Cooking Slump

The warmer weather is welcome, to say the least, but it isn’t helping my motivation in the kitchen. This last week I tried my youngest and pickiest on a gluten free diet, without telling him. It was hard~ I ended up feeding him a lot of bars and snack-y things just to fill him up, with apples, carrots and green juice filling in the nutrition holes. Those three items are constants anyway, so at least there was a bit of normality to his diet. He did eat a bowl of rice one evening which he hadn’t done for years, claiming he didn’t like it, and a couple of new items were eaten but honestly, it was so hard trying to find things to fill his belly that by this weekend I’m so sick of cooking and baking I could scream, or better, fast, if I didn’t have to feed everyone else constantly. One thing I did add to the pumpkin/cinnamon scones I always make was topping them with a simple icing~ powdered sugar and water. After eating them plain for a few days my youngest always tires of them, so I added the icing and he was thrilled to finish them off. And I also found some vanilla sandwich cookies made by kinnikinnick that were a nice addition to his lunch box. Unlike a lot of gf cookies which have calorie and fat numbers off the charts, these are much more reasonable and taste light and delicious. (Ok, so they didn’t all make it into his lunchbox.) I didn’t really see a drastic difference in my youngest, although when I finally gave him wheat again yesterday he later woke up from a bad dream and had to get me. He did not complain about his stomach at all this week, which he sometimes does, nor did he suffer from being “too tired” to go to the park. Connected? Who knows. At least I’ve figured out a few items to add to his diet and I will continue to watch his reactions to what he eats, but quite frankly at the moment, even the thought of prepping strawberries sounds horribly painful. Maybe if I move all the kids’ favorite foods and some dishes low enough they could make their own meals for a day or two…Although then I’d be doing double time on the clean up. Maybe a restaurant is in our future.