All About Lactose Intolerance

Milk or Cream in Cooking

Best alternative for milk or cream for cooking is coconut milk or coconut cream, just need to watch out for additives in the milk or cream. For use in soups, almond milk could be a good substitute.

Lactose Free Cheese

Finding lactose free cheese is important, and something that I thought we would have a lot of problem finding. I’ve been learning a lot of cheese, especially aged cheeses, is naturally lactose free.

So aged cheeses, like Cheddars, Colby, Jack, Swiss, and Parmesan contain zero grams of lactose. (source)

A good way to check the lactose content, if it is not listed separately, is to look at the sugar content of the cheese. Generally speaking, a lower sugar content means lower lactose. Lactose will be listed in the cheese in the sugars line.

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Some cheese and milk, like Liddells lactose free cheese, actually have added lactase enzyme to break down the lactose to make it more digestible. Lactase is an enzyme that is naturally produced in our small intestine, but for people with lactose intolerance, there is either not enough, or none being produced. Artificial lactase is most often extracted from yeast and from molds (source). The effectiveness of added lactase tends to vary from person to person in alleviating their lactose intolerance symptoms.

Other food ingredients that may contain lactose:

  • Milk Powder
  • Milk Protein
  • Milk Solids
  • Nonfat dry milk
  • Whey
  • Whey solids or protein

Sources:

What is the Ingredient “Flavour”?

What is Flavour Ingredient

Recently we were looking more closely at the food labels in our pantry, and at what ingredients are there. For health reasons we have been attempting to eat more naturally, and have a better idea of what is in our foods. While looking at many of our canned goods and sauces we came across the rather bland ingredient of “flavour”.

That was rather non-descript, so I decided to contact the company that makes one of the canned items in question, and this is the response that I got:

The flavour used is of synthetic origin.  The actual profile of the flavour cannot be disclosed as it is proprietary information.

I was shocked to be honest!

It was always my understanding that we were supposed to be told about what was in our foods, I did not know that companies were allowed to put “secret” natural or artificial ingredients in food that we eat!

Amazingly it seems that the rights of companies to maintain their “proprietary information” is greater than our rights as consumers to know what we are putting into our bodies. We aren’t even allowed to know if the “flavour” or “flavouring” is natural or artificial in origin. Apparently there are over 2000 secret man-made flavour additives that don’t need to be identified by name or number. So while I have been trying to avoid numbered ingredients, the innocuous label of “flavour” has slipped by me.

The Food Intolerance Network has a great article about Flavours and Flavour Enhancers that goes into a lot more detail.

In the future our family will be avoiding the ingredient “flavour” or “flavouring”.

Photo credit: Margarine via photopin (license)

Make Shift Roasting Rack

Tonight’s dinner plans for a BBQ rotisserie ham got a bit messed up by rain, yes it’s raining here in Calgary in January. A bit hard to use the BBQ in the rain.

I figured that I would bake the ham as that is a common way for people to cook hams. The problem that I ran into though is that I do not have a roasting rack yet for the bottom of my roasting pan.

After racking my brain for a few minutes, and even considering using our baking cooling racks which didn’t end up fitting, I came up with this idea…

I took the forks from the rotisserie and stuck the in the sides of the ham, leaving the bottom tongs on the forks under the ham so it would be elevated slightly.

It’s not elegant, but it works…

The ham is roasting now and I’ll be doing an orange glaze on it for the last half hour of roasting.

Free Jamie Oliver Food Toolkits

As part of Jamie Olivers’s Food Revolution he has recently released some free toolkits. The toolkits are designed to help you start the food revolution in your home, school and local community.

The four free toolkits are:

  1. Learning how to start to cook
  2. Cooking with your kids
  3. Facts about flavoured milk
  4. Start changing your school’s food

You can download these four free toolkits on Jamie Oliver’s web-site here.

Where to Hide Chocolate from a Sweet Tooth?

My wife is a huge sweet tooth and if we have chocolate in the house it is gone within days. She also doesn’t read this blog, so I figure that it is safe to write on here where I hide the chocolate so that she can’t find it.

So, where is the best place to hide chocolate from a sweet tooth?

The best place that I have found to hide chocolate, or other sweets for that matter, is in the vegetable or fruit crisper in the fridge.

The fruit crisper may not work if your sweet tooth likes their fruit, but as long as they don’t like fruit it could work for you.

I used to try to hide the chocolate near the back of the fridge, behind some of the regular food, but it usually got discovered.

Hiding it in the fridge crisper has worked for about a month. I just have to be careful that there is no one else around when I go to take out the chocolate. If I’m not careful the game could be up in an instant, and them I’m back to find a new hiding place for the chocolate…

Where do you hide chocolate and sweets from the sweet tooth in your house?