Month: August 2018

SCD treats and baking are typically full of multiple ingredients, almond flour, coconut flour, honey, baking soda, eggs, vanilla, coconut oil, cashews…almonds, other nuts, and more almonds!…but, what if you don’t want almonds, can’t eat almonds, and school lunches don’t allow for snacks including nuts?? Well, that my SCD friends is where fruit comes in! There are snacks that kids have always loved, fruit roll ups, fruit gummy snacks, and of course popsicles! SCD does not need to be difficult to be yummy and exciting, here are a few ideas~

Popsicles are such an easy treat and there are many, many ways to make them. You will need a few things to help make these SCD popsicles, well pop! First, find some fun popsicle molds. These can make all the difference in a child’s eyes! Here are some really fun molds to choose from including push up pops, colorful holders, animal popsicle holders, and the list keeps going! Don’t skip getting these as they will make your child and other children around cheer with excitement! When other children get excited for your child’s snacks, they become rather proud of their difference in food, obviously this occurs mainly for the younger kiddo…but, older children will be delighted (maybe more quietly) in the fact that treats look professional as well.

Any mixture of fruit is fantastic when blending with honey and lemon. My two children especially like Strawberry and Lemon, Henry specifically likes strawberry, blueberry, and lemon. I use a vita-mix which was given as a gift and it has been a life saver in grinding through seeds. Sur la Table has some smoking deals on them currently and although expensive, they last and are well worth it with making soups, smoothies, ice cream, popsicles, pancakes, you name it. Here is an example of the popsicles we make- ingredients and inspiration from our ‘food bible’ :), Against All Grain include:

1 pound of fresh organic strawberries (you can use frozen as well)

1 cup organic blueberries (again we use fresh organic blueberries, but you can use frozen as well)

1/2 cup of water

1/3 cup of fresh lemon

1/4 cup of honey

sprig of fresh mint if you like this twist, especially with strawberry and lemon mixture without the blueberry

Blend well and add to popsicle molds, freeze for 4 to 6 hours or until completely frozen. A great tip from Danielle Walker is to run the frozen popsicle under warm water until the popsicle loosens and comes out easily from the mold.

Feel free to add to this or combine different fruit such as watermelon, peach, and banana to create a more filling popsicle. I find simpler combinations taste the best. The strawberry lemonade combo in Danielle Walker’s cookbook has been a winning popsicle treat for my sons and their friends for a couple years now. Enjoy and have fun with those popsicle  molds!!

Next up, is an easy follow up recipe because the ingredients are just about the same! From Elena’s Pantry ~

The Strawberry Lemonade Fruit Roll up is just about the most fantastic lunch snack ever and will help big and little kids alike feel like they are back in snack action. VERY simple recipe, can’t get more easy…but, you have to be patient with how long it takes to make them unless you have a dehydrator. I do not, therefore I have to use my oven and my patience..

All you need is 1 pound of strawberries and 1 teaspoon of lemon zest…and….THAT’S IT!

Here are the instructions from Elena’s page:  Strawberry Lemonade Fruit Roll Ups

Will tell you, if you cook too long they will become crunchy, and if you keep in the oven not long enough, they become kinda smooshy. It may take you a couple go’s to get them exactly perfect. I do not cut them to perfection so Henry can have as much fruit roll up as possible, don’t want to cut the good stuff off! This is such a great roll up, I have had one of Henry’s friends tell me it was the best fruit roll up he had ever had!..he is my new favorite friend by the way ;).

Couple more fruity treats!!~

Next up is SORBET! I love sorbet, most people I know love sorbet..the only people that don’t love sorbet, are those that don’t like sweet, cold treats full of vibrant colors…and who really wants to hang out with those people anyway?? Ha, just kidding! You can use any fruit – we love raspberry, strawberry, and blueberry.

All you need:

1 pound of strawberries (or fruit of choice), hulled and halved,

1/4 cup of honey.

Cut and hull or de-seed if using something like melon and stick in the freezer until completely frozen.  Take your frozen fruit, add to a food processor and blend with a 1/4 cup honey. Blend well until it looks as though you have a very soft sorbet. Try to blend as much seed as possible. If concerned about the seeds you can always run it through a mesh strainer. Put your mixture in a freezer safe container and freeze around 1 to 2 hours. A warmed ice scream scoop cuts through the sorbet well when serving! Enjoy!!!

Lastly, are the Fruit Gummies! You will again need some fun gummy molds found here. They are fun to play around with and you can ask your kiddo what he/she likes the best to get them excited!

