Mock 'n' Cheese (with Recipe!)

It should be "Mac 'n' Chake"....err...nevermind! The macaroni's real, the cheese isn't!

Here's the recipe:

1 cup alternative milk beverage (again, it's hemp milk for us, but it can be anything!)
2 tbsp, plus 1 tsp vegetable oil
4 tsp corn, tapioca, or arrowroot starch 
1 cup carrots, cooked and mashed
2 cup cooked macaroni (I used whole wheat, but sub in whatever type of pasta works best for your needs!)
salt and pepper


1. Whisk "milk" with the 2 tablespoons of oil and the starch and bring to a boil in a large saucepan, using medium heat. (Although it's not in the instructions, I lowered the heat at this point and waited for it to thicken before the next step). Reduce heat to low, stir in carrots and remaining oil. Add the macaroni and stir until heated thoroughly. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste.

Mashing the carrots

The finished product in the pot. This is not a photography blog. ;)

This is a great base for a fake macaroni and cheese. It's wouldn't be the first choice someone who can eat the real thing, but there are a few additions that can jazz it up a bit. (Aside from the ketchup that K has decided must accompany this meal!)

- chicken/veggie stock
- peas or corn
- tuna
- bake it with a bread crumb topping
- the list goes on!

Mock 'n' Cheese

Leave me a comment if you wanna see the recipe! ; )

Oooooh, I'm evil, I know. I don't have time to make an entry though and wanted to let you all know that I'm here. So, I'm doing some extremely transparent attention whoring. :D

Okonomiyaki!

I've blogged about okonomiyaki before - when we went to Japan. We ate as much as we could. ;) It's a savoury pancake with cabbage and pretty much any other vegetable under the sun in it. Okonomi means "what you like" (roughly) and yaki means fried. When you're at an okonomiyaki restaurant in Japan, you can choose from a vast list of ingredients. In its normal form, okonomiyaki is neither clean nor allergy friendly. It is made with eggs, fatty cuts of meat and it's fried in copious amounts of oil. Then you smother it in a sweet vegetable/worcester sauce and mayonnaise. MMMM!


I love okonomiyaki. But, with an allergic kid and a waistline that has expanded just writing about it, okonomiyaki is not a wise choice in our house. So, I came up with an alternative that is probably a bit sacrilegious, but yummy enough to be a good alternative. 

As I said, it's a savoury pancake, so I started with my egg-free standard pancake, with some modifications to make it savoury:

1 cup flour (I used whole wheat - that is so not standard!) 

2 tsp baking powder (As I wrote this I realized that we've been using 2 tablespoons all along! Oops!)

1 cup dashi*

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp milk or water (in our house, we use hemp milk for K)

Vegetables:

- cabbage (a must - a usually buy the coleslaw kits as the cabbage is already chopped to the perfect size. You can always chop your own cabbage too!)

- corn

- zucchini (I shredded it)

- carrots (also shredded)

- tuna (ok, that's not technically a vegetable)

- pork (hmm...maybe I should have called this section "ingredients"; no pork this time, but it's a common ingredient, usually in thin strips)

*Dashi is a Japanese soup stock. It can be made from a number of things, including fish and seaweed. It gives the pancake a more authentic taste. Chicken stock or water can be used as well. 

As with a typical pancake recipe, combine the dry stuff first, then add the wet stuff, being sure not to overstir. 

Add the chopped/shredded veggies (and tuna) to the batter and stir only long enough to coat the vegetables. There should be more veggies than batter - although, there are no hard and fast rules. Spoon about 3/4 cup of batter onto frying pan and cook as you would a pancake - wait until it begins to be cooked on the sides, and flip. If using pork, it is placed on the top of the batter and fried. 

Serve immediately! Usually, it is topped with Japanese worcester sauce (Otafuku and Bull dog are the main brands)  and mayo, but we left that off of K's. We gave him some ketchup instead. :) It's also good topped with powdered seaweed and bonito flakes. 

