New Foods!

I thought I would post something not about my children or school for once.:)

Since three of us in my family are on this "crazy, we can't eat anything" diet, I am always on a search to try some new foods. Now that I am feeling better and have some energy again, I feel a little ambitious sometimes.

Because of this, I told Megan that we were going to try a new thing every week.  One day, we were at the grocery store and I told her to find one thing in the produce section that we have never bought. We ended up buying fresh green beans.  I have always bought canned and about 6 months ago, I started buying frozen, but fresh? I have not bought them once! So we got some and we love them!  Somewhere in my childhood I remember eating fresh green beans because the taste came back to me, but I thought they were great and so did Megan!  I think they are on our grocery list every time now!

That same day, I also bought grapefruit. Again, I never bought it and have never tried it. I didn't think it was so good and nobody else did either, so we will probably not do that again, unless someone can tell us how to make it taste better.

Along with new foods, I am trying to get away from the colored dyes in foods. Our only downfall is cereal.  Since we are off all wheat-based cereals, there are very few we can buy for Christian, Courtney, and I.  One cereal that my kids love and is filled with dyes is Captain Crunch (the store brand.) At this moment there are about 8 boxes of cereal in my pantry and none have food dyes in them. Guess what Megan said this morning? "There's nothing to eat!"  (She can have wheat, so I guess I could buy some cereal specifically for her.)

The other day, I tried a new flour recipe.  Oat flour doesn't work for everything, especially banan bread, so I wanted to find an alternative. I have a gluten-free cookbook and it had a flour recipe in it. You combine rice flour, tapioca flour, cornstarch, and sorghum flour. It was also supposed to have coconut flour, but that stuff is expensive! I combined all these and made muffins the other day, they were pretty good, but not "great" yet.

One thing we do use oat flour in is cookies. I just take a regular chocolate cookie recipe and replace everything with what we can have.  wheat flour = oat flour, eggs= egg replacement, dairy butter= non-dairy butter, milk chocolate chips= real chocolate chips.  I make these quite a bit and they are always kind of dry and they are crunchy, somebody the other day mentioned that I should add applesauce to put some more moisture in them.  I should try that!  I really think the best thing about these cookies is that since they don't have real eggs in them, I don't feel bad about eating the cookie dough!

Yesterday, I tried out another new recipe.  I have seen "banana ice cream" around and I had about 3 batches on bananas that were starting to turn brown, so I searched around and found a recipe.  After reading a couple, I came up with my own. I put as many bananas as I wanted in the blender, added some lemon juice, added quite a bit of rice milk and I blended this all together.  (I froze the bananas first, but that made it worse.)  After I had this mixture, I put it in a bowl and put it in the freezer.  Tada, banana ice cream!

I have also noticed that we have some tortillas in the fridge that nobody is eating. I found a recipe where you can fry cut-up tortillas and then you dip them in sugar and cinnamon and make chips.  Sounds good, right? I was going to try these sometime, but only Matt and Megan can eat them.

Our new sloppy joes recipe is also a big hit, I use ketchup or BBQ sauce as the base instead of tomato soup.  Yummy! (Then I take corn chips and use the sloppy joes as dip since I can't eat bread).

Rice krispies are always good too! And I saw some new popsicles at Sam's this week, the first four ingredients are berries, sugar isn't until #5! I bought those right up!