The recipe for Strawberry Fruit Gummies can be found here and it takes a little time so it is best when you have an hour or two to really get them done right. Henry prefers the fruit roll ups to these, but they are great for those kiddos that LOVE fruit snacks…and there are so many that do!

Hope you have fun with these recipes, they have been a great addition to our SCD life! Putting in the extra mile for these type of treats, I guarantee, will be received with a huge smile!!

I am lucky to have my family. Two sets of grandparents for our children, who although live in distant places from us, check in, show love, and from time to time we get to see. Both of my children know both sets of grandparents, Nomi, Popi, Grandma, and Granddad, each special in their own right. We are visiting Nomi and Popi this weekend and that is always a treat! They are extremely knowledgable in meats as they have a Wagyu cattle ranch, genetically the same as Kobe beef from Japan. Along with steaks that we can be certain are raised without hormones and grain free (grass fed only), the tomatoes and veggies are HOLY COW amazing. We sat down for dinner and we all ate the same thing, which in SCD world is always the best thing about home cooking, along with food tasting great. The preparation of meals can sometimes, or a lot of times feel tedious, but when with family it can be felt as ritualistic and healing. A happy gathering good for the soul. SCD can be looked at as this – “Treat each step in preparing the meal as a small ceremony. Wash the tomatoes, bell pepper, carrot, celery, and parsley as an act of purification…having the opportunity to sit with our family and friends and enjoy wonderful food is something precious.”  Home For the Soul – Anthony Lawlor.

Now I should preface that this dinner also had rice pasta made by Jovial found here. Rice, however, is NOT an SCD legal item, however after Henry has been on SCD for 2 years, his GI doc. and nutritionist gave him the go ahead with trying rice. This needs to be monitored by blood and calprotectin sampling to be sure the body adjusts well with new food. But, even without the rice pasta, the dinner would be just right and everyone would love it! The meat is grass fed, NY steak with only salt and pepper as every good steak should have. A nice broccoli, with salt and olive oil drizzle (add lemon if you like as it is sooo yummy), the Jovial farfalle (bows) with olive oil salt and pepper, generous on the salt because we do not use butter. And, best of all — at least, in my opinion salad. This salad was simple but perfect – Romaine lettuce, peeled and seeded tomatoes, avocado, radish, seedless English cucumber, shaved red onion and Radicchio.

Radicchio has a bitter and spicy taste and has been in existence since ancient times. Italian scientists recently tested radicchio and it’s content was amazing in it’s ability to have health benefit. On the benefit list:

Promotes weight loss

High in antioxidants

Promotes bile production which in turn improves digestion

Helps limit Neuronal damage and increase Vitamin K for bone health

Neutralizes fre radicals and fights cell damage

Contains a substance called inulin that helps regulate blood sugar levels

Aids in digestion and colon cleansing. Used to fight intestinal worms and parasites

– Health Benefits of Radicchio, Organic Gardening News and Info, wordpress.com –

The salad dressing is a Nomi salad staple, 1/4 cup homemade red wine vinegar, adding 2 teaspoons of salt and 1 tablespoon of dried oregano. Leave the salt, oregano, and vinegar together to blend for five minutes. Then add 1/2 cup olive oil, shake well or whisk together and wha-la!, you have an amazing salad dressing that everyone will love.

We are blessed to have family around us, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, dogs, you name it! Food brings us together to feed the soul and forget about the rest..

Now on for DESSERT!!! Ice cream sandwiches …where do I start!? I have always remebered the creamy vanilla ice cream in between a perfect, chocolatey soft cookie on a warm summer day. Sitting, or more like bouncing around at the public pool along with other children who had ice cream melting all over their faces from their ice cream sandwiches. Kind of weird and disgusting to think we all swam in it, but none-the less.. It was the most popular summer treat as a child, so I had to attempt to give Henry this messy summer memory! SCD can be very frustrating, as we feel that treats and moments of being a child are taken away. The treats that create memories are what is missed and I have definitely felt this frustration. So let’s get some of those memories back shall we!

The idea came while making blondies. Henry was also eating vanilla ice cream at the time and the thought came…why not add the vanilla ice cream in between two blondies! It is pretty fantastic. Now, the taste is different from the ice cream sandwiches we grew up with, as all SCD baking is..let’s get real. But, remember we eat with our eyes AND taste buds, especially children and this is good on both fronts. So here we go with the recipes, vanilla ice cream first!