Mmmm....okonomiyaki!

So there you go - a healthier, allergy friendly okonomiyaki!

I did something right!

Week one of clean eating is done and I am pretty durn pleased with myself. I weigh myself on Sundays - I was down 2 pounds last week and 1 pound this week. (I kept last week under my hat in case I went back up!)

I'm also on week 4 of week 2 of the Couch 2 5k. (So I've been doing week 2 for about 4 weeks now!) I'm going to move on to week 3 the next time I go out. My reasons for staying at week 2 are manyfold. First of all, I have only been running once, maybe twice a week. The program recommends three. Once you hit week three, you have to one for THREE straight minutes. That scares me. But I will do it! I am signing up for a 5k run in October, so I have to do it! And many friends of mine are also signing up for runs as well - some claim to have been inspired by me! I can't let them down!

On the cooking front, I bought this book yesterday: Allergy Proof Recipes for Kids and I can't wait to try it out! It has a mac and "cheese" recipe in it! I'll keep you post with the results!

That's my quick update for today! I must come back with recipes and pictures. I promise my next entry will have both! :)

First Test: Passed!

This post will have two themes: part rant, part patting myself on the back, all obnoxious. ;)

Patting myself on the back

My first big test of my commitment to the clean eating plan that I've been doing was my night out with the girls. Every week we go out, exercise and then stuff our faces with yummy homemade food. Generally this is good, homemade food with the occasional pizza thrown in (on busy weeks!). This week, nothing was planned so, the possibility of going out was looming over our heads. I dutifully packed my "clean" coleslaw, zucchini and scrambled eggs with an ice pack and headed out. As I suspected, after the workout, we spied a poster advertising daily specials for members of the gym at the restaurant. (The gym is part of a hotel, so there is a restaurant very close!) We hemmed and hawed - I was about to give in! But the hemming and hawing lasted a nanosecond too long and I slammed my foot down.

"NO!" I exclaimed.
"I brought my dinner and I'm going to eat it!"

And that is how I stuck to my guns, ever so shakily, and ate my coleslaw and scrambled eggs. Now, part of it was cheapness and the sheer fact that if I didn't eat the coleslaw, it would have to go into the compost and  that would have been a huge waste of money. But I stuck to it. Going out with friends can be the most difficult aspect of changing one's eating behaviours. Happily, my friends are extremely supportive and don't (openly) mock me.

Ranting


As I've worked my way through the meal plan, I've mixed and matched. I haven't always been able to eat exactly what is listed for a given day because of time (or a toddler who ate my bananas ;) ), but I've always substituted with an equivalent from another day. As I planned my smoothie for tomorrow morning, I was so grateful that clean eating doesn't eliminate dairy. I love dairy. Which of course got me thinking...I've been reading and hearing from friends again about recommendations to quit dairy full-stop.  As you probably know, if you've read any previous posts, my little guy has a dairy allergy.  To all the moms out here who may have stumbled across my blog, I want to share this:

My guy is allergic to dairy. I cut dairy out of my diet for the entire time that I was nursing him exclusively and reintroduced it at about 9 months. My guy also had eczema. There is absolutely NO correlation between my cutting out dairy and his eczema. Even when I hadn't had a lick of dairy for 6 straight months, his cheeks would flair up for days at a time. The eczema went away at about a year old - no rhyme or reason. It was NOT related to dairy in any way.  I struggle so much with his snacks. It breaks my heart now that he can see what we're eating and he reaches up for it. I hate worrying that I may have taken a sip of my coffee with milk, so I don't want to kiss him. Now that he knows he's missing out, I'm wondering if my husband and I will have to adapt our diets.

