Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Adventures in Soy Cooking

So I have recently had a bomb dropped on me about the way I need to cook. I have known for a while that my husband has needed to change the way he eats. He has Crohn's disease and struggles with it daily. We have tried all sorts of medication and not much of it has worked. So now we are trying to change his diet a little. When he was younger his mother put him on a soy free diet and he claims he did much better on it. So he believes in addition to his Crohn's that he also has a soy allergy. Ok, no problem we just won't eat anything with soy in it.
Ok, big problem, almost everything you buy in the store has soy in it. So, now in addition to wife, mother, housekeeper, general cook and chauffeur, not to mention current preschool teacher to my 4 year old twins, I know have to become a master baker and cook in all things soy free. Which means now that I am doing a lot of experimenting.
I have to make everything (except dairy, yay!) practically from scratch. So here is a list of a couple of things I have started to make from scratch: tortillas (surprisingly MUCH better fresh) donuts, cheesecake (really it was the graham crackers that I had to make from scratch), cake (I am a cake mix queen no more), rolls, biscuits, pie, bread, granola bars and bagels. I am probably forgetting a bunch of stuff here but I have a newborn so I still forget things easily at this point, I blame lack of sleep.
I have found that I really didn't know what was in my food before, and I honestly didn't care. My mother in law really had tried to open me up to know what all we ate was really a bunch of soy, corn or wheat, even in the meat we eat because that is the same stuff they feed animals. Anyway, now I am committed (maybe begrudgingly) and am trying my best to master this new way of eating.
I know that my children and I who do not have this problem could eat whatever we like, and sometimes we do, but I think it best not to make to many meals at a time, I am only one person and cannot stretch myself that far.

Here are some pics of some of the stuff i have made, I haven't figured out how to take good pictures of food so this is what you are getting.