Food Allergies

I will pass up my planed Monday Blog in order to get this information out to as many people as possible.

Calling all people with food allergies: This is YOUR chance to weigh in as a national committee is creating new diagnosis and treatment guidelines.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is seeking public comment on a draft of Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Food Allergy. AANMA founder and president Nancy Sander is a member of the committee that's working on these guidelines.

The public comment period is open until May 3. Health care professionals and interested members of the public are encouraged to review the guidelines and participate in the open comment period by visiting the NIAID Food Allergy Clinical Guidelines public comment site at www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/foodAllergy/clinical/comments.htm.

"Food allergy is an important public health problem that affects millions of Americans, and may be increasing in prevalence," says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, MD. "These draft guidelines provide information to a wide variety of health care professionals about how to diagnose and manage food allergy, and treat acute food allergy reactions."

The guidelines are based on an independent, systematic review of the scientific and clinical food allergy literature. Information gathered from the literature review was incorporated into a full report on the state-of-the-science in food allergy that will be made available after the publication of the final guidelines.

As part of the process of developing the guidelines, NIAID brought together a coordinating committee that included representatives from 33 professional organizations, advocacy groups and federal agencies. The role of the coordinating committee was to appoint an expert panel, review drafts, approve the final guidelines and develop a plan to distribute the final guidelines. The expert panel, composed of 25 members with expertise from a variety of relevant clinical and scientific areas, wrote the draft guidelines.
The guidelines cover the following topics:



· Definition and prevalence of food allergy

· Natural history of food allergy and closely associated diseases

· Diagnosis of food allergy

· Management of non-acute allergic reactions to food

· Management of acute allergic reactions to food, including anaphylaxis, a severe, whole-body reaction



"These guidelines represent a major commitment on the part of many people and organizations working to improve the care of individuals with food allergy," says Daniel Rotrosen, MD, director of the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at NIAID. "The process of developing the guidelines has also helped us identify gaps in the current scientific knowledge that we can begin to address through future research."



All comments will be reviewed by the coordinating committee, expert panel and NIAID. Where appropriate, these comments will be used to develop final guidelines. The final guidelines are expected to be released by the fall of 2010.



More information on the development of the guidelines may be found at www3.niaid.nih.gov/topics/foodAllergy/clinical/.



NIAID conducts and supports research-at NIH, throughout the U.S., and worldwide-to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available at www.niaid.nih.gov.



The NIH includes 27 institutes and centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.



For more about food allergies, visit www.aanma.org or call 800.878.4403. You can also follow AANMA on Twitter and Facebook.

Cafe Tremolo

After Friday Fun Knitters we went to a new restaurant in Tucson called Café Tremolo. It has only been open for 3 weeks and they are still trying to sort out the menu and fine tune it. Even though they are fine tuning the menu, this is a place you have got to go to. Everything was fresh. The food tasted crisp and the flavor just was one explosion of flavor after another. The iced tea has a wonderful flavor and required no sugar, it was brewed to prefection.


Our waiter said that everything was fresh including the roast beef which they roasted themselves. The Kitchen is open so you can see what they are doing, so I walked past the kitchen and saw a very clean work area, they were well organized and worked in great harmony. The hamburger patties were huge and formed by hand, not by machine as many places use. Judy said the hamburger was very good and trimmed off the portion that was too big for the bun. Natalie had the lox and bagel platter which was present very nicely with onions, plenty of crème cheese, an egg and many more things. Most of the table had the saffron rice and sautéed shrimp dish which appeared to be very good, every one finished it to the last drop. I had the tuna salad sandwich which was very good, but a tad on the huge side. My sandwich was served with Jicama slaw which was made with jicama, carrots, cilantro and a sweet vinegar dressing. The salad was a wonderful taste sensation with each vegetable having a very crisp and distinct taste; I could have made a meal of it. They even came up with a dairy free dessert. A wonderful brownie surrounded by fruit. It was enough for 2 and Judy graciously agreed to share it with me.

Café Tremolo is located at 7401 N. La Cholla Blvd., Ste 152 Their telephone number is (520) 742-2999 The are on the east side of the Foothills Mall at Ina and La Cholla Blvd. They are open for lunch and dinner. This is defiantly one place that I will go to again. Please give this newly opened local business a try, it is worth a drive.

My disclamer: I went to Cafe Tremolo with friends and paid for the meal myself. They had no idea that they were being reviewed. The views expressed here are my own.
Have a good day and enjoy your families.

Hamster Helper

It has been a while since I have blogged. Eric has been sick and the days have been long. So that being said it is time for a family favorite recipe and a bit of humor

Hamster Helper
1 pound of ground meat your choice

1 large jar of spaghetti sauce again you choice

2 cans of mushrooms

1 pound of fun shaped pasta cooked and drained.