I just don't think it's worth it to toss out dairy. My son is quickly becoming a skinny little guy and I know that if I could just give him some yogurt, he would get so much of the nutrients that would do him good. It doesn't help that many other protein sources are also off-limits. I don't recommend a dairy free lifestyle if it's not absolutely necessary. It's so much hassle for what benefit really? Sure, try it out, see if it makes a difference but if there is a real allergy, it will be very obvious. At the very least, take your research beyond the internet and talk to medical professionals before tossing out an entire food group rich in nutrients and good stuff for your (or your child's!) body!

That's my rant. I'm absolutely sure I posted the exact same rant about four months ago. It's something I feel rather strongly about.

Day 2 - I'm still alive!

So it's the end of day 2 of my 14 day plan. I should have taken a picture of the meal because K was actually able to eat the exact same meal that we did. It was ground beef (which I was surprised is considered "clean". Ground meat scares me a little, so I get the angus beef. I'm sure it doesn't really matter, but I'm hoping it makes a difference) tomatoes, red onions and garlic cooked together and served over whole wheat penne. On the side, spears of broccoli. I cooked broccoli for myself and then ate it!! Y actually seemed to enjoy it too, which was cool because I was afraid he might walk out after seeing ground beef on pasta. I wasn't so sure, but it was good! It also called for a little bit of parmesan, which I didn't have, so I used some feta. I left it off K's of course.

AND, I took my lunch out with us today! I brought along a cooler, and stored my tuna salad (another thing that K was able to eat - and LOVED!) until it was lunch time. We ate in the food court - Y was the only one to order anything. I was very proud of myself.


I guess the whole point of this post was to pat myself on the back. No one ever accused me of being overly modest. ;)

Clean Meatballs

This is a great way to get some protein into the little ones. My little guy loved it and it was super easy to modify to make it allergy friendly. It was shamelessly stolen (and slightly modified) from The Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook. 

1 1/2 lbs lean ground turkey
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1 egg (This was one of my only modifications - I used applesauce instead of egg)
1 cup oat bran or breadcrumbs (I have found bread to be super tricky as there is often sesame. I used wheat germ, but I have since found rice breadcrumbs that are basically allergen free)
2 tbsp fresh parsley, finely chopped
2 tbsp basil, finely chopped
2 tbsp oregano, finely chopped 
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper


Preheat the oven to 400 F.


In a large bowl place egg (or applesauce) and breadcrumbs or oat bran. Add spices and mix well. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. Using an ice cream scoop make meatballs and place on prepared cookie sheet. Place in hot oven and bake for 20 minutes or until golden. (I am super paranoid about meat, so I ended up adding about 5 minutes.)

Le Eating Clean

I've decided that it's time for a change. I'm always thinking that I should be losing weight. Whilst chowing down on greasy slice of pizza, or while devouring a creamy treat from a well-known ice cream chain. Hell, I've been siphoning off $22 a month automagically to Weight Watchers for an account that I never touch. When I stepped on the scale the other day, however and saw three numbers together that I haven't seen since 2006 before I successfully lost 30 pounds, I knew it was time for a change. In the same week I heard about a 32 year old woman who had a stroke. The obesity problem in North America is not a myth, I'm living proof.

I'm kicking off a two-week clean eating plan. I bought a bazillion dollars worth of groceries and I'm going to follow the plan in this month's issue Eating Clean. (Or Clean Eating. I always forget.) But anyway, I'm going to try. My extra super supportive husband has come up with a list of milestones for me to reach. My goal is a healthy pound a week for a total of a gazillion pounds. (Not really, but I'm content to not broadcast my weight for now.) My hope is that by following the plan for 2 weeks, I'll get a better idea of good food combinations so that I don't always have to follow a plan. And I would also like to kick start the weight loss for a little more motivation. The first hump is always difficult if you're not seeing results.

It just so happens that Clean Eating (or Eating Clean) is also a great tool for feeding a very allergic toddler as well. I have some recipes that have been waiting to be uploaded, but due to a lazy blogger, they are backblogged. (Think that'll catch on?) I'm going to try to post at least one of these recipes tonight.