There are many SCD legal recipes that I love. The SCD legal vanilla ice cream that I like the best is in Danielle Walker’s cookbook – found here. The vanilla ice cream that Henry loves the most differs, most likely because it is the creamiest. Luckily, it is also the easiest I have made to date. The creamy texture comes from the cashew base. And it is extremely easy to work with, and therefore why it is the ice cream sandwiches’ best friend. The creamy vanilla recipe is out of the cookbook “N’Ice Cream” and it is also where I found a wonderful vanilla milkshake recipe which I listed a couple posts back. The cookbook has a lot of really fun recipes and it is worth adding to your collection. Find it here! The creamy vanilla ice cream Henry loves:

Very simply add 3/4 cup of cashews nuts in a medium bowl, fill with water and let sit overnight. Drain and rinse the cashews and add to your blender along with 1 full fat can of coconut milk (Trader Joe’s is great, no gums!). Add in 4 tablespoons (or more depending on taste) of honey, and lastly the recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of vanilla. I do not add one teaspoon because as I have mentioned, vanilla is one of those more is better. I go with about 1 tablespoon or use a vanilla bean and about 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Mix all of the ingredients in your blender until smooth and creamy. Add to your ice cream maker and follow instructions. Alternatively, if you do not have an ice cream maker, add to a bowl that will be safe in the freezer and freeze for around 3 or 4 hours. Mix well every 30 minutes until consistency desired forms.

Next are the blondies. By themselves they are just so good. I am a huge chocolate lover and although these do not include any chocolate, they give you a suspicious feeling that there may be some in them! The recipe is from Comfy Belly and is so good and easy! I then cut the blondies into longer rectangles after completely cooled, put a scoop or so of ice cream on one side, close it up with a blondie top, and there you have your ice cream sandwich!! Stick in the freezer for around 20 minutes to harden everything up to give that ice cream sandwich texture. Feel free to make into little ice cream bites, using the typical square blondies. And to be super fancy, you can use molds to help form the exact size and cut of the sandwich you like. Put your parchment paper surrounding the ice cream sandwiches and wrap them up for on the go. I am sure your kiddos (and the kid in you) will be filling up pools, lakes, and oceans with ice cream filled faces once again!!

Enjoy your time with family and friends. This diet can be very time consuming and overwhelming, but there are also moments of clarity when food is seen as what it should be, something to make you feel well and bring loved ones closer together at the table… or in the pool!

Keeping with the theme of holding on for dear life to the last few weeks of summer, my two boys have always enjoyed having two things growing up, toys sales and lemonade sales. Henry especially will sit out for hours yelling “Come Get Your Lemonade!” while dancing around and being excited for his customers to offer money for his magnificent drink. As early as he was in diapers, he would sit proudly in front of his freshly squeezed lemonade and happily pour a glass for $50 (give or take)… So, when the diagnosis came Henry had Crohn’s disease and we decided to embark on SCD, those memories and sales looked like they would be coming to an end because lemonade would not be lemonade without sugar! Lemon-water without the “ade” does not sell well.  Soon after deciding that this disease and diet was not going to run our lives into a doomed and depressing slump, I started looking around for lemonade without sugar. I didn’t have to look far for honey sweetened lemonade!! I was hopeful that it didn’t have that honey after taste and to my grateful surprise, it didn’t! This recipe is just perfect, although often times I add more honey or less lemon depending on the customer ;).  I add more honey more times than not, but again adjust yours to your liking. Here we go with ingredients:

1/2 cup to 3/4 cup of Honey depending on your liking..start with 1/2, you can always add more. 

1 cup of lemon juice- freshly squeezed. I get a work out using my hands, but by all means use an automatic press if you have one! One cup is the equivalent of around 6 or so full size lemons. We use organic lemons when in season, or really organic when I can actually get them to grow on our lemon tree.

4 1/2 cups of water

Easy process from there! Heat your water and honey in a saucepan over low heat just enough to dissolve your honey. Shouldn’t take long, around a minute or two. 

Add your freshly squeezed lemon juice to the water/honey mixture. Taste and add more honey if it is not sweet enough for your wonderful customers. 

Pour the mixture into a pitcher (glass preferrably) and add around 2 cups of ice, or whatever will fit the pitcher and chill your lemonade. 

I love adding mint and orange slices, allowing them to sit in the lemonade. It gives such a great taste and look! 

We recently had a lemonade sale and this lemonade became the talk of the neighborhood…in a good way, don’t worry.  We were sold out in a half an hour with 3 pitchers full!!! 

Enjoy your last warm weeks of summer, cooling off with your freshly squeezed honey lemonade, it will not disappoint!! 

Mint chip or in our case, mint without the chip recipe is again thanks to our ‘food bible’ Against All Grain.

