December 3, 2013

UPDATE: Gluten-free week one.


Posted by Ethne~

Hey dudes!  I hope you all had a very nice Thanksgiving!

We are a week into the gluten-free/paleoesque/good-for-you (a/k/a GF for short) diet and I'm here with a report.  It wasn’t a true GF week because I wasn’t 100% strict on Thanksgiving, though I also tried to keep the kiddos from gorging on gluten items too.  Full-time job almost.

Cooking out of my new cookbooks has worked out ok.  One thing I noticed is that the one lady’s paleo crock pot recipes are often 6 hour timing, which is shorter than my work day, so my Asian chicken cooked a little longer than was called for.  It was edible, but I bet it would’ve been better had it been cooked just 6 hours.

Homemade sweet potato fries; bacon-mushroom hamburgers with cashew-flour buns.
KD likes her sweet taters.  I'm using up our Heinz ketchup then will try making my own.  I made a BBQ sauce from scratch for those burgers and it was REALLY good.

Target and Cub have great GF sections.  I’m finding most of what I need between the two stores and Target especially even has boxed-type dinner sides and lunchbox items that are really nice for the work week.  Still, there are a few things I haven’t found that I’m going to have to go to Whole Foods for.  (I didn’t end up getting coconut aminos – huge debacle – but did find GF soy sauce, so I got that instead.  If we were strict paleo, soy wouldn’t work.)

Thanksgiving we tried to keep the girls on track with the holiday snacking (ie, meat, cheese, corn chips, salsa – just no crackers), but then we didn’t go nuts over them having some stuffing and gravy at dinnertime.  I easily scraped the crust off their pumpkin pie and they couldn’t have cared less.

So not perfect, but a good college try for week one.

As to any noticeable changes, I can’t say I’ve seen anything crazy different, though the girls were with Grandma and Grandpa yesterday and they reported an awesome day – having had a completely GF weekend.  So we’ll see how week two comes along.

On a few other notes, for Thanksgiving, I made a beautiful scalloped oyster dish – recipe originally from bff Steph and adopted with love by my dad – but no one loved it here.  It might be one of those that you have to grow up with and/or you have to be an oyster lover (like Dad) to appreciate.

It turned out beautifully

I went Black Friday shopping at 1am on Friday with my sister, Whit.  I didn’t go on Thursday because I find it completely wrong that the stores open on Thanksgiving.  Since they had done so, by the time I was shopping, the stores were a ghost town, which was kinda nice – and I managed to find a lot of what I was looking for.

We also decorated the house for Christmas.  These pictures aren’t very good from my phone, but I wanted to show a few anyway.  I love this season – and we managed to keep family and Jesus’ birthday at the forefront.  We worked Santa in too – he’s the holiday celebration representative for children!

All sorts of fun family ornaments!
Santa and the nativity all together.  I made the little candle mat.  The girls told me they like all the homemade things I make.  Melt my heart!

Have a great day!

2 comments:

Faith said...

Re the crock pot---I have experimented both with a timer, and with a programmable crockpot. The timer works in a pinch--will turn off at whatever time you set. But the programmable crockpot? Totes amazeballs (to quote my sister). You tell it to cook at whatever temperature for however long, and then it will automatically turn to warm. That will ensure it's still ready when you get home, without being overcooked. If you use a crockpot a lot, as I do, you may want to give it a go.

WOM-MOMS said...

Awesome!