Safe mayo! No, really!

I have spent a while trying to figure out a way to make truly safe mayonnaise.

There is a risk of salmonella poisoning with any raw egg product. It wasn't always this way; salmonella used to occur only in fresh eggs that were not cooked right away. However, today, salmonella is getting into the eggs before they're even cracked.

People who are immune compromised (many children with autism, or anyone with an autoimmune disease) are going to have a harder time fighting off a salmonella infection, too.

There are a couple of ways I'd researched to make a safe mayonnaise. One was using a cooked mayo recipe. However, in the cooked mayo recipe usually used by the Pecanbread members, the cooking does not kill salmonella -- the mixture does not get hot enough. I stuck a thermometer in it to be sure and it never got up to 150 degrees, which is the temperature necessary to kill salmonella. Not only that, the temperature must be maintained for 3.5 minutes, which is impossible without cooking the egg.

Another way to ensure safe mayo is to use PH test strips, and make sure that the PH is around 3.5. An acid environment kills salmonella.

(I had a citation for that one, I did, but it makes you sign up for this service now. I will give you the link anyway HERE should you choose to check it out).

But let's face it - none of those ways are really all that easy. I want easy! I want safe!

You could also buy pasteurized eggs. However, none of the stores near me carried them.

I was about to give up! I was so mad!

And then I spotted a carton of liquid egg whites at the supermarket.

Ingredients: Egg whites

I was intrigued. They were cheap, they were PASTEURIZED (*choir of angels*)

But would it work?

YES! YES! YES!

SAFE MAYONNAISE WITH PASTEURIZED EGG WHITES

1/4 cup egg white (egg white ONLY in the carton)
1/2 tsp ground mustard
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp vinegar
3/4 cup oil (approximate)
ear plugs (you can thank me later)

Dump the egg white, ground mustard, salt, and vinegar into your blender. Put your ear plugs on. Turn the blender on to HIGH and start adding the oil slowly. How slowly? Add it at a speed where you think you will possibly never ever be done with the mayo.

Keep adding it slowly, until the mixture starts to emulsify. If you look inside, at the beginning you will be able to see right to the bottom of the blender. Staring at the blade is kind of scary, so look away now and then.

You'll notice a difference in the sound as the mayo starts to glop together. Keep adding the oil slowly until it has glopped together to the point where you can't see the blade anymore - or if you can, it's intermittent.

Then stop the blender and you will have mayo! Safe mayo! Germ free mayo!

I know, awesome, right?

Keeps for about two weeks, but mine never lasts that long. You can make a second batch right after the first if you want, but give the blender 5-10 minutes to cool down. Running it at high speed warms things up and it could make your mayo end up a bit thinner than you'd like it.

Enjoy!

NOTE: MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT GET LIQUID EGGS. JUST THE EGG WHITES. Why? Because there's about a billion ingredients in liquid eggs, but egg whites are only whites. Huh. Why do they do that? See what this page says:

Liquid eggs are frozen in a blast freezer at -23°C. When thawed, whites and whole eggs are free-flowing, but freezing gelatinizes straight yolk. Therefore, yolk is combined with sugar, corn syrup, glycerin, phosphates or salt to ensure it stays fluid.

Ew.

So yeah, egg whites for the win!

An SCD birthday

I decided to try to make Clark chicken salad for dinner, since we are both so sick of chicken soup. When I got home, I tossed two thawed chicken breasts that I'd forgotten about into my trusty nonstick skillet along with about a cup of water.

I then grabbed the recipe for mayo from the Pecan Bread web site. Yes, you have to make that too.

It was a "cooked" recipe which made me feel slightly better, since you heat the yolks up just until they start to cook and then blend it with oil until it does its magical turn-into-mayo thing. Unfortunately I cooked it a little too long, due to the pan not being quite on the burner, which resulted in a scorched corner of the pan. In a panic to cool the pan quickly, I tried to run the edge under water and succeeded in adding a bit more water to the egg mixture. Whoops. I then stirred and stirred and the egg kind of un-cooked somehow, so it was OK and I dumped the mixture into the blender when I was satisfied.

I started blending, and tried not to get hit with little pieces of egg yolk as I added the oil in a thin stream. Clark stimmed a bit as his coping mechanism to deal with the loud noise, so he was rocking and humming for a little while. I really couldn't see what was going on in the blender, so I just kept blending and hoped for the best.

And in the end, I had mayo! Well, kind of. I'd take a photo, but I ran out of time. I'm going to make more though and I'll add a photo then.

It ended up creamy, but a bit less firm than I'd imagine mayo should be, and it unfortunately tasted too much like olive oil for my taste. I will definitely have to get some safflower oil.

I stuck my new mayo in the freezer to chill a bit and then cut up one of the chicken breasts for Clark. I popped that in the freezer on a paper plate as well for a few minutes, but Clark was pretty impatient and all that cooking had taken way longer than I'd figured. *sigh*

So I dumped a bunch of chicken on his plate and mixed about half of it with the mayo, and added salt and pepper. He said, "I like this!" but he says that with pretty much everything until he's at least three bites in.

I was trying to clean up when Clark said, "You can eat with me." I think. I get fuzzy on the phraseology sometimes, but I think he said that.

I said, "Well, I don't know what to eat. I don't want the crock pot soup, and I want to save the chicken for you. So I'll just sit here with you if that's OK." I took my cup of water and sat down across from him at our kitchen table.

He said, "We can share!"

My mouth fell open. He's never said that before. And then he said, "You need to get a fork."

I blinked, and went into the kitchen. I got one of our metal forks. He said, "No, a colored one."

I reached into the drawer with his reusable Ikea plastic forks and he said, "The yellow one. OK."

And I sat down with him and ate chicken salad. I got some more of the mayo and mixed it with the other half of the chicken on his plate and we ate and chatted about...oh, I don't know. Lately he's been such a motor mouth, said my husband, Jeffrey. Autistic kid, motor mouth? Does not compute. But yeah. Halfway through he didn't want it any more and asked me to put honey on it (I did). He then proclaimed he was done without a single bite of the chicken with the honey. Haha.

While he was finishing, Jeffrey said, "Your birthday is coming!" and Clark said a few of his standard responses, like Thanksgiving is coming, since he's gotten a little confused about Thanksgiving and his birthday, and that his birthday is November 27. But then Jeffrey said, "What do you get on your birthday?" and Clark covered his eyes with his hands and said, "You say it."

Jeffrey didn't know what Clark wanted him to say, so we both looked at him, and he whispered, "Say cake! Say cake for my birthday!"

We were so surprised. Then Jeffrey looked at me all crestfallen, thinking he couldn't have cake, but I just kind of blurted out, "I can do it."

Jeffrey said, "How?"

