Tapioca Flour

One of the ingredients I have bought for gluten free cooking is Tapioca Flour (which may also be called Tapioca Starch). This flour was recommended to take the place of corn starch in many recipes.
But what is a tapioca? According to my "extensive" research involving looking it up on Wikipedia...
Tapioca is "an essentially flavourless starchy ingredient produced from treated and dried cassava (manioc) root and used in cooking." Cassava is a nifty little root looking something like a sweet potato and used similarly to potatoes or sweet potatoes. It is high in starch, calcium, phosphorus, and Vitamin C. Cassava is especially important in agriculturally poor nations as it "gives the highest yield of food energy per cultivated area per day among crop plants."

The nutrient facts for my Ener-G brand Tapioca Flour are for 1/2 cup of flour: 170 calories; 0g Fat; 0g Protein; 42g Carbs with 0g Sugar. Apparently, all the wonderful benefits of calcium, phosphorus, and Vit C have been processed out by the time cassava becomes tapioca because these are not present in my flour.

Goat's Milk

Often, kids with food allergies are able to use goat's milk as a substitution for cow's milk. This has something to do with the size of the proteins in cow's milk are too big for many children's guts to digest. We do know that Ryan was able to thrive on goat's milk as a baby. Titus, however, is allergic. Tried some goat's milk powder this morning. He drank about 4 oz, started screaming and within 30 minutes was red and broken out. It took a doze of Benedryl and an hour before he was ready to play. Ryan and I will probably drink it to use it up, and now we know.

Food Allergies

I am going to try again to be a blogger, and this time I am going to focus on the subject of cooking for my kid with food allergies. Here is a current list of all foods that Titus is enough allergic to that they are prohibited from his diet:

• Cow's Milk
• Eggs
• Peanuts
• Wheat
• Barley
• Oats
• Corn
• Beef

Some other foods that I have to be cautious of:

• Bananas - seriously allergic
• Citrus - somewhat allergic
• Other fruit - a bunch will cause a break out
• Rye - have not tried as everything else on the gluten list is prohibited

When Titus has an allergic reaction his skin breaks out into itchy oozy eczema, but we have some freedom because he has never had any trouble with his breathing. The only food that has caused vomiting is bananas. So that is where we are now. As I have time I will try to answer some of the more common questions about how we got here, and what I am currently doing, but mostly I hope to write about the results of what new foods we are trying. Cheers!