Our new friend Patricia Biesen over at ChicagoNow.com just included insectg's no-tomato sauce recipes in her blog.

Thanks, Patricia!

Ever wish you could take the information from Cooking Allergy Free with you? Now you can! "Allergy Guard" for the iPhone (or iPod Touch) has all the allergy and ingredient information from Cooking Allergy Free, and puts it in the palm of your hands. It's packed with the almost 2000 ingredients and their relationship to over 150 different allergen groups that you can find on the site.

Available now for only $1.99, and with the ability to update itself as new ingredients are added, you'll want to have this in your pocket whether you're at the store, out to eat, or preparing your next meal!

What are Bio's?

Thanks to our Discussion Board, we've realized that one thing that makes Cooking Allergy Free so great is your desire to help others like you. To assist people in finding that help, we've implemented Bio's. In your Bio, others can see your allergies and get a little background information on your situation, what's worked for you, and how long you've been coping. We plan to integrate this information into other facets of the site to make our community even stronger!

Check out the Bio's of the Cooking Allergy Free developers: Alex, Melissa, and Will.

Please be aware, privacy is important to us. We've provided many options when editing your Bio to allow for hiding your personal information. Most options are set to private by default.

May Cookbook Contest

Speaking of Bios, our May cookbook contest is meant to encourage you to enter your own. Through the month of May, everyone who enters a 'blurb' about themselves and a photo (which can be a picture of yourself, your children, your favorite recipe creation, whatever) will be entered into a raffle to win a free cookbook. As always, the cookbook is your choice, but we have a good selection of recommendations on our "Cookbook Suggestions" page.

Other new features

In addition to Bio's, there's a lot of nice, new touches we've been spreading around the site that you may be interested in.

• Photo icons - Now when searching for recipes, a camera icon will show you which recipes have pictures.
• New allergens - At your request, we've added a dairy allergen category with different sub allergens.
• Enter recipes easier - Try our new ingredient parser. This helps make entering recipes smoother by splitting your quantities and ingredients automatically.
• Administrator posts - Posts in the discussion board from an administrator now appear in a different color. This helps you easily find out if an issue you've reported has been resolved.
• Now accepting donations - Cooking Allergy Free was started and is run by 3 people who have had to cope with allergies in their own ways. It takes a lot of time and effort to continuously keep the site updated and make each improvement. If you find the site valuable to you, and can find it in your heart to make a small donation, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cooking Allergy Free has a wealth of recipes, but we don't have many pictures of your creations. That's where the February contest comes in. When you're viewing a recipe, you can click the "Upload photo" link right under the picture box. For the month of February, we want you to upload pictures for as many recipes as you can, from any of the great recipes at Cooking Allergy Free. Of course, don't hesitate to upload more than one per recipe. At the end of the month, there will be a raffle for all users that uploaded pictures, and the winner will receive a free cookbook. We're very excited to see your creativity and chef spirit!

Shopping Lists are here! You can now add recipes to your shopping list by checking the box in a list of recipes or clicking the "Add to Shopping List" link when viewing individual recipes. Once you have all your recipes selected, click the My Shopping Lists link on the left side to modify, view, and print your shopping list. This is a quick and easy way to print up ingredients for multiple recipes. We hope you enjoy the new feature, and if you'd like to let us now how we could improve upon it, please hit our post about shopping lists in the forum!

Like we previously posted, we're spending a lot of time behind the scenes to improve features on Cooking Allergy Free. In general, our goal is to make our site the easiest way to find safe recipes for your dietary needs, and get the answers to any questions you may have.

The new improvements available today:

• New 'Monitoring' capabilities in the Discussion Board:
  • In the upper right corner of each forum or topic, there's a "Monitor" checkbox. When enabled, an automated email will be sent to you whenever a new post is made. This should help greatly with keeping up-to-date on the discussions that interest you most!
• Allergen Hierarchy implemented:
  • We've implemented a new method for showing you allergens either when selecting them in your profile, or viewing them in the allergen listing. Now all allergens are grouped according to their parent allergens and categorized in a much easier manner to help find and select multiple allergens.