I said, "I have a recipe. For like these peanut butter brownies, I can use almond butter, we can test it." We're almost to stage 2, so I think we could do that.

At first Jeffrey didn't want to since we are still working on a variety of food for Clark to bring to school but then I said, "He could still bring them to school too," so he was sold. Yay!

Then Jeffrey said, "What else do you get for your birthday?" Clark looked confused. We told him, "Presents!" and Clark looked awed. Then he said he needed a new police car and a new garbage truck and a new dumpster for his birthday. A green dumpster.

We just looked at each other again. It's the first time he's ever told us anything that he actually wanted for his birthday.

Almond butter brownies. That's what I'm gonna make for him. Next week. And the other stuff? Well, we're just gonna have to see what we can do about that.

zzzzzzz...

As I write this, fatigue has settled behind my eyes, making it difficult to concentrate. The last few weeks on SCD have been a whirlwind.

Something shifted over the past few days, though.

I got home, and Clark was hungry, so I checked out the chicken soup that had been simmering in the crock pot all day. It didn't look right to me, so I let it go. I went into the fridge and brought out leftover chicken salad. I had cooked four pounds of chicken breasts a few days previously and set them in the fridge to chill.

This chicken salad, I have to say, is the food that seems the most normal to me from all the SCD foods we've been eating. Simple and unassuming, made with homemade mayo, I had shredded half the chicken by hand the day before, slowly. I then mixed it with a liberal amount of mayo, finishing it with a sprinkle of sea salt and a few turns of a pepper grinder.

It wasn't easy to get there, though, because I learned that making a delicate emulsification of mayo was, in fact, more delicate than I'd figured.

I added light tasting olive oil to my blender -- too fast. I was in a rush, and that was my fault. The mayo never took, and I ended up throwing an entire cup of precious, costly olive oil into the trash.

I yelled. I was angry. But my anger was not going to magically turn the mayo into anything other than a soupy mess. So I started over, again, and this time, I relaxed. No reason to get tense about it. It had to be done.

Things suddenly felt a bit more manageable, when before everything felt like an obligation. Clark ate it up after it was done, and asked for more. And when I tasted it...ahh. It was worth the trouble.

So Clark had his leftover chicken salad. When I finally got to really check the crock pot, everything was overcooked and burnt. I hadn't added enough chicken to the crock pot in the morning, in my haste to get out the door. This resulted in not enough liquid, and everything burned.

I threw it out with a sigh. But I wasn't upset this time. It was time to make Clark's birthday cake.

ALMOND BUTTER BROWNIES, STAGE TWO (EDITED TO ADD: THIS IS THE NEW VERSION.)

1 16 oz jar unsalted Trader Joe's almond butter
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup pasteurized egg whites (so you can lick the bowl! otherwise, two eggs will do)
1 tsp scd legal vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup honey (if you are not using vanilla, use 1/3 cup of honey

NOTE TO BLOG VISITORS: THIS IS THE OLD VERSION; I WOULDN'T MAKE THIS ONE. THERE IS FAR TOO MUCH HONEY IN THIS RECIPE.)

1 c almond butter
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 egg
1/2 tsp SCD legal vanilla
1/3 cup honey

Mix by hand (it will get thick). Using a spatula, scrape it out of the bowl into an 8" square pyrex dish that has been liberally oiled. Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes or until lightly browned.

STAGE ONE: Recipes

I will edit this as I go, and link to it in the sidebar. OK? OK.

The Pecanbread Food Stages Chart! if you're interested.

NOTE: HOW TO COOK VEGGIES

Veggies should be very soft. Yes, some people do cook carrots for four hours. In my experience, that hasn't been necessary. I boil large quantities of baby carrots usually for an hour, 90 minutes tops. I check them with a butter knife. If I can easily slice one with a butter knife while it's floating in the boiling water, they're done.

*********

CHICKEN SOUP (mostly from BTVC, EGG FREE)

Chicken legs and thighs, about 4 pounds or so
Ten peeled carrots or 1-2 pounds of baby carrots
1-2 onions
5-6 garlic cloves
4-5 stalks of celery

Get a big pot and fill it halfway with the chicken parts. Add peeled or baby carrots, chopped onion, garlic cloves, and celery. Fill pot with water until it almost covers the contents of the pot, but not quite as more water will cook out at the start.

Put a lid on it and simmer for 4 hours. You'll need to check it and add more water as it cooks. Take the meat off the bones, and throw away the onions, garlic, and celery on stage one because you can't eat it. On stage two you can leave the garlic in but you still have to throw away the other stuff.

After making the soup in this way, I added a teaspoon of sea salt and a teaspoon of sage. Next time I'll try adding the sage ahead of time, but spices sort of vanish when you cook something for four hours, so I'm not sure if it will make a difference. I ended up with a lot more chicken than necessary, so I separated out some of it to use for chicken salad later in the week.

************

SAFE MAYONNAISE WITH PASTEURIZED EGG WHITES

1/4 cup egg white (egg white ONLY in the carton)
1/2 tsp ground mustard
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp vinegar
3/4 cup oil (approximate)
ear plugs (you can thank me later)

Dump the egg white, ground mustard, salt, and vinegar into your blender. Put your ear plugs on. Turn the blender on to HIGH and start adding the oil slowly. How slowly? Add it at a speed where you think you will possibly never ever be done with the mayo.

Keep adding it slowly, until the mixture starts to emulsify. If you look inside, at the beginning you will be able to see right to the bottom of the blender. Staring at the blade is kind of scary, so look away now and then.

You'll notice a difference in the sound as the mayo starts to glop together. Keep adding the oil slowly until it has glopped together to the point where you can't see the blade anymore - or if you can, it's intermittent.

Then stop the blender and you will have mayo! Safe mayo! Germ free mayo!

I have successfully doubled this recipe in the blender, and now that's the only way I'll make it.

Keeps for a week in the fridge, as long as you always dip into it with clean utensils. Safety first!
**************

CARROT PANCAKES

1 1/2 cups well cooked baby carrots (water squeezed out, seriously)
4 eggs
1 tsp SCD legal vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon (you should test this as a food)
4 tsp honey (optional)
1/4 tsp sea salt

Mash up the carrots with the other ingredients until it's as smooth as you'd like, or you can puree it. Fry in a skillet with a small amount of oil.

Makes about 9 pancakes.

****************

VEGGIE MUFFINS

2 cups pureed fruit or veggies (water squeezed out, seriously)
4 eggs
4 tsp oil (coconut was recommended; I used olive)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
4 tsp honey (optional)
1/4 tsp sea salt

Mix together. Put in muffin tins with liners.

Bake at 400 for about 30 minutes. Makes 12.

******************

BANANA PANCAKES (multiple sources)

1 very ripe banana
1 egg

Mix, fry, eat.

