Food Breakthrough!!!!

I tried regular brown rice yesterday for dinner, and I haven't had any reactions as of late. I'm not counting my chickens until I try it again on Wednesday. I'd hate to have the same experience that I did with peanuts (I had peanuts and didn't have a reaction, then I had them a week later and didn't feel so hot). But this could potentially open up a wealth of gluten free recipes that usually contain some form of rice flour.

[This is Katherine trying very hard not to get too excited] WHOPPIEEE!!!! Um...ahem...I mean...I'm not holding my breath or crossing my fingers.....

Challenge Update #1 and a New Look

Kaiya having fun in the bathroom while recovering from surgery.

Kent having fun in the kitchen because he was just too darn small to push out side.

Well, my blog’s been sporting a new look for a little over a day now. I wanted to make my blog a little more personal so I added some “allergic to sitting” bling. I’ll keep tweaking as I view my blog in other browsers and on other monitors. It may take a while before I get the look that’s just right.

I won’t bore you with too many Challenge updates; only those that bring insight into our lifestyle and health. But a couple of bloggings ago, I mentioned that Kevin and I entered into the “Spring into ASUFit” Challenge and we’re counting our minutes of exercise each week. In doing so, we’re finding that we weren’t actually spending a lot of “time” exercising before the challenge, just “effort.” For example, we’d go run three miles on Mondays (30 minutes for me, 20-something for him), rest Tuesdays, cross train on Wednesdays (30-60 minutes), rest Thursday and Friday, bust out on a long run on Saturdays (1-2 hours), then rest Sundays. It seems like a lot of exercise, but if you count all of that up, that’s only 2-3 hours of workouts each week. We were efficient, but not continuous fitness nuts.

Now, we’re continuously exercising. We’ve started attending a free fitness class on Mondays called “Boot Camp” and it’s kicking some serious booty (pardon the pun). My quads are still a little stiff from the billions of lunge-type moves we were bustin’ (at least I’m not wincing any more when I stand up or sit down). And the big thing that’s giving us minutes is the dog walking. Now that the puppies are outside and wittle Kent is getting bigger, we like to go on 30 minute walks around the neighborhood. Where before now our kitchen and bathroom looked like the pigsty above due to Kaiya’s surgery and Kent’s smallness. Those are shredded “wee” pads mind you…

In addition, we’re keeping track of other times that we’re walking about, like when we’re shopping for long periods of time. Take yesterday, I went to Hobby Lobby and walked the isles for an hour and 40 minutes after doing a 2 mile run. Now, I’m not reaching my target heart rate while shopping, but I can guarantee that I was burning more calories than sitting on in my recliner sippin’ diet Sprite. I’m all for a shopping diet.

I wuv Hobby Bobby [said in baby voice]!

So far my team has racked up an average of 348 minutes a week (we’re competing against weekly averages). My personal total for last week was 362 minutes (Kevin had 390, the cheater…hee hee). Although we’re not in first place by any means, we’re having a lot of fun and it’s inspiring us to get out of the house.

Speaking of out of the house, I’ve “sampled” some excellent home-baked, gluten free, milk free, soy free but full of taste cookies this past week. By sample, I mean “quality tasted at least 5 cookies in one sitting.” I found one recipe online and baked it last weekend by substituting almond butter for the peanut butter it calls for (see it at http://www.recipetips.com/recipe-cards/t--2736/gluten-free-peanut-butter-cookies.asp). This recipe is so simple it hurts! It’s got five ingredients if you leave out the chocolate chips. And it’s high in protein. Good for those laying off the carbs. The cookies turn out to be crunchy and salty sweet! The Food Allergy Blog recommended squishing down the cookies before baking, which I did, but I don’t think that was even necessary. Perhaps it’s a difference of nut butters…

The other recipe I kind of sorta forgot to get from my ma-n-law, but she took a recipe that also normally calls for peanut butter and she substituted almond butter as well (except she made her’s from scratch by using a little coconut oil and a food processor). Her recipe turned out to be oatmeal, chewy deliciousness! I’ll share the recipe as soon as I can get it next. Or Sandy, you could post it in the comment section if you’d like?

