1-2-3 Gluten Free

We tried out a new gluten free brand, 1-2-3 Gluten Free Inc.  This company is dedicated allergen-free & gluten free.  Their facilities are certified by the Gluten Free Certification Organization (GFCO), as well as, free of are peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, dairy, soy and casein.  They also are Kosher!

We tried their Bundt Pound Cake Mix.  My family loved it.  It actually is as simple as one, two, three.  We poured in the batter, added the ingredients, placed it in the oven.  Voilà!  Probably the easiest bundt cake I will ever make.  To avoid one problem we had - make sure your bundt cake dish is the right size, mine was too big.  The cook time was slightly longer than the packaging indicated - we went for an extra 15 minutes.

To make the cake special I added a chocolate ganache drizzle (or in my case chocolate ganache saturation), my man made some whip cream and we cut up strawberries.  It was amazing!

 

Happy Friday!!

This is for my sister.  I spent the day cleaning, while my man and the girls watched Lord of the Rings.  I might have blogged too.  And now, feeling the fatigue from scrubbing bathrooms, not to mention the permanent smell of bleach up my nose, I decided to relax and look up the msn.com news.  I know, I know, google shudders at the thought. 

 

When I was on msn.com tonight I saw this headline near the bottom of the home page:  Cute bunny balances stuff on his head

 

Needless to say I just had to click on this slide show - of which there are 18 photos.  Too freaking cute.  More than anything though - this bunny reminds me sooooo much of my med school sister - that I had to share.  So, even though we are states apart, and I will never, ever own a rabbit, I thought she would appreciate a post dedicated entirely to her, and her love of bunnies...

 

This bunny is talented.  :-)  And since the bunny is balancing food, we will pretend it is gluten-free food and that way it is okay to have on the blog.

http://now.msn.com/stuff-on-my-rabbit-tumblr-features-funny-photos

Happy Saturday Night!
Might have spent too much time with the bleach tonight!  Yikes.

Pamela Pancake Mix on Saturday!

Our Version of the
Pamela Pancake Mix Recipe:

• 2 Cups Pamela's Pancake Mix
• 2 Eggs
• 1 1/2 Cups Water
• 2 Tablespoons Oil
• 1 1/2 Tablespoons Vanilla*
• 1/4 Cup Sugar*

Directions:  Mix in electric mixer, cook medium heat till bubbles are solid, flip for one minute, done!

*We added the sugar and vanilla.  Sometimes I like to make it with Cinnamon too!  You might need to put in slightly more flour to determine your desired constancy.

We love to add bananas and maple syrup to our pancakes. It is a great Saturday meal, one we try to have every weekend.

Happy Saturday Afternoon!

 

Artisanal Gluten-Free Cupcakes

I have mentioned several times that I am now making cupcakes out of a new book.  I am not altering the recipes and I will not be placing the recipes online. 

I love this book and highly recommend it for a gluten free household!  The recipes all utilize a gluten free flour combination of brown rice flour, sorghum flour, corn starch, potato starch, potato flour and xanthan gum.  I find that the cook times accurate (something that is hard to find in gluten free recipes).  The recipes are well organized, easy to follow, and relatively fast to make.

This weekend I made the vanilla with chocolate frosting cupcake. (Page 45).  My family loved the vanilla cupcake with chocolate frosting.  It is one of the more standard cupcakes we have made.  By standard I mean no fillings, no candy ingredients, no fruit, no cookies or fancy frosting.  Of course, sometimes simplicity can be simply understated.  My family ate all 24-30 cupcakes over last night and this morning (I would know the exact number, except they kept disappearing as I made them).  Ramona wants her birthday cake made from this cake and frosting recipe.  My man actually asked me to make more (a high compliment from him).

On a Maffeoberry scale this book gets 5 out of 5 maffeoberries. 

Happy Saturday Morning!

The sun will come out tomorrow...

Or today. The sun is shining, the snow is melting, the kids feel great and are having a great time in the yard. I still feel a little burnt out from one week of snow days, followed by Ramona getting sick; however, I plan to bake out my frustrations tonight with some more Creme filled cupcakes. I have the semi sweet, heavy-whip frosting left over in my fridge... it needs a cupcake home.

For today I have a Beezus post.

Beezus learned early on the power of written word. Ever since learning how to write mom she had been able to aptly express her frustration with me. In fact, her first signs or letters were simply "mom" with an "x" through it when - I had managed to displease her. I have that sign saved, so I will post it when I find it. I guess my daughter is truly a child from the sixties ready to protest at the drop of a hat... or in her case, when she is told to take a time out. The apple did not fall far from the tree in this case. I have always been one to look for injustices that need protesting. Anyway...