******************

SALMON PATTIES

2 cans wild salmon, drained
5 eggs
1 tbsp lemon juice or vinegar

Mix, fry. It's not the best recipe, but it's OK when you have nothing else on hand. :)

************

Snoooore...cooking marathon

OK, so this week's marathon is a little spotty. I started Friday night, since I was supposed to be writing my next Wonder Woman script, but my right hand was bothering me due to a lot of typing at work.

So. I decided I would make some Stage One Meatloaf with the rest of the ground beef I had. I found the photo I posted of the last ones! I think I will change the name now to Porcupine Meatloaf.


The right side is before baking. I covered both sides with onions after sticking in all the garlic cloves.

By the way, I made the meatloaf without adding egg to it, and it turned out fine. It was a bit crumbly while warm, but after it was refrigerated it behaved like any other cold meatloaf. I will put the egg as optional in the recipes.

Since I didn't want to just have the oven going for one pan of something (Ha! Remember the old days, when you would just cook ONE dish at a time in the oven?), I also put in a pan of chicken in with garlic and onion.

Then Jeffrey and I watched a bunch of TV, the timer went off, and I forgot to go get the food until it had been in there probably 30 minutes or so longer than it should have been. Fortunately, just the onions on top were burned. Whew! I also took out chicken parts to make soup the next day.

Saturday, we headed out early. We stopped at Whole Foods for almond butter and shortening (I wanted to grab some of the spectrum stuff in case I wanted to experiment with it), but they were out of the 365 brand almond butter. We picked up a similar jar, which we thought was $9 but it was actually $14. That took about 10 minutes to straighten out, but straighten it out we did.

Next, we hit Costco. I picked up a bag of Tyson chicken breasts, a package of ground sirloin patties, a container of fresh cut pineapple, a large bag of onions, and five dozen eggs, so it was a light trip for us. But! I found one of those digital thermometers with a probe, which I will now be using since my yogurt thermometer has proven to be inaccurate. I tested it in boiling water and it registered boiling at 195 degrees. Augh!

We went back home, and I was trying to decide what to do, since we were going to run a few more errands but we had to have lunch first, and I didn't want to disrupt my planned cooking too much. So as soon as we got home, I put a large dish of pineapple into the oven for two hours. I shooed Jeffrey out the door to go to In-n-Out, and when he came back there was still an hour to go, so my planning wasn't really perfect. I dozed on the couch while my kitty Zack crawled into my lap, because that's really all you can do when you're pinned down by 14 pounds of feline.

It was somewhere in this time, when Jeffrey was putting receipts into the checkbook, when we realized we finally had enough money to buy a Wii.

This was a little bit unprecedented. We had planned to get a package deal at some point, but the package deal had unfortunately sold out. However, we knew our local comic shop had them, and they were only slightly exorbitantly priced there.

We pondered, considering the money we'd saved and the bills we had. We promised that we would send the tax refund directly to the credit card. And then we went out to see if they had any left.

They did not, but they said more were coming within an hour. So we went over to Target and got a couple of games and the extra controllers we needed, and then we went back to pick up the Wii. Whee!

Obviously this kind of shot half the afternoon. We knew we wouldn't even be able to open the thing until Clark went to bed anyway. As soon as I got home I started chicken soup, realizing I was out of celery when I was ready to cook. Oh well, no celery then.

We played with the Wii a little bit at night, and I made the unfortunate discovery that playing the games will aggravate my wrist. Well, considering how much writing and crap I have to do, it's probably a good thing. Also, the Resident Evil game is kind of disappointing. I've been a fan of them since the beginning, since nothing relaxes me like blowing the heads off of zombies, but interspersed in the games is a lot of suspense and a fair number of puzzles that you have to figure out and work through. I always appreciated that. And this game has no puzzles at all, and very little suspense. You even have unlimited handgun ammo, which also robs some of the tension. As fans of the other games will attest, there's nothing as nerve-wracking as exploring a new area while knowing you're down to your last 14 bullets.


Not that great.

Anyway! Next, I made a pan of almond butter brownies. I made them with the egg replacer recipe on Pecanbread due to a desire for more egg free recipes expressed by my readers! Don't say I never did nothin' for ya!

For the egg replacer, I omitted the vinegar and I should have omitted the baking soda that's already in the recipe, due to the fact that each egg replaced has a teaspoon of baking soda, but otherwise they were pretty decent. They were very cake-like but they held together pretty well once refrigerated. Plus, I got to lick the bowl, and that's almost worth the price of admission right there!

And that was Saturday. See how I'm not really getting that much done? Sigh. During Saturday night, I made an interesting discovery. You know how I was talking about peeling all that garlic? Well, the garlicky acids or whatever ended up physically burning my left index finger. Someone had warned me this could happen, but I was having a heck of a time wondering why cutting up a lemon was burning the crap out of my finger. It's not visible or anything, but anything acidy or tomato-ey is all WHOA OW.

On to Sunday! First I made mayo, and I cooled the mixture before putting it in the blender, but I still ended up ruining the mayo. After being really mad about it, I made another batch with REALLY cooled off cooked mayo, and that worked like a charm. So make sure you really cool off the cooked part before you make it! It will save you time, sanity, and whichever oil you deem to use in the mayo!

We then went to the regular grocery store for goat milk, sparking water, spinach, gelatic, squash, and decaf coffee. Ever since starting this, I've become pretty sensitive to caffeine, which wounds me greatly. Being a picky sort when it comes to coffee, I am secretly insisting that I must get a decaf version of each coffee that matches the caffeinated ones I have so that I can do half and half without sacrificing taste. So, I have two bags of Dunkin Donuts coffee, so I went out and got a bag of Dunkin Donuts decaf. Oh DD, when will you come to SoCal and make my life here complete? This former Midwestern girl misses you so. I hear they are coming, which is why I can now buy DD coffee at the grocery store, so I cannot wait!

Oh, and at the grocery store I bought spinach in bags, because I bought spinach at Smart-n-Final and it came in this 3-pound brick from Mexico:


A more appetizing brick, I have not seen. May be used for construction in any climate zone with permafrost.

Since it took approximately 1,024 years to thaw, I decided I would get the kind in bags despite the fact that the bags are slightly more expensive.

I came back home and did a bunch of dishes while Clark had lunch and Jeffrey went to In-n-Out. I started a pot of green beans to boil, and when Jeffrey came back I started ketchup. In order to have enough for the week, I use two huge cans of tomato juice and 1 cup of vinegar and let it boil forever all alone by its lonesome. I don't stir and stir anymore.

I then prepared another pan of chicken breasts and another pan of hamburgers, and those are in the oven now, but I forgot to set a timer so now I will have to guess when they are done. LOL.

