wife, mother, ph.d. student, hot stuff.

Friday, October 17, 2008

milk issues


First, a hilarious photo of the men in my life. I wonder if Julian will decide to imitate Robin's scorn towards cameras once he has conscious control of his facial expressions.

I am both allergic to milk and lactose intolerant. Thankfully, these conditions are on the mild end; I can still eat cheese and yogurt and ice cream without much consequence. I just can't drink milk straight. As such, I'm not used to the taste of plain milk; I have never liked lactaid, or goat's milk. So when Julian was born, it was very weird to suddenly be a milk spout. I know I know, cow's milk does not equal human breast milk, but it sure looks similar.

Unfortunately, it seems that Julian is sensitive to my breastmilk when I eat dairy products. So I am now abstaining from my daily cheese/yogurt intake. This is not too huge of a deal. However, since becoming pregnant, I have a newfound appreciation for ice cream. The idea of not being able to eat ice cream filled me with angst.

So I decided to take a hint from PETA. I already had plenty of expressed breastmilk in the freezer and fridge, including a bag of milk that was expressed before I stopped eating cheese, and couldn't give to Julian anyways. If this stuff is good for my baby to eat, why can't I eat it? So we made a batch of vanilla ice cream. And it is delicious.

3 comments:

Sarah said...

Ah, vegan-friendly ice cream. At least, for that brand of vegan that abstains from animal products over concerns about animal treatment and their lack of ability to give permission to use their products. Brian and I used to joke with Sam L-L about marketing human cheese for vegans.

I've heard that breastmilk is super-sweet. Did you have to reduce the amount of sugar you added to your ice cream?

W said...

I don't think that Robin altered the recipe, except to use a combination of margarine and breastmilk to substitute for heavy cream. It IS quite sweet, but that's all right by me.

the main problem is that the margarine didn't mix thoroughly, so there are some lumps of margarine in the final product. the next batch we try, we'll probably just use plain milk instead.

Andrea Gray said...

Oh my! Very creative :)
I had milk issues while nursing one of mine and it was killer. I never thought of making my own "dairy" products. You truly have a scientific mind! I'm really enjoying your updates, and being able to follow along with little Julian even though you all are so far away.