Woman of the Week: Stacey Fokas

by Kelsey Rolfe

If faced with the challenge to develop and maintain a dairy-free diet, what would you do?

When her daughter Anastasia was born anaphylactic to dairy products, Stacey Fokas, the author of Freshalicious: Eat Fresh,was confronted with having to eliminate dairy from her family’s menu. That meant radically changing the way they ate.

“It obviously changed the way I had to cook, how I had to prepare foods, and [I had to] recreate my recipes so I still enjoyed eating,” Fokas shares. Her recipes often replace dairy products with substitute ingredients — for example, in the place of milk, Fokas now uses almond, soy, or rice milk. Cheese isn’t replaceable, but Fokas claims her recipes allow it to go unnoticed.

Ridding her kitchen of dairy products wasn’t the only step Fokas took to ensure Anastasia could eat without an extreme reaction. “The easiest way for me to deal with her food allergy was to cook from fresh sources, in-season, and read my food labels to know where my food was coming from,” she said. At the time the food labels weren’t as good as they are now, Fokas says, “So there could’ve been traces of milk in foods and I would only find out by her reacting.”

To deal with that issue, Fokas turned to Ontario farmers. She went on what she calls “food journeys” to local farms to buy directly from farmers. Fokas stresses that people need to become more connected with their food sources. “One of the most important, and valid points that a farmer will always make to me is that they feel there’s a disconnect with today’s society and natural food,” she says.

Fokas made sure to include her food journeys — all 37 of them — in her cookbook, in the hopes of making her readers aware of the natural food available to them. “A lot of people don’t understand that within a 25-mile radius we’ve got farmers producing all kinds of foods that are available to us every day.”

Freshalicious: Eat Fresh was, Fokas says, inspired by her daughter. “[She] had asked me for a few years to share the recipes with people, and ... I thought, ‘Why not share with people ... how we’ve managed to eat dairy-free in a healthy way?’ So it wasn’t just a book for people who were looking to live that way, it was a healthy cookbook for everybody.”

Fokas self-published her cookbook and, with a friend’s help, was put in touch with Chapters. “They asked me to send them a book, I sent them a book, and they ordered,” she said. The Freshaliciouscookbook is currently for sale in Ontario Chapters locations.

To learn more about Stacey Fokas and the Freshalicious cookbook, check out her website.