Note to reader: This draft is re-printed here with the author's permission. These student drafts are provided for a couple of reasons: first, to give you a taste of the variety of topics and approaches students have taken, and second, to provide instructors with readings that might be used in class discussions and activities. These samples are not perfect and represent final grades from across the grade scale (A through F), so please be forgiving, understanding, and respectful if you find errors or problems.
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Kaylee Holmes
Dr. Peterson
ENGL 1010-Literacy Narrative
13 September 2016
The Life of Food Allergies
Twenty minutes! Eric just said we have twenty minutes to finish the competition, I can’t believe how fast the time went by. There are so many different foods being cooked in the gymnasium of West Valley High. When you walk in it smells like a fancy restaurant. I look around at my team, Kristina is putting the stuffed peppers into the warmed metal pan and Cody just blanched the bright and fresh green beans. As I finish rolling the spinach bacon chicken rolls I hear another team packing up their equipment and breaking down the tables they used. Eric warns us that there is only five minutes’ left. I survey around me to figure out what else there is to do. There is nothing left to do, we are done. The competition leaders take our appetizer, entrée, and dessert to be judged. It felt amazing to get through the culinary event.
I have learned more about the science of cooking by learning to cook allergy friendly foods for myself, than in my ProStart culinary class. In ProStart I learned about and cooked foods from cultures and countries around the world. All of the components of the restaurant industry and how to run a restaurant. We even did catering and ran a restaurant in our school. You would think that being in this class would teach you a lot about cooking food, and I did, but with my food allergies I learned much more.
I am sitting at the kitchen table doing my algebra homework when I get diverted by the bitter sweet smell of chocolate brownies. I check the time remaining until they are supposedly done, five minutes’ left, which seems forever, I am craving something that I have not had in about two years. When I took the brownies out of the oven they look just perfect, they were fluffy and looked soft but cooked. After they cooled for ten minutes, I took a bite, it was amazing how the brownie just melted in my mouth. I was so eager for this batch of brownies to be eatable. The batch of brownies before turned out to be a complete mess and very unappetizing. They were hard as rock on the edges and rubbery in the middle.
It was Saturday morning when I decided to make me a loaf of sandwich bread. I based the time to bake the bread off of what it would take to bake regular wheat bread. When the timer buzzed I looked at the bread through the oven window. It was puffy and slightly browned on top but when I inserted a butter knife into the middle the knife came out with wet and raw dough. I thought the oven was not cooking the bread evenly so rotated the pan and raised the temperature another twenty-five degrees. After thirty minutes passed I checked the bread again, and the knife still had sticky batter on it. After two more hours my sandwich bread filled the house with a mouthwatering aroma of delicate and sweet bread. Once I smelled this I knew my bread was finally done.
From many attempts and experiments of trying to find the combinations of ingredients and correlating it to the time of cooking I have learned many things. To get food friendly for people with allergies and make it look and taste correct takes a long time. There is a need to know what types of flours can go together and what starches to add to the flour combination. Then knowing the mixture of the ingredients to how long certain flours and starches take to cook. I have had many experiments to find out the right combinations to make the food have a texture that it should have. One problem that occurs with learning this skill is thinking you have the right texture when mixing the ingredients together but when it is done cooking the texture is nothing similar to what it needs to be. There have been times when the texture comes out too thick, too thin, gooey, raw, soupy, or hard as rock.
The first couple of weeks of eating allergy friendly foods was difficult for me. Trying to find recipes free of gluten/wheat, eggs, dairy, and peanuts was extremely difficult. I tried almost all of the websites out there on the internet. I spent hours on the computer researching for recipes. For example, allrecipes, food allergy sponsored recipes, blogs from parents of kids with food allergies, and many more. I even checked out every single cook book from the library that was stated for gluten free, vegan, or for allergies. Some of the recipes sounded very appealing and the recipes that had pictures looked heavenly and tempting but then there was some that just looked distasteful. When I thought I finally found a recipe I could use there ended up being an ingredient that I could not have. I struggled a lot those couple of weeks, I was frustrated because I wanted foods that I could not eat anymore.
When there is an event happening that has food provided I don’t go. But I have had many people ask why I was not at an event or if I am going to go to an event, I dread when people ask me this. Then when I explain to them that I have food allergies they ask me what in the world do I eat. My answer to these people is that there are alternatives and replacements I can use. The replacements I have learned that I can use vary. Instead of wheat flour I can use potato, corn, rice, tapioca, or almond flours. For dairy I can eat Swiss and Parmesan cheese because it is aged, but for the cow’s milk I can do almond, cashew, soy, coconut, walnut, or rice milks. For the eggs there are egg substitutes for example bananas, applesauce, water, or egg replacer powder. It all depends on what I am making that I decide what egg substitute I use. Most of these options are nice to have.
Even though I have had a couple of years to learn all I need to know about the science of cooking allergy friendly, I still am not the best and still have some learning to do. But I have also learned more than cooking I have learned patience, how to travel with food allergies, and how to communicate to people that I have to eat different things then they do.