Now I gotta get my yogurt started, and after the beans are done, I will be able to make two pans of egg bread. I'll also probably hard boil some eggs for breakfast next week.

I'm going to post about my yogurt making, I swear. Probably next post. With more photos! And stuff! See ya!

Thanksgiving

We're going over to visit with some very good friends this Thanksgiving. I told them not to worry about us, so this morning I have spent a lot of time cooking.

I promise some kind of photos. I promise.

We started off with some banana pancakes (one SCD ripe banana, one egg, mash it together with a fork, fry). Clark was really pleased with those and so far no diarrhea emergencies. Yay!

After that, I made a new batch of cooked mayo. I intended to get safflower oil, but that didn't work out, because it had added vitamin E and I wasn't sure if that was SCD legal. I'll have to look into that. I ended up getting some extremely light tasting olive oil, and that did the trick. It was very good!

Mixed that up, took a photo (I will post it later and then update this), and started in on some hamburger patties. I figured that if chicken salad was good, hamburger salad would be good too.

HAMBURGER SALAD (STAGE ONE)

1 pound beef patties or ground beef
1 whole red onion, cut into large pieces
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup SCD mayo
1 tsp olive oil

In my skillet, I tossed in a whole red onion, cut into quarters. At this stage onion is only for flavoring, so you don't eat it. If you're further along, chop it up finer. I also added some fresh peeled garlic. I sauted that in about a teaspoon of olive oil and then put three 1/3 pound ground sirloin patties into the microwave to thaw.

After they thawed, I put them in a sauce pan and started browning them. But wait, that's pan frying, which is a no-no, right? Well, not exactly. I do it kind of half and half.

I pan fry them until they're almost done (or at least halfway to done), but then I add about half a cup of water to the pan and put a lid on it. Now you're doing more of a steaming, boiling kind of thing. Turn the patties about every five minutes. Every time you turn them, check the water level and add enough so there's about 1/4 inch of water on the bottom at all times.

You'll end up cooking them in the water for probably 20-30 minutes that way. The liquid will reduce and will taste really yummy.

So that's that. Chop up the hamburgers and mix with the mayo (add more or less to taste). Yum.

Once that was prepared, I moved on to making some little veggie puree muffins.

This one I got off the Pecanbread Yahoo! group. Diane on the group posted the recipe, but she doesn't remember who came up with it. You can also use the batter like a pancake batter. I first tried the recipe as posted, but then I made a bunch of modifications, which are reflected below.

VEGGIE MUFFINS (STAGE ONE without vanilla; stage two with it. I think.)

2 cups pureed fruit or veggies (water squeezed out, seriously)
4 eggs
4 tsp oil (coconut was recommended; I used olive)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
4 tsp honey (optional)
1/4 tsp sea salt

Mix together. Put in muffin tins with liners.

Bake at 400 for about 30 minutes. Makes 12.

I made the first batch with a mix of leftover green beans pureed in the blender and some leftover cooked carrots, and they were really too wet, so I edited the above to reflect that you really need to squeeze the water out of the cooked veggies really really well. I also decreased the eggs. The original had four eggs and one cup of veggie puree. I made them that way at first, but I thought four eggs was just too much. Besides, we need to eat more veggies anyway, not more eggs.

My second batch is with carrots, and I made a half batch of the above recipe to test that. Hopefully they'll be better (I'll edit this again if they are). Clark loved the too-wet ones, though, so another winner. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy New Year! marathon cooking!

New Year's Eve was mostly uneventful. The husband and I settled down to watch a bunch of season 9 Seinfeld, which was a Merry Christmas to Us gift as a result of receiving gift cards. Whee!

Five minutes before midnight, we stood out on our balcony. We could hear a few people counting down, and then a shout of "Happy New Year!" which might be the cutest thing I've ever heard on New Year's. Then there were a lot of bangs, some of which were undoubtedly people firing guns into the air, because I live in a slightly ghetto neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Ah well.

So I kissed my hubby and we went to bed.

Earlier in the evening, I cooked two pans of chicken breasts in preparation for the marathon of New Year's day. So at least I'd done that.

My darling Jeffrey let me sleep in (wonder of wonders!) and cooked Clark some eggs for breakfast. Whew. I staggered out and started figuring out what I was going to need to get done.

First: ketchup. I've given up on my stir-and-stir-till-I-go-insane method and tossed my largest stock pot on the burner with a full can of Campbell's tomato juice and 1/2 a cup of vinegar in it. Forgot to add a little honey. Oh well! Put the lid on slightly askew and left it to simmer.

Next I made mayo. My first batch failed. Don't add the oil so fast, people! It is so not worth it! To make up for the failed batch, I made another one. And then my ears were starting to hurt from the blender. So Jeffrey held his hands over my ears while I made the third batch. Whatta guy. I'm going to buy earplugs and I will encourage you all to do the same.

At this point I checked the ketchup and it was done. I ran a load of dishes too.

Third, a double batch of almond butter brownies. I don't like a double batch in a 9 x 13 pan. I don't know why, but I don't like the thickness of them. So I used my 8 x 8 pan and put six foil and three paper cupcake liners in a muffin pan and did it that way. While they were baking, we started packing and looking for clothing to bring to Idaho. We realized we had to do some laundry. In went a load of clothes.

The muffin-like ones kind of burned a little but they were still edible. The 8 x 8 pan was fine. Hooray. Out they came to sit on the counter.

I started to mix up some chicken salad from the mayo. I should have been making egg bread at that point but I got a little sidetracked. By then it was lunchtime anyway, so Clark got food and Jeffrey went to In-n-Out while I got my act together. Since Clark finished off the jello we had, I made a half batch of jello for dinner and stuck that in the fridge. Clark helpfully told me that I'd forgotten to put the clothes in the dryer.

You know, it's bad enough when they start getting bossy. It's even worse when they're right.

He then told me that I'd forgotten to 'do the lint' on the dryer. He was also right about that. -_- OK, so it's clear he's fully recovered from the candy cane incident!

I used all the egg whites that I had left over from the mayo to make myself a sort of omelette out of cooked pineapple and almond butter and salt. It was weird. No, that is not really a recipe. No, I am not sharing it. However I did play with the pineapple and I figured out that baking it (I did so last night) works pretty good.

PINEAPPLE

Fresh pineapple spears or cut up yourself
Water
Pyrex dish

Put some water in the bottom of the Pyrex dish. Not too much. Cover the Pyrex dish and cook at 400 degrees for 2 hours.

I cooked it uncovered, but I wasn't thrilled by how dry the parts not under water looked. That's why I put that you should cover it, because I should have! I turned the parts halfway through. You don't have to do that. But you can if you want.

