Aww Nuts!

With all of W's diet restrictions it is just a matter of time until many of those restrictions will be staple changes to all of our diets. Like most families, there are recipes that end up on rotation and I was excited to start testing substitutions with some of our favorites.  One of those is a copy cat recipe of PF Chang's Lettuce Wraps (from Iowa Girl Eats - its awesome!).  Of course, it has peanuts in hard form and peanut butter in the recipe, so I though I would try it eliminating the peanut pieces completely and substituting Almond Butter to see how much it changed the taste.  It worked wonderfully and no one could even tell. Of course W didn't eat any as we had been discouraged from trying tree nuts and chicken until a later time.

Nighttime Scare
That night I woke up with a start thinking that I had heard a weird sound coming from the monitor.  I went to check on W and he had vomited in his bed. I pulled him out of bed and took him to the bathtub to get him cleaned up.  While he was soaking in the bath, he threw up again and I recognized the weird noise that startled me from sleep.  He was choking, struggling to throw up.

After a few more times of this I got him to hold down some his Zofran and gave him some Benedryl for good measure as he had no fever or other symptoms to rule out an allergic reaction.

Illness or Allergy
The middle of the night episode really shook me to my core.  It wasn't that he threw up.  We were par for the course on that one, but it was the choking that got me and the fact that it was done in the middle of the night when I wasn't there to see it and help him if he couldn't get it out. 

Not knowing whether or not it was the result of illness or allergy, we made an appointment with the pediatrician.  Our regular doctor wasn't in so we saw someone new.  He spent all of 5 minutes with us and when I flippantly commented (mistake #1) that vomiting was a regular thing for W, he immediately said that there was nothing wrong with him and that he would work up a referral to a GI specialist, and out the door he flew.

Not at all comfortable with this prognosis, I immediately called the allergist, who got us in the next day.  We went through the usual of what had he eaten, what had we eaten, etc.  W had been tested for almonds already twice in his life, once when he was 5 months old and once when he was 9 months old.  Both of those tests came back negative. Our allergist, however, still suspected that it was indeed the almond butter and we ran yet another skin test for almonds.

Ding! Ding! Ding! She was right.

Apparently, cooking the almond butter could have gotten the proteins sucked up into our vents, where they sat and got warmed up by our heater, recycling into the air all night long until at last they cause W to react. Really? Sounds crazy and scary, but I am better with that explanation that none at all.

More Substitutions
So now we will eliminate all nuts from our home and I will start looking for yet another substitution. The world of substitute peanut butter and nut butters seems to have come a long way in the past few years and I see advertisements on other allergy blogs for things like WowButter and NoNuts. I have long known about Sunbutter, but since our little man is also allergic to sunflower oil, we must steer clear of that one as well.  Please feel free to share your favorite nut butter substitute and help me find my next experimental ingredient.