Month: June 2012

Hiding Supplements in Sunbutter and Chocolate

My son is too small to swallow pills. Since we avoid dairy, we supplement with calcium, magnesium, zinc, probiotics and occasionally other things (strangely he will just eat fish oil…go figure). These do not taste great. But I don’t want to add more sugar to his diet. Enter chocolate yogurt. It hides calcium, magnesium and probiotics like a champ. We simply take So Delicious Vanilla Yogurt (if you need sugar free you can use plain plus stevia) and add a really heaping teaspoon (about a measured tablespoon) of unsweetened cocoa to about 4 oz of yogurt. It is very chocolatey, it hides the taste of the probiotics and the minerals, and he hasn’t gotten sick of it yet. If your child cannot have chocolate you can try pureed blueberries or strawberries. Chocolate just hides a multitude of flavors since it is naturally kind of bitter. If the supplement that you need to hide is iron, this will not work. Iron tastes foul in chocolate yogurt. What works there is Sunbutter. Make a Sunbutter sandwich and just mix in the powder from the iron capsule. Not only do you not taste the iron, but the copper in the sunbutter helps with the absorption of the iron. Just remember to never take iron and calcium at the same...

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Vegan, Dye-Free Gelatin Dessert

I grew up in the 1970s so I was a child exposed to Jell-O. Gelatin desserts tend to fit a mold (pun intended) of being a combination of either sugar or sweetener combined with artificial colors and flavors. Also being real gelatin means that they are made with animal products. So the gelatins that I grew up with are not safe for anyone on a Feingold diet nor for vegetarians. They also complicate Kosher cooking since they are not pareve. Which is why I was pleased to find Natural Desserts brand all-natural cherry jel dessert. It works almost exactly like the gel desserts you remember. Yes, the red is a bit faded and it could stand more cherry flavor. I have plans to make it with juice instead of water the next time, but its a nice addition to the hypoallergenic kitchen. The only ingredients in the Cherry flavored one are Evaporated Cane Juice, Adipic Acid, Potassium Citrate, Natural Flavor (gluten-free) and beet powder. For anyone who doesn’t want to work too hard for a dessert, here you go. I am not sure if there are any nightshades or citrus in the various flavors. My guess is that there is citrus in the orange flavor, but nothing else. That said who wants to actually use the epi-pen? I would call the manufacturer if your allergies are life threatening just...

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Gluten-Free Dairy-Free Soy-Free Classic Chicken salad with Apples

Today it was 97 and humid here in the Chicago suburbs. This is why I am not a fan of turning on the stove in the summer. I find we tend to come home late from the pool and I am looking for something cold, superfast and nutritionally balanced. I am looking for a five minute meal. This takes some time to make (as in about 20 minutes with virtually no cleanup) but take a scoop put it on a bed of lettuce and you have dinner. You may need two scoops for some people but the dinner salad on a hot day is a very good thing. Also we tend to have spent the day at the pool snacking on popcorn, mango chips and other shelf stable “snacks” so we are not exactly coming home with hearty appetites. I am unaware of canned kosher chicken, but you can always use poached chicken breasts and yes I do have a recipe for those. They are a major time saver and allow you to avoid the cans. Eventually I will post it. If you cannot have eggs use vegenaise. If both eggs and soy are on your do not eat list, I don’t think this recipe will work. I can only attest that it works with mayonnaise which means either safflower mayo for the soy intolerant or vegenaise for those...

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Watch Forks Over Knives for Free!

Full disclosure, I bought several copies of this movie and gave them to everyone as Christmas gifts last year. It is my favorite nutrition documentary (although Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead is the funniest) mostly because it is a good quality film with the same message that I end up beating people silly with. Change your diet and you will change your life. Anyone who is gluten-free for a non-medical reason may want to know that the doctors in this movie do not think that gluten is a problem for most people. It is dairy that virtually no one should eat. I agree with them. Most people seem to digest gluten with few ill effects. I have not seen good research indicating that gluten is harmful to people without autoimmune or psychiatric disorders. At most, it appears that a third of the population should avoid gluten. Now my gut (note, not my medical training) tells me that the reason that this particular vegan diet works and other wild meat diets also sometimes work is because you don’t eat a lot of grains. Grains are pretty much empty calories and there isn’t a primate or bear that I know of that eats them on a regular basis (gorillas are vegan but chimps do eat some animal products) I also think that avocados, coconut, olives and some fish are probably healthy...