So. After eating we went out because we had to get travel bottles and soft sided coolers for our trip. We did that. OK. I got new jeans, yay! My other ones had a hole. By the crotch. And I couldn't find the patches that I'd used to patch all of my son's ripped pants. So I whined and complained and I got some clearance jeans as a result. Don't say complaining never gets you anything! :P

Home! We packed some more. I made two pans of egg bread. And then two more pans of egg bread. Clark is of course going out of his mind now because we are going to go on an AIRPLANE which in his mind is something like MEETING ELVIS should he have been born forty years earlier or so.

Then I hard boiled...11 eggs, and boiled more carrots, because I had run out.

Then I made a pan of hamburgers.

Got the monster to bed. He actually went to sleep. Hooray. I sat down and figured out most of my meals and exactly what I was going to carry on the plane. Got everything figured out reasonably, and also realized I should make some carrot pancakes. At least by then the carrots were done.

I made 15 carrot pancakes, and that was all I could make because the five dozen eggs I'd purchased were all gone, which signified the END of my cooking spree.

And here I am, done! Finally! And we get up at 4 a.m. so...I guess I'd better take a shower and get to bed soonish.

I am going to reorganize my recipes for YOU! Soon!

See ya next week. :)

Poor planning

I was determined to have a few marathon cooking sessions over this weekend so that I could concentrate on the rest of the week with a minimum of distraction.

So! Into the kitchen went I on Saturday at about 11 a.m. The morning was spent grabbing a few essentials, including a few new canning jars, hamburgers, chicken breasts, and such.

Two batches went into one of my newly purchased Kerr jars. Hooray for mayo!

All did not go according to plan, however. I had some trouble separating the yolks from the whites and ended up wasting an egg or two that way. Since mayo requires yolks only, I ended up with a bunch of whites.

Self, thought I, I will try to make meringues.

So I whipped up the egg whites, added less honey due to the immense amount in the recipe from the Pecanbread site, a little vanilla, and I had a shiny fluffy mass of meringue. Yay.

I spooned it into a large Ziploc bag and cut the corner off to pipe them into little piles of what looked like white angel poop, for I am fancy.

And then I set the oven at around 200 degrees, and stuck them in there.

I fed Clark my last hamburger for lunch and there was no more leftover food, which meant there was nothing for me to eat. I made a batch of ketchup and got that packaged up in my second Kerr jar. Two hours later, at 1 p.m., I checked the meringues. They were not dried out.

I took a little nap. At 2 p.m., they were still not done. Finally I jacked up the heat on the oven to 300 and 20 minutes later, they were closer to done, but not really, so my first batch of meringues was not a success at all.

I was also in a low blood sugar rage and nobody wanted to be around me. I scraped up some of the meringue substance and ate it off the sheet, and perked up. I fed a few to Clark who thought they were the bees knees. Guess I'll have to try those again sometime.

I tossed a pan of hamburgers and a pan of chicken into the oven. Those were done at around 3:15, and I finally got to have lunch along with my migraine. Boo.

And that was my Saturday disaster. *sigh* At least Clark got to have chicken salad for dinner, which he loves.

On to Sunday!

I made Clark and I carrot pancakes for breakfast.



Clark was very happy to polish off, oh, nine of them or so. And then I told him he couldn't have any more so I could eat something. Sheesh.


No mother, he's not starving. I swear.

We then went to Ikea, which was buckets of fun as usual. I got a $2 frying pan, a $5 package of food storage containers, and Swedish coffee. Oh, you Swedes. I love your sense of style, your commitment to environmental responsibility, and your sassy food choices. Jeffrey picked up some Christmas gifts for Clark on the sly. Clark loves their little wood train sets.

Then, home again. I was all about soup today. I had put some bags of chicken parts in the fridge to thaw. Jeffrey informed me in the morning that one of them had sprung a leak. Why not, I love salmonella in the morning.

Anyway, I put on a big ol' pot of chicken soup to boil. Then I decided to play with butternut squash. Jeffrey had oh so helpfully peeled a big one for me.

So I put four pounds of butternut squash, about 1 1/2 sweet onions, and 1 pound of peeled and cored apples chopped up in a soup pan. I added 10 cups of water.

Then I sat down and cried as every muscle in my right arm was hurting from chopping up all of that. Whee. Hey, at least my wrist wasn't too bad, which was a miracle.

I simmered the squash soup for about an hour and a half. Then I pulled out every bit of the onion and processed the soup through my blender in batches.

The first batch had about half the squash and all of the apples. I added 1/2 tsp of ginger and 1/2 tsp of salt to that batch and ate that with Clark.

Too much ginger! Clark didn't like it. Oh well.

The second batch, which was the rest of the squash, I processed with 1/4 tsp ginger, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and 1/4 tsp salt. This tasted better, but still a bit bland. Also the onions were a bit too strong I think.

So I will work on that more before I post a recipe. It was great fun and delicious anyway. Hooray.

Next I made two pans of egg bread, and they really weren't dried out enough, but oh well. Into the baggies they went for Clark's lunch tomorrow.

I then made a pan of almond butter brownies. I seem to be tolerating them now, yay! I ate three of them and nothing bad happened. I had stopped at Whole Foods to get another jar of almond butter, and they were totally out of the cheap brand. That made me mad, until I opened the pantry and saw a jar that I had apparently forgotten existed. Um. Yay!

And then my chicken soup was done at about 5 p.m. I let it sit on the stove until 7, and separated out the chicken and I still burned my fingers. Blah.

But I had a great haul of food. I have a biggish container of squash soup, two big containers of chicken soup, a small amount of chicken salad that I'll be eating at lunch today, some almond butter brownies, egg bread, and I still have a decent amount of mayo and ketchup to last me the week.

I did a bunch of other stuff over the weekend and still somehow feel relaxed. It's interesting. For the butternut squash soup, I peeled two apples. It took me like five seconds and I didn't even think about it being odd or too much work. Huh. Old me would have definitely thought it was a pain. I probably would have whined about it too. Hmm.

So that is a rundown of another SCD weekend for you. :)

Weekend cooking -- chicken soup and more

You will save yourself a lot of sanity if you cook a lot on the weekends. And boy, did I cook.

On Saturday I made a huge pot of chicken soup. The recipe is mentioned in the book Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

CHICKEN SOUP

Chicken legs and thighs, about 4 pounds or so
Ten peeled carrots or 1-2 pounds of baby carrots
1-2 onions
garlic cloves
4-5 stalks of celery

Get a big pot and fill it halfway with the chicken parts. Add peeled or baby carrots, chopped onion, garlic cloves, and celery. Fill pot with water until it almost covers the contents of the pot, but not quite as more water will cook out at the start.

Put a lid on it and simmer for 4 hours. You'll need to check it and add more water as it cooks.

