Amazing Gluten-Free and Kid Friendly Recipes!!! And So Cheap!

Really, I am a collector of recipes.  I"m addicted to cookbooks, I read them by the hour.  I LOVE them.  And I love the ones with pictures. So, you might consider me an expert of sorts and I'm here to tell you where you can find some amazing healthy recipes that will enable you to make the most beautiful and delicious food!  Please head over to Lydia's Divine Health Blog where her August e-book is now available for a mere pittance.  Or you might consider purchasing a subscription and save even more!   You can check out some pictures before you purchase if you like, and the book includes beautiful color photos of each recipe.  I know you won't be disappointed!

The Body Ecology Diet and GAPS Diet Meet! LOVE This!

The author of  The Body Ecology Diet, Donna Gates, and the author of  The Gut and Psychology Diet, Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride have gotten together in this inteview to discuss Autism and the serious problem of gut dysbiosis.  I really LOVE this stuff, so good and so important for anyone with children, not just autistic children.   You can read the amazing story of  Dr. Campbell-McBride's son has completely overcome autism  on her site.

Anyway, I wanted to post  part 1 of the 6 part  youtube videos of the interview.  Hope you enjoy! It's worth watching the rest of the interview...




And Amilia loves beet kvass, that makes me happy!

Gluten-Free, GAPS, Gut Healing...etc, etc,...

I've been scouring the web looking for info.  The kids will be arriving home this weekend and I'm gearing up for big changes around here.   I've been diving back into Nourishing Traditions, checking out the GAPS diet, looking at tons of gluten-free recipes, and percolating.  I've got my first couple of batches of kombucha brewing and some beet kvass ready to store in my fridge as well.  I'll also be lining up an appointment for Eva with Dr. Gleixner as soon as she gets home, apparently our supplemental health insurance will cover 80% of the cost up to a certain amount each year, YAY! 

I'm not sure how difficult this is going to be, I do know that the change will not be fun at first, especially after coming back from grandma's house, a processed/refined food nightmare (I try not to think about it).  I'm thinking about school lunches, I'll have 3 in school this year.  I'm thinking about all the food available at school from breakfast club to halloween, christmas, and valentine's parties, to birthday cupcakes sent in by other moms.  How will I deal with all this?  I'm considering having the school freezer stocked with a few cookies and other healthy treats for those unexpected treat days if possible. 

So in all my surfing, here are a few great and very interesting sites and blogs I've run across:

The Spunky Coconut, a blog written by a mom of two young children with various health challenges who has authored a cookbook that I WANT. 

The Art of Gluten-Free Sourdough Baking, an intriguing concept I think, with recipes (and recipe ebooks available) and thoughts by Sharon A. Kane who I discovered when she commented on one of my posts

The GAPS diet, based on Gut and Psychology Syndrome by Dr. Natasha Campbell-Mcbride.

How To Make Your Blood Boil! Govenment Dietary Guidelines....

I hope other parents out there are aware that your child, if in the public school system anyway, is being indoctrinated into life threatening nutritional lies.  Of course I don't blame the teachers or anything, but it's something to keep in mind as you try to find the delicate balance of teaching your children the truth about nutrition in a way that is respectful of those who are sincerely wrong though their intentions are wonderful.  These teachers are just doing their jobs of course, they're not educated in real food. 

But somewhere there are many rich and fat men who are at least somewhat aware of the lies they are perpetuating.  Adding purposefully addictive ingredients to foods they KNOW has absolutely no nutritional value, foods they KNOW are killing people.  I just read an article about the new USDA dietary guidelines (which is pretty much based on the same ideas as the Canada Food Guide) for 2010 on the Weston Price Foundation site and it makes me so angry!  How can these people who have so much power and control and influence over how people think about food continue to recommend such horrible food choices????  I feel the food industry is linked with the pharmaceutical industry and they have a very happy money making scheme, the first makes everyone sick, the second drugs and sedates them all so they die slightly more slowly  in a semi-conscious state. 

What can we do?  We can learn, we can teach our family and friends through beautiful delicious nourishing real fresh foods.  The way to the heart is the stomach, and believe me, you will win your children, friends, and other family over through fresh raw homemade ice-cream and juicy grass-fed steaks, crispy farmer's market bacon and fresh pastured eggs, hunks of creamy yellow butter melted generously over hot veggies fresh from the garden, sprinkled with real salt, a hot baked potato with lots of butter and thick sour cream..  MMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Take that margarine and fat free chemical laden sour cream!!!!  Would you like a chocolate covered granola bar now?  How about some tasteless white 'bread' or MSG chips?  These 'foods' are not real and once people get a taste of the real things and if they can realize these things are healthy and no guilt should be experienced when eating them, they will choose the real foods easily.  EASILY.  And we'll all feel better, look better, think better, love better.  Honest. 

OH, so here's the article called " PROPOSED 2010 USDA DIETARY GUIDELINES --A RECIPE FOR CHRONIC DISEASE" over at the Weston A. Price Foundation that set me off a little.  There are some good food guidelines at the end of the article.

Looking For Amazing Recipes? Gluten Free? Low Sugar/Carb?

My wonderful amazing friend Lydia from Divine Health has put out her first e-book!!!!!  I just finished ordering mine and can't wait to try out the recipes, the pictures look soooooooooo good!  Please head over and check out her blog and consider buying her Divine Living Ebook – July 2010 edition.  Here's the description:

"This month’s ebook includes 8 entire meal plans, so you can have 2 new dinners per week to add to your repertoire, plus a few extra recipes, such as muffins, brownies and a divine chocolate recipe you won’t want to miss! I am selling each monthly ebook for $7.95 – (that’s $1 per meal plan)."

