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Zero8 in Montreal may well be the first restaurant to offer a 100% hypoallergenic menu. While people like my husband Martin Kouprie – a peanut and legume allergy sufferer himself – have been offering allergy aware dining options for the last decade or so, this restaurant is unique in providing a full service menu that does not include any of the 8 most common food allergens:

• Fish and seafood
• Peanuts
• Nuts
• Sesame seeds
• Milk
• Soybeans
• Eggs
• Wheat and glutinous grains of any kind

So, what does that leave for people to order at Zero8? Lots. There is pasta (presumably rice or spelt noodles are used) with tomato sauce or venison ragout, duck confit, steak frites and even house-made gluten-free bread ($2 per portion). Oddly, the menu is very protein based. I’d love to see a few legume dishes such as braised lentils or a chickpea tagine, too.

Does a restaurant like this one interest you? If it does, why?

Despite allergy fears and warnings that prevent nuts from being available in schools and many other public places, Canadians are eating more nuts than ever before. While general nut consumption in Canada grew by 14% last year, trail mix growth increased by 22% as people discover these foods as healthier snack choices.

Our household certainly reflects these trends. While peanuts, pistachios, pine nuts and hazelnuts are never served at our house due to Martin’s allergy to them, I started to buy lots of dried fruit and nuts such as almonds, walnuts and pecans last spring. My son Oliver is literally always hungry in the evening. He’s still weeks shy of his 13th birthday and already 5’ 10” tall but only around 130 lbs so he has good reason to eat a lot. And, once he’s had his food groups for the day, I’m fine with him eating ice cream and cookies.

Problems arose when I realized that I’d fallen into the habit of buying him chips on a regular basis. Eating high fat, processed, salty snacks is a habit that I don’t want him to develop. So, I started laying out bowls of nuts and dried fruits in our TV room and guess what? Chip consumption plummeted.

We’re also true to trend when it comes to who in our family dips into which bowl. Recent research indicates that 65% of younger snackers opt for fruity blends or candy coated nuts and I must say that Oliver is our biggest dried fruit consumer (although I’ve been eating an awful lot of the Back to Nature chocolate almond and cranberry blend since I discovered it earlier this month!) Meanwhile, Martin and I are like the 54% of older consumers who say they prefer plain or raw nuts.

What about you? Does your nut consumption conform to these stats or are you a maverick?

Note: The autumn issue of my online quarterly food trend newsletter Topline Trends will be live by the end of the day! Read all the yummy details!

You can tell quite a bit from this picture:

1. That I have never been called an artist and likely never will be
2. That I have also never been called a calligrapher and likely never will be
3. That I have brought home take out Indian food at least once in my life
4. And, most salient to today’s topic, that I live with someone who has food allergies.

My husband Martin is one of the 3% of adults who has a peanut allergy. He is also deathly allergic to hazelnuts and gets sick in varying degrees from eating other legumes such as lentils (pictured above as Dal Tarka), chickpeas and pine nuts.

Most of the time, we work around his allergies just fine; however, it does mean that I do a lot of label reading when I grocery shop. I cook lentils and chickpeas and buy hummus often but keep them (as illustrated above) well labeled so that Martin doesn’t inadvertently make himself sick.

When it comes to the deadly stuff (peanuts and hazelnuts), I’m a lot more careful and seldom use them at home. That said, I have to admit that I sometimes have shameful, distracting cravings for peanut butter. Since peanuts are, in essence, my hubby’s kryptonite, it seems wrong to fantasize about peanut butter and banana croque monsieurs. Wouldn’t a better woman be able to swear off this stuff out of loyalty?

A result of my day-to-day peanut butter deprivation and this deep-seeded guilt, is that when Martin is out of town, I  succumb to unabandonned peanut butter binges. The high of dipping a spoon into a jar of that sticky goodness is tempered only by the intensive, obsessive kitchen cleaning that comes afterward. It’s pathetic, but it’s who I am.

Do any of you have to cope with living with someone  who has a food allergy or such a strong aversion to certain foods that it affects your shopping and meal choices? If so, how do you run your household safely and harmoniously?

I’m not big on cutesy clutter like wine charms and corncob holders but I really like these reusable ceramic cheese signs. We love cheese and are very adventurous but invariably, there is a guest who is afraid of bold cheeses or, almost as often, once the wine starts flowing, I forget the proper name for a particularly new or interesting cheese.

I bought a set of four or five a couple of years ago (I saw the same package at Kitchen Stuff Plus recently for about $10) and use them when we have parties to identify each item on the cheese board. The set comes with a dry erase marker so that you can reuse the signs easily. I just pop them in the cutlery holder and run them through the dishwasher for clean up.

Recently I realized that I could use these little signs to identify items on a buffet table and that they’d be especially useful for calling out dishes that contain allergens like nuts or eggs that my guests might need to avoid.