Pea & Ham Soup

Before stirring the meat in. I used yellow split peas. Next time I think I'll try to find green ones for the colour.

An amazing slow cooker recipe for pea and ham soup from a friend of ours. We made it over the weekend and it was well-received by all except Miss 2... she struggled with the texture I think but had 3 spoonfuls with the promise of yoghurt to follow! Despite that, I think it is a fantastic recipe. It can also be done in a pressure cooker or on the stove top but you'll have to work out your timings for them.

1 cup split peas (yellow or green), washed and soaked overnight

~8 cups water

1 (~700g) ham hock (a ham shank is better I think but harder to get)

1 chopped onion

Pepper & salt (usually the ham is salty enough but I added a tsp of chicken stock powder)

2 chopped carrots

2 potatoes, peeled and chopped

a chunk of pumpkin, chopped

1 sweet potato, peeled & chopped

You can add other soup vegetables like celery if you like.

Place eveything in the slow cooker (include the water that the peas were soaked in as part of the 8 cups and add more if you need to so that you cover everything in the slow cooker) and cook on low for about 7hrs or until the meat is falling off the bones.

After it is finished, remove the bones and as much of the meat as you can. Blend the soup (you don’t have to, but I prefer to. You can just give it a good stir and it will mostly break down anyway but still stay a bit chunky – depends how you like your soup). Chop the meat into small pieces and put back into soup. Stir and season with pepper again if you think it needs it.

Hot Chips & Chicken Salt - Red Rooster & McDonalds

Having fun with a birthday treat earlier this year :)

I have been meaning to blog about this for a while because last year we went to Red Rooster for hot chips and, after it taking a very long time for them to find the ingredients of their hot chips and chicken salt it then turned out that it had gluten in it. So we went back to our safety zone of McDonalds fries (download the food sensitivity table or look at the ingredients list)

However, I thought I would check the nutritional information again and looks like they no longer have any allergens in them. So whether or not the information I got first was right or not, you can now know that their chips and chicken salt are free of gluten, dairy, egg, soy, peanuts, treenuts and all other main allergens. Nice to know that a more solid potato chip is available.

Read more about hot chips and which other ones have allergens here.

Sultana and Oat Cookies

I think these are the best allergen-free cookie I have made so far. Crunchy but slightly soft inside. Yum!
I adapted this recipe from Taste.com.au.

The amount below made 14 cookies. You can easily double the mixture:

65g dairy free spread
1/4 cup caster sugar and brown sugar mixed together (about half and half)
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
Equivalent of 1 egg using No Egg
1 cup gluten free self raising flour
1/2 tbsp soy milk
1/3 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup sultanas
another 1/2 tbsp soy milk

Preheat oven to 180C.
Add sugars and vanilla essence to the dairy free spread and mix with electric mixer until creamed. Add egg replacer and mix until well combined (takes a little bit of time).
Sift in flour, add the first bit of soy milk and stir until combined well.
And in oats, sultanas and the rest of the milk and combine.
Roll into balls, place on baking paper on a baking tray and then press down with your fingers or fork.
Bake in middle of oven for ~17 mins or until golden. Mine took 17mins :)

Menu Plan Monday

I really do the planning!

Bit late this week!
Monday - Lamb and Vegetables (my husband and I had a fantastic lamb curry so I just made plain meat and 3 veg for the kids)
Tuesday - I'm going to try out a Chicken Parmigiana using soy cheese (normal cheese for the rest of us though!). Will tell you about it if it works!
Wednesday - pizza night - will use chia seeds in it and mushroom, zucchini, corn, capsicum and maybe ham on top.
Thursday - soft tacos - those tortillas will get another workout!
Friday - Fish and homemade chips and veg.
Saturday - Will be out for a shared dinner - have arranged for the sausages to be gluten free and will be making and taking a pea & ham soup that is allergen free for everyone but hopefully she'll try it. Will take along a bread roll from Choices too.
Sunday - leftover soup (hopefully!) and toast. Maybe a Raffertys sachet for her if she baulks at the soup. Easy dinner day!

Ideas for picky eaters and more

I watched this interview and thought Kelly's suggestions for introducing foods to picky eaters quite useful. Similar to what I said a while ago but more specific. There are some other good tips as well. Kelly's focus isn't feeding children with allergies but I think there are lots of useful things. Our Gluten Free Family will probably have the rest of the interview up soon or you could follow the links. Apologies for the way the video goes on the screen - I haven't designed the blog for wide screen! And you'll probably need to turn it up.

Mrs Robens Tortillas

The results!

The all important fold and hold test!

The other day I ordered a tortilla mix from the Allergy Train website. I made sure I put burritos on our menu plan and so on Sunday it was burrito time! The mix instructions are designed for the mix to be used all at once so I had to work hard at working out my ratios but I managed to make just enough for 3 tortillas. One problem was that you need a tortilla press but I used our sandwich press (with baking paper because we often put buttered normal bread in there) and although they were a bit thick, we had success! My daughter really enjoyed them and they rolled really well - no breakage - a very important thing in the gluten free world! I tasted them and they were very pleasant, even in the aftertaste. So we'll be doing that again soon. These tortillas also might be a good lunch option for when she starts school (but hopefully she may have grown out of the allergy by then...?)

