Wednesday, January 14, 2009

GFCF Tortillas and Lasagna Noodles and GREAT granola recipe

For those readers who are or have their children on a Gluten and/or Casein Free (GFCF) diet, here are a couple of products worth trying.


The first is the brown rice tortillas from Food for Life. I thought tortillas were long gone from my son's diet. But in our last order from Azure Standard, I decided to try the brown rice tortillas from Food for Life. I was skeptical but we'd give it a try. We planned a taco night and first of all, my son was thrilled to be eating tortillas like everyone else and he liked it. I am not sure whether he liked it because of the taste or for the simple fact that he was eating a tortilla like the rest of us. In any event, he ate it. Win win.


The next item was Tinkyada's Brown Rice Lasagna Noodles. I prepared it like I would normal lasagna, just sans cheese. We (my husband, daughter and I) just sprinkled some raw cheddar cheese on top and it was great. My son loved 1) being able to again eat what everyone else was eating and 2) It was really good. I could not tell the difference. So, if you even are wanting to just reduce the amount of whole wheat you get in your diet, this could be another alternative too!

Lastly, I was watching Good Morning America on New Year's day and they had a homemade granola recipe that looked really good. I went to their site here and got the recipe. I was really disappointed that they call for Canola oil. If you read my blog regularly you know Canola oil DOES have trans fats but in a sneaky kind of way. But I think trans fats are trans fats so we don't do Canola oil. I substituted coconut oil which is our favorite here. I worked off of that recipe and used the oats, ground flax, shredded coconut, almonds and sunflower seeds. I did add the peanut butter and honey mixed with the oil. It is DELISH! Perfect way to start the morning with some great protein, carbs and good fats not to mention fiber. To make it GFCF compliant I used GFCF Oats and I skipped the peanut butter for my son's, I think he is reactive to peanut butter. But, he also loves it so an all around hit. Hopefully you will try it and let me know what you think. Our nutritionist really cautions the use of regular breakfast cereals. Most have mainly carbs and not enough protein and healthy fat and the overwhelming carb load does funny things to your blood sugar. The recipes also said you could add in dried fruits but if you have a child with Autism (or without for that matter) who struggles with yeast, I would avoid that. Dried fruit will feed yeast which is the last thing you want to do.

We have our monthly phone consult with Dr. Woeller coming up and if we do another OAT test and my son still has high yeast and bacteria, we may be switching to the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) which basically starves both of those organisms. Now that won't be so great from the standpoint of that 20 pound bag of rice flour I just bought last month from Azure but oh well....So, in the meantime I will be reading Breaking The Vicious Cycle and finishing Julie Matthew's book and learning as much as I can about the switch from GFCF to SCD. Could be interesting but many, many people (even without Autism) have reported great things by eliminating lots of the yeast and bacteria feeding foods until the body can heal and then slowly adding them back. I think my son has had a lot of healing in just the last 6 months but yeast and bacteria, once they take hold, can be tenacious and can take years to resolve. So maybe I will have a whole new arena to blog on coming soon.

BTW - Kombucha is bottled and I have 2 more batches brewing. I was disappointed to find that one gallon didn't go as far as I'd like. I only got 8 bottles out of it! I hadn't sat down to do the math but still, I thought I would get more than that. But, we've got SCOBYs growing and hopefully soon we will be producing enough to drink daily plus give away to friends (who save their bottles of course, lol). Stay tuned for more kombucha fermenting pix!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Shari Goodman said...

Glad to hear about the tortillas. I had ordered those but they didn't show up in my order. Also, I had Tate on the SCD diet for almost a year. It was hard but in the end, it made him allergic to almonds and some fruits because the diet was so limited. You can basically only cook with almond flour. My DAN dr also told me to not do the yogurt since it is with milk. I loved the book though and use it all the time. I have the yogurt maker and use it for our family. Tate probably has some yeast but the bacteria is gone. Will it ever end???? I took him out of hab Mon, Wed and Fri so we should have some park days!