Dessert Junkie

After almost a week of gluten-free living I’m coming to terms with “the diet”.  I think it really hit me because I really do love food.  Always have.  This past Easter my sister and I were laughing at how all of my memories of childhood are somehow food related.

 

• One of my first memories was making a special concoction of peanut butter on a spoon with a few chocolate chips and garnished with sugar on top.  I then hid under the dining room table to eat it since I didn’t want to get in trouble.
• My mom making yummy extra-sweet strawberry treats.  The kicker?  They actually LOOKED like strawberries! Total awesomeness to a 3-4 year old into Strawberry Shortcake.
• I LOVED eating watermelon at my Grandparents house in the summer.  It was extra-good MN watermelon.  So juicy and sweey!  And I got to practice my non-girly spitting without looking like a total pig.
• One night Bill & Sylvia, my parents friends, gave us ice cream with nuts on top.  I ran off to play before eating it all and when I returned it was a soupy mess.  WTH!  
• One of my favorite parts of spending the night at my friends house?  Her mom always got us Dunkin Donuts in the morning.  I always got a powdered sugar-coated donut with some sort of fluffy chocolate frosting on the inside.  Jamie didn’t remember this.  I was all, “HOW CAN YOU NOT REMEMBER THE DONUTS!?”
• My friends and I would stop by CircleK every day on our way home from jr high and get Coke Icies.  Oh, and my lunch every day was a pack of Hoho’s and Chocolate Milk.  Seriously.

 

So after looking at some of these, I think it’s mostly “sweets” that I’ve had a thing for.  Which makes sense that I considered going to Pastry School for awhile. Ha!

The good news is it will be relatively easy to adjust some recipes.  Just switch to Rice flour and add Tapioca something-or-other.  I haven’t done it yet, so I don’t really remember what the typical ingredients are for gluten-free baking.  Can you tell?  lol  Anyway, the nice thing is that there is a way and I can learn.  I can’t just grab anything off the shelf, but I can figure something out on how to have it.

The trick, it seems, is not to mope around about what you can’t have.  (Although I’ve heard a good mope is normal at times.) Really try to concentrate on what you CAN have.  Like this:

 

Mmm… chocolate.  Is it lame or cool that I naturally think of Star Wars when I see this?  Yeah, you’re right.  Lame.

ps- I’m not going cold turkey with dairy quite yet.  I’m focusing mostly on the wheat right now.  I don’t know, just in case you’re curious…?

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Homemade Taco Salad

Yesterday’s lunch of Homemade Taco Salads. Doesn’t it look cute and yummy?  I was very proud of myself.

Sexy Cooking

So for the last few weeks I’ve start using thescramble.com for menu planning.  I love it!  I’ve tried other menu planning sites/plans and this one, in my opinion is THE BEST.  It’s totally easy to use and personalize and uses healthy and fresh foods.  Plus they are always fast and easy recipes.  Plus it includes personalized shopping lists, ready to print.  Isn’t that what we all look for during the week?  Something easy and thinking-not-required?

But, I do truly enjoy cooking and baking and want to make it fun, too.  So I’m thinking I will cook a recipe from my Christmas 2007 gift, “Nigella Express” on Saturdays.  The “Express” means that they are not cumbersome recipes…  Limited ingredients and relatively quick for what you get as an end product.

I LOVE her and was so excited to get this cookbook.  When I was telling my sister, Jamie, about getting the cookbook she said, “Who’s Nigella Lawson?”

“She’s from England and made those Choco-Hoto Pots you loved so much.” I stated.

“Oh!  Is she that really sexy chef?”

“Uh, well…. I guess.  I never thought of her as sexy before….”

“… oh yeah.  I know who she is… She’s totally sexy.”

LOL – Jamie cracks me up.  It’s good to have a sister like her.

So hopefully I can bring out my inner Nigella and do some sexy cooking. lol

E-vil

I don’t know if any of you are interested in this or not, but we have toned down Jr’s food restrictions.  We were doing the full Feingold Diet (taking out dyes, preservatives, salycilates, etc) and have since scaled back.  Over the course of the year we realized that whenever anything was affecting him, it was always dye related.  This is the whole point of the Feingold Diet – to reintroduce and see what is/isn’t causing a reaction.

