Feeding a kid with food allergies

Feeding a kid with food allergies can be tricky at best.  Depending on their allergens – and the severity of the allergy to each allergen – entire types of foods can be off limits for your child, or in some cases, for your entire family. 🛑

School lunches?  Yeah, that’s a tricky one.  Never have I been able to slap together a PB&J sandwich 🥪, toss it in the lunch box, and call it a day.  But I don’t say that to complain, because our lack of ‘ordinary’ in lunchboxes has forced me to be creative, and we’ve come up with some fun – and yummy – options through the years. 

‘Snacky’ options in lunches?  Another tricky one!  Brandon can thankfully eat foods with labels that say ‘may contain  ­­­­_________’ (fill in the blank with peanuts or any tree nut) or ‘processed in a facility that shares equipment with _________,’ so that does open up options to us that I know are not open to many other families who manage food allergies.  Still, there are certain foods that do make him uncomfortable that carry that designation – specifically granola bars, both crunch and chewy.  Even those that are safe ‘by the label’ cause some angst for him . . . . “That oatmeal sure looks like a nut to me, Mom.  I just don’t know what’s in those.”  So instead of risking a cross contamination issue or causing his sweet heart any more worry about the safety of what he’s eating, I took matters into my own hands and found a recipe that he likes. 

Any of those healthier snack bars like Kind or LaraBar or many of the Cliff bars?  Yep, those are out too.  Nuts (tree nuts in most of those cases) are really healthy snack options, but all are off the table for him, for the time being. 

So, back to the granola bar issue, I have found some good recipes online for both chewy and crunchy nut free granola bar options, and we’ve phased in and out of those over the years.  However, one snack in particular has stuck with him for nearly a year now, so I wanted to share my take on that recipe here today. 

I found a recipe when looking for 'energy bites' to pack for swim meets for both of my boys.  I have since tweaked it for our needs and for his taste buds, and it’s a winner!  Healthy, high in protein, portable, and yummy.  We call them ‘power bites’ 😊 so I wanted to share with you the ingredients and how I make them.

I’ll warn you up front, it’s kinda time consuming and it’s kinda messy.  The concoction, once mixed, is rather sticky!  But more on how I deal with that later.  So here we go – a school food/snack that’s safe for my kiddo who is allergic to both peanuts and to all tree nuts.

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Here’s my lineup of ingredients.  

Sometimes (if I remember!) I also add either ground flax seed or ground chia seeds.

Okay, so for the dry ingredients first:

•  1 cup oatmeal (ground up in a food processor); you’ll use about ¾ of it for the recipe, and reserve the last ¼ for the preparation phase
•  ¼ cup protein powder (we alternate between chocolate and vanilla)
• 1-2 Tbsp of ground flax seed or chia seeds
• 1 Tbsp ground cinnamon
• stevia or sugar to taste - I tend to use about 1/8 of a cup of the stevia/sugar blend I have in the picture above

Mix them all together in a bowl, and it’ll look like this.

In a separate bowl, mix together the wet ingredients.  I suggest doing this separately from the dry ingredients, because this part is *sticky!!*, and adding the honey to the Sunbutter seems to thin out the Sunbutter a bit, making the concoction easier to incorporate into the dry ingredients.  So, for the wet ingredients, mix together:

• 1/3 - 1/2c cup honey
• ¾ cup acceptable nut butter – we currently use Sunbutter, but any safe nut butter for your family could be used here
• 1-2 tsp of vanilla

Mix those three together, and it’ll look like this.

Next, mix the wet ingredients into the dry ones.  This’ll take some patience and a bit of muscle 💪.  If you need to make it wetter, add a bit more honey, or even just a touch of water (don’t do too much water – it’ll quickly make the mixture turn mushy.)

Then it’s time to start making the ‘bites.’  I used to use a Pampered Chef scooper, but the mixture is so thick and sticky, that I got more frustrated than anything at trying to do it that way.  So, just take a spoon, grab out a portion of it, and put it in your hand like this.

Roll it into a small ball between your hands,

and if needed, sprinkle a bit of the reserved ground oatmeal on the top while rolling it, if it’s too sticky, like this.

Start lining ‘em up in a container, and you’re good to go!

I try to put parchment paper or foil between the layers, so that they don’t stick to one another.  

You can pop them in the freezer for about 20-30 minutes to let them ‘set’ a bit, but after that, transfer them to the fridge for storage.

This recipe makes about 12 power bites.  I normally make a double batch so I don’t have to get messy and sticky more than every other week. 😉 Brandon typically takes 2-3 every day in his lunch, more when he's staying longer at school or has sports in the morning, to give him a boost during the day.  #teenagerboy

Here’s to feeding kids with food allergies safe and healthy alternatives! 

Cheers,

MKB 🐢💚