If your child has been diagnosed with a food allergy, you know both cooking at home and dining out can quickly become a challenge. Since healthy eating begins at home, and eating at home begins at the grocery store, we turned to Amie Valpone of The Healthy Apple for some advice on how to stock your pantry for success, whether you're dealing with food allergies or just want to take a cleaner approach to your family's diet. See how Amie, a nutritionist who specializes in clean eating, fills up her own grocery cart, and how you can transform your own to accommodate your family's dietary needs.
"Cleaning" Up Your Grocery List
Essential Condiments
- Extra-virgin olive oil
- Flaxseed oil
- Grape seed oil
- Champagne vinegar
- Apple cider vinegar
- Balsamic vinegar
- Organic Dijon mustard
- Organic coarse, seeded mustard
- San-J wheat-free tamari soy sauce
- Amy's Organic salsa
- Sun-dried tomatoes
- Hummus (try Tribe, Wild Garden, Sabra, or Cedar's)
- Hot sauce (try Cholula or Sriracha)
- Miso (white, barley, and red)
- Organic lemon juice
Continue reading for what to buy in the gluten-free, dairy-free, and freezer departments
Gluten-free Starches
Gluten-free pasta
Gluten-free bread (try Rudi's, Udi's, Glutino, or Canyon Bakehouse)
Rice (brown basmati, wild, risotto, long-grain, and Bomba)
Bob's Red Mill gluten-free oats
Mary's Gone Crackers bread crumbs
Millet
Corn
Buckwheat
Amaranth (a nutty, high-protein grain)
Quinoa
Teff (a light, whole-grain flour)
Potatoes (sweet and purple varieties)
Beans (mung, white, black, and chickpeas)
Lentils (yellow, red, brown, green, black, and vertes du Puy)
Split peas
Healthy Dairy/Dairy-Free Alternatives and Eggs
- Greek plain yogurt (try Chobani, Fage, Siggi’s, or Stonyfield Oikos)
- Pacific Foods Unsweetened Almond Milk
- Manitoba Harvest Hemp Milk
- Woodstock Farms Firm Tofu
- Nasoya Lite Firm Tofu
- Eggland’s Best Organic Eggs
- Eggology 100% Egg Whites
- Earth Balance Vegan Butter
- And a note from our friends at YumSugar . . . for the lactose-intolerant or -sensitive, try substituting cow's milk with goat's milk, and soft cheeses (mozzarella, burrata) with harder ones (parmesan, pecorino).
Keep in the Freezer
- Unsweetened frozen fruit (berries, peaches, bananas, pineapple)
- Artichoke hearts
- Broccoli
- Cauliflower
- Lima beans
- Pureed Winter squash
- Large uncooked shrimp
- Preportioned organic chicken breast
- Vital Choice low-mercury white fish and scallops
- Seapoint Farms Frozen Edamame
- Cascadian Farms Frozen Organic Vegetables
For more of what to stock in the rest of the kitchen, check out The Healthy Apple's complete shopping list.
Source: Flickr User Natalie Maynor
