WARNING! This clam chowder may be hazardous to your health!!! You may find yourself eating so much that your stomach explodes. Honestly, after my first bite, I was sure that my wife had mixed up the pots and served me from the non-GFCF one. However, since she only made one pot of chowder - all of it GFCF - I was safe. And well fed. And happy. How often can you say that your GFCF meal does that?
When you need a special treat for a kid who can’t have candy or lots of sugar, a little creativity goes a long way!
For a recent birthday we decide to start the day off with Mr. Breakfast. The foundation is our GFCF French Toast Pancakes. Add the yolks from a couple of hard-boiled or fried eggs, a strawberry and a strip of bacon and you’re all set. Believe it or not, our daughter is allergic to both bacon and strawberries - for her we used eggs, a slice of cantaloupe for the mouth, and a triangle of cantaloupe for the nose. Be creative and you can work around just about any allergy you’re up against.
Tonight we tried a new recipe - Fresh Pasta Salad, and it turned out beautifully.
We altered the recipe by omitting the tomato sauce- making it less allergenic for our son who has been reacting badly to tomatoes. We also added cooked chicken to the dish, making it more of a meal, and less of a side. It was a great meal at that - I only wish we had made a bit more Italian dressing to go with it - we’ll probably double the recipe next time.
I’ve been a huge fan of Enjoy Life’s Snickerdoodle cookies for quite some time now. These have to be the best GFCF cookies commercially made - hands down. At my house, box of them doesn’t last more than two days once it’s been opened.
With the firm belief that we can bake anything better homemade than a factory can mass produce, we set off on the daunting task to better this pinnacle of cookies. I do believe that our Woggle-Bug test kitchen have managed to do it once again! Our Snickerdoodle recipe has amazed me (and somehow managed to shrink my pants waistline in the process!). Unfortunately we haven’t been able to keep a batch around long enough to get a picture of them (sorry honey!), so you’ll have to make a batch for yourself to see (and taste) how good they are!
The results were delicious! We made pumpkin pies with this crust (I used lard instead of margarine) and it was the hit of the night. I may have to chain myself to the treadmill after thanksgiving, but I will probably make a bunch of these!
Bet you can’t eat just one!
Our local grocer is in the process of remodeling. Because of this, they have lost about 1/3 of their frozen foods section - eliminating less popular items like gluten free bread. So to get bread we either need to make a 1/2 hour drive or make it ourselves. While we have a lot of experience and success in GFCF baking, my bread always turns out horrid!
Well, no more! I have finally figured out a quick, easy, and (relatively) cheap way to keep my kids sandwiches supplied with a bread like substance that I can make without fail. What is the secret to my newfound success? Flatbread. It’s no-rise, it stays together, and my kids will eat it. However, it is definitely not wonder bread - your kids will have to be willing to have bread that looks and tastes a little different. Mine think it tastes better and have had not a single complaint. Cost-wise it all depends on how thin and big around you roll them out - I’m getting about a loaf’s worth out of a 22 oz bag of sorghum flour - making the cost a bit less than most prepared GFCF bread. It’s been a major convenience improvement for us!
We’ve been extremely busy this month, and have been missing the ability to have easy meals - like ordering a pizza. After a bit of work, we finally came up with an easy GFCF dinner we were able to buy at our 
neighborhood grocery store. (Disclaimer: it’s a ‘gourmet’ grocery store for all of the rich people on the other side of the tracks…. you won’t find this stuff at Super Wal-Mart.) So without further ado - our easy four course GFCF meal:
1) Course one: Ian’s Sweet Potato Fries or Alphatots. They are both GFCF. The Sweet Potatoes have soy oil, so you’ll want to watch out for them if you are soy sensitive.
2) Course two: Applegate Farms Uncured Turkey Hot Dogs. I believe most of their hot dogs are GFCF and SF, but their website doesn’t make nutritional information easily accessible - so read the label before buying them (like you don’t already spend hours reading labels at the store)
3) Course three: Frozen veggies. Usually broccoli, as it’s a cruciferous veggie, high in vitamin c and antioxidants. Sometimes green beans or peas - especially if the organic ones are on sale!
4) Course four: lacto-fermented foods. We make our own sauerkraut and 
pickles, using the recipes from “Nourishing Traditions“. The ‘good’ bacteria help keep our intestines healthy and happy. They are pretty darn easy to make, and when we keep them handy (having a small serving at dinner) the sensitive stomachs seem to perform much better.
While this is still a lot more work than ordering a pizza, in 15-20 min we can have a hot meal - and if you keep the hot dogs, veggies and fries in the freezer it’s an easy meal that can be kept around long term, “just in case”. We’ll have this meal when an experimental dinner recipe has bombed.
We have enjoyed so many other Enjoy Life products that I thought I’d give their “granola” cereal a shot.My first surprise was that the cereal was black - they looked very much like crumbled asphalt. I didn’t expect that at all, but it wasn’t enough to throw me off my mission. (this may bee enough to make them a no-go for a child who judges food more by look than by taste).
After adding ricemilk, I took a bite. It felt as if I was eating crumbled asphalt - they were as hard as rocks. No problem, I thought - I’ll just let them soak a couple of minutes. Five minutes later I tried again. It was like eating crumbled asphalt with an 1/8″ layer of soggy cereal on it. The box could definitely claim “Stays crunchy in milk!”.
You might think from what I have written so far that these were a dud in my book. Quite the contrary - they were actually very tasty once you got over the hard texture! We ate the whole box in one sitting. After trying the Cranapple Crunch (it was much more like traditional granola), I decided that we just got a batch where the ‘clusters’ were way too big (each one was 1/2 - 3/4″ in diameter) their crusherator must have been on the fritz.
Dorothy had a big, overnight, school trip out of state recently, and one of the big challenges to her going was the food (of course!). She is on a strict GFCF diet, and is allergic to 40 other foods - making her ability to eat at the buffet or fast food non-existant. In order to allow her to go on the trip, we provoided all of her food for her. The lunch below is a great example of what we packed for her:
Everything was packed in small ziplock bags (we normally use Reynolds Cut-Rite Sandwich Bags as they are waxed paper and Dorothy is allergic to plastic - but for the sake of not spilling went with plastic bags for the trip).
Here you can see the contents:
We packed rice cakes (as our local store was out of GFCF bread…) with GFCF mayo in a squeeze, lunchmeat, and some lettuce for an instant sandwitch (that isn’t soggy), carrots, pumpkin seeds, a pear, and some chips. Not the paragon of nutrition, but way better than McRonad’s…..
This is how we get our kids to eat hard boiled eggs, even though they ‘hate’ them! Check out our GFCF Lunchbox Ideas page for more great ideas.