I have a post in me that talks about my mother in law and feeding almond meal to Bella on Christmas Day but I think I need a few more days to be a little more objective and less snarky about the whole thing. But don't worry, B is fine (thank God). The lesson there for my MIL is: just because something says Gluten Free, doesn't mean it is NUT free. The lesson for me is: never trust anyone when they say something is nut free. Sigh.
Instead, I thought I'd share something kind of neat.
For Christmas, Mark got me a Nintendo DS (yes, I'm 10 years old). It's baby blue and came with a snazzy patent leather case (jealous? I thought so).
That's not the neat part. The following is.
He got me a few games, one of them being Personal Trainer: Cooking. You know the one from the TV commercial with Lisa Kudrow from Friends?
Anyhoo - it has over 200 recipes with instructions in it, and you can do all sorts of things with the software like make shopping lists, watch technique videos (and most importantly learn to cook with your kids - which Bella and I LOVE to do together), but you can also search by ingredient and exclude recipes that contain certain ingredients. There's a setting to identify foods you want to exclude and it tags the recipes (and their images) to highlight that they contain the offending food (and it can be anything - apples, peanuts, tofu, etc.).
So I've finally gotten to the neat part (geez, talk about building a clock instead of telling you the time!). When I did a search for peanuts, only two (yes 2!) recipes came up. Pad Thai was one (and you can just omit the nuts from the recipe) and a chinese dessert that used peanuts as a garnish (again, you could just delete it).
One last thing: when you turn on the game it has a screen shot at the beginning that says something to the effect of "when you are cooking for someone, be mindful of any food allergies they may have". Nice!
It was so great to hand the device to B and tell her to pick anything she wanted to make!
Hope you all had a great Holiday Season and that you have a very Happy New Year. I'll see you in 2009 -
