My mom has been on the look out for cookbooks for our family, that meet both Jake’s requirements of being allergy free, and my requirement of being gluten free.  I can’t remember where she heard of this little book, but it is written by Jennifer Katzinger who has a bakery in Seattle called Flying Apron bakery.  The cookbook is both gluten-free and vegan, so uses no milk or eggs, and in their place, she uses a lot of sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and yams.  I’ve seen some book reviews mention that some vegans do not consider honey vegan, and honey is used throughout this book, but you could substitute agave nectar for honey if that is a concern.

I really had trouble deciding which of these delicious looking recipes I should start with and the Blueberry Cinnamon Scones recipe ended up winning.  Jeremy and I had gotten in the bad habit of going to Starbucks on