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Feb. 14th, 2019 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynMy sister's kids have food allergies. One of them in particular, to be sure. Another has a few other issues. We're mostly talking intolerances here, no anaphylaxis, but in practical terms what it means is that there is an array of food products that they are advised not to eat, or to only eat if prepared in specific ways.
Fortunately, wanting to be able to prepare food that was safe and acceptable for people I knew who had restrictive diets was about nine tenths of the reason I set about learning to cook in earnest in the first place. (The remaining tenth- if we define 'in earnest' as 'not only learned to cook well enough to feed myself and not develop nutritional issues, but took actual academic food preparation courses'- is divided between 'I want a set of skills that will allow me to still have a job if all the computers explode due to the Y2k bug' and 'what do you mean normal people don't just make cracked black pepper pasta with garlic cream sauce starting from flour and eggs and peppercorns when they can't find a supermarket that sells cracked black pepper pasta'.)
Currently the accommodation food I learned to make that's gone over best with my sister's kids is the chocolate aquafaba ice cream. No dairy, no nuts, no coconut, and no ice cream machine; this one gets made with a Kitchenaid stand mixer, and admittedly a small amount of xanthan gum (when I run out of xanthan I'm going to try to get tara gum as I am led to understand that tara gum works better in cold recipes). I have two cans of chickpeas in my pantry at the moment because fairly soon I will be attempting to make at least the meringue part of Prue Leith's vegan tropical pavlova for them. The kids like fruit, but I don't know if any of them have issues with pineapple or kiwi and I don't think they've ever had passionfruit, so the only part of Prue's recipe I'll be making will be the meringues and the vegan pastry cream. Probably using organic fair-trade palm oil grown in Colombia as a coconut oil substitute in the pastry cream, as palm oil doesn't set any of the kids off. I need some extended time for that, though. Aquafaba whips up pretty nicely given time and Kitchenaid, but the baking process takes like an hour and a half. Also part of the recipe involves melted white chocolate and I have to make sure the Ghirardelli white chocolate I have is safe for the kids, because you can't extrapolate from one brand to another when it comes to melting performance.
One of them is... some form of lactose intolerant. I'm not sure exactly how severe it is. It may be an issue with one of the dairy proteins rather than a lactose issue, now that I think about it. The result is that my parents and my sister have to have non-dairy milk available. My sister is trying to keep the amount of soy the kids get to a minimum, so right now that means Oatly is a very popular beverage for them. I will probably be using Oatly or Hood's Planet Oat Extra Creamy as part of the vegan pastry cream depending on which I can get hold of, but last night I made my first stab at making my own oat milk. (At my doctor's recommendation I've been having refrigerator oatmeal for breakfast for quite some time now, so I have a container of oats in my pantry about the size of a Maine Coon.) Things I have learned so far:
- The oats did not need to be soaked overnight
- The recipes on the net call for a high speed blender, but if you don't mind standing there holding down the button for a minute and a half, a Ninja works just fine (for half the standard amount made by online recipes, anyway, I wasn't about to do a four-cup recipe as my first experiment)
- A double layer of cheesecloth will work well enough for straining, although I think I may use butter muslin if I do this again, since I have that on hand for cheesemaking
- No-gums-no-emulsifiers-no-thickeners oat milk does not stay homogenous. If you put it in the fridge overnight you have to shake the living hell out of it the next morning to get it back to the right consistency.
- It works pretty well in moka pot coffee, although I have not yet attempted to heat it and do not intend to attempt to foam it because I do not own a foaming wand, so I cannot vouch for the level of heating at which it goes from 'warm beverage' to 'slimy and clotted'
- I had about 3/4 of a cup of the stuff in my coffee before I left the house. I still had what I was pretty sure was a faintly oaty taste in my mouth by the time I got off the train to work in Boston.
We will see how the rest of the stuff is tomorrow.
Fortunately, wanting to be able to prepare food that was safe and acceptable for people I knew who had restrictive diets was about nine tenths of the reason I set about learning to cook in earnest in the first place. (The remaining tenth- if we define 'in earnest' as 'not only learned to cook well enough to feed myself and not develop nutritional issues, but took actual academic food preparation courses'- is divided between 'I want a set of skills that will allow me to still have a job if all the computers explode due to the Y2k bug' and 'what do you mean normal people don't just make cracked black pepper pasta with garlic cream sauce starting from flour and eggs and peppercorns when they can't find a supermarket that sells cracked black pepper pasta'.)
Currently the accommodation food I learned to make that's gone over best with my sister's kids is the chocolate aquafaba ice cream. No dairy, no nuts, no coconut, and no ice cream machine; this one gets made with a Kitchenaid stand mixer, and admittedly a small amount of xanthan gum (when I run out of xanthan I'm going to try to get tara gum as I am led to understand that tara gum works better in cold recipes). I have two cans of chickpeas in my pantry at the moment because fairly soon I will be attempting to make at least the meringue part of Prue Leith's vegan tropical pavlova for them. The kids like fruit, but I don't know if any of them have issues with pineapple or kiwi and I don't think they've ever had passionfruit, so the only part of Prue's recipe I'll be making will be the meringues and the vegan pastry cream. Probably using organic fair-trade palm oil grown in Colombia as a coconut oil substitute in the pastry cream, as palm oil doesn't set any of the kids off. I need some extended time for that, though. Aquafaba whips up pretty nicely given time and Kitchenaid, but the baking process takes like an hour and a half. Also part of the recipe involves melted white chocolate and I have to make sure the Ghirardelli white chocolate I have is safe for the kids, because you can't extrapolate from one brand to another when it comes to melting performance.
One of them is... some form of lactose intolerant. I'm not sure exactly how severe it is. It may be an issue with one of the dairy proteins rather than a lactose issue, now that I think about it. The result is that my parents and my sister have to have non-dairy milk available. My sister is trying to keep the amount of soy the kids get to a minimum, so right now that means Oatly is a very popular beverage for them. I will probably be using Oatly or Hood's Planet Oat Extra Creamy as part of the vegan pastry cream depending on which I can get hold of, but last night I made my first stab at making my own oat milk. (At my doctor's recommendation I've been having refrigerator oatmeal for breakfast for quite some time now, so I have a container of oats in my pantry about the size of a Maine Coon.) Things I have learned so far:
- The oats did not need to be soaked overnight
- The recipes on the net call for a high speed blender, but if you don't mind standing there holding down the button for a minute and a half, a Ninja works just fine (for half the standard amount made by online recipes, anyway, I wasn't about to do a four-cup recipe as my first experiment)
- A double layer of cheesecloth will work well enough for straining, although I think I may use butter muslin if I do this again, since I have that on hand for cheesemaking
- No-gums-no-emulsifiers-no-thickeners oat milk does not stay homogenous. If you put it in the fridge overnight you have to shake the living hell out of it the next morning to get it back to the right consistency.
- It works pretty well in moka pot coffee, although I have not yet attempted to heat it and do not intend to attempt to foam it because I do not own a foaming wand, so I cannot vouch for the level of heating at which it goes from 'warm beverage' to 'slimy and clotted'
- I had about 3/4 of a cup of the stuff in my coffee before I left the house. I still had what I was pretty sure was a faintly oaty taste in my mouth by the time I got off the train to work in Boston.
We will see how the rest of the stuff is tomorrow.