After making the soup in this way, I added a teaspoon of sea salt and a teaspoon of sage. Next time I'll try adding the sage ahead of time, but spices sort of vanish when you cook something for four hours, so I'm not sure if it will make a difference. I ended up with a lot more chicken than necessary, so I separated out some of it to use for chicken salad later in the week.

On Sunday, I did some more marathon cooking. First, I cooked three chicken breasts in the oven with olive oil, salt, sage, onion and garlic. I let it cool, shredded it, and put it in the freezer. It was yummy, and I know, because I ate some out of the pan. :) I would have cooked more but that was all the chicken breasts I had left.

I also cooked a pan of hamburgers with the chicken. I get the frozen ground sirloin patties at Costco. They are a very good deal and don't have additives. I put them on a cookie sheet lined with foil and put garlic and onion on top of them. I discarded the onion pieces after cooking because you can't eat them until later on in the diet.

Then I reduced the heat in the oven and made another pan of almond butter brownies for Clark's lunches. I ate one, to see if it would bother me. It didn't seem to, but I didn't feel that wonderful after eating it, either.

Next was two pans of egg bread. I cut that up and stowed it in baggies for Clark's lunches next week.

I also made mayo! Hey, remember how I promised you a photo? Well here it is! Don't say I never gave you nothin'.



Hopefully it won't taste sucky. I used light olive oil, but I fear this light oil isn't as light as the other light olive oil I got before. We'll see.

And then after that, I boiled up two pounds of baby carrots for lunches, too. Then I packaged up some chicken soup and baby carrots for my lunch on Monday.

I want to make ketchup again but I don't have any jars. Oh, if you want to buy individual Ball jars or something like it, go to a craft store like Michael's. I can't use a whole case, so I think I will go there and grab a couple for stuff like this.

Candy canes are evil

I wish I could say that everything leveled out after Clark got an illegal, but it got worse before it got better.

While Clark's behavior started to improve and he started to pull out of the candy cane-induced regression, his health got worse.

He was almost over a cold at the time he ate that candy cane. On Christmas Eve, his nose started running a lot more. On Christmas Day he had a terrible hacking cough.

He was coughing less yesterday, and I think he's past the worst of it, but SHEESH. Everything that could go wrong did. My mom nagged me about giving him cough syrup, but when I looked at the Delsym left over from our pre-SCD days, it had high fructose corn syrup in it. Um, NO. I gave him a spoonful of honey instead.

I was pretty busy through the holiday. I was cooking beef patties or chicken breasts most days. I made mayo. I made meringues, which Clark was very happy to eat, even though I haven't figured out how to make them right yet. And then they don't stay crispy. I don't even know how to store them.

Regardless, we had a fun Christmas Day. We went to the Los Angeles Zoo the day after Christmas, and Clark had a good time there too. He was very happy to see grandma and grandpa and Uncle Bobby and Auntie Cathy.

They are heading home now. I do miss my parents sometimes. Sigh.

I stayed busy. I wrote an audio script on Christmas Day, because as a writer, there is something wrong with your brain where you write when you have to, not when you want to. I'm supposed to get an IUD tomorrow and I'm kind of nervous about it. And next week we're flying to Idaho and I'm REALLY nervous about that.

I also e-mailed a compounding pharmacy near me to ask if they could make my sulfasalazine into a pill that's not loaded with corn starch.

I came across the most interesting little snippet in the Wikipedia entry for sulfasalazine:

Because sulfasalazine and its metabolite 5-ASA are poorly absorbed into the bloodstream, it is surprising that the drug is effective against symptoms outside of the intestine. One possible explanation is that, given that ulcerative colitis produces arthritic symptoms, it is possible that, in some cases, the arthritic symptoms are actually a product of unrecognized ulcerative colitis, which is effectively treated with sulfazalazine.

Fascinating. Especially considering that I have NO SYMPTOMS of gut dysfunction. None! And yet, the SCD clearly has an effect on me. The drugs that work for people with UC are working for my rheumatoid arthritis as well.

So for all those people out there thinking, "But I don't have any problems with food!" I posted this for you.

An imperfect Christmas

We had a lovely holiday, and the gluten-free girl inspired me to post about my imperfect Christmas.

We were not prepared for the holiday, really. December is a very busy month for Pendant Audio most years, and this year was no exception. There is usually a fair amount of rearranging so that none of our productions are released during the week of Christmas as well.

We were also preparing for our trip to Idaho, and my parents were flying in for Christmas as well. So by the 23rd, I was really at peace with the whole situation.

We managed to shop for Clark's Christmas gifts by having a friendly neighborhood babysitter for one evening. That went well. But after that...eh.

On December 24, we started early, planning on meeting with my family later. My husband had a brilliant idea and thought it would be cute to take Clark to the mall and explain to him that he should choose a gift for each of us.

We got to the mall at around 10 a.m. Clark had a picture with the mall Santa and was very hyper as a result. So I decided to take him around the mall first. Daddy waited in the food court. Clark insisted we go up the escalator.

While we were going up, I asked him, "What kind of present do you want to get for Daddy?" Clark replied, "A yellow one!" I said, "No, well..." and he said, "A blue one?" And then he immediately said, "Ornaments!" but I wasn't sure if he meant for Daddy or if he was just exclaiming about the mall decorations. Undeterred (I mean, he's got autism, which kind of instills a remarkable patience in you about certain things), I went into Hallmark.

He looked at some of the ornaments, I told him not to grab, and I pointed out some of the boxes. I found a Superman ornament and said, "Clark, look! Who's that?"

"Superman!" he said, immediately.

"Do you want to get that for dad--"

"YES!"

OK then. :) I then found a sparkly star (Clark liked that for Daddy too) and a yellow gift bag (also approved).

I then went to American Eagle and picked out a nice shirt for my hubby, because we had a price limit on gifts and because I knew he was sick of all of his shirts.

We returned to the food court, and Daddy took Clark to pick out a gift for me. We then returned home.

My parents ended up not coming over on Christmas Eve, but that was fine. I made mayo and chicken. My sister was sick, and her car was in the shop, and my parents were at her place, so they decided to meet up with us on Christmas day.

That night, I went out on the balcony with my husband and we talked and I drank wine and felt generally celebratory. I poured some wine on the ground for the gods and told the world that this would be our successful year, and I meant it. :)

Christmas Day came, and Clark was VERY EXCITED about it, for the first time ever! This was the first year he really got it. And he got Tinker Toys and Frosty and Rudolph DVDs and train pieces for his train sets and some books.

Then it was time for me and Jeffrey to open our gifts from Clark and to each other. Clark had chosen a bright red glass drinking glass for me from Pottery Barn. Apparently he at first suggestion "a yellow present" was the same for me, too. :)

Then my husband gave me a beautiful Teavana tetsubin teapot. I was absolutely stunned...and mad that he disregarded our budget. -_- But he said he just had to get it for me. I love it of course!