We're very excited about the improvements, and hope you are too. So go ahead, give the new features a try, and please let us know what you think! Whether you like the changes, or have ideas for improvements on anything, we always want to know! We're already working on some other neat stuff, and we can't wait until we can announce more!

Wow! The holidays pegged us all around here more than we ever expected. We always intended to have at least a few status posts about how we're growing and doing here at Cooking Allergy Free. That idea didn't pan out toward the end of last year. However...

In the last few months, we've been seeing great things from all of you, our wonderful userbase. We've been getting new recipes, great feedback, and our forums are really starting to grow with great questions and feedback on the allergy topics that concern you. It's truly great to watch Cooking Allergy Free growing at the pace that it is, and we're still not even 1 year old! In any case, we're still devoted to improving on the site, and take each and everyone of your comments and suggestions seriously.

As some of you know after receiving our January newsletter, we are having another contest this month. This one is to get everyone more affiliated with our forums, and the great discussions going on there. Now through the end of January, any posts in our forum (new question or response to anyone else's) will get another entry into our end-of-month raffle for a free cookbook! More posts lead to more entries and also the more help you provide to others. We hope you find what you need while you're there.

Finally, as far as future changes to the site, we're working on a few neat ideas and improvements that should make Cooking Allergy Free even more helpful for your day to day cooking and information needs. Keep your eyes peeled, we can't wait to make 2008 a great year for everyone!

The scavenger hunt came and went. We had a larger amount of submissions than we were expecting, which was wonderful! In the end, our user "Michelle" was randomly chosen as the winner. As a prize, she chose the very useful cookbook, "WhatsToEat - The Milk-Free, Egg-Free, Nut-Free Food Allergy Cookbook".

She already received it and is hoping it will help with her daughter's allergies. It's always great to know and hear how Cooking Allergy Free is helping others! Again, we're overwhelmed by the great response we received from the the scavenger hunt, we really enjoyed making it! As always, keep your eyes peeled for the next event.

Finally, we generally try to keep the site as up to date as possible, but the last few weeks have kept us more busy than we expected. We're always checking new recipes for unkown ingredients and keeping our database as up to date as possible. So even if we don't have any new posts for the front page, we're always watching the forums. So always remember, you're just a click away from getting your questions answered!

The scavenger hunt has ended and was an even BIGGER success than the last contest! We hope that everyone had fun hunting around our site. We sure had fun coming up with the questions.

Thanks to everyone that played! We are in the process of contacting the winner. Check your e-mail to see if you won. Even if you didn't win this time, watch for our newsletter this month to see what the next contest is.

"Coping with Multiple Food Allergies" is our first, of many informative articles on food allergies, coping with them, and anything else you may be interested in. We have a couple of ideas for future articles lined up, but most of our topics come from your emails or from looking at the different topics in our Forums.

We hope you find some good information in here. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated to improve on these in the future!

For the month of October, we're having a site-wide scavenger hunt. There are 7 simple questions related to different features from Cooking Allergy Free. All you need to do is get 5 correct and at the end of the month, you'll be entered into a drawing for a free cookbook!

More details can be found at the link below. So go ahead, get started, and most of all, have fun! We hope you'll learn more about the great features offered here in the process.

Get more scavenger hunt contest information here!

Have questions about your allergies? Sure you do! We get questions sent to us all the time, but I'm sorry to say, we don't have all the answers (but we try to get as many as we can). Who better to help you out than others in your situation?

That's why we've added forums to our site to allow you to ask your questions to the rest of our users! Go ahead, try it out, and post whatever's on your mind about allergies, cooking, or how our site functions. We'll be watching the posts closely, and try to answer as many as we can.

This is the first step in starting a real community around here, so go ahead and get involved. We'll be adding more features in the future so that we'll really turn into your only stop for your allergy support needs. As always, let us know if you have any suggestions, or experience any problems with the forums or anything else. We've tried to test everything, but gremlins have slipped in before!

