Struggling to get my head around dairy free food and cooking. Help!

[MinkyBorage]

Any tips?
DDs eczema has pretty much cleared up since removing cows milk from her diet. Can still have goats and sheeps stuff.
I especially struggle with no butter, especially with baking. I guess I can use oil or margerine, but it's just not the same.

try using the pure vegetable spread, most margarine's contain cows milk.

Minky I use olive oil for savoury sauces etc. and a tasteless oil (try rice bran oil from Saisbugs) for cakes etc. and i use the ('melt in a saucepan' recipes). cont..

I don't use the spreads 'cos they are ALL full of palm oil which is hard to digest IMO. The recipes that work well with oil are gingerbread, choc brownies etc.

I'm fairly sure vitalite is both vegan and palm oil free

Are you sure colditz? It doesn't have any hydrogenation either?

I used vitalite for baking and cakes/bicuits tasted lovely. I'm sure it's another spread that is ok to use. I think someone told me on mn.

There's a book of cake recipes called Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache in which all the recipes are dairy-free but don't use oil either - the fat comes from ground almonds and eggs, so obv no good if she can't have nuts/eggs - but they work really well. You could request it from your local public library to have a look at.

"Pure" sunflower spread is a reasonable substitute for butter to put on toast etc, though I don't use it for cooking.

You could try goats' butter? Might be an acquired taste though.

Oh, also, you can make nice flapjack using peanut butter (or other nut butter or tahini) in place of butter.

Thank you. I am struggling though as I am a total butter addict. I need to find a good margerine. DD doesn't like the one I bought from the health food shop so back to the drawing board, I'll have a scan of vitalite ingredients, thank you. Interesting comments re palm oil too, thanks.

Indelible, I have that book. Brilliant! I'd forgotten about it. Thank you. Peanut butter flapjacks sound great too, although I'll have to keep them at home due to nut ban at school.

I was debating goats butter but I don't fancy it myself. I should try dd on it though, I bet she doesn't mind. She likes goats milk, and it makes me gag just thinking about it!

rice bran oil sounds interesting too. Thank you. Great tip.

Sue Lawrence has a v good cake recipe in her baking book where you use a jar of mayonnaise instead of butter. It is eggs and oil after all.

It was a v tasty cake.

Minky I don't know if yr DD would mind but I use good olive oil on my toast I love it!

I used Pure sunflower, vitalite (for baking) and goats butter when I could get it.
Personally, I didn't like goats butter so just stuck to olive oil for cooking.
Also, I used to bake lots of muffins as most of the recipes use oil.
We had normal butter for the rest of us and now, thankfully, ds2 is fine with that too.