::ANNA::

NewART +

It's starting to look a lot like Christmas around here.  

Mum's been wrapping presents, Dad's painted my bathroom, Ella and Luke finish school tomorrow, I've been baking like mad today to provide them with gluten free gingerbread men and snowflake sugar cookies for their little class celebrations tomorrow, as well as cooking up a few Christmas creations for the store this weekend.  

I hope you like them.

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I'm also learned today that gift certificates are now available for future classes at reneepearson.com.  You can learn more about them here.

Halloween Treats

I've been plagued by migraines again this week that start in the wee hours of the morning.  In fact, I've had 5 in the last 8 days.  Needless to say, it's been a quiet and uneventful day.

Ella and Luke did manage to get creative in the kitchen with their Daddy, and made some halloween treats. You can view the original recipe at Live Gluten Freely, though you can totally make these *with gluten* if you wish.  It's just a matter of the brownie mix you like to use.  We like Pamela's Brownie Mix.

Hoping the headaches subside tomorrow so I can do some creating myself, but I'm not going to push it.

I made Ice Cream

[stock image]

Successful homemade ice cream has never really been attempted in my house.  I bought and ice cream maker a few years ago with great intentions, but after a few icy failures, I lost interest, and it's pretty much been gathering dust since.

This Summer, I vowed to give it another go.  I love my ice cream which can be a bit of a challenge when you can't eat dairy.  There are some great alternatives in the stores these days but they're pricey! 

I figure there has to be a way to make *scoopable* homemade ice cream, and today I proved it, with a little help from Amy at Simply Sugar and Gluten Free.  I substituted all coconut milk for the milk and cream in her recipe, and I have to say, I'm feeling quite pleased with myself.

A reminder that persistence often pays.

Good Intentions

I had the best intentions of getting a few pages done this weekend and playing with some of my new product just released in the store.  Top of my list to play with are:

Luke finished day care on Friday.  He's been in full-time day care since he was 18 months old and had 3 fabulous providers.  I wanted to document this major milestone but it's been one chaotic weekend. Ridiculously busy actually.

There was boot camp, Martial Arts, library, Chuck E Cheese birthday party to attend, a visit to the mall, a play date with the cousins, a trip to the movie theater to watch Karate Kid, more bird rescuing antics, as well as tonnes of cooking.

You may have missed it from this post that I had blood work done on both Ella and Luke in which the results showed that both of them have an immune response to the gliadin protein in gluten.  In fact, Luke's levels were almost double those of Ella's and so we have made the decision to put them both on the gluten-free diet.  I had dreaded going this route with Luke but he has surprised me. His understanding of why he has to be on the diet and his acceptance has been amazing.  He appears to less symptomatic than his sister but I have noticed a lot less frustration and anger since we switched his diet.  It's early days but I'm optimistic at this point.

Of course, the new diet has opened a whole new can of worms for me and it's clearly evident I need to be more organized than ever in the food department.  When it was just me eating GF, I would eat prior to the event, but that doesn't quite fly when you're 7 and 5 years old.  I was making pizza at 8.30 am on Saturday morning and icing cupcakes, so that we could take our own pizza and cake to the birthday party.   Chuck E Cheese were more than willing to accommodate us by reheating our goodies and both Ella and Luke took it all in their stride.

I was doing the same the thing this morning in preparation for their play date at their cousin's house, making packed lunches at breakfast.  Summer break begins Tuesday which means play dates and sleepovers galore.  I don't ever want E and L to be excluded because of their restrictive diet, so I've come up with a game plan where I will send their food with them wherever they go, if need be.  If I can make it comparable, even better.

Ella and Luke's favourite meal is spaghetti, so I was busy tonight making 2 big batches (one without garlic and onions for Luke) and filling small BPA-free containers with appropriate portions (small for Luke and bigger for Ella) which can be pulled out the freezer, reheated and served alongside their favourite GF pasta.

Next week, I will do a big batch of GF pizza and freeze in slices.  The following week will be fried rice, and so on.

Hoping this will get us through the Summer and make mealtimes with friends a little easier for all involved.

Gluten Free Review: Custom Choice Cereal

This past week I had another fun gluten-free adventure with Custom Choice Cereal.

This is again timely, as blood tests have confirmed both Ella and Luke are gluten sensitive. They both tested positive for high levels of the Anti Gliadin IGG antibodies.  Moving forward, we are now all following a Gluten-Free diet.

