Shabbos- dinner – challah, chicken soup, chicken, baked butternut squash, baked yams, carrots and celery, sauerkraut, power bars and lollipops; lunch – chicken, beef cholent, kishke, mini pumpkin kugels, cucumber salad, orange cranberry relish, power bars, peach crisp
Sunday – breakfast – oatmeal; snack – ants on a log (celery spread with peanut butter, topped with raisins); dinner – leftovers – kasha, rice, baked beans, lentils, soup, cooked vegetables, salad (I like the fridge to be empty to start off the week :))
Monday – b – polenta; l – hearty vegetable soup; d – pizza with nut flour crust, salad
Tuesday – b – coconut mango pancakes; l – hard boiled eggs, vegetable sticks; d – falafel, salad, techina
Wednesday- b – chocolate zucchini muffins; l – shopping day so I’ll pick up something; d – corn chowder
Thursday – b – sweet potatoes with almond sauce; l – corn chowder; d – beef and pinto beans
Friday – the last few weeks the kids have enjoyed a special baked treat about an hour before candlelighting – it’s always something made with challah dough
Every time I make a nutritional change to our diets, it means that menu planning becomes more time consuming for a while until I get used to thinking about the new way I’m changing over to. I’ve made a number of adaptations over the years, and each time, there’s a learning curve as I have to readjust the kinds of foods I make, looking for different recipes and taking into account new and different information. That’s the challenge I’m having right now, trying to make gluten free meals (as well as trying to cut down on grains in general).
I’ve depended heavily on wheat flour for our breakfasts in particular – muffins, biscuits, pancakes, and waffles regularly appear on our breakfast table. The easiest thing is just to stop having them, and eat eggs and yogurt every morning instead. That idea has a lot of appeal, honestly-the kids love omelettes and yogurt with what I call grainless granola (sliced almonds, shredded coconut, sunflower or sesame seeds, and raisins) – it would make menu planning so much simpler! But instead I’ve been looking for substitutions since my kids really enjoy this kind of food.
Last night I told my dh (not for the first time) that I wished I was a person who could have one or two weekly menus and use them forever. It would be so easy to know that Wednesday night was always baked salmon, you know? No brain work, no time, no thinking involved. But as he said to me, “You’ve never been like that.” Sigh. It’s true. It seems so boring and limiting. But boring has its definite advantages. 🙂
Avivah
I’m all for boring too. It works well for us with the ages and stages our kids are at. Iy”H I will soon have kids your age with good kitchen-competence who will take our culinary efforts to a higher level. For now, thought, predictability saves the day! 🙂
During our six-week gluten-free experiment I had great luck with quick breads (muffins, biscuits, pancakes, etc.) just replacing the wheat flour with 50% rice flour and 50% tapioca. Xanthum gum definitely helped the biscuits, but I didn’t notice any difference for the other quick breads. We also enjoyed blini (buckwheat pancakes). Bread? Forget about it. 🙂 We thought DH might have had celiac, but it turns out it was giardia, a remnant of our trip to Ethiopia. At least, we’re pretty sure…
Thank you for sharing that combination – it sounds great! Thanks to having the grain grinder, using alternate flours is easy and affordable! I’ve used some of these for baking (though not the combo you suggested), and they’ve worked out well. Now I’m looking for ways to make muffins and pancakes without using any grain/seed flours – that basically means using coconut flour and nut flours instead. If I can do this, then everyone would be able to eat the same breakfast. But these aren’t flours that I have baking experience with so it means lots of experimenting! 🙂
hi avivah, and happy belated birthday! could you please post the recipe for sweet potatoes with almond sauce? thanks! -julie
Yes, it’s a good recipe and I’ll be happy to share it in the next day or two!
oh- one more question- don’t you have, like, hundreds of pounds of stored grains? if so, what will you do with them if you go grainless? just curious if once you make a decision that A is better than B, you still leave room to serve your kids B… thanks for the always enlightneing posts!
LOL, I have alot, but not that much!
Anyway, I can’t see how to go grainless and to stay within my budget. Even my super honed frugal shopping skills would be overly challenged by that! 🙂 And honestly, I don’t think that for my kids going grainless is necessary for their health. For me it’s been something I’ve been putting off since my anti candida diet experience almost three years ago (since most of you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are links for reference: http://oceansofjoy.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/snow-and-treating-candida/, http://oceansofjoy.wordpress.com/2007/02/23/die-off-renovations/).
I had great succes with these coconut blueberry muffins with coconut flour last week, but you would probably need to triple the recipe and that would call for 9 eggs. They were really good and easy to make. I like using coconut flour when I am stressed for time in terms of soaking.
http://www.cheeseslave.com/2008/10/08/coconut-flour-blueberry-muffins/
Do you soak your polenta? I have never made polenta, but I want to try, but I am somewhat confused about how to soak it.
I went to the site linked and after copying it and putting it in my notebook, saw that it was almost exactly like something that I got from somewhere else that are called Coconut Honey Muffins except it has blueberries. They must both be based on the same recipe from Bruce Fife’s book. I was glad to see the recipe and realize that there are a number of adaptations possible of this basic recipe.
I haven’t yet baked with real coconut flour, since I bought 50 lb of unsweetened shredded coconut a couple of months ago with the intent to blend it and use it in place of coconut flour. So far it’s worked well but I have to experiment more.
I haven’t had luck soaking my polenta. I’ve tried using lime as it says in NT, but am not confident that I’m doing it right. The instructions there aren’t very helpful and leave me guessing. When I tried soaking the cornmeal in lime water for cornbread, the kids were all unhappy with the final result. So I usually don’t bother anymore. I don’t use much cornmeal so I’m okay with that.
I have found the polenta soaking instructions confusing and thought the same thing about notknowing if I am doing it correctly re cornbread. We don’t eat it very much either so I’m thinking I’ll skip the soaking on this one.
I own the coconut oil miracle by Bruce Fife and also had great result with his banana bread recipe.
Q: If your experimenting doesn’t work out, will your kids still eat your food? If not, what do you do? Or do your experiments always come out edible? 🙂
Yes, they’ll still eat it – not all of my experiments are fantastic, but they’re generally okay. At a certain point in cooking you get a feeling for what will be good together and what isn’t. If something turned out horrible, I wouldn’t serve it.
Are you going to fry your felafel or bake them? I baked a batch last week — they came out ok, but not light enough. I will try more baking powder next time.
Bake – it’s faster to put a couple of pans in the oven than stand there over the stove. I’m all about fast and efficient. 🙂