The winner of the Auguest recipe contest has been notified and has received her gift! The winning user, Elbienne Jae, submitted 19 delicious recipes which can be viewed here. We thank everyone who participated; as always each recipe was automatically tagged by its allergies so that all our users immediately enjoy the benefits of more recipes tailored to their allergy needs.

As a reward she chose the, lengthily titled, book The Whole Foods Allergy Cookbook: Two Hundred Gourmet & Homestyle Recipes for the Food Allergic Family.

We'll have more contests in the future, so please keep your eyes open for more posts here. Until then, we hope that each of you enjoy the allergy free recipes we'll continue offering and always hope you'll feel free to start your own recipe cookbook from your own, and others recipes! Thanks again for all your support!

The recipe entry contest has ended, and was a wonderful success. It was good to read over every recipe submission, and even better to see our community developing by helping each other through sharing your great ideas. I'm glad we were able to create a website where once a recipe is entered, they can immediately be used by a multitude of people with diverse allergies.

Thanks to each of you that helped us out, we grew our database by almost 100 new allergy friendly recipes! We are in the process of contacting the winner so that she can select the allergy diet cookbook of her choice. We'll be sure to let you know which was chosen, in case it might help you as well!

Have you been making our recipes? Wanna share your results with others? Now you can! Simply take a picture of your creation, find the recipe you made, and click "Upload Photo" in the top right. To see an example, view our "Rosemary Chicken".

As with anything, let us know if you see anything out of the ordinary. We're always working on more features around here to help you with any food allergy issues you may have, but don't want to move onto the next one until we're done with the last.

Finally, there's only 10 days left in our recipe contest. We've received quite a few new recipes already, but it's still possible for anyone to win a free cookbook! Enter them now so others can enjoy them; and remember, each recipe you enter goes straight into your "Created Recipes", so you'll always have them right at hand when you need them. Go on and give it a try!

We've cleaned up the viewing of recipes to make the most important information easier to find, and to make viewing a little prettier in general. Please tell us what you think, a lot of the changes were made due to your feeback, and we'd love more suggestions.

Finally, start taking pictures of your masterpieces! We're getting ready to add the ability to upload pictures of any recipes you've made. The placeholders are there now, and we plan to enable the feature over the next few days.

WOW! We've gotten a ton of new recipes for the site, and we thank each and every one of you for them! For those of you already trying for, and those who may have a large selection of recipes ready to be entered, the cookbooks that are available for our recipe contest are below:

• Allergy Cooking with Ease
• The Allergy Self-Help Cookbook
• The Whole Foods Allergy Cookbook
• Allergy-Free Cooking
• Gluten-Free Girl
• Special Foods for Special Kids
• Food Allergies For Dummies

If you have any other cookbook suggestions, please suggest them.

Cooking Allergy Free is hosting a contest for August 2007. The user who has submitted the most recipes during the month of August will win a cookbook -- it's that easy. We'll announce the winner on September 1st, and he or she will be able to choose the prize from a list of available cookbooks to be announced shortly. Good luck entering recipes!

After just a few short months, more than 100 users have joined Cooking Allergy Free! We welcome you all, and truly hope you enjoy your experience here and find all the allergy recipes you need. Thank you for coming, and please continue telling your friends; most of our visitors have been from word of mouth.

Since we hit 100 recipes, we've had about a dozen or so added, but we could really use some more. The wonderful thing about entering a recipe (in addition to helping others like yourself) is that you don't need to know any of the allergens in a recipe, we take care of that for you through our ingredient database. So if you have a great recipe that you think others might like, or know of a special recipe tailored to an allergen of yours, submit it. We really appreciate all the recipes and great feedback we've received so far, and we'll continue doing our best to help you find healthy allergy friendly recipes!

There have been a few requests for allergens that were not in our database, so we've added them. Both Gluten and Capsaicin (peppers) are now available to add to your user profile; just log in and use the edit button above. It couldn't be easier to find allergy free recipes!

