Managing Christmas
Depending on your family, your outlook, your desire to gorge on turkey or your tenancy to sit in a Victorian money-lenders snapping at your single employee, refusing to allow him enough coal to fend off a bitter Christmas Eve – you may look forward to Christmas with abandon or edge closer to it with caution…
(always open with a concise, short sentence they say…)
Christmas can be a political minefield at the best of times; add in a couple of allergies and it can become a proper boiling pot… But there are some key things to look out for and some easy ways to smooth things out in advance. Here are my seasoned (get it?) tips for a allergy-free family Christmas if you’re not the one cooking!
- Deal with stuff before the main day… It sounds like an obvious point but having conversations about ingredients in the middle of cooking a complex Christmas Day meal for multiple family members is a perfect recipe for raising family tensions. Chances are, if its a well planned meal for multiple people, the ingredients will have been bought a few days in advance and the meal planned weeks before. That’s the time to talk about what ingredients are being used and work out what you can or can’t eat…
- Roast Christmas Dinner is one of the easier meals for milk and soya allergies. Assuming nobody is roasting the veggies in butter or basting the turkey in lard, its only the extras that are likely to catch you out.
- Gravy is probably your biggest threat. Most gravy granules (if not all) contain soya. The only option I’ve found is Bisto Gravy Powder. The proper old fashioned stuff you make into a paste and then slowly add water to.
- Bread sauce is probably a no-no unless its been made for everyone with dairy-free milk and non commercial bread (soya flour)
- Vegetables finished with butter is possibly a risk too – particularly if done as part of the ‘put these on the table’ family roles rather than the ‘I’m in charge of cooking here’ family roles!
- If cheese and crackers are part of the overall Christmas experience then obviously the cheese is one to avoid. But surprisingly (and it caught us out one year) quite a few types of crackers aren’t suitable. One to check before topping with something else. Particularly as the contents and their packaging are likely to end up separated from each other fairly early on
- Suggest bringing a allergy suitable pudding. You can’t really ever have enough sweet things around the house at Christmas and puddings are often very difficult to make suitable for all. If done in the right way it can be a nice way to help out
- Chocolates and nibbles around Christmas can be hard but there are quick wins out there. Some supermarket own brand after diner mint thins are suitable and Montezuma dark chocolate buttons can never go wrong!
A lot of this comes down to the potential hazards of eating in someone else’s house at a time when you suddenly have food around that you wouldn’t eat across the rest of the year. I don’t expect every single point here to be useful to everyone – but it might help raise a few important points for some people; and that’s enough for me!