While I’m working off the cookie calories in the Challenge, I hope you have a great rest of the week!

Spices, spices, more spices, and more spices, and more spices, and more spices, and more spices, and MORE SPICES!

People have mentioned to me that I have quite a few spices. Well, my name is Katherine and I come from a long line of spice-aholics (I also come from a long line of German bowlers and Potter Heads----Harry Potter that is, but that’s for another blog entry).

[ALL intone at the Spice-aholics Anonymous (SAA) meeting] “Hello Katherine.”

Yes, hi. Hi there.

My mom’s spice cabinet is always overflowing into other cabinets in the kitchen. But when I moved away to college, it didn’t really catch on. I had your traditional salt, pepper, onion/garlic powder, and chili powder. However, I started collecting more when I had to remove all gluten, corn, milk, yeast, grapes (a lot of which I’ve added back).

Why is that?

Well, just think about a meal stereotypically eaten by non-allergy prone, but well balanced dieters, John and Jane Doe. John and Jane like to fix some regular dinner rolls, fried chicken, and a salad with some carrots and celery. Let’s just say this stuff is all homemade so that they can choose not to deep-fry stuff or work with filler ingredients. What would John and Jane do once they’ve finished cooking and are ready to sit down and eat?

They break out the stick of margarine, maybe go for some gravy, add a little ketchup for John Jr. (yup, they’ve got a kid), and top off the salad with some thousand island dressing.

Holy cow! We’ve got a lot of ingredients here. Even if I replace the bread with a gluten-free recipe, try to batter the chicken with coconut flour (I’ve done it and it’s really good tasting!), and try alternate recipes for ketchup and salad dressing, the meal isn’t quite the same. It’s tasty, but it just doesn’t have that zing to it that comes with a tasty store-bought butter, dressing, etc. So basically, when John, Jane, and John Jr. cook up zucchini like my husband and I often do, they probably either fry it or steam it with butter, salt, and pepper. These simple ingredients have a lot of flavor and there’s really no need for anything else. But when I can’t have the butter, ketchup, gravy, etc . I turn to SPICES!!!

Here’s a look in my two spice racks. One picture is kind of deceiving because I’ve got the spices stacked up on two big turn-tables, so there are several rows not pictured.

I’ve also added a recipe below that’s heavy on the spice and quite tasty. This one’s a seafood salad modified from a recipe that my mom likes to use (which normally calls for mayonnaise and mustard). We like to double, triple, or quadruple the recipe depending on how much leftovers we want and the price of shrimp.

Seafood Salad
1 c shrimp
2 chopped hard boiled eggs
1/2 c of chopped celery
1/4 c chopped onion
1/2 c chopped cucumbers
1 chopped red bell pepper (or jar of pimientos)
1/4 c of your choice of oil (I like sunflower)
1 tbsp of your choice of vinegar (wine for me please, but no cheese…)
1/8 c dried parsley
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 tsp of powdered mustard

Rinse your shrimp (very important! don’t want E. coli). Combine all of the wet ingredients with the chopped veggies and shrimp. Then add the spices and mix. Serve on a bed of lettuce.

Terrable, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Health Week

Sorry to have missed the last blog. I didn't have such a great week health-wise and it actually has nothing to do with allergies. We're (yes Kevin caught it too) still using the vinegar treatments for the foot fungus which seems to be working, but I succumbed to a variety of other problems, including a case of UTI, digestive issues because of the antibiotic I'm taking to combat the UTI, my monthly bill, and headaches brought on by the monthly bill because I haven't been able to exercise because of the UTI. N-E-ways, the good news is that Kaiya has recovered from her surgery, Kent is outside with Kaiya after an all-evening counseling session on Friday between the two, and we have new bar stools. Yeah for bar stools!!!! Yeah for no "grunt" on the kitchen floor!!!!