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The Multiple Food Allergy Family Vacation

Last year my father turned seventy-five. He wanted his whole family together for the birthday and we managed to pull this off by having a two day party at my aunt’s house in Maryland. The issue of course was that while our varied food allergies are surmountable one at a time, for this event we needed to avoid all of the following foods. Gluten Dairy Nuts Beans Seeds Legumes Fish Shellfish Meat And we needed to avoid them in a fun party atmosphere for at least 48 hours. Now avoiding gluten and dairy can be handled by an increasing number of chain restaurants (we love you Bonefish Grill) but something like this requires planning. And while I am sure that with enough time and money you can find a high end caterer who can handle all of the above, a DIY solution is likely to be your best bet. In case you are wondering, you are indeed correct in assuming that other than salads, quiche, and veggie stews there is not a lot to work with. Also while a vegan diet may be wonderful for most people suffering with diabetes and heart disease, if you are epi-pen carrying deathly allergic to all beans, seeds, nuts and legumes, you should probably have some meat or eggs in your diet. Healthy vegan eating assumes you can eat beans, nuts or lentils....

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Curried Eggplant With Chickpeas

If you are looking for an easy, fast, healthy gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free, soy-free, vegan dish for a weeknight dinner or a party…this is the one. It is not my recipe. I am just putting a link to it below, but it cooks fast, freezes well and is pretty on the plate. When I needed a go to dish for a dinner party for my vegetarian brother and his wife, this was the one. I can’t and won’t try to improve on it. It is already perfect. I have never missed the yogurt. I just skip that entirely. Enjoy!...

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Gluten Free Dairy Free Soy Free Quiche

Quiche is not particularly fast. Easy, yes, but not fast. It takes about half an hour to prepare and an hour to bake. That said you can make more than one at a time with minimal additional time and effort and then during the week when its 90 degrees out you can just warm it up quickly in a toaster oven and serve it with a salad and call it dinner. You can reheat it and call it brunch. You can slice it and serve it cold. The key is that it keeps for a week and can be reheated easily. I This is my favorite quiche. If you really cannot have either coconut or soy creamer then I have used flax milk and that has worked as well. It is a bit less rich tasting, but otherwise good. Ingredients 5 big leaves swiss chard (about 4 cups chopped with major “vein” in the middle removed). You can also use a similar amount of spinach. 4 large eggs 3 tbsp oil (I use bacon fat or Spectrum butter flavor shortening) 2/3 cup So Delicious coconut milk creamer 1/2 cup Daiya Mozzarella 1 med / large onion (minced) about 1 1/2 cups 3 cups (about 8 oz) fresh chopped mushrooms, (I used shitake, but portabellos also work) 1/8 tsp pepper 1 10 inch GF pie crust (I make them in...

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Foods and Additives to Avoid

Sometimes you don’t even have time for cake or cookies even from a mix. Sometimes you just need to punt and buy the processed stuff. But you don’t want to be buying anything that is going to create more problems than it solves. So how do you choose? Figuring out fact from fiction is a pain in the butt. At the end of this email is a list of foods to avoid. I don’t really disagree with the list but a lot of the reasons that they give for WHY you should avoid these foods are either incomplete or just not true. #1 on their list is artificial sweeteners. I agree completely that they should be avoided but for very different reasons. Despite what you may think there is ample scientific evidence from third parties that artificial sweeteners do NOT give people cancer. The list makes claims against the safety of aspartame that are just not scientific. Some people are sensitive to aspartame and they need to avoid it because it can make them very ill. That said, it has been tested very thoroughly and if you go to PubMed you will see that for artificial sweeteners, it really is among the safest. We still avoid it completely, but if you really feel stuck, it seems that for most people it is the best of the worst. It is...