If there's other allergies that you have that we don't have listed, or if you have any other suggestions to make Cooking Allergy Free even better, please send us a message!

We've hit enough users that we're able to start providing some statistics on the most common allergies, how many allergies most people have, and other interesting facts. A taste of the type of information is above. This weekend, we'll be adding more statistics, along with other nice little improvements!

More than 100 friendly allergy recipes, and (even to our surprise) we just had our 1000th ingredient added with the creation of Lou Ann's Hot Wings! When new recipes are added, we try to tag each new ingredient with their associated allergens as soon as possible. This way, others like you looking for allergy free recipes can find those great allergy friendly recipes even quicker.

On a side note, we're signing up more and more users every day, and the sites really just starting to grow. For just being around a few months, our growth has been better than we expected. Thanks for your support!

We're getting noticed! After a just a few short months, we're getting some visibility from some of the larger food allergy sites out there. We're working to try to increase our name so that it's easier to find us. The more that find us means the more recipes and more we can expand the site. As always, we hope you find healthy allergy free recipes for your food allergy diet needs, and if you have any suggestions for improments, let us know!

Thank you Allergizer for understanding our goals and helping us out!

We've been adding quite a few recipes, and been making some changes (many due to your great feedback) to make the site easier for you to use. New features include:

• Legend key on recipes and recipe listing pages
• Easy recipe submissions
• Listing of recipes now has a better organization to it to help you find safe allergy free recipes faster
• Improved searching of recipes

There's plenty of other minor improvements too. We hope you like them, and hope it helps you in your search for healthy cooking.

I know much hasn't changed here recently, but that's about to change. A lot of work is going on behind the scenes, and we are working on getting new recipes and expect to have more than 100 in June. Keep your eyes posted, and you'll see some great results soon! Thanks for those of you regulars here, and please keep adding those great, food allergy friendly recipes for everyone else to enjoy!

Welcome to the newly designed site! You asked for it (and we knew we needed it too). Since the original posting, some of the first emails we received said that the colors were too drab. Now that all the functionality is here, we have more recipes coming in, and everything's going well, we knew we needed to touch things up next.

Hopefully you'll enjoy the new color scheme and overall look of the new design. Please let us know if you find anything out of the ordinary, you never know what lurks in the shadows with an overhaul like this :)

To those of you that have submitted any recipes to make our database more complete, thank you! We hope everyone continues to find what they need for a healthy lifestyle.

We're live! The database has the first set of recipes in it, and ready for you to use. Over the coming weeks we'll be adding many more recipes, and adding to the design of the site to make it even friendly to use, along with adding more features.

The features available to you right now are:

• User profile creation with food allergen selections.
• Categorized and searchable recipes which are sorted according to their food allergen friendliness to you.
• Large ingredient database with associated food allergens to help you find the right recipe for your dietary needs.
• Easy recipe submissions. Use ingredients from our database, or add new ones. If we don't have it, we'll go find any food allergens associated with it so others can feel safe making it as well.
• Find a recipe you like? Add it to your Favorites to easily find it when you return.
• Much much more.

As always, please send us feedback about your experiences or let us know if you have any problems using any features on the site.

It's almost ready! As you can see, the first few recipes are starting to be entered into the database. We're not calling this completely ready yet, but we're just about there!

Please let us know if you see anything wrong, or you have any suggestions for the page!

Have you had difficulties finding recipes and cooking ideas that are tailored specifically for you? "Cooking Allergy Free" is devoted to creating an easy-to-use recipe database which can be custom-fit to your needs. Have food allergies? Don't like carrots?

If so, then this site is meant for you. By filling out a simple form which asks which ingredients you don't want in your recipes, Cooking Allergy Free will only return recipes tailored to your dietary needs.

Cooking Allergy Free has not gone live yet. However, we expect to have our extensive, and fully searchable, recipe database online by the middle of March. Please feel free to sign-up using the link above. Once Cooking Allergy Free is fully functional, we'll send you an e-mail to let you know!