Goulash is a dish that most people have had once in their life, or at least know of.

It’s a favorite in my family. A favorite that is regularly in meal rotation, and the last helping is often fought over.

It’s a meal that I have a tense relationship with.

I sat at an evening supper with my parents, brother, and one of my sisters eating the famed family goulash.

Then I felt it.

The feeling that came more often than not. The hard lurch in my stomach that rolled up my throat and stopped suddenly.

Then it happened again.

It was a feeling that I desperately tried to will away with sheer stubbornness and spite. I would not let it dampen the mood of another family dinner.

The feeling won, and I was sick.

I ran from the table and into the bathroom—away from my sister’s question of if I needed a hair tie to hold my hair, from my parents’ concerned glances, and from the goulash.

Goulash was tricky. It was a favorite food that would soon make its way onto my restricted foods list thanks to my newly diagnosed EE for one reason:

Goulash contained dairy.

More specifically cheese, but a dairy product all the same.

Many of my favorite foods would soon join goulash onto the restricted foods list.

Dairy was the primary cause of my EE. It kicked in my body’s white blood cells and made my body attack itself causing a reaction.

The only solution: eliminate dairy. For good. Completely. No more cheese, butter, or milk. Anything remotely containing a dairy product was off limits.

Let me tell you something you might not know: dairy is in almost everything

It’s something that if you’re not acutely aware of and looking for, you’ll never know.

I had to know. It became second nature flipping over a package of food and scanning the ingredients list: casein, caseinate, whey, milk powder, butter solids, the list goes on. I became an expert at skimming the ingredients and singling out the different types of dairy or finding the bolded words at the bottom of the ingredient list: Contains Milk.

I had to say goodbye to my almost nightly grilled cheese (it was my favorite food at the time) and to bowls of ice cream shared with my siblings.

We had to tailor family favorite recipes to be “Kristen friendly”, which is a term my mom coined that soon spread to the extended family’s vocabulary. “Kristen friendly” meant a dish or recipe that didn’t contain dairy. It was alienating to be eating a bowl of plain noodles while the rest of my family had homemade baked mac and cheese. But my mom and the rest of my family soon became experts at scanning labels and coming up with new nondairy recipes for me, something that I’ve never taken for granted.

It also helped that I wasn’t the only person in my family that was dairy free. My brother-in-law, Aaron, had a sister who was also dairy free. Jill sent me a cookbook, Go Dairy Free: The Guide and Cookbook for Milk Allergies, Lactose Intolerance, and Casein-Free Living by Alisa Marie Fleming. This particular cookbook didn’t revolutionize the culinary world. The recipes were decent, but nothing that could replace my dairy favorites. This cookbook did something else: it sparked my curiosity. It made me wonder “what if…” and it got me into the kitchen.

I started to help my mom, working to make recipes “Kristen Friendly”. I started combing the internet to try new nondairy recipes and products. I started coming up with new recipes for myself. I soon figured out that for most cookies, butter flavored Crisco is almost indistinguishable from actual butter. Or that coconut cream can be whipped up stiff peaks like regular cream. Although it wasn’t easy, my EE became manageable.

I’ll honestly tell you: it was hard transitioning away from dairy. It got better when I found a nondairy butter substitute, and even more so when I found my first pint of nondairy Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. That’s not to say that there still aren’t challenges. There are days when I don’t want to ask people what is in the cookies they brought to the meeting. I just want to eat the darn cookie and not worry or think about it (I’m very sorry to say I missed out on Kylie’s pumpkin chocolate chip cookies that she brought to the Antelope editor’s meeting. Everyone said they were delicious, and I believe them!). Searching the internet for nutritional facts and ingredients can become tedious, like having to search for Runza’s nutritional menu to look up whether or not the breading has milk in it (it does). 

A final, big challenge is that sometimes I’m not able to ask the person who made the food if there’s dairy in it and take a chance eating it, then see if I have a reaction because of it. There are days when I don’t want to go through the extra steps of making something dairy free, because sometimes, all I really want is a big bowl of cheesy goulash.