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Letting Go

For most of my life I maintained exactly a 3.2 GPA. The amazing thing about it is that it was my average grade in a small grammar school, a moderately competitive high school and a ridiculously competitive college. I always did just enough work to get a B+. This is the sort of thing that makes for an excellent executive. If you have limited time, people and budgets you are going to have to triage. You need to decide what will never get done, what will get done very poorly, what will be done adequately and what will be excellent. What really matters. And this was critical to maintaining my sanity when my child got sick. I triaged like crazy. So yes for a year and a half I showered only every day and a half and wore nothing but yoga pants and got haircuts only every four months. And stuff piled up and I didn’t make any new mom friends. It was hard, but it worked. I recall looking around the occupational therapy waiting room once and noticing that not one mother in there had a manicure, a pedicure or highlights. Not one. In a year of OT I saw one manicure. It is easy to say that something cannot be done. But it is rarely true. Very often it simply requires difficult, even painful, tradeoffs. Tradeoffs around...

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Gluten Free Dairy Free Very Very Blueberry Pancakes

One of the many things that I love about Namaste mixes is the fact that they are all made in a facility that is free not only of the big eight (i.e. gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free, fish & shellfish free, peanut free, egg-free and soy-free) but also free of potato (and realistically therefore nightshade-free) and corn. They state that they do not use GMO ingredients AND for the amount of pancakes you get they are the least expensive mix. Oh and there is no sugar in the mix either. In addition the pancakes are actually the best I have ever had…period, and I ate gluten for 44 years. One of the things I like about this recipe is that it is so good for “the diet”. The pancakes are so sweet that syrup seemed kind of gross to everyone except our little sugar addict. It has no added sugar. It has no yeast. It uses 2 POUNDS of frozen wild blueberries (so you will probably get a meaningful amount of fruit into your child) which our nutritionist said were fine for anyone fighting candida or yeast issues and it uses about 12 ounces of coconut oil. Both blueberries and coconut are key nutrients for brain function. Coconut oil extracts are being researched as a possible cure for Alzheimer’s. Coconut oil is brain food. And we all could use some more...

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Asthma, Autism, Allergies, and Princess the Cat

Many years ago when I was between apartments I spent two months crashing on the couch of one of my best friends. At that time she owned two cats one of whom was aptly named Princess. Princess was a walking meowing stereotype. She did not cuddle. She only tolerated the humans who shared her apartment because they supplied food and cleaned the litter box. She went about her day with the aggrieved air of someone who felt that their lot in life was utterly insufficient. She was obese. And she did NOT eat dry cat food. This apartment dated to the turn of the last century and lacked air conditioning. The months I spent there were during summer. The cat food often sat untouched, attracting bugs and stinking up the kitchen. So I asked my friend if we could feed the cats dry food which would smell less and save her a small fortune. The cat already disliked us so really what did we have to lose? She said that there was no way that Princess would ever eat dry cat food. She said the cat would starve herself before she ate dry food. Princess, despite her obesity, was a poor eater who barely at the high end wet stuff. What could I possibly be thinking? I was thinking that we had never really tried. So after an ample...

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Curried Chicken Salad with Apples and Grapes

Summer in Chicago is hot and humid. Today, it will hit 92F. And at the end of a long sweaty day I don’t want a 30 minute meal. I want a 10 minute meal with no pots, no pans and no need to turn on my stove. It would also be good if it was nutritious. And so I have one. And of course it is gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free and soy-free. The only offending food is the eggs in the mayonnaise. If you can’t have eggs, but can have soy, you can get soy mayo and it will work just fine. If anyone finds a way to do it without eggs or soy, please let me know. You can probably swap extra firm tofu for the chicken but I haven’t tested that so I am not sure. Ingredients 1 12.5 ox can chicken in broth OR about 1 2/3 cups cooked cold shredded chicken if making kosher 1 cup finely chopped celery 1 cup chopped apple 2/3 cup chopped grapes 1/2 cup Hain’s safflower mayo 2 T curry powder (I used Mc Cormick organic which is not marked kosher, but I know kosher curry powder is available) 1 Large container of greens or raw spinach 1/4 tsp salt if not using salty canned chicken Equipment Paring knife and cutting board Can opener Fork for getting chicken out of can...

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