1 pound of frozen mixed vegetables

1 cell phone with incredibly bad reception
Optional ingredient

1 can black olives drained and sliced

In order to make this a 1 pot meal, cook the pasta as per package directions, drain and set aside. Next brown the ground meat of your choice and be sure to break up the meat in to small pieces. You want to make sure that the ground meat is fully cooked and no pink remains. If the meat is very fatty drain the extra fat and rinse the meat.

Add everything but the cell phone to the pan and mix well. Set the stove to medium-low and cooked for about 45 minutes. This recipe will hold well on low for as long as you need. If you keep this on low for more than 1 hour you might have to add more water to keep the dish moist.

Ok so I did not put the cell phone in the pot, but this is the fun part. Try to explain to you dear darling family member that you are making your own version of Betty Crocker’s Hamburger Helper and with the right drop outs it will sound like hamster instead of hamburger. You can take this where ever your heart desires, have a bit of fun with this.

Let me know how your families like this recipe. Have a great day and enjoy your families.

Fund Raiser

Because of the earthquake in Chilie I will be donating 20% of all sales to Doctors Without Boaders from now till the end of March 2010. So check it out and pass it on. http://www.tinyurl.com/handmadebysheri .

They are dealing with much more than a sick kid(earthquake trumps e-coli any day), and I can not think of any other way to help.

Enjoy your families and pass this on to whom ever can help.

Thank you.

A Blanket Update

I started this blanket as my Raverlary Olympic project. I know what was I thinking. A queen size blanket done that quick is never going to happen.

So here is the blanket by the numbers so far. It is 100 inches wide, yes I have allowed for shrinkage. To save Teri the horrors of the blanket shrinking I will wash and dry the blanket before I send it to her. Your welcome Teri.

I have completed 3 full rows of blocks. Which measures 12 inches high.

I have used 17; yes that is 17 skeins of yarn. Each skein only makes 3 modular blocks. I figure I need to kint at least 34 rows of blocks before I add the border.

I had origianly started this as a stash buster project, but considering that I only had 24 skeins of this yarn to start with I have had to buy more. I do hope that I have enough yarn to finish this without having to buy more yarn. I am mixing up the colors of the blocks and going on an angle so yarn form differnt years  land in the diffrent sections.  Cotton grown in diffrent colors vary in color from year to year.

Let me know if you want me to write this pattern down when I am finished and I will add it to my Art Fire studio and Raverly.

Have a good evening and enjoy your families.

The Day That Went Through the Blender

The day started off well enough. Although I should have known that it was not going to continue when my hot cocoa boiled over in the microwave oven, let’s just say the microwave had more cocoa than I did. I even got my to do list written out and was busy going down the list in a decent fashion.

Then at 10:30 I got the call from school. It was not “Urgent” but Eric was not feeling well. I asked the inevitable question did I need to pick him up now. The answer was no, but I called his doctor to make a same day appointment anyway.

So I recalculated my to do list and took the most urgent errands that needed to be done and went to go get Eric from school. We got to the doctors with a few minutes to spare, enough time to add one round to my never ending socks for this winter, at this rate they will be finished for our first 105 degree day of the summer. Did I mention that they were Lorna’s laces wool. We got in and saw Eric’s doctor very fast but it was getting the lab samples from Eric that took over 2 hours. The lab test quick results came back very quickly. So prescription in hand I took Eric home and handed him off to his afternoon aide and ran to get the prescription.

Mean while I told John that he was in charge of dinner, that I did not have time to make the chili I had planned to make for dinner. So after deciding he did not want canned soup and tuna sandwiches he went out and picked up take out. I find it so wonderful that after an equally long and hard day that he would go out and get us a hot dinner. You have just got to love a man who does this.

Two quick loads of laundry later it was time to put my day in writing. Yes one phone call does frequently turn my day upside down. I think it is time to go find some yarn and try to unwind before midnight. So have a great night and enjoy your families.

Not a Typical Thursday.

Well it has been a day of extreme highs and lows. The high's a very good lecture and fashion show by SWTC at knitting guild , lunch with friends and Eric’s big smile when he came off the bus. The weather was also wonderful. The lows having to deal with rude people who imply my life is screwed up when they make a mistake. Really is that necessary to insult your customers because your company screwed up?


I also discovered that I lost my cell phone today. I tore apart and cleaned out my car twice, my purse the counters, my closet floor, and all my knitting baskets and anywhere else I could think off. I even called my phone twice and it went straight to voice mail. No I don't know how long its been gone, this is how often I use it. So I am off to pick out a new phone and any suggestions would be lovely.

My hands are still sore from all the clapping at the Joshua Nelson concert last night. So instead of knitting I will be relaxing, yes I think I know what that word means.

So Have a good evening and enjoy your families and have a great evening.