I just wanted to provide a quick update. Kevin and I have joined a Fitness and Wellness Challenge team here on campus. Starting yesterday, we're counting all of the minutes that we spend exercising each week and then we're sending our minutes to our team captain, who then averages our minutes, and sends it on to ASUFit, who, after 10 weeks of Challenge, will give out a free lunch and medal and trophy awards. So far, I've got 46 minutes counting today and yesterday. Yeah for bar stools, no "grunt," and 46 minutes!!!! I'll post something more exciting Thursday.

Kent: The New Addition to the Family

Causes sleepless nights, toy stealing, lots of mopping, additional trips to the vet, interruptions during CSI, but he's the cuddliest puppy I've ever known. He likes to wrestle with Kaiya and has the cutest little growl. His full name is Klark Kent (he's really shy when you first meet him, but he's Superdog when you get to know him). He's our new puppywuppy and he's all we can think about this week. That, and the fact that Kaiya's going to get fixed tomorrow so she probably won't feel like taking part in one of my long runs this weekend. In the next week or so Kevin and I are going to try to transition him into staying outside during the day.

Recipe for this Week: Boil Your Meats

Making meat dishes that have only the ingredients you can tolerate can be a part-time job sometimes. So, Kevin and I have taken to boiling chicken and hams (for boiled ham instructions see my previous post for Purloo). It's easy, you can do other things while it's cooking, it tastes good, and you can use the chicken broth for soups, in replacement for oils in stir-fry dishes, and it's healthy. Chicken usually takes about 2 hours to cook. I personally enjoy getting a pack of 8 to 10 thighs (good dark meat that's still healthy), rinsing them off, peeling off the skin, and sticking 'em in a pot of water. For a quick side, you might try making some mashed potatoes using this cool technique of peeling the potatoes. Thanks for the link, Mom!

Stomach Problems Galore! And Disaster Recipes

Lately, several people close to me have been experiencing some digestion…let’s call them “inconveniences.” Bill, my boss got some kind of 24-48 hour stomach bug that was “really uncomfortable.” Kayla, Terrell, Sandy, and Glenn all came down with food poisoning after eating at one of their favorite restaurants. Dixie “The Pug” had to lend her body heat and moral support in order to help Glenn and Sandy recover. Kayla’s pregnant (Yeah!!!!), but that means some foods just don’t sound/smell/taste right. And even Maverick, Kayla and Terrell’s border collie, decided he wanted in on the fun and decided to eat himself some pecans with the shells still on them, which then led to an unfortunate drooling session, no appetite, and a very high vet bill (Kevin and I got the funniest/saddest email from Terrell narrating the whole unfortunate tale; we hope he gets to feeling better).

Now, I personally must puke once a year. It’s a tradition. I’ve given up fighting it. However, I haven’t come down sick yet. So, while I await the inevitable, I wanted to look back on some of my alternative food experiments gone wrong. Most of my cooking experiments have not ended in some sort of digestive disaster. But for the one that did, I will just describe the ingredients and not the graphic events that unfolded. Some of you who know me might have heard these stories already, but I thought they were worth mentioning again for posterity sake.

Chewy PancakesBack when I was dating Kevin, we discovered flour made from Tapioca. We thought, “what a cool thing!” A flour that’s not made from wheat or other grain is exactly what I needed at the time. So we ended up with several bags of the stuff and started thinking about what food we’d like to replicate. I love pancakes. I missed pancakes. So we tried to make pancakes with tapioca flour and our current knowledge about regular pancake recipes.

Let’s think about this for a second. What consistency does tapioca pudding have? It’s kind of a Jello or gel like substance, right? So we ended up making something that looked very similar to a pancake, smelled like a pancake, tasted like a pancake, but the consistency was quite “off.” The best tapioca pancake that we came up with was something akin to a round, flat pancake-flavored gummy bear. Would you eat a round, flat pancake flavored gummy bear for breakfast some Saturday morning? Enough said. After some experience with the flour, it’s best left in pudding and, sparingly, in soups and gravy to thicken them up a bit.