My parents came over later, and we opened gifts from them. My sister and mother got $5 gifts and handmade jewelry, my dad got a book set about bars and wines, and my brother got a set of game pens (etch a sketch, operation). They were a big hit. Hooray for creative budgeting. Costco is a wonderful place.

I got some nice things as well -- a nice top, a sweater, $20 for Starbucks, earrings, and money (which will go into the Wii fund).

My stove was scrubbed, but I didn't dust or vacuum. My bathroom was clean, my bedroom wasn't. But we had a very Merry Christmas anyway! :)

Egg drama

So, according to a certain egg supplier's web site, pasteurizing eggs does not kill salmonella.

From Eggology:

Pasteurization heats the egg to approximately 130˚F (any higher and the egg would cook), but heat won’t kill Salmonella until approximately 174˚F.

This is, as you might have suspected, not entirely true. First off, as I said in my previous post, salmonella dies when a product is heated to 150 degrees for 3.5 minutes. I also provided information in that post that tells us that salmonella does not only come from outside the hen.

This other site says that heating the eggs to 134 degrees for 3.5 minutes kills salmonella, too. And their eggs aren't cooking at that temperature either...so...

(feel free to insert your own rendition of, "Liar, liar, pants on fire...")

The USDA web site assures us, in fact, that any pasteurized egg product bearing the USDA seal has actually been pasteurized and all the salmonella beasties that might have been in it are, in fact, deceased. They have ceased to be! They are ex-salmonella!

Salmonella? Dead. Yes, dead.

Now, of course, that does not mean that salmonella cannot grow in a previously pasteurized product. There's still a chance that the product could become contaminated from something else -- like if you cut your rare hamburger in half and dip the knife in your newly made mayo. So, you still have to follow normal food safety precautions -- always use clean utensils, and pitch it after a week.

But we don't have to be slavishly brand loyal in order to stay safe from salmonella -- much as companies might wish it to be otherwise.

Merry Christmas!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. We did! Although I really need to make mayo. Sometimes I can't even look at another piece of plain chicken with olive oil. LOL.

I wanted to talk a little bit about prep time when it comes to cooking. I've been getting a little more adventurous in the kitchen, and I've realized the value of prep.

You know how when you watch a cooking show, everything is measured out ahead of time in cute little bowls? Veggies are chopped and ready to go, and eggs are pre-broken?

Well I learned there's a reason for that! :)

For some recipes, you do need to do actual prep. It makes the cooking process go much more smoothly. I can't even tell you the times I was sweating that I wouldn't have enough time to chop up the chicken before the onions burned. It was a very "duh!" moment for me.

But don't worry! It's not hard, and I promise you don't need a cute little set of matchy bowls to do it. So if a recipe requires prep, I will describe the best way to go about it.

Plus I have a willing sous chef... my son! His auntie Cathy bought him his very own Spongebob apron for Christmas, so he's ready to go in the kitchen this year!

We'll talk again soon. Promise. :)

Cooking marathon, epsom salt baths, and dripping goat yogurt

OK, so I haven't posted in WAY too long. I was waiting, you see. I wanted to regale you with tales of yogurt making, but I don't have my pictures ready yet. I apologize.

This weekend, though, of course I had another cooking marathon. It was mostly fun, and Saturday was spent making a whole bunch of chicken soup, along with two big pans of chicken breasts. I then threw in a Pyrex dish full of pineapple, and I cooked that for two hours. An hour in, I tossed in six 1/3 pound ground sirloin patties from Costco. While all of that was going on, I boiled a big pot of carrots. On Sunday I made two batches of egg bread so Clark would be set for school, too.

So I was pretty set on meats for the week.

I also made a double batch of ketchup, and ruined the mayo yet again. But reader Kim chimed in and told me that I need to COOL it before adding it to the blender. Perhaps I will stop having so many problems if I do that. Meh. Thanks for the tip, Kim!

So, the yogurt was a success, even though I fretted over it for 24 hours. I will post the process once I have the photos. I chilled it, put it in the fridge, and tasted it.

OK, so I wasn't exactly thrilled. It tasted like cottage cheese and lemon juice, except not as good. I put some honey on it but I didn't much like that. Strangely, I liked mixing it with ketchup better.

So I went ahead and started with 1/4 tsp. Then I went to 1/2. When I hit 1 tsp, I got really irritable so I figured it was working. I decided to drip the yogurt for better tolerance, so I grabbed a small glass jar, a plastic funnel, and a coffee filter. I put the filter in the funnel, stuck it over the jar, and poured some of the yogurt in. Now I'm using the dripped stuff and increasing again and I'm OK.

Since it didn't kill me, I figured I could try it out with Clark. I gave him 1/8 tsp. He woke up at 2:30 a.m. and didn't go back to sleep, but I didn't immediately tie it with the yogurt. The next day, same amount, and the same thing happened. He was also stimming like CRAZY. It was insanity. The humming, the rocking, the crawling, the head shaking...it was almost too much to deal with. But I was pretty sure it was die-off that he was experiencing, not a reaction to the yogurt, so I was determined to persevere somehow. At least he liked it. He keeps asking for more.

Today I decided I would give him a break from the yogurt and we ran an epsom salt bath for him. We just put 2 cups of salts in a bath and let him soak in it for about 20 minutes.

Then we got him ready for bed. Right before we were going to read his bedtime story, he said to me, very seriously, "The water made me feel better."

My mouth physically dropped open. I said, "It did?"

He looked at me seriously. "Yeah."

So...cool. He went to sleep and seemed MUCH more calm, so I am hoping for the best right now.

cooking marathon returns!

I went back through my old posts with the intention of organizing my past recipes a bit better.

I did make some headway on that, although some of those recipes need to stay in the archives. A few are just embarrassing. :)

Anyway, I had forgotten that I used to do these cooking marathon posts. The thing is, I don't do all that many cooking marathons anymore. I still cook in bulk a lot of the time, though, and I will often make two or three things in a day, but rarely will I devote the entire day to cooking.

I've made quite a lot of food over the last two days, however, so I will share that with you. Cooking marathon returns!

Yesterday it was still hot, although not quite hot enough to keep the apartment shut tight, thank goodness. Air quality has been an issue, due to the Station Fire here in SoCal. We kept the windows open while I cooked a whole butternut squash in the oven. If you've never cooked squash this way, I highly recommend it. My hands aren't a fan of cutting up anything as hard as that, so it's very nice to just set it in a small glass pan, prick it with a fork, and leave it for about 90 minutes at 400.

