Katherine's Red Lentil Curry

When your food allergies only allow a limited set of foods, it is somewhat tricky to come up with sufficient sources of protein in sufficient variety to keep picky little taste buds happy. Fortunately, Katherine seems to like lentils enough that we can work those into the mix. They are a great source of protein, and tasty to boot.

Note: We make our own chicken broth by putting half of a natural chicken into a pressure cooker with about 2 quarts of water and a dash of salt, cooking at high pressure for 30 minutes, then allowing the pressure to release naturally and straining the broth. We put it in the fridge overnight and skim the fat in the morning, then freeze 2 cup portions to work with.

Mix together 2 cups of homemade chicken broth, a dash of salt, 3/4 cup of red lentils, half a tablespoon of curry powder, and 2 small seeded chopped fresh tomatos. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the lentils are soft but not mushy. Use a stick blender to puree some of the lentils to a desired consistency. We puree more than I'd like, but just because little K has some trouble digesting at this point.

Allergy-Resistant Chicken Nuggets

It's a real challenge cooking for a little girl who has food allergies out the wazoo. We can't have corn (that's a biggie), green beans, oats, peaches, milk, wheat, eggs,.... well, it's shorter to list what we can have, which happens to include chicken, rice, and peas. There are only so many ways you can prepare chicken, and nuggets seem to be a hit, so we gave it a try. We also had to buy organic chicken breasts to eliminate the possibility of arsenic (go figure - the pesticides and other junk they put on chicken feed ends up in the chicken meat, and Katherine ended up showing high levels of arsenic on her tests). I have been geeking out about our new meat grinder, so it was great to get a chance to run the chicken through and see how well it would work. Of course, it did fantastic. One nice thing about the chicken we bought is that they don't add water during processing - the first time we tried grinding chicken it came out to a smooshy mess. We mixed in peas and a tad of salt, made patties, dredged them in rice bread crumbs, and pan-fried in some olive oil. I happen to think they were quite tasty, and fortunately, so did Katherine.

Hopefully we'll be putting together more recipes of gluten-free and casein-free foods. We'll share the ones that end up being good.