Silvana Nardone, former bakery owner and current founding Editor and Chief of “Every Day With Rachel Ray” magazine, loves food. And so do her kids, who have never known a kitchen that didn’t have an Italian pastry chef (a.k.a. mom) at the center of it. That’s why the news that her ten year old son, Isaiah, was allergic to gluten and dairy was such a devastating blow.
Not only was nearly every food Isaiah considered a comfort food off his new diet, Nardone had to worry that her cooking habits had somehow driven her son’s body to be sensitive to two of the staple elements of Italian cooking.
“It was unexpected, and I did feel a mother’s guilt,” Nardone told AOL Health. “I asked myself, ‘Did I push his body to this with the 50-pound bags of flour I had laying around?’ I’m no expert, so it could have just been my guilt screaming at me, but I did wonder if it was a physical reaction from overconsumption of those products.”
Regardless of the cause, Nardone needed to find an answer to her son’s first question – “What am I going to eat?” She had, of course, a long list of “safe” foods, proteins and fruits and vegetables that would keep Isaiah healthy, but wouldn’t be terribly satisfying to his 10 year old cravings. So Nardone decided that the whole family would eat what Isaiah could eat, and that she would find a way to make his diet palatable.
She was more than up to the challenge. After much trial and error, Nardone created everything from an all purpose, gluten free flour blend to replacements for the dairy her son craved. She’s poured all that work into a new cookbook – “Cooking for Isaiah” – filled with 130 gluten free, dairy free recipes for American favorites.