At this point we are still just keeping things as organic as possible, checking for preservatives and other unnatural ingredients and avoiding them when possible.  But will have absolutely no dye.  Dye is E-vil.  As in the Fru-its of the De-vil.  You know, like from So I Married An Axe Murderer.

I think this is still dt’s favorite scene:

 

Anyway, that’s the scoop.

milk & cookies

Jr and I made some Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies yesterday. (peanut butter is on the safe to eat list!)

They are especially good frozen.  Yum!

More Past Pictures

We just got our new camera delivered yesterday!  But we’re still figuring the thing out… so I thought I’d give you a look of some past pictures.  Never before seen on the internet!  Here are some of dt and me on our Anniversary.  We went to a cute chocolate and wine bar at The Domain.  We had lunch and then champagne and yummy chocolates.  Mmmm.  Now we’re talkin’!

Dinner

Potato Leek Soup with green onion, chives, cheese, sour cream and toasted challah bread. Mmmm…  Super easy if you buy the Imagine brand pre-made container!  (this was a suggested recipe on the box – except for the bread.  I just added that)

To freshen things up I paired it with Fruit Salad made with homemade whipped cream.

Easy enough, healthy and delicious!

Yummy

Or as James Lipton would say scrumtulescent. (well, actually Will Ferrell as James Lipton)

They were gone within 24 hours.  Good thing I only made half a batch!  Found on ivillage.com

Chocolate Crumb Bars

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 cup butter or margarine, softened
  
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  
• 1/2 cup sugar
  
• 1/4 tsp salt
  
• 2 cups chocolate chips, divided
  
• 1 1/4 cups Sweetened Condensed Milk
  
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
  
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
  

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease 13 x 9-inch baking pan.
   
2. Beat butter in a large mixer bowl until creamy.  Beat in flour, sugar and salt until crumbly.  With floured fingers, press 2 cups crumb mixture onto bottom of prepared baking pan; reserve remaining mixture.  Bake for 10 to 15 mintues or until edges are golden brown.
   
3. Combine 1 cup morsels and sweetened condensed milk in a small, heavy-duty saucepan.  Warm over low heat, stirring until smooth.  Stir in vanilla extract.  Spread over hot crust.
   
4. Stir nuts and remaining morsels into reserved crumb mixture; sprinkle over chocolate filling.  Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until center is set.  Cool in pan on wire rack.

Blue Beauty

With all of this time in the kitchen I’m doing lately, I’ve set my eyes on this blue beauty:

Who knows, I’ll probably never actually own it but a girl can dream, can’t she?

Jr Update

I think after my moment of being overwhelmed last week I was able to pull myself together (or God helped settle my nerves) and start thinking about positive steps in moving forward.  I re-looked at the items in our house to see if anything could have triggered behavior and the yogurt I had been giving him every morning and every evening with his supplements are not in the diet.  I had assumed that it was okay because it is very natural and organic, but they contain natural salicylates.  (I’ve long suspected he has a salicylate-intolerance)

Also, when his teacher called she had said he drank some lemonade in science class that they had made and she was really sorry (knowing his diet was restricted).  I assured her that lemonade is actually normally okay so not to worry about it.  I didn’t really think much about it after that. Then a few days later, when Jr wanted to show me how they made the lemonade he informed me that it was PINK lemonade.  They had put drops of Red Food Coloring in it.  I KNOW that the food coloring is why he became more destructive.  It was only an hour or two after that that he wrote on the carpet.  Once we took out Artificial Food Coloring and Flavors last year his aggressive/destructive behaviors stopped.  So he consumes Red Dye and lo and behold!  Here it is back again.  I know that is not coincidence. Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about what they put in foods, but some of it can be pretty horrible.  Just please be aware of what you are really giving your kids! 

But besides ADHD, there have been fun things going on too. Here are a few pictures of Jr last weekend.  He caught a gecko in the backyard and was very VERY excited about it.  We were planning on keeping it and went to the pet store to get supplies.  That is where we discovered that lizards need heat lamps and stuff we weren’t prepared to get and realized we know nothing about taking care of a lizard.  We had pumped it up and he was so excited and so we bribed him with an Ant kit in exchange for letting the lizard go.  Sometimes you have to do what you have to do as a parent.

Here’s video of him showing it off:

He also built an awesome Marble Run contraption that weekend:

Look at that smile!  He was so proud!