You may also subscribe and pay one discounted price to recieve a new ebook full of creative and nourishing recipes each month for a whole year!

Gluten Free--Never Say Never!

So I believe I've mentioned that one of the things I most want to see is my oldest daughter overcome some health issues she's had pretty much her whole life.  She's had stomach pain and problems associated with it (such as gas, constipation, and some other embarrassing symptoms) since she was a baby, she's also is very prone to blood sugar fluctuations, has vision problems (for which she wears corrective glasses), headaches, shoulder and neck pain sometimes, hay fever, and randomly breaks out in hives for seemingly no reason at all.  She got the poorest start in life compared to the other children because she lived the longest without the benefit of decent real food on a regular basis--I didn't start looking into nutrition until she was almost 3. 

When I first ransacked my kitchen and dumped any and all processed and refined foods she experienced immediate improvement in some areas, mainly her moods and temper tantrums.  Taking the sugar out really seemed to help her.  At that time I also switched to soaking all my grains, using raw milk and cream, natural sweeteners, more organic and grass fed meats and wild caught seafood, and plenty of fresh veggies and fruits.  I look back on that time as a time I never felt healthier or had more energy.  I've never really been able to recapture that feeling fully since. 

I've been searching the internet and books, reading, reading, reading....and listening to interviews ect...and I have to say I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that we need to go gluten free.  To me, this would explain why I did so well on Fat Flush the first time I did it when I was quite a few years younger.  I experienced such good results but since then it seems to take longer and longer every time I try it.  I think it may because the longer I keep eating certain offending foods, the more damaged my digestive system has become.  Just a theory anyway.  The other factors that I can't get away from are taking a look into my family.  Celiac itself is an autoimmune disease that contributes to a host of other autoimmune diseases such as diabetes (on both sides of my family), arthritis (rheumatoid, my grandmother), thyroid disease (on both sides of my family), Alzheimer's (on my mom's side) and more.  Celiac is very often never diagnosed and underlies so many of these conditions that I'm now very suspicious of our genetic predisposition of gluten intolerance whether it's truly Celiac or not. 

So when Eva gets back from her grandparents' house I'm taking her to see our local natureopathic DR. so we can hopefully get to the bottom of all this once and for all.  I could go gluten free on my own, but for her I think she will do much much better with it if she has a doctor explain it to her.  On the one hand I don't really want to go for the full fledged gluten free life, (which will NOT be just for Eva or even for her and I but for the the whole family) but on the other I'm already familiar with plenty of great recipes and have experimented a lot with gluten free cooking and baking.  I already make several cookie and muffin recipes that are gluten free, and even always make gluten free pasta and lasagna when we have it.   

And all this just after I said I wasn't giving up bread haha!  Oh, but I'm NOT giving up bread, I've already discovered a gluten free recipe for sourdough buckwheat rolls....and I have many more delicious alternative ideas percolating.... Once thing I won't do is use those gluten free recipes that I find nutritionally very weak or use weird and complicated ingredients.  Whatever we eat will have to be richly nourishing, extremely delicious, and simple to make!

Check out this great interview with Dr. Thomas O'Brien on Underground Wellness Radio on celiac disease and gluten sensitivity for more information on all this.

Fermented Pineapple Drink and Oatmeal Muffins

I have a pineapple,  so I googled 'fermented pineapple drink'.  Now, this is what I've found and I think it looks very interesting and summery. 

Fermented Pineapple Drink (Guarapiña o Mavi de Piña)

 

The great thing is, you use the skin of the pineapple which I normally throw away.  The skin can also be used for pineapple vinegar, also known as cortida, which is supposed to be yummy as well.  In fact, this recipe is probably very similar to making vinegar except the addition of sugar and optional spices, the fermentation time would obviously be much shorter for a drink.  I'm going to try this in the next day or two so I'll let you know how it goes!

 

In other news, I've just made a big batch of one of my kids' favorite muffins.  But this time I fooled around with the recipe quite a bit  and did some pre-soaking.  I don't think I've ever done conversions yet involving soaking so I'm quite pleased with the results.  Here's what I did:

The recipe actually says to soak the oats for 10 minutes in buttermilk, so I figured, why not longer?  And why not throw in some oat flour with it?  Of course it says to use all purpose flour, 3 cups to be exact.  So I used half that amount of oat flour, and for the other half of the flour I used half as much coconut flour (so that would be 1 cup) which I mixed with all the dry ingredients for the base.  I followed the rest of the recipe except adding an extra egg to offset the coconut flour a bit, the oat flour also offsets the dryness of coconut flour because it's so moist. 



Here's the recipe which will make 3 dozen, half it if that's too many muffins for your house!

Oatmeal Muffins

3 cups rolled oats
1 cup oat flour
3 cups buttermilk (or soured milk, or equal parts liquid whey and water)

Mix this together in large bowl, cover, and soak for 12-24 hours.

When you're ready to bake the muffins preheat the oven to 375 and  stir the following together in large bowl:

1 cup coconut flour
1 1/4 cup rapadura
3 tsp ground cinnamon
3 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp real salt



Then add 2/3 melted butter and 5 fork beaten eggs to the soaked oat mixture.  Add to dry ingredients and stir just until moistened.  Fill buttered or papered muffin cups about 3/4 full and bake for 20 minutes. 



Variations:

mix 2 tbs rapadura and 1 tbs cinnamon together and sprinkle the tops of the muffins

decrease butter to 1/2 cup and add 3 cups grated peeled cooking apples to the egg mixture

My kids approved the recipe changes and I'm limiting muffin intake as I type!  They also LOVE the apple version, though I haven't tried it yet with the new changes.  There's no reason it shouldn't work just fine!