Custom Choice cereal enables you to create great tasting gluten-free cereal mixes on-line from a variety of high quality ingredients and delivers each mix conveniently and promptly to your doorstep.  

The founders of Custom Choice Cereal, with backgrounds ranging from investment banking and consulting to game development, met in 2007 at UNC and were united by an entrepreneurial mindset and a passion for cereal.  You can see founder, Hajo Engelke, in action here. 

Their mission is to raise awareness of celiac disease (coeliac in the UK) and gluten intolerance and make cereal *safe* and available to everyone.

It's a REALLY fun and easy 3-step process in which you can create your own designer cereal mix.

1.  Select your Base:  Choose from the 3 different cereal bases.  You simply select the *Choose Me!* tab.

2.  Add Ingredients:  In other words, you get to pick and choose all the yummy mix-ins.  You have a wide variety of organic and non-organic fruits, nuts and seeds to choose from, ranging from dried berries, exotic fruits such as pineapple and goji berries to pistachio nuts.  Select the fruits first and then click on the *Nuts and Seeds* tab, to add your remaining mix-ins.

I really like how all the nutrition facts are listed with each ingredient and easily accessible.  Simply click on *more information*.

You will also notice your *View Cart Contents* update as you add each ingredient with both the price and the nutritional value.  I thought that was REALLY COOL.

3.  Place your Order:  The first thing you do is name you cereal.  Ella and I got a big kick out of this.  As our cereal was a joint effort mixing both our preferences we went with EllaBoBanna.

Custom Choice Cereal must have liked it too as I have just noticed it made their top 5 cereal names on their blog for last week.

You can then complete your order by providing shipping details and payment.  I also liked the fact that their system saves your mix and gives you a unique Mix ID for re-ordering purposes.  They remember so you don't have to.  This also appears on the cereal packaging along with the nutritional info of your designer cereal.

Delivery was very prompt and I had this cereal in hand in no time.  I can only give positive feedback on the process.  It was so easy and intuitive.

So what do we think of this cereal  and how have we been eating it?

I LOVE THIS CEREAL. 

I went *off* cereal when I went gluten-free 3 years ago because I couldn't find anything I really liked.

I REALLY like the base cereal I chose, the *Good Morning Organic Flakes*.  Not too sweet for my tastes, and the the fruits and nuts provided perfect balance of sweetness and crunch.

Ella, on the other hand loved the process of making the cereal, but I couldn't get her to try it.  From a child perspective, the mix-ins could be expanded to include just a few extra special add-ins such as chocolate chips or a few GF Marshmallows to make the cereals a little more appealing to children.  

Luke, also is not interested in trying it.

I have to say, I don't mind. 

All the more for me! 

It's been the pre-bedtime snack of choice this week.

A few of the different ways I've been eating EllaBoBanna Cereal:

• Munched on straight out of the bag.
• Mixed with some chunks of dark chocolate and eaten Trail Mix-style.
• Eaten with milk or plain yoghurt and topped with banana or fresh berries.

I also have ideas of mixing some of this into my next batch of protein bars which are an evolving variation on these.

This cereal is on the high-end in terms of price point.  My total cost after check-out was over $10.00 which is high even for GF cereal.  This cereal is definitely a case of *you get what you pay for* and worthy of a *special occasion* breakfast title.

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Big thanks to Custom Choice Cereal for allowing me to test-drive their system and sample the end product.

I really love your cereal!

Eating Fancy

It doesn't happen very often when Eric's not around.  The kitchen is generally his domain.

I prefer to eat a little more simple than he does, and if it can't be on the table in 30 minutes, then I lose interest quickly.

Tonight's fare was so pretty, and tasty, though Ella and Luke would beg to differ, I thought I'd share:  Salmon with Caramelized Cherries, discovered via Whole Foods.

I'm a big fan of meat/fish with fruit.   

Enjoy!

Dangerous Grains

I read this book while in Florida a few weeks ago, and it pretty much cemented in my mind what I already knew.  Gluten sensitivity is real and can cause a wide variety health issues.  

Some of what I learned in this book, published in 2007:

• Human Beings have only been eating grains for 1% of their evolutionary existence.
• Gluten sensitivity increases the risk of cancer by 200-300%.
• Gluten will attack human tissue when placed together in a petri dish.
• Gluten can attack other organs in the body other than the intestines.
• An estimated 90 million Americans are gluten intolerant, most of which don't know it.
• Gluten releases opiod-like peptides during digestion which is what makes them so addictive.
• Gluten intolerance can cause peridontal and gum disease.
• Documented evidence of Gluten Sensitivity exists from the late 1800s.

