Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Program

My son, the reason for this blog, was "diagnosed" with some food allergies last fall. No nuts, no corn (now including syrup and sugar), no fin fish, no shell fish, in addition to all the "No"s he already had. Well, that was great. Just hunky dory. And it was also fantastic timing, given that it was right before Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Ironically, he was pretty much left with fruit, veg, and meat. The title of this blog also became his menu for a while (figuratively, at least). To be honest, it was more than a little disheartening. I was looking at his previous restrictions as a challenge, but this seemed insurmountable. After all, there is only so much that one can do to a Brussels sprout or a carrot stick.

I didn't really cook much for a month, forget about inventiveness. Most of the recipes here had already been created, but when I ran out of them I really lacked the motivation to create anything new. Thus, this poor blog has been a little bit lacking for the last few weeks.


However.....

Last week I came up with my first new recipe in a long time (which I will post shortly) and even better, we got some good news. It appears that the "no nuts" ban will be lifted(it looks like it might have been a false positive). It is my hope that it will be, and he will get nuts back, and I will be able to create some yummy new things once I have something, anything to work with.

In the meantime, go buy some mascapone cheese and some strawberries. I have some yummy almost-starch-free crepes to tell you about.

Pancreatic Glucoamylase Deficiency

ummm... what?

I still vividly remember the day that I first heard those words. It was the end of an extremely trying time when two children had to have surgery (albeit minor) in the same week while I was by myself half the country away from my family, trying to survive grad school at KUMC while also homeschooling my three boys while I also kept it together, and the whole time my AF husband was deployed to the Middle East.

It sucked.

However...

It was also the end of an extremely trying time in my life. My youngest child's surgery was a total success, and we no longer needed to worry about complications with his eyesight. It was his second surgery, and we were thrilled that it was also the last. My oldest now had answers. He'd always been extremely thin, in about the 5th percentile for weight while in the 90th percentile for height. However, he was starting to falter on the growth charts, and we'd had a succession of broken bones and injuries stemming from falls/incidents that seemed quite minor and illnesses that became more serious than they should have. Generally speaking, he was just off. Of course, he'd also been suffering terrible gastrointestinal distress for his whole life- think what it would be like to have severe lactose intolerance plus fair amount of food poisoning at every single meal for every single day of your life.

It sucked.

And now, we had answers. Because my beloved (yet extremely picky) DH was away for several months, I had some time to try to figure out what we could now eat before he came home.

Youngest kiddo was now fine.

Middle kiddo decided that he wanted to be a doctor.

Oldest kiddo would now be fine. He grew 4 inches and gained 20 pounds in the first two months after we eliminated starch from his diet, and grew a couple additional inches in the following months.

I figured out how to feed my family without resorting to broccoli for breakfast, which we love and DH decidedly does not.

And my husband came home tanned and handsome as always.