Whipped Goats Milk
Kevin and I recently discovered goat milk about a year ago. We’ve been able to find it at Wal-mart and most grocery stores that have any kind of an alternative food section. It’s a little bit stronger than cow milk, but I haven’t had the real thing in so long that it tastes the same to me. We also noticed that you can buy canned evaporated goat milk as well. Since we had such great success at making ice cream by substituting goat milk for cow milk (can’t taste the difference according to Kevin), we thought we’d try our hand at whipped cream.

So we invited our friend from graduate school, Lonie, over and made ice cream out of the refrigerated goat milk and whipped cream out of the evaporated milk. Let’s just say that the canned goat milk has a definite funk to it. I’d equate the taste of this stuff to that grass/dander smell that often hovers around horses, goats, cows and other livestock. Not a pretty picture. If you want to make whipped cream from goat milk, I’d suggest finding the fresh milk with a much higher fat content instead of going the canned route. Just an FYI.

Rapidly Multiplying Cookie Recipe
If you have a cookie recipe that calls for potato flour and you’ve run out of another ingredient required in your recipe, don’t add more potato flour. It’ll turn into burnt mashed potatoes on a pan. You’ll have to add so many more ingredients to compensate, that you’ll make 5 dozen cookies by the time you’re done. That’s what happened to me. They were good but we had them around FOREVER.

Coconut Pizza
About a year after the gooey pancake incident, Kevin and I found a new flour made from coconuts. This stuff smells wonderful and even tastes good by itself if you happen to get some on your hands while baking. We found a great recipe book online where you can make all sorts of dishes from chicken fried steak, to cake. However, before we got the recipe book and before we educated ourselves with the almighty Google, I decided to make a coconut flour pizza crust. I took a really simple no-yeast recipe that calls for water, flour, oil, salt, and baking powder and substituted the wheat flour for coconut. Easy? Yes. It tasted pretty good too (a lot sweeter crust, but still good).

The night that I made the pizza and the next day, I spent a lot of time in the bathroom with what I thought was just a random digestion problem. No big deal. It happens. But it just wasn’t going away. Kevin mentioned that maybe we should look at the nutritional information on the package of flour. Lo and behold, we found our answer! The serving size for coconut flour, according to the back of the back of the bag, is 2 tablespoons. In two tablespoons, you can get 23% of your daily diet of fiber. But, and here's the kicker, we used 2 and 2/3 cups of coconut flour for the pizza crust. I had 3 pieces of pizza (approx. 3/8 of the total pizza). Kevin did the math. With those three pieces of pizza, I ended up with approximately 225% of my daily fiber needs in one meal. If someone didn't know me better, they might think I was trying to kill myself with fiber. Too bad I didn't know about the fiber content until after I had another slice of pizza the next day and decided to experiment with coconut flour in a cookie recipe (I had ten small cookies the next day).

Instead of a Recipe
Above are just a few of the problems we’ve run into while trying to come up with new and tasty recipes. Cooking is a science: its chemistry. So it’s no wonder we’ve had our share of setbacks. If you’ve made a few alternative food recipes yourself, I’d love to hear about them. I’ve enabled the comment section so that you don’t have to have a blog in order to comment on my blog.Instead of providing a recipe for this week, I thought I’d list out some of the alternative foods that I have *successfully* used in replacement of common ingredients. There are many other substitutions out there; this is just the list of ingredients that don’t seem to give me any reaction.