This book was a timely read for me.  I have been Gluten Free for several years now.  Just recently we've also placed Ella on a gluten free diet.  She's always been behind the curve in terms of development, but toward the end of 2009 she had incessant leg pains that would wake her up in the night crying/screaming for literally months on end.  I consulted her pediatrician who did a full blood work-up without any results other than chalking it down to growing pains.

At the beginning of the year, we decided to try a gluten-free diet just to see if it made a difference.  Having gone through the process of eliminating gluten from my own diet, I knew this had to be Ella's decision, if she was going to stick with it.  It needed to be a choice and not enforced, otherwise she would feel deprived. So she's been on and off the diet several times over the past 4 months, and has been allowed to *cheat* freely.  However, she quickly discovered that every time she cheated the leg pains came back, as did a new-found tummy ache.  Perhaps, she always had the tummy ache or perhaps she had just built up a level of tolerance.  She decided the week before we went to Florida that she wanted to be on a gluten-free diet.  She didn't want to hurt anymore.  I was sure she'd waiver during our vacation where she was bombarded with junk food stands at every destination. Nope.  She stuck with it and is still doing so.  We've noticed whiter teeth and her teacher has seen improvement since we returned from vacation. 

This is very real.

[supplies + journaling]

With big companies such as General Mills debuting gluten-free Bisquick and Hamburger Helper and Betty Crocker's new gluten-free cake mixes already on the shelves in my local Target, I am optimistic that others will follow suit and increase awareness of gluten-intolerance and celiac disease.  I often wonder if and how many cases of breast cancer could be attributable to gluten-intolerance?

Check out the Gluten-Free Challenge here.

It seems apt at this point to share a gluten-free recipe.  

This was lunch today: Sesame Ginger Maple Tofu by Averie, at Love Veggies and Yoga, over Asian Slaw, by Jenn Cuisine.  I tweaked the latter recipe to taste by adding a higher ratio of Peanut Butter, adding GF Habanero Hot Sauce + Agave Nectar, substituting Apple Cider Vinegar and adding some water for a runnier consistency.  Funnily enough, Elana's Pantry was thinking along the same lines with her own rendition. These two recipes are Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Vegan and Low Carb, and I can attest, very yummy!

Sandwich Petals in Action

I just discovered an photo using of the Sandwich Petals I mentioned in Friday's post.

This is the Agave Grain variety stuffed with the previous night's leftovers a.k.a Fish N Veggies with Tahini Dressing.

New Layouts, a Party, Sandwich Petals GF Tortilla/Wraps and a Petition.

A few things on my mind this Friday afternoon.

As I type, music is blaring in the background as we gear up for our St. Paddy's Day party tonight, so it seems appropriate that I post these new pages using my ArtPlay Palette Lucky to be released in the store this weekend.

I've shopped for food, friends have helped me decorate and Eric's now working on the lights.

Looking forward to getting together with our friends tonights.  

Hoping I won't be too worse for wear for my birthday tomorrow.

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Super-excited about a recent food discovery that I thought I'd share as they've fast become a staple in my breadbox.  I know, odd I would have a breadbox when I don't eat bread in the conventional sense, but i do.

Enter Sandwich Petals:  The Ultimate Gluten-Free Flatbread. 

In their words, and mine.

I've searched high and low for a good and affordable Gluten Free and Dairy Free substitute for tortillas and wraps only to be disappointed with plastic tasting versions that break apart when handled.

My bootcamp trainer picked up a pack of the Agave Grain flavour from an event that she attended a few weeks ago, and I've since ordered a Variety Box and tried the other two flavours, Spinach Garlic and Chimayo Red Chile. 

Tip: Order on a Monday you get 2 boxes for the price of one (12 wraps in each variety for a total of 36 wraps) making them a very affordable $.35/wrap.

Sandwich Petals with it's 10 grain blend are made by Raquelita's Tortillas located here in Denver Colorado and were created for Celiacs, Diabetics, Athletes and are virtually allergen free.  Not only are these wraps GFDF but they are also Soy and Nut Free.  You can read more about them here or there's a video about them here.

