there are lots of ways to make chicken, but half of them involve dairy :(

So, going into my third month of eating dairy and alpha-gal free, and I'm starting to try to prepare for the oncoming train of food allergy stuff that is Christmas. I love, love, love Christmas. It is by far my favorite season of the year, and one of my very favorite parts of it was eating. I love almost every traditional thing you eat (or drink, for that matter) at Christmas. This year, things will have to be different.

But, different doesn't have to equal bad! I'm finding more and more recipes of things that are "close" to what I've always enjoyed, just not exactly it. For instance, carrot cake! I found a great recipe on a website (which was copyrighted, so I won't be sharing the link, but you can do a google search for "dairy free carrot cake" and find it) for carrot cake!

I certainly don't have the skill to turn this blog into a recipe sort of website, since I honestly rely on my gracious wife to do most of the cooking, but the bigger picture is that there are alternatives out there. The secret is in not comparing them to what you used to have. Quite honestly, I suspect that the things I used to have, while certainly delicious, are probably not quite as delicious as I remember them being. We tend to remember things as either much better or far worse than they actually were. The bigger picture is health. I feel better when I don't eat these things, and that is verifiable by experience.

I learned the hard way last week that bread (of almost every variety) has milk in it. I would never have thought that, but I learned the hard way. Two days of missed work, missed class, and just being totally drained with big itchy hives taught me an important lesson: don't eat dairy. Ever.

So, my tip for the day? I'm sure people already know this, but application has proven it true for me. READ EVERY LABEL OF EVERY THING YOU BUY. There are things out there that you would never think you'd be allergic to that can be really, really bad. Like non-dairy powdered creamer for coffee, most of which contains some variety of milk in it. Or bread. Or a medium rare T-Bone. . . . ok, maybe not that one.