Allergy to Mustard

We suspect that Bee has a new allergy - mustard.

While this shouldn't actually come as a huge surprise, I was disappointed that another food had to be removed from our list.

Mustard comes from a seed and Bee seems to be allergic to most other seeds.  Therefore, it would make sense that she could not have mustard either.

She has eaten foods containing mustard in the past and has never had a problem - until now.

This past week I made our honey dijon chicken recipe that calls for Dijon mustard.  We sat down to dinner and after 2 bites Bee declared that she did not like dinner and wasn't hungry.  This was very unusual for her, especially since she had just said she was hungry.  I looked very closely at her and could see her lips and the skin around her mouth starting to swell.  A few minutes later her mouth, cheeks, and face were covered in huge hives.

At that point my husband and I pushed our chairs back from the table, grabbed Bee, and ran to the bathroom.  We washed her face and her mouth and scrubbed her hands.  Then we administered Bendaryl and covered her hives with cortisone cream.  We put Bee on the couch with us and we all sat around and watched her, waiting to see if she had difficulty breathing or any additional swelling.  Thankfully after 30 minutes, the swelling went down and the hives started to fade.

That's when I thought about what we had eaten for dinner and I had the nagging feeling that it was something in the chicken recipe.  Since that recipe only has a few ingredients it was easy to guess that it had to be the mustard.

So, no more mustard for us in any of our recipes.  It's just another ingredient that we now have to watch for as we read labels.

I had so hoped that her seed allergies (which have always seemed less severe) would start to recede.  I guess we now know that they are not getting better but may in fact be getting worse.

Now we will be avoiding flax seeds, poppy seeds, mustard seeds, sunflower seeds, quinoa, chia seeds, and sesame seeds.  Ironically, hemp seeds are not a problem for us as our family drinks hemp milk.  Why is this possible?  I don't know....Food allergies don't always make sense to me!