lunch, instead of the dry alternative.

Pâté perfected, it was now time to put my second plan into action and create a M-friendly version of Beef Wellington. Sadly at the moment for us there can be no pastry, mustard, mushrooms, crepe or indeed beef, but there is chicken, chicken liver pâté, cucumber and rice and that, I decided, was more than enough. I carefully cut into a chicken breast and created a pocket, which I filled with thin slices of cucumber and lashings of the pâté. I coated the filled breast with a rice crumb and then oven-baked. M tucked into it heartily last night and devoured the lot, which was just amazing to see. So that’s another dish to add to my repertoire, though perhaps the end result was more “Chicken Kiev“, than “Beef Wellington”, a “Chicken Wellington” you might say!

Flatbreads and Fajitas

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It’s been quite a while since I last had a new recipe to share, but this one has become a definite favourite at home and M asked me to share photos of his “most delicious meal ever!” on my blog. We are still stuck at 3 safe ingredients plus oils for cooking at the moment and it’s becoming more and more difficult to make rice, chicken and cucumber even remotely interesting to eat at every meal-time. The inspiration for this new recipe came from G and her current post-SATs topic about the Mayans. They had been looking at food in current day Mexico and she came home raving about wanting to try fajitas:

“Once M can have some more foods, then you could make him spicy chicken and find some safe wraps and then we could both try chicken fajitas.“

Her enthusiasm was catching and, as G is so often reluctant to try new flavours and ingredients, I started to wonder whether I could jump on this Mayan bandwagon and transform our staples into a version of this popular dish. My first challenge was to find a recipe that could provide the wraps needed and stumbled across this great one for rice flour flatbread. Deciding to not run before I could walk, I started by trying my hand at making flatbread and seeing what response it got from my discerning duo. The recipe was easy to follow and simple enough to accommodate M’s new food needs as it just requires rice flour, water, oil and salt. Flatbread made, I nervously served them and watched the entire plateful disappear before my eyes – an instant hit.

The original ingredients- I failed to get a photo of the finished fajita!

With the flatbread puzzle solved, it was now time to construct some M-friendly chicken fajitas for dinner. I finely sliced some strips of cucumber, pan-fried some chicken with lots of black pepper and thyme (he’s not yet allowed to trial chilli flakes or anything spicier than green herbs) and used some of the home-made chicken liver pate I’d perfected at the weekend to add a little something extra. He wasn’t quite sure how to put them together, so we decided on a thin spread of pate on top of the flatbread, a sprinkling of cucumber and some small pieces of chicken, before rolling the lot into a shape vaguely reminiscent of a fajita. G added some sliced carrot and mayonnaise to hers and they both quickly scoffed the lot. This is the first “sandwich” M has been able to enjoy in a long time and I doubt it will be the last!

A tri-umph of rice-themed goodies!

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Recently I’ve been spending my time baking and cooking up a whirlwind as the days ahead have been looking busy. With a day for G and M at the holiday club run at Mike’s work, an appointment with M’s consultant and dietitian at GOSH to review his progress 4 months post-tube and a planned short stay in London to see the sights and to dip our toes into the world of being away from home with NG-tube in tow, a plethora of safe snacks and treats for M were much in need. I prepared rice pudding, rice-flour sugar cookies and rice krispie cakes to satisfy the appetite of my youngest and to reassure myself that we would have some things with us to feed him whilst the rest of us enjoyed some much-missed meals out. I also used the opportunity whilst trialling banana to add some to the mix and made some banana sugar cookies too.

The recipes can be found in the everything-free recipes section and are so easy to follow that next time round, my plan is to be sitting back with a cup of tea, whilst G and M get on with the task of creating their own delicious masterpieces!

Who knew you could make so much from rice, sugar, rice milk and canola oil? Any other suggestions for simple recipes will be very gratefully received!