When first starting the SCD diet with our family I was terrified that I would never make our waffle/pancake breakfast again. I wasn’t just dramatic, I really didn’t understand all the options out there with different flours. There is coconut flour, almond flour, cashew flour, pea flour, pecan flour… without sounding like I am in ‘Forrest Gump’ I will move on. The first few attempts were DISASTROUS. But, my family didn’t disown me and I kept trying because of it. The first pancakes I would like to discuss are Danielle Walker’s, Against All Grain waffles. Her cook book  “Against All Grain”has been what I have termed the bible of my sanity. In this book you will find a waffle recipe using cashews, which I have used numerous times and they taste AMAZING. The texture is not crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside like wheat flour gives, but the taste is pretty great. I am not using this recipe as a step by step but I suggest you giving it a try as it is one excellent breakfast. You can find the recipe here: https://againstallgrain.com/2012/06/21/grain-free-waffles/   HOWEVER!….this recipe is unlike the one in her cookbook because it leaves out….VANILLA. By now you may have noticed I love vanilla, so you really should add it. 1/2 tsp she notes, but I would go for a full tablespoon. Also, the cook book is 1/2 cup of coconut milk, not the 1/3 cup almond milk the online version posts which I prefer. I add all of these ingredients at once in the blender until smooth and add to the waffle maker on low heat.

1. 2 egg
2. 1/2 of a ripe, spotted banana (this is to ensure ripeness and less starch, very important for SCD
3. 1 Tablespoon of Coconut Flour
4. 2 Tablespoons of Almond Flour
5. 1 teaspoon of Vanilla

In order to make this:

1. Cup of blueberries frozen or fresh
2. 2 tablespoons of honey
3. Teaspoon of lemon
4. Splash of cold filtered water

~Here are some of our pictures that have come from these pancakes ~

I am starting out strong by sharing this recipe as this is a treat that we like to call…get ready for it – – COTTON CANDY bites. This, in our opinion, tastes so much like cotton candy because they have that true sugary taste (without the sugar of course) and just melt in your mouth after the initial crunch. They are the first cookie where Henry asked for more and more and more. Luckily, this recipe creates many as they go fast! Credit to “Baking for the Special Carbohydrate Diet”- Meringues

I have tried a few meringue recipes, but this seems to work the best for taste, crunch, and LOOK. Gotta have pretty food or kids and us big kids don’t find it as appealing. Meringues can be intimidating, but it is pretty simple as long as you’re not trying to make them on a rainy, humid day. Here we go!, ingredients:

1 teaspoon of lemon

1/4 cup of honey

1 to 2 teaspoons of vanilla (I like more!)

Candy thermometer

6 egg whites- stick them in the fridge for 30 min before whipping if time, if not I have done without this step and been fine because our eggs come straight from the fridge anyway.  (organic, pasture raised if you can)

~Set your oven to 200 degrees. ~

• Put your honey in a saucepan, don’t heat yet because it will only take a minute or two to get the honey’s temperature to 235.

• Put your 6 egg whites (making very sure that you do not have ANY yolk) and the teaspoon of lemon in the mixer. The lemon will stabilize your meringue. If you do not have lemon, white vinegar will also complete this process.

• Begin whipping the eggs until stiff peaks form at medium to high speed. Meanwhile, as you are waiting for the peaks to arrive, heat your honey to a boil on med/high heat until 235 degrees is achieved (use your candy thermometer), or if you don’t have one, heat for about 3 minutes.

• Remove from heat immediately and while continuing to whisk, slowly pour the honey into the eggs (drizzling it as close to the side of the mixer as possible). Add your vanilla. Whisk until smooth and glossy. Don’t over whip as the mixture can start to separate becoming less fluffy…nobody like a non- fluffy meringue!

• Fun part now! You can use a spoon, or pipe the meringue mixture on to two baking sheets lined with parchment. I find it easiest to pipe the mixture using icing bags with a star tip. I have used different sizes, so use the one you like the best. Play with size, but monstrous meringues have not worked well for me, as of course with two boys I have tried crazy shapes and sizes!

• Bake at 200 degrees for around 1 1/2 to 2 hours. The meringues will change to a darker color the longer you leave them in. If they are bigger go for the full 2 hours. Environment will play a part if it’s dry or humid in your area, so play with the time depending on this.

• Take out and immediately after they cool (just takes a couple minutes) put them in an AIRTIGHT container. This will be the key to keeping them crunchy.

ENJOY, these will go FAST!!!! Let me know if you and your family agree with our Cotton Candy opinion!

This milkshake is so yummy, I replaced coconut syrup and added honey to make it SCD legal along with additional avocodo to make it extra thick and to allow for more good fats! Don’t forget a full cup of ice to give it that true milkshake feel.