Her most recent letter to me is below. I received this letter when she was grounded from the iPad for not going to bed nicely. She likes to stay up late into the night reading and I am under the silly impression she needs to get rest. So I wanted her to rest and told her she would lose iPad privileges if she did not go to bed. Well, she did not go to bed and spent two days without the iPad. You would have thought the end of the world had come to pass in our house.

I also got a note that said "Roses are red, violets are blue, I need the iPad and so do you."

Ha!

Have a great weekend!

Gluten Frustration

Today it is snowing!  What???

I was driving home today from Ramona's doctor appointment, with snow falling in swirls around me (because it is blizzarding in mid-April!!) and city trucks cleaning up tree branches broken from the storm last week, and my mind is digesting the conclusion of the our most recent visit to the hospital. 

Clutching the steering wheel and sighing to myself.  Today I feel like a mom with children diagnosed with Celaics.  Most days I just feel like a mom that bakes more than average.  Most days I feel like a mom that has her shit together and is taking names and kicking gluten ass. Most days I am making lists of new products, budgeting for our favorites.  Today I just feel a little beaten by a disease.  Today I feel like maybe it rules the house despite our best efforts.

We went into the doctor this Thursday after spending most the night up with Ramona sick.  My man and I were taking turns with her in the bathroom.  When I could not be with her, it was because I had to be with her younger brother who woke up when we walked back and forth outside his room.  Till 2am she was whimpering and I felt frustrated.  Like, geeze, if gluten was a person I would be taking my anger out with a baseball bat on gluten's butt.

Ramona has these stomach aches more frequently than I like to think about, and as a result, frequently misses school due to them.  This week she came home early from school on Wednesday morning.  I was very proud of our school - she complained about a tummy ache and they called immediately, saying they figured it might be Celiac related.  They did not play her symptoms down, they did not hesitate.

So, Wednesday morning I dropped everything to get her, because Ramona never complains about pain unless she is truly in it.  And usually it is only a matter of time before she vomits or needs the bathroom once she complains about a stomach ache.  I was more afraid she would be vomiting in class if I did not hustle.

She spent the day home, resting, in pain, not particularly hungry and then the night in the bathroom.

I had it.  Oh, hell.  I have had it.

I made another appointment with the doctor.  I decided this is it!  I am going in with guns blazing.  I am going to advocate.  I am going to demand new tests.  I am going to say that my kid does not need to be in pain.  That obviously this isn't gluten!  Obviously we missed something else!  This might not be the first appointment I went in complaining about these aches and pains. 

Sometimes I have to ask myself what I am hoping to walk away with, but deep down I know exactly what I want.  I have this illogical hope that this time someone will say, Oh, we missed this very easy to diagnose and cure no-big-deal-virus!  That is why her stomach hurts.  Here is your miracle prescription.  May you never have to see your kid lose sleep over gluten again.  This will pass.  Here is your clean bill of health.

Well, I love our doctor.  I takes time to find a doctor you truly like.  I find this especially true if there are any special needs involved.  Our doctor listens, she asks questions, she does not hesitate to run tests and takes our frustration seriously.  Then she always gives it to me straight (and delicately).

We have some new tests we are running, along with a general blood count panel.  But, it comes down to this is most likely cross contamination.  Sigh.  I did have bagels for a morning playgroup on Tuesday morning, but I thought I had cleaned up.   I told the doctor this and then I stressed to her that this seems like a HUGE reaction to what must have been a crumb I missed on the counter top.

As I am driving home I keep hearing Ramona's doctor say, "Ramona might be much more severely sensitive than her sister.  Had she not already been on a mostly gluten free diet she might have been very sick." 

It is not that it did not occur to me, it is not that this has not been said to me before, but today it just keeps playing over and over.  I remember when Ramona got sick in Mexico, we almost did not go to the Chichen Itza.  But we sucked it up, barely making it and then her sister got sick on the bus.  Everyone near them worried they had a flu and all I could think was nope, this is just Celiac kids vacationing.  Sigh, sigh double fracking sigh.

Time to be grateful:
My kids are relatively healthy most the time.
There is a cure, it is called no gluten for us.
Ramona is feeling better and spent a lot of the appointment laughing - including when she got her blood drawn.
They have nothing more serious.
They are happy.

And I am grateful and I can see that in the over all scheme of things we are okay.  Sometimes though we need to decompress, validate our feelings and just say out loud, this sucks.  Sometimes.