We filled our burritos with chicken and chick peas seasoned with an Old El Paso burrito mix and pan fried, grated carrot, diced tomato, cucumber slices and shredded lettuce. Yum.

Popcorn when travelling

Normally I like making my own popcorn but it's a bit of a hassle on holidays so we buy Coles butter or lite butter microwave popcorn. It's only allergen is soy (so fine for us!) an it is quite tasty. We prefer the lite for health reasons and the salt is a little overwhelming in the butter version anyway. So that's what we will have for a snack this long weekend while we are here near the beach. Have a great long weekend those of you who have it - are you doing anything special?

Banana Muffins

I know they are expensive, but when you have kids with allergies, you just have to bite the bullet to ensure your children eat well and are full and healthy. So after a short hiatus, my common sense, and a desire to support the Queensland farmers, means we are back on bananas, although slightly less often than normal.

I make this healthy tasty (normal flour/milk) muffin all the time for my son. He loves them. Yesterday I gave them a go with gluten free flour and soy milk. Even I thought they tasted yummy and I can't stand banana (and don't particularly like GF flour either...!).

Here's the GF recipe:

Rice bran oil for greasing
2 overripe bananas (I had to put them aside especially!)
2 tbsp Honey
1 1/2 tbsp Rice Bran Oil
3/4 cup soy milk
1 1/2 cup self raising gluten free flour
1 tbsp psyllium husk

Preheat oven to 200C. Grease 9 muffin pans in a muffin tray with oil.
Mash bananas in a bowl with a fork. Add oil, honey and milk and mix well. Tip: if you do oil first and have a squeezey honey (ie don't need to scoop into honey) the tablespoon you use will be oily and the honey will slip out easily!
Add the flours and mix together quickly with a spoon. Don't overmix - lumpiness is fine in a muffin mix.

Divide mixture into muffins pans and bake for 20mins or until skewer comes out clean.

The muffins freeze well.

Never leave home without it

I have rarely forgotten our kids' medication when we have gone out and, thankfully, never been in a position where we had a reaction and couldn't do anything about it. I want to encourage you to never leave home without your child's medication because you never know if or where a reaction could occur and sometimes even unpredictable reactions occur. A couple of examples from our life:

- I was buying a few things at the supermarket with my Mum. We had the 2 kids in the pram - they didn't get out/touch anything/eat anything - all of a sudden I noticed that there are itchy welts appearing on my son's face and they were spreading by the second. Antihistamine in and the reaction slowed and stopped. We have no idea what caused it - was it an airborne reaction or did he touch the pram wheel that had something on it and rubbed his face? Very thankful for meds then and although he had a reaction, I appreciated that it was very educational for my Mum to see how quick, real and mysterious reactions can sometimes be.

- At playgroup last week I was about 30 seconds behind my daughter to the morning tea table but by the time I got there another mother had set her up with a bowl of fruit and crackers - she is allergic to all the crackers that were in her bowl and had already had a bite out of two of them. Thankfully she barely reacted (her reactions are pretty mild compared to my sons's) and I didn't need to medicate her. But she became very distressed that I took the food away (I think she thought she was in trouble, rather than the loss of the food - I need to work on not showing panic!), poor thing, and it took about 5min to console her. Funnily enough, I had to give my son some antihistamine because he had a reaction - big itchy welt on his chin and cheek. I have a feeling coconut could be the problem (we have had 3 possibly coconut related reactions). It's not a nut and he hasn't been tested for it due to no concerns in the past, and what I've read tells me that there isn't actually a test for it...
Most of the mums at our playgroup are very aware of my kids' allergies and always ask before serving my children anything. Unfortunately this mum's English is pretty limited and it seemed like she didn't know. It's possibly time for another announcement about my kids.

I pack our medications in the bag pictured above - it is a formula bottle bag so is insulated - good for temperature control and protection for the glass antihistamine bottle, it's also red and therefore easy to locate. We have the antihistamine, epipen and asthma gear in there. It's easy to carry on your shoulder or pop in the nappy bag.

How do you carry your medications?

Allergy Train Website

Hopefully they will look better than this one

Oscar's Mum blogs about cooking for her son who has food intolerances and I enjoy reading because sometimes we cross over in what we can cook. The other day she blogged about succeeding in cooking tortillas - I have been looking for a successful tortilla recipe/mix for a long time (we love tortillas!) and so her link to the Allergy Train website for Mrs Robens Tortilla Mix was quite exciting.

I have placed my order (along with a couple of other things - had to make the $12 postage worth it) - and will let you know how it goes. By the way, I noticed that you can get a lot of Eskal brand items including the ice-cream cones that I mentioned on Wednesday.

Ice Cream Cones

We recently instituted Friday night ice-cream after dinner. The kids are super excited about it and often try to work out if it is Friday yet. Miss 2 can have soy ice-cream and we are currently using So Good's Chocolate ice-cream. I was at a specialty shop and happened on some gluten-free ice cream cones by Eskal and so I snapped them up. Both kids really enjoyed having them and we saved washing up 2 more bowls :)

There's lots more gluten free products by Eskal here - we have enjoyed the Deli Crackers before but haven't seen many of the other products in regular stores. I think some aren't dairy free so make sure you check.