Yuck, this whole week was a mess!

I'm glad this week is nearing to a close. My 3 year old and I have the worst cold and cough since Monday! I can deal with it but she doesn't tolerate cold and coughs well.  She is miserable! She barely slept at all which in turn kept me up as well.  Anyway, thank God she's feeling much better today. I was about to lose my mind with the constant crying!

I had planned on starting GAPS this week but because of our illness I've decided to postpone it.  I didn't want to add more misery to our misery lol.  I'm still feeling intimidated but I feel I have a better grasp of the diet now and I'm going to do my best to make this work.    I'm still feeling disorganized! I keep thinking about things I need to have and get ready ahead of time.  There's a lot!

I got my GAPS book

I received the nearly 400 page Gut and Psychology (revised edition) book late last week.  It's a hefty book!  I'm trying to read as much as I can before I start this diet for me and DD.  I want to get organized, I want to make sure I understand it clearly before we begin.   As I go through each chapter, I can already tell this is going to be so difficult. 

I'm more than halfway done with the book.  Right now I just feel so overwhelmed and wondering if I can really do this.  DD needs to do it too.  I could probably cope better because I'm an adult but she's only 3 and there's so many foods she has to avoid. So that means the list of foods on GAPS is even smaller.  I'm stressing out and we haven't even started!

Going to this GAPS means re-writing everything that I've been doing for the past 3 years of DD's life.  Not such an easy task.  I need some real brain-storming and good planning.

Dairy-free Peas and Carrots soup

I was reading a story online and in it a teenager makes peas and carrots soup for a cancer-survivor.   I've never had it before so naturally, it made me curious and I just had to make it.  I googled and tweaked a recipe that would work with our food issues.  So here it is.

*Ingredients:

1 cup of frozen peas
1 cup diced carrots
Some diced celery stalks
A dash of thyme
A dash of salt and pepper
A few pieces of chopped garlic
A cup or so of hemp milk ( you can also use almond or any other dairy-free option.  Use real milk if you can tolerate it)
A tbsp of tapioca starch to thicken it (you may use arrowroot or potato starch too)

Saute garlic then add everything to the pot.  Bring to a boil.  When vegetables are tender, turn off the stove.  Let it sit for a little bit.  Puree.  Serve!

I initially made this with coconut milk.  It was lovely!  The 2nd time (in the photo) was with unsweetened hemp milk.

*I eyeball when I cook.  I apologize for the approximations. 

What we eat(Rotation Diet)

I've had quite a number of people asking me what we eat everyday, mainly for breakfast.  I'm sorry I'm just posting this now so late.  I'm making some drastic changes though so in a few weeks this may not even apply anymore.   DD and I are going to do GAPS.  See link if interested.

gapsdiet.com

Anyway, here are things we eat for breakfast on rotation: I'm not specifying what days we actually eat them.

Breakfast ideas:
Muffins made from nut butter or nut flours
Pancakes made from nut butter or nut flours
Fruit with malanga butter*
Fruit peanut butter or cashew butter
Chestnut flour muffins *I'm still experimenting with other recipes
Coconut pancakes
Coconut bread
Coconut muffins/cupcakes
Coconut yogurt (homemade)
Turkey bacon
Sunny Side up eggs/scrambled eggs
Poached eggs
Avocado or avocado with eggs or with turkey bacon
Malanga cookies (they're healthy) that I baked
Yam cookies

Occasionally:

Homemade hash browns
Sweet potato hashbrowns

Keep in mind that I mainly bake/cook sugar-free on top of everything else. If I think of something else I'll post :).  I hope this helps some of you.

*I purchased malanga butter, malanga flour and yam flour from Specialty Foods.  They don't have a website, just a phone number you call and they will send you a very detailed catalog of all the tuber flours they sell.  They sell baked goods, imitation nut butters, specialty oils, lipbalms and lotions that can be made according to your allergies.  They are all pricey items but worth it if you have plenty of allergies.

SuperBowl Sunday Beef Stew!

I love cold weather because I love soups and stews :).  Here's another hearty yet easy recipe.  It was just succulent and a perfect healthy meal for Superbowl Sunday!

*Ingredients:

Any cut of beef, preferably with bones, preferably grass-fed (this one is organic), this was a large cut.
1 tbsp ground pepper
1 tbsp sea salt
A cup of roughly chopped carrots
A cup of roughly chopped
a cup of Bok Choy
1/2 red onion(or white or whatever you have)
A few pieces of diced garlic
1/2 cup of chopped celery
Enough water to cover the entire thing

Put the meat to cook with the garlic, onion and celery. Cover the whole thing with water.  Set to cook in low.  In the morning when I woke up, I added the vegetables and let it cook for another hour or so, til they're tender.

Voila! Easy meal!

*I don't measure except when baking, sorry! I just love, love, love to eyeball!

If you have leftovers and you're tired of this meal, shred the beef and make it into Vaca Frita!  I'll post a photo and a recipe for that later.

Update on Chestnut Muffins

I usually like to soak the flours I use so last night I soaked the chestnut flour mixture(minus the leavening agent).  I just soaked it with hemp milk and let it sit on my countertop.  In the morning, in typical fashion, the soaked flour was very watery.  In my attempt to salvage it, I just added stuff that I would normally add to make pancakes.  I made one pancake very, very thin, cooked it on medium heat but it still didn't come out as I wanted.

Next I thought I'd salvage the mix even more and make the muffins that I had originally in mind.  I added more chestnut flour, I don't even remember, perhaps about 1/2 cup.  Baked it at 375 degrees.  The same thing happened, it was gooey.  So the whole thing was a disaster pretty much.  I wasted an expensive flour.  I ended up giving my daughter eggs for breakfast which messed up the rotation diet because today's not egg day(for those who follow a rotation diet, you know what I'm talking about).

Sigh, alright, so do you have the same experience when soaking flour(nut flour)?  It always comes out watery. In the past I soaked buckwheat and quinoa and had the same results. I'm not sure what to do.  I really want to soak the flours first to get rid of lectins, phytic acid, etc so they can be easily digested.

Thoughts? For now I guess I won't soak the nut flour.

Flaring up

Well for the past week I've been flaring up.  I had a bout of pneumonia in the beginning of January and I'm sure the antibiotics and the steroids messed up my stomach again.  I'm thinking of trying GAPS now.  For those of you not aware of it, here's a link for more information.  I tried doing SCD but when I started feeling better, I just started cheating and then I was back to where I started.  It was hard because the holidays came and the pressure to eat forbidden foods was so strong. I know, I know, I need to have a stronger resolve.  Well I'm desperate now so I've decided to do GAPS and probably my daughter who's 3 will be on it too.  She's been having some symptoms off on an again and it's really stressing me out.

GAPS
www.gapsdiet.com

SCD
http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info/index.htm

If you are doing GAPS please comment.  Thanks!