The Nut-Free Sandwich Solution
My daughter Iris's preschool is, like so many these days, a nut-free zone. Often Iris will come home and, after a morning of nut deprivation, eat a big bowl of toasted pecans.
Before she started preschool, her standard lunch was the same as every other non-nut-allergic kid's: peanut butter and jelly. I did my best to choose a good quality jam and bread (the Innkeeper's brand multigrain bread from Costco is delicious), but it was your basic PB&J. This wouldn't fly under preschool rules. So I've fumbled with various leftovers and other sandwiches, and fallen back on deli ham more often than I'd like to admit. (I've tasted "soynut butter," recommended in the preschool handbook, and could not in good conscience serve it to anybody with taste buds.)
Sesame and sunflower seeds aren't on the school's list of controlled substances, though, so I was delighted to learn that Trader Joe's sells sunflower seed butter. And it's really good: as smooth as Jif and sweet but not too sweet. The only drawback is that it's an unemulsified "natural" butter that has to be stirred before spreading. It's great with Bonne Maman strawberry jam. Iris took such a sandwich to school yesterday and came home with an empty lunch box.
If you don't have a Trader Joe's in the neighborhood, Sunbutter offers sells full line of sunflower seed butters online.
Now, I wonder if I could make a good sandwich involving sesame paste or other legal spreadables. Preschoolers like duck rillettes, right?
About the author: Matthew Amster-Burton lives in Seattle. His work appears frequently in the Seattle Times and Seattle magazine. He also maintains the blog Roots and Grubs. His favorite food is pad Thai.
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15 Comments:
My friend Doug loves sunflower seed butter SO MUCH that he once bought a bazillion jars to share with me and some of our other friends after dinner (which explains the photo above). It is good stuff, indeed.
roboppy at 10:29AM on 02/18/08
In our area, more and more schools are nut free to the grade 8 level. Makes for fun times when you have a picky, non-allergic student. I know my daughter's school has banned all nut products, but I am not sure if that covers sesame or sunflower seeds. I'll have to check, because if they don't, I'd go for this. You almost want to put on dark glasses when you continually serve the "crackers, pepperoni, yogurt tube, piece of fruit, peanut-free granola bar" lunch for the upteenth time! (my kid won't eat cheese either!)
Maureen at 11:21AM on 02/18/08
My preschooler loved pork rilletes - and he was just a normal American 4 year old, not raised in France, but deep in the heart of Texas. I would send him with a little tub of it packed in a lunchbox with a cooler-thingie, and he spread it on crackers or baguette slices himself. But he never much cared for fruit in his lunch, even sliced up appealingly.
dksbook at 11:24AM on 02/18/08
i've been eating sunflower seed butter since i was advised to stay away from peanuts. i love it! i actually infinitely prefer it to peanut butter now. i have the plain version of the sunbutter, which i had bought thinking would satisfy a craving for peanut butter banana and honey, but it's so sweet and tasty that i just spread it on the bread alone. no need to order it online in manhattan -- westside markets carries it.
if you leave the unopened jar turned upside down on the counter overnight, gravity will do a lot of the work of stirring the oil back in.
btw i lived on duck rillette sandwiches when i lived in paris.
cybercita at 11:26AM on 02/18/08
I'm allergic to peanuts (and real nuts as well :/) but I can eat the sunbutter. For all I remember it tastes very much of peanut butter. I love the stuff.
feriorrenna at 11:39AM on 02/18/08
I've found that tahini makes a nice sandwich if sweetened up a bit. My two current preferences are tahini and fresh clover honey or tahini and maple syrup. Both combinations are also great on toast (and I can get tahini at my local grocery store in the organic section).
ffaat at 12:07PM on 02/18/08
The only problem with sunflower seed butter is that it tastes exactly like sunflower seeds. Yuck.
Luther at 2:42PM on 02/18/08
I don't know if almond butter is allowed, but that's a really tasty nutbutter. It's on the pricey side, but if your kid is going through nut withdrawls, it's a great alternative. The whole separating oil, need to stir it in thing is not a major problem. It's pretty easy to get it all incorporated and it's well worth not to have all those fillers and hydrogenated oils mucking up the jar.
FigswithBri at 4:57PM on 02/18/08
I'm a huge fan of peanut butter, but I've been drifting away from it after I discovered Nuts to You, a Canadian company that makes organic nut and seed butters. In terms of a nut-free butter, I'm a huge fan of their pumpkin seed butter (although I'm not sure it would be allergen-free if it's made in the same place that makes nut butters) but if you CAN eat nuts, the company also makes "Mystery" butters, which are combinations of two or more nuts/seeds. YUM.
Vincci at 5:45PM on 02/18/08
I know in our school district, all nuts and nut butters are banned from school lunches to grade 8. I actually have a call into the school to find out about the sunflower butter...... I sure hope they allow it.
Maureen at 10:23AM on 02/19/08
Umm...these are all really cool solutions to a nut-butter problem, but I'm astounded that no one has expressed shock and/or outrage that a school is actually banning certain foods.
I don't have kids, but I went to school, for sure.
How long has this been going on?
And why am I the only person who is shocked and/or outraged?
missbhavens at 1:12PM on 02/19/08
@missbhavens
no you are not the only one. i could go on for hours about the little freedoms being stripped from our "land of the free", but it wouldn't serve any purpose on this site.
i often wonder how these people who make these rediculous rules think they survived going through school themselves without them back in the day.
solution: if your kid has a nut allergy then you pack their lunch everyday, tell them not to eat other kid's food, and not to share food. problem solved and no one else inconvenienced. why is it the school's responsibility to restrict everyone's diet for a few individuals??
protest at 1:32PM on 02/19/08
I am not sure why I'm even justifying the last two posts with a response, but I guess I'll chalk them up to ignorance. I can see how people without kids are less aware of the problem.
A. More kids are more allergic to nuts, especially peanuts, than they were twenty years ago or whenever you were in school.
B. Lots of kids are so allergic to nuts that they could go into anaphylactic (i.e. deadly, throat-closing) shock by being around someone eating peanut butter, or by using the water fountain after someone who ate peanut butter touched the handle. It doesn't matter how careful they are about not eating nuts.
I hope this makes it clear to anyone who is wondering. The schools are trying to protect kids from dying.
--Wendy Burton, RN BSN
Wendy79 at 2:48PM on 02/20/08
Emily Bazelon of Slate did a nicely evenhanded column on this topic:
here
To what Wendy said, I would add that it's not possible to prevent a three-year-old from eating somebody else's food.
mamster at 4:07PM on 02/20/08
Hey - cool! I just found this stuff recently too and used it for my Kid's birthday!
justjenn at 6:36PM on 02/21/08