The Food Journey Continues

Wow...I can't believe it's been nearly two months since I posted.  I'm such a slacker.  Now, in my defense, I was a tad busy helping Preacher Man plan a huge Easter event, in addition to my usual stay-at-home-mommy-Feingold-following-have-to-cook-everything-in-the-universe-from-scratch gig.  So anyway, here I am. 

I promised to keep you updated on the Free Spirit's diet progress, so here is a long overdue report.  We've been on the Feingold Diet for eight months now.  She has improved by about 50 percent, which is awesome, and I am grateful for that.  The thing that baffled me, though, was the fact that we couldn't seem to get any consistent results.  I heard story after story of how people's kids mellowed out on Feingold.  There was a definite "before" and "after".  The Free Spirit couldn't get more than three good days in a row (and that only happened once).  And lately, she's been almost back to her pre-Feingold behavior (as I type this, she's flailing through the hallway at church shooting off a foam rocket and singing nonsense songs.  Luckily, we're the only ones here--but if we weren't, she'd still be doing that.) 

Enter The Doctor.  After much prayer, we had decided to take her to an allergist.  The trouble was, we didn't know how to go about finding one who was sympathetic to the Feingold program.  Many doctors are unfamiliar with the program, and others simply do not believe it works.  We had neither time nor patience for such nonsense. 

Thankfully, the Feingold association has a list of doctors, and I began to research them, still praying fervently.  The name of a certain doctor came up everywhere I looked.  We decided he was the one.

Long story short, The Doctor gave Free Spirit a skin prick test and drew some blood (I'm sure you can imagine how that went.  Think ADHD child with no impulse control being approached by a person with a needle).  The skin prick test showed that she was allergic to...deep breath...eggs, milk, wheat, corn, cashews, potatoes, walnuts and tuna. 

I was speechless.  Honestly, I did not expect ANY results from that test, because I had heard that sensitivities don't show up on allergy tests and I thought that was what was going on.  I thought, well, we have to get that test out of the way, and then we can move on to the next one.   But no, we have full blown allergy here.  And that was just the skin test.  The blood test, which comes back in about four weeks, is testing for 96 other foods to see if she is allergic to any of those.  Oh joy.,

So now the question becomes...what do I feed her?  Feingold allows most of the foods she's allergic to.  Allergy diets sometimes allow dyes and preservatives.  At this point, it seems I will be doing some Feingold/Allergy hybrid that I work out myself.  I did order a recipe book that looks promising.  It's called Allergy Friendly Food, and it seems to combine the best of both worlds.  No dyes, no preservatives,  no eggs, milk, wheat, corn, etc., etc., etc.  It's possible the doctor will give us a diet tailor made for Free Spirit when we return to discuss the results of the blood test, but until then, I have to feed her something.

Again...I'll keep you posted.

Snack Art

When Free Spirit was a baby, she was sugar free.  For snacks, we gave her carrot wheels and told her they were cookies.

Then a sweet little lady in the church nursery introduced her to The Cookie...and the obsession began.

The problem was further compounded by a grandmother with a Hershey bar.  And another grandmother with exotic Australian candies.  We were outnumbered.  The Sweet Tooth was born.

If left to her own devices, the Free Spirit would consume nothing but junk.  Which is why she isn't left to her own devices.  I'm on a never ending quest to get more fruits, veggies and meat into her.  (The meat thing is somewhat frustrating.  She wants to be a vet and refuses to eat "her patients".)  So I just bought her this book called Snack Art.  She can play with her food, which will hopefully get her mind off ice cream.  She made this:

And this:

And she actually ate them.  I'm happy...she's happy.  We have had to substitute ingredients once or twice when they weren't Feingold friendly, but it wasn't too hard.  All in all, five bucks well spent.

Food Paranoia

One of the advantages to being married to The Preacher Man is that he gets two weeks off at Christmas.  Although we spend a lot of time together working for the ministry, time to simply be a family is a treat, and we look forward to this little break.

There is only one problem.  He gets bored.  And then he gets weird.

This year, the weirdness has manifested itself in a vendetta against my food.

Case in point:  On Wednesday, I was making bread.  Since the Free Spirit started the Feingold Program, I have had to bake our bread from scratch.  Surely you've seen the gigantic loaves I've been making (if not, see here).  I found two bread makers at garage sales, and while I didn't care for the bullet-proof square loaves they turned out, I was pretty impressed with their dough-making setting, so now I just use them to mix the dough and I bake it in a normal bread pan in the oven.  I try to make two loaves at a time, because, as I'm sure I've discussed in earlier posts, I hate to cook.  So if I'm going to have to do it, I do it in bulk so it can be done less often.  

So on Wednesday I had made two lovely loaves of bread, one in my amazing silicone loaf pan, and the other in the new glass pan I'd just bought that day.  Since it was my first time using the glass pan, I hadn't learned yet how to adjust the baking time, so the loaf baked in that pan didn't get cooked through.

Preacher Man happened to wander into the kitchen.  When he saw the bread, he said, helpfully, "I don't think it's cooked all the way through."

"No, I don't think it is," I agreed.  My intention was to slice the bread and toast it, thereby finishing the cooking and salvaging what could have been a baking disaster.  Apparently, I should have said this out loud, and then perhaps Preacher Man would not have felt the need to rescue the bread.

I left the room for less than two minutes.  When I returned, Preacher Man was gone, and my under cooked loaf had been gutted.

Now, as I keep saying, I hate to cook.  I had just worked long and hard to make that bread.  And now it was mangled.  I stood in the middle of the kitchen making unintelligible sounds for several seconds, and then I sought out Preacher Man.

"Did you," I gasped, barely able to contain myself, "hollow out my bread?"

"Yes, I did."

"Why would you do that?"  I'm pretty sure I was hyperventilating by now.  Preacher Man is either extremely brave or he hasn't learned yet what I look like when I'm about to strangle him.

"It wasn't cooked all the way.  I scooped the insides out and they're on a cookie sheet in the oven."

And so they were.  A big mound of dough, right in the middle of my oven, now utterly useless for making sandwiches.  And of course, there was the equally useless hollowed out bread shell on my counter top.

I tossed them both into the wastebasket and banned him from the kitchen.

I should have posted guards.

The next day, he bought some trail mix.  Now, I like trail mix.  In fact, my very favorite is a brand I've only ever seen at Aldi called Southern Grove.  I will only eat the Dark Chocolate Cranberry flavor.   But that isn't the kind Preacher Man bought.  He bought an ordinary, run of the mill peanut and M&M trail mix.  Which I can't stand.

All of this would have been okay, since he bought a small bag that was only for himself...but when I left him alone in the kitchen, he proceeded to mix the inferior trail mix with my heavenly Dark Chocolate Cranberry!  Not a small bowl of mine mixed with his, mind you, but all of mine with all of his!

I think I handled the situation very well.  I said, quite diplomatically, "WHY DO YOU KEEP RUINING ALL THE FOOD?!"


To which he replied, "I thought you weren't going to eat that.  I'll buy you another one."  And then he backed out of the kitchen.

 This time, I'm installing an alarm.