An inconvenient food allergy

If you've researched keto you've probably seen a lot of recipes incorporating eggs - because they're so versatile - and nuts - because the oils are very healthy and the flours are convenient replacements for wheat flour. Unfortunately, M is allergic to both eggs and nuts, including peanuts.

The egg allergy is mild, and he can tolerate small amounts in baked goods, so that gives us a bit of freedom we're lucky to have. His allergist also believes he'll outgrow it completely in the next couple of years, and we're really looking forward to that - breakfast will be a lot easier when it can be a simple scramble of eggs, cheese, and cream.

But the nut thing is frustrating, since so many kid-friendly keto recipes use them in some form or another - butters, flours, oils. It takes some creativity and experimentation, but a few useful replacements I've found:

- KetoCuisine: a dairy- and sunflower oil-based "flour" that is a 5:1 ratio itself. It's not a 1:1 replacement for nut flours, so you can't do a direct substitution, but the company that makes it has a number of recipes on its site and you can often find it incorporated in other people's custom recipes. It's a useful way to bulk up fat content and add a little bit of cake-like texture to things that don't otherwise call for it; in the sunflower seed surprise cookies I make, I added a bit to the recipe to give the cookies a little lighter texture.

- Coconut flour: I know that coconuts are sort of considered a tree nut, but not really? My son's never had a problem with coconut, and that's true of most nut-allergic people I know, so we're able to use coconut flour. It does have a coarser texture than wheat flour, though, and I find it a little "chewier", and my son's not wild about it in all recipes. It does the job, though, especially in things like Fathead Dough recipes as a substitute for almond flour. It's more absorbent than almond flour (or regular flour for that matter) so you only use about 40% of what a recipe using almond flour calls for.

- Sunbutter: I love and adore peanut butter and I'm somewhat heartbroken my son can't eat it, but Sunbutter - sunflower seed butter - works pretty well as a replacement. It has a mild, nutty taste that combines well with a number of other ingredients, so I've mixed it with Greek yogurt, porridge, baked goods, and used it as a spread. There are sunflower seed butters that include more sugars or other carb-heavy flavorings, like maple syrup, so Sunbutter is the most straightforward one I've seen. Of course, you can grind your own sunflower seeds into butter, but I am too lazy for that. Sunbutter comes in creamy and crunchy versions. M isn't wild about the crunch version incorporated into things like yogurt, but he likes the texture it adds in baked goods.

What have you found that makes good substitutes for common allergens?