At the same time, I made some hard boiled eggs. When they were done, I rinsed out the pan and then used it to start a large batch of SCD ketchup. You just reduce Campbell's tomato juice to the thickness you'd like. I posted about how to make ketchup here, and that's one of the posts I wish would be lost to the sands of time. I now simmer it in a very large pan with a mesh screen on top and I leave it alone. I bought the screen for $2 at Ikea. So now I don't have to watch it at all anymore!

Later in the evening, I pulled together what was left in the produce drawer and made a vaguely Mexican skillet meal. I really can't share the recipe, because I haven't truly yet succeeded in making anything taste really Mexican. I used some nice lean ground beef and chopped up some green onions, tomatoes, and jalapenos. I then heavily seasoned it, but like I said, it wasn't all that great. :)

The next day (today), we went shopping. First, I made Karianne's bread, and left it out to cool (after Clark begged a piece, of course).

We bought the following SCD legal items while out:

--almond butter
--coconut milk
--goat milk cheddar
--2 pounds frozen spinach
--red peppers
--yellow peppers
--1 bunch red leaf lettuce
--1 bunch romaine
--6 bunches green onions
--bok choy
--tomatoes
--zucchini
--organic raspberries (99 cents for a little container, yay)

Now, the almond butter, coconut milk and goat cheddar will likely last at least two weeks, but most of the other food will likely last around 10 days (if we're lucky).

Due to my bargain hunting ways, this trip did not break the bank. At Trader Joe's, the almond butter is $5 per jar. The coconut milk is 99 cents a can. The goat milk cheddar is around $10 per pound (I don't buy it often; it's more a treat for my son), which is half the price of any other goat cheddar.

The most expensive produce I purchased was the yellow peppers and the frozen spinach. Both were $1.29 per pound.

OK! Next, I left the spinach on the counter to thaw, and then I decided to be brave and bold and try a triple batch of totally safe mayo in the blender. It worked! It was also delicious so *cough* it's already half gone *cough*.

My last cooking task of the day was meatloaf. I took the now-thawed spinach and dumped both pounds of it into a large bowl. Then I realized it was really really wet, and I figured that wouldn't work well for meatloaf, so I decided to drain it. I dumped it into my colander over another pan and drained it just by pressing down with my hands, since I was short on time.

Once that was done, I put what was left of the spinach back in the big bowl, along with four pounds of beef, about 1/2 a cup of SCD legal ketchup, and spices and seasonings. I made four small meatloaves and tossed them in the oven at 400 for about an hour and a half (I think I accidentally set the oven at 375, which is why they took so long. Argh.)

They turned out OK. Nothing to write home about, but they'll be adequate for the coming week.

So that's all for me. *sigh of relief* I guess it kind of was a marathon, wasn't it?

I am chained to my kitchen

Well, while I'm still up, I should talk about the rest of today.

Jeffrey really wanted us to go out and experience the day after Thanksgiving madness. The last three years, I've been in retail management, and so I've worked every day after Thanksgiving since even before then.

We wanted to have a nice day, but I wasn't sure how we were going to do that when I would have to bring food for me and Clark for lunch.

So I spent the morning getting food together.

I made the carrot muffins the night before, the ones I've mentioned previously. They turned out pretty good, except for the fact that the paper linings disintegrated in the refrigerator. I'm going to stick with pancakes from now on. It's just not worth it.

Clark had the leftover baked apples from Thanksgiving that he didn't seem to like then. The only difference was that they were now cold. I don't think he liked them warm.

I had a plate of chicken parts that I'd cooked last night, so I took the meat off the bones and mixed them with the last of the mayo I had. I put that in a little tupperware container.


Don't they look good? The ones I made look nothing like these.

I then boiled another batch of carrots and made a batch of carrot pancakes. I put all of those in Clark's little insulated lunch box along with an ice pack, and we were on our way.

It worked out well; Jeffrey was able to get a hamburger and fries, even though he felt guilty eating them in front of us. Clark was mostly fine with it, after daddy explained that they were "regular." I don't feel bad that my husband was eating that food; Clark is going to have to deal with that for a looooong time and the more practice he gets in refusing food from others, the better.

Clark ate all of the muffins (five of them) and a good portion of the chicken salad. He then had two of the pancakes.

We had a good time and Clark and I rode the carousel in the mall. Clark loved it! He told me solemnly afterwards, "That was a lot of fun." It is so great to see his awakening into himself. Ooh, one other thing.

While I was in the kitchen cooking the other day, I was frustrated because I couldn't find the salt. I said out loud, "Where's the salt?" Clark came over and said, "It's here, mommy," pointing to the regular salt shaker.

Did you know regular salt has dextrose in it? Which is a sugar? Yeah, me neither, at least not before SCD.

I said, "No, the other salt." I've been using a little sea salt grinder from Costco. And Clark said, "It's right there!" It was practically in front of my face; I don't know how I missed it.

The thing about that is that not three weeks ago, I had asked Clark to bring me the salt. I had the Morton salt out; you know, the one with the girl with the umbrella on it? I told him, it's blue. There's a girl on it.

It was literally right in front of him and he just did not see it. It was sooooo frustrating trying to get him to see it and pay attention.

And here he was, finding it, no problem at all.

Oh, this diet. Every time I get down about how hard it is, something like that happens, and it's like the clouds part and a ray of sunshine comes through.

My afternoon was spent cooking, baking apples and making chicken for tomorrow. And then I ate the rest of the apples, meaning I'll have to make more tomorrow, but damn, were they good.


Look, somebody else made apples and served them with yogurt. How smart of them.

BAKED APPLES

2 pounds granny smith apples, cored, peeled, and cut into 1" chunks or smaller
cinnamon
1/2 cup water

Combine ingredients in large glass 9 x 13 pan lined with foil. Bake at 425 for 45 minutes. Let cool for a while, then scoop into a Tupperware container and toss them in the fridge.

Fast lunches

Well, I was working from home the other day and I decided to cook myself something special.

So I took some leftover chicken breasts, pulled them into pieces, sprinkled them with my new found legal onion and garlic powders from The Spice House and then fried them in a little bit of olive oil until they were lightly browned.

Then I dipped the pieces in my homemade mayo. I had made a double batch and after it was done, I stirred in 1/2 tsp legal onion powder and 1/4 tsp garlic powder.

And I put a little honey on the side.

SO. GOOD.

I've also made honey mustard by mixing a bit of that legal Great Value mustard with honey. YUM!

Recipe revision and legal mustard!

OK, so I want to let you all know that my new recipe for mayo is easily doubled in the blender, no problem! I will revise my "Stage 1 recipes" section to include this.

Also, Great Value mustard at Wal-Mart is SCD legal. I was surprised, too, believe me. Ingredients: Vinegar, water, mustard seed, salt, turmeric, paprika.

Have a great Sunday!