Beautiful Blueberries and Thinking About Back to School (already!)

It's blueberry time!  I've been out of frozen blueberries for a few months now and I'm determined to fill my freezer while I can.  We use blueberries in smoothies, tossed into yogurt,  the occasional batch of muffins, or dessert such as pie or my favorite, crepes with cream cheese filling and blueberry sauce.  Eva eats her pancakes with blueberry sauce too claiming that maple syrup hurts her stomach.  So far I've been picking 3 times for a couple hours each time and probably have a couple of gallons or so in the freezer. I want more!  I'd like to try my hand at blueberry wine and also freeze some blueberry syrup (lightly sweetened with a touch of honey).  We'll see how far I get! 

According to my family age-old wisdom, blueberries should NOT be washed before freezing.  Of course, I've been notified that some people do wash them, but I pick wild berries way back in the woods on my parents' land so washing is unnecesary. If you do wash your berries make sure they are very dry and then freeze first on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper before storing in containeers.  I  pick fairly clean to begin with, but later I also pick through lightly and pull out any twigs , leaves or bad berries I find.  Then dump into a container, snap the lid on and put in the freezer!  Simple!

Today I also made pancakes with coconut flour and buckwheat flour and they turned out really well.  Ben, my pancake addict, ate them up.  I also made some with mashed banana and am going to work on them until they make a really good school lunch snack.  I realize I'm going to have to be more creative this year to figure out how to incorporate all the changes I want to do with our diet.  For one thing, I may not have any bread to work with, or if I do it will be very different. 

Thankfully I've been able to talk with Eva  a lot already about the changes and why we're doing them. She's had a really great attitude so far and really seems to be understanding the basics of gut healing and nutrition.  I've already got a fair amount of homemade chicken stock in my freezer and she's looking forward to taking a thermos of that in her school lunches (she drinks it with a straw, I'm lucky she's always liked it so much).  As soon as my in-laws travel back home in a few days I'll be ready to really dig in, though I still have to order the GAPS book and read it!  I'm not sure if we'll follow it exactly or not until I read it all but I think we'll be following at least 90%  from I've read on their website.