Tomato Soup for food allergies

As Emily wrote about earlier last month, we all are having some changes occurring in our respective lives.

A couple things for us includes:

• Two new vehicles this year, unplanned on both accounts.
• Hubby's new job which after working from home since last August has greatly increased his work commute.
• This change of job may also include a move down the road....but not right away.
• Oldest daughter getting her driver's license--both great and scary all at the same time.

However, the most stressful for me has to do with our #2 daughter.  She has a wheat intolerance that we've known about for at least a year now.  Removing wheat from her diet improved her lifestyle for awhile and then last Fall sometime she started complaining again.  Recently I took her to a naturopath (because the pediatrician wasn't as helpful as I'd like) where we had some blood work done and the results came back that she also has a dairy, egg, and peanut issue too.

I have to say that after dropping her back off at school after that appointment and then browsing through the grocery store to see what kind of options she'll have, I went back out to my vehicle and cried...and called my mother.  I felt like dealing with the wheat issue was a piece of cake (yeah, punny) compared to this new diagnosis.

It was a temporary meltdown on my part, but right now I have a love/hate relationship with food because of all of this going on with my daughter.  I think that is normal.  I'm pretty sure I'll get over it, because we sort of went thru this when we discovered the wheat issue--denial, anger, acceptance, etc. all those grieving steps.

Anyway, the saddest part about all this for me, thinking of my daughter, is that she will eat anything, and likes about everything, and here she can't have all these things.  That is probably a huge blessing too, because I'm not sure any of my other kids would have as many options as she has because of their food "pickiness".  We're working through it and she is being a good sport as we try new recipes and I figure out a new way of cooking for my entire family, because I am not making a couple different things every night just to make everyone happy.

She and I have a shared love of tomato soup.  Regular canned soup, i.e. Campbell's, has wheat in it--if you didn't already know that.  Gluten-free canned soup is expensive, and really neither one is as good as homemade.

I found this tomato soup recipe from The Chew--one of my favorite shows to watch.  I made it the other night night and it was delicious.  #2 ate hers with some Glutino pretzels and was super happy with it.  I've been eating the leftovers for lunch.


pic from The Chew

Recipe changes/details:

• I used 4 pints of my own canned tomatoes
• Substituted rice milk for the cream.
• And didn't use as much garlic as the recipe called for.

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Down the road I'll probably be sharing some things here and there with what we are doing to make her life better and some things that I've learned or I am doing to switch up the diet.  There are certainly lots of websites and books out there to help us out.

Here are a couple helpful books I found at our local library.

• Allergy-Free Desserts by Elizabeth Gordon
• Allergy-Free and Easy Cooking by Cybele Pascal
• The Ultimate Allergy-Free Snack Cookbook by Judi and Shari Zucker
• Allergy-Friendly Food for Families

Kidswithallergies.org