Nardone - Cooking for Isaiah: Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Recipes for Easy, Delicious Meals

Copyright 2010 Silvana Nardone

Photographs 2010 Stephen Scott Gross

All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction, in any manner, is prohibited.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nardone, Silvana.

Cooking for Isaiah : gluten-free & dairy-free recipes for easy, delicious meals/Silvana Nardone.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-60652-565-4

1. Gluten-free diet--Recipes. 2. Milk-free diet--Recipes. I. Readers Digest Association. II. Title.

RM237.86.N37 2010

641.5638--dc22

2010014371

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To my angel Isaiah, my handsome son. You are the reason this cookbook existsa delicious reminder that together, love and food are natures greatest healer.

I fell in love with Silvana for two reasons: Number 1, her biscotti, and Number 2, her fig-and-rosemary wine crackers. The truth is that I never wouldve imagined Sil cooking without flour, because when I first met her five years ago, she owned an Italian bakery in Brooklyn. Cooking for Isaiah proves that shes an inspired, masterful baker and cookwith or without gluten and dairy. I can tell you firsthand, Silvanas food boggles my taste buds!

Sil always talks about her kids (as all mothers do), and we flip through beautiful pictures of Isaiah and Chiara whenever shes carrying around a new batch. One day she mentioned that Isaiah had to cut gluten and dairy from his diet. I wasnt sure what she was going to do, since shes such a bread- and cookie-baking mama, but leave it to Sil to get her kid fed! Some mothers would have looked up recipes, but she wrote them.

Every time we eat at Sils house, we enjoy handmade pastas and fresh-from-the-oven desserts. A few of my favorite recipes are the after all, whats a birthday without the cake?

All the recipes in Cooking for Isaiah were written with love, and whether or not you need to limit gluten or dairy, you can taste that in every bite.

Love,

Rachael Ray

I am not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist. I am not a trained chef. I am not a food scientist. I am just a mom who wants to feed her kids. And hunger does not wait. Like a good Italian-American, I like to feed people. Even more, I like to make good food for people who love to eatfood that tastes like home. So when my 13-year-old son, Isaiah, was diagnosed with food sensitivitiesto gluten and dairyI wasnt going to let that turn our lives upside down.

But I couldnt imagine what life would be like in a gluten-free world. Let alone dairy-free or anything else-free. The one thing I knew for sure was that making good food was all about trial and error until I get to that something that I fall in love with and cant get enough of. I know its really good when I crave it the next day and the memory of it lingers past the crumbs left on my lips. I could learn a new way to cookand I would have to. I would heal Isaiah through a plate of pancakes. It was the only way I knew how.

Gone were the days when I could pick up Isaiah from school and stop at an Italian bakery for an afternoon snack. Hed stare endlessly into the big, shiny display case filled with rows and rows of sprinkle-coated cookies and pick out four or five. Memories flooded my heada cup of hot chocolate, Isaiahs backpack hanging off his shoulder, a slice of pepperoni pizza, basketball shoes in the middle of our living room, ice cream before dinner. These were the daily rhythms of our lives. I struggled to cling to the smallest of details to keep them from slipping away. Overnight Isaiah had to cut out everything containing gluten and dairy.

Months earlier, Isaiah had developed warts all over his hands and knees. Friends reassured my husband, Stephen, and me that boys get warts and that theyd go away on their own. But watching him pull at his long-sleeve T-shirts to cover them up was heartbreaking. So we decided to take him to our pediatrician, who recommended an over-the-counter medication to remove them, but there were just too many warts. Then we took him to a dermatologist, who started to freeze them off, one by one, while Isaiah sat there gripping my hands and swallowing the pain. I asked the doctor to please stop. I can still see the scars on his knees.

But something the dermatologist had said kept ringing through my head: Warts are caused by a virus, and Isaiahs immune system should be able to fight them off. I wasnt sure what this meant, exactly. Searching for answers, I found myself e-mailing someone I had stumbled across on the Weba homeopathto ask for help. A few days later the homeopath prescribed immune-boosting supplements for Isaiah, but a month later nothing had changed. Then she ran a food-allergy test, and two weeks later we had our answers. Isaiah was intolerant to gluten and dairy. The homeopath turned to Isaiah and said, Youre lucky your mom is who she is.

Isaiah turned to me and asked, What am I going to eat?

Everything stopped. What do you want to eat? I asked.

Cornbread.

Later that day, when we got home, I headed straight to the kitchen and started reading every label in the pantry, fridge and freezer. I cleaned out everythingbreads, cheeses, cookies, ice cream, snack bars, cereals, condiments and candy. I didnt want Isaiah to see anything he couldnt eat. And there it was, all in one big pile: breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner as Isaiah had understood it for practically his whole life.

That Halloween, Isaiah dressed up as a vampire goblin. His then-one-year-old sister, Chiara, wore a fluffy dog costume and spent most of her evening riding around on her dads shoulders. The next day, after Isaiah had shoved in as much Halloween candy as he could stomach, he went gluten-free and dairy-free. Less than a month later, I cooked my first gluten-free and dairy-free Thanksgiving.