• Allergen: Oils/Butter/Margarine
  Substitute: Corn, Coconut, Grapeseed, Sunflower, Nut Oils (i.e. Walnut), Sesame (strong flavor)
• Allergen: Wheat Flour
  Substitute: Coconut, Gluten-Free All-Purpose, Soy, Potato, Tapioca, Pinto Bean, Chickpea
• Allergen: Cereals
  Substitute: Corn Flakes (i.e. Frosted Flakes or GV), Buckwheat, Oatmeal
• Allergen: Noodles/Pasta/Carbohydrates
  Substitute: Corn Spaghetti Short-Grain Sweet Rice, Potatoes
• Allergen: Cow Milk
  Substitute: Coconut, Goat's Milk, Almond/Soy
• Allergen: Artificial Sweeteners
  Substitute: Sugar, Splenda, Honey, Agave Nectar, Beet Sugar
• Allergen: Chicken Eggs
  Substitute: Egg Substitute (preferable), Egg (in limited amounts)
• Allergen: Flour Tortilla
  Substitute: Corn tortilla, Tapioca Sheets
• Allergen: Vinegar
  Substitute: Wine Vinegar

Why Run So Long? And Mmm, Mmm Cookies!

I completed my first half marathon last weekend at the Resolution Run. Yeah! I didn’t meet my 10:30 per mile goal, but I did make it just under 11 minutes per mile (check out my running log on the right or the race results here for detailed info). Thanks to everyone who inspired, encouraged, and helped me build up to the race!

I was thinking about doing another half sometime in the next few weeks while I’m still in shape, but I don’t think I’ll make it. All upcoming races are out of town (Austin and Dallas), they cost a lot more money, and I’m running out of mental poop for this season. I’m ready to move on to some cross training, which mainly includes swimming, hiking, and biking. Speaking of “mental poop,” this brings up the topic of racing in general.

Before the break, I had an interesting question posed to me by Chris at a Christmas party. He asked me "why would you want to run a half marathon." At the time I answered "because of health reasons and because it's a challenge." I went on to elaborate about how running has helped me and my allergy problems, how many foods I’ve added back into my diet, how using races help inspire me to keep running. But afterwards I got to thinking, there’s a billion reasons to run a half marathon. And I don’t think that any one reason can stand alone.

I love the feeling of complete exhaustion after a really long run. My lungs feel heavy and relaxed, I feel sleepy, I’m hungry, so then I eat a good meal, shower-up, and take the most spectacular nap ever.

I love how deep I sleep while at night while I’m training. No dreams. No waking up in the middle of the night. When I do wake up in the morning, I’m ready to tackle the day instead of sleep some more.

I love the alone time to think about things. All kinds of things. I can think about curtain colors, the color of the sky, or my coloring face as my heart beats hard and fast. Long runs are great for reformatting the old hard drive.

I love when other people run with me. Although it’s hard to find someone who runs at your same pace and who wants to run at the same time, but when you do find someone, it’s fun! Especially on long runs. I used to sing to Trina (although badly) while we were both training on Burma Road over the summer.

I love running long distances because it’s like reading a book that I just can’t quite put down.

I could go on and on and on about my reason for running long distances like half marathons. There is no one reason for me, and I’m sure that my reasons are a little bit different than other people. It’s a hobby, but a passionate one. You’ll rarely find someone out there running 13.1 miles because they “just” randomly felt like running. Anyway, I’m sure this won’t be quite satisfactory for skeptics out there, but if you equate running long distances to some other hobby or exercise that your passionate about, you’ll get it.

Below is my first ever successful gluten-free, egg-free, milk-free, corn-free cookie recipe that I developed after craving cookies like mad. I hadn’t been running for very long (this was about 3-4 years ago) and I hadn’t added so many foods back into my diet, so I’ve got a few funky ingredients in this recipe. The trick is to make the cookies small and bake them slowly so they don’t burn (so you might have to adjust the temperature a bit). Make sure to flatten the cookies and, also, don’t try to add more baking soda or powder in order to get the cookies to rise more. More rising ingredients will make them taste like metal.

Cinnamon Almond Cookies

1 cup almond flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup potato flour
1 cup coconut milk (canned)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp vanilla (optional)
Coconut oil for pans

If you can't purchase almond flour at your local health food store, just buy some raw almonds (make sure you get them without other oils) and use a food processor to grind them up as small as you can. Add all of the dry ingredients together first, then add the wet after. Grease two pans with coconut oil. Take a teaspoonful of dough for each cookie. Flatten each cookie once they’re on the pan.

Makes about 30 little cookies or so.