I eat them for breakfast stuffed with eggs and turkey; for lunch with stir-fried veggies or salad; or for dinner as a pizza base or cut-up, toasted and served as chips.

If you live locally they are available at Paradise Bakery and Cafe.  6 of their locations are carrying them across Denver.

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On the topic of food, you'll remember this post about Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, which will premiere on ABC on 26th March.

Jamie Oliver has now started a petition that he'd like to take to the White House after the TV series airs. You can check it out here.

Skiing, Raw Cookie Dough Balls and More AlbumMagic.

It's been a few weeks since we ventured into the mountains skiing so it was fun to get away this weekend. E and L were cautious on the slopes at first but soon got into the swing of it again. 

On this trip, Luke became particularly interested in skiing on the narrow paths and *jumps* between the trees, which was fine, until he decided to *barge* me out the way because he wanted to take the *jump* first.  This little guy can pick up some serious speed and managed to catapult me off track into a tree.  I wasn't hurt, bar perhaps my pride, but more so, I was seriously disappointed in him.  Needless to say, little man was in big trouble.

It took me back to a story my Mum likes to tell about me at a similar age.  We had a play park near our house with 3 big swings.  They were yellow, red and mint green.  The mint green one was in the middle and that was my favourite.  On one occasion, my Grandad Day, my Mum's Dad, took me to the park and there was another little girl on *my* swing.  I proceeded to walk up to this little girl and pushed her off the swing so that I could have it.  I received a swift clip around the ear before being marched home to my Mum, without getting to swing on my favourite green swing after all. The entire way I remember telling my Grandad that I was going tell my Mum on him, and when she whole-heartedly supported his action, I remember being completely shocked.  

I distinctly remember this moment like it was yesterday.  My adult mind being trapped in a child's body. I can honestly say I had no clue that pushing that little girl off the swing was wrong until the moment I was reprimanded for it.  From the way Luke re-acted on the slopes yesterday, I have a feeling it was totally the same for him.  It just didn't occur to him that his actions were inappropriate which can be typical for a child with Asperger's Syndrome.  

For the most part, Ella and Luke do very well socially, but once in a while they'll do something completely off the wall and we have to take the time to try and instill something that doesn't inherently come naturally to them.

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Today, Ella and Luke are home from school.  It was Teacher Parent Conference week last week and so, for some reason or another, Ella has a day off.  

It became apparent this morning that I wasn't going to get anything done so I decided to run some errands and tackle some baking.  E and L assisted in making a chocolate cake using 2 favorites, Pamela's Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Chocolate Cake Mix and Cherrybrook Chocolate Frosting Mix.  I usually like to bake from scratch, but mixes are easier when E and L are in the kitchen and want to be involved and these are 2 of our favourites. 

I also had a bash at new type of sweet treat:  Raw Cookie Dough Balls.  I've seen numerous variations of these on a variety of raw and vegan food-themed blogs and I like the idea of how these healthy sweet treats can be made in a snap.  

I settled on Averie's Raw Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls, but i think you could totally switch these up to create all kinds of concoctions.  For example, choose any raw nut, any type of cereal, switch the chocolate chips out for dried fruit, add chopped nuts, extracts or spices such as cinnamon or nutmeg. So many possibilities!

My ingredient list ended up looking like this:

2/3 cup Raw Cashews

1/3 cup GF Oats.

1 tbsp each of Maple Syrup and Agave Nectar 

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

1/4 cup 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate, chopped into large chunks

1/2 cup GF Oat Bran, for coating my little balls of dough.

What can I say?  These got 4 thumbs up in our house, and if little man likes them, officially the pickiest eater on this planet, then they must be good.  I liked that I threw everything into my Vitamix to create the dough, I stirred in the chocolate chunks and then E and L helped me roll them into little balls with a dusting of oat bran.  They were ready in 5 minutes flat.

Thought I'd share this cool little eat.

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 AlbumMagic is re-open for registration!

The first AlbumMagic class was so well-received that I will be teaching the class again 14th April through 4 May 2010.  This 3 week classes teaches you all my tips and tricks for putting together cohesive albums in a snap.  You can learn more about AlbumMagic here.

Read what some the students in the previous class had to say about the class. 

Here's the album I created during and using the material from AlbumMagic.

You can also see how a few of my previous students used their skills to create this album and this album from what they learned during AlbumMagic.

Got questions about the class?  Join me on Wednesday, 3 March 2010, at 8pm EST on ReneeTV.