 

Still storming

This spring storm has really shut our city down. There have been power outages lasting for days, property damage, schools have been closed, trees have fallen over (onto houses, sidewalks and streets), tree branches have frozen and snapped off, tons of black ice is on the roads and sidewalks, police sirens have been the background noise most nights. It is storm chaos. This spring storm reminds me more of a winter storm. The city asked the residents to not clean up after the storm - worried about people becoming injured by falling branches.

The storm has taught me again how to be a South Dakotan.  Not because I had to use a hammer to chip the ice casing off which was encapsulating my car.  Not because I had to push my front door open against six inches of snow - in the month of April!  Not because of the ice covering my driveway and walkway my poor man has slipped on multiple times, or that the tree branches that have fallen or frozen to the ground!  But because of the sense of community and hospitality.  Friends, neighbors and strangers welcome those without power into their homes.  One set of neighbors came to our house to let us know our ducks got away, due to a tree branch breaking down the duck fence.  They actually sat with them to make sure they would not get far.

And of course everyone has a positive view on things.  One friend said well at least those spots in the yard with too much shade this year will have better grass coverage, another is relieved that although a tree branch fell on my home no one got hurt.  I could tell both friends felt the pain of watching their trees go as deeply as my man and I feel watching ours go.  A lot of us lost sleep listening for another snapping branch.  My man and I have been keeping positive as possible, though we admit that losing the tree that would have held the tree house this year was very sad to see.  My favorite tree is holding up as proudly as possible.  We still have the tire swing branch!  Yeah!

Needless to say this storm has made life interesting in my household. All the kids have been home since Wednesday this week.  We got a five day mini 'vacation'.  This means impromptu crafts, baking, movies and projects to keep the peace.  For the most part I have been shocked how well the week has gone... since I did not have time to prepare.

Ramona made special clothes pin clips to make butterfly snack bags for her class next week. This is something I have seen on Facebook and she apparently wants to try it out.  Beezus wants to get her autobiography project done for school, which gives her an excuse to harass me to let her on the computer. I had the girls clean their room and they actually did! Plus we finished Voyager up. Beezus was in tears, because she was sad for the series to end.  We hit an open house play date hosted by a good friend of ours.  What a great idea and way to get out of the house and see other friends for a while.  My favorite part was when all the kids had broken off into tiny groups to play different board games.  We brought over the movie Madagascar 3 and the kids huddled in the movie room to watch.  back at home the girls got to play in the snow (finally there is enough to make something out of - and it is soft and fluffy).  We had them stay away from the house and the trees and they made gigantic snow balls.

Baking during the storm:

We made a new muffin recipe peanut butter and jelly muffins.  Make sure to have the jelly in them; otherwise, they come out a bit dry.  We made our old favorite red velvet cupcakes.  I tried out a new recipe from the cupcake cookbook my sister got me a year ago Artisanal Gluten-Free Cupcakes.   We made the Boston Creme Cupcakes (pg 163). This is the first time we attempted a cupcake with filling.  There were three components to the cupcake - the cupcake itself, the custard filling and the chocolate ganache icing.  Patting myself on the back for trying something complicated with three kids home!  ;-)  I brought a few to the open house play date for my friends to try - and they liked them (important sometimes to get adult approval - though kids are more painfully honest).  Beezus was quite found of the custard (she kept sneaking into the kitchen to get some when I was not looking), and my man liked the cupcakes themselves (he also kept sneaking into the kitchen and grabbing unfilled and iced cupcakes), and Ramona could have cared less for these in general (she has different tastes).  Ramona likes the Pamela Mix Chocolate Cupcakes with milk instead of water and chocolate chips.  Ah well, to each their own.  Speaking of Pamela's Products we also made Chocolate Chunk Cookies with our Pamela Mix that we get sent as subscription order from amazon.com every three months.  Bulk ordering keeps down the costs and scheduled delivery means less shopping time.  I LOVE subscription ordering!

Two days left till my girls are back in school... feeling the kids at home burn.  Here are some photos from the last couple days.


Ramona helping baking.

Beezus said that the one cupcake with sprinkles that are round instead of stars could be a 'spirit bead' or as she said 'a spirit cupcake'.  The she explained the concept of a spirit bead to me, which I have in turn looked up for you: "As they created intricate geometric patterns out of thousands of tiny beads, Native American women would intentionally string a wrong-colored bead into an otherwise perfect pattern. This was called the spirit bead. The spirit bead was placed in an otherwise flawless piece of art as an act of humility, a way of recognizing the inherent imperfection of humans. Presuming that a human could create something perfect would be an affront to the true perfection of the gods."

Red Velvet Cupcake with a ton of cream cheese frosting,
and gold stars for decoration.

Happy Weekend!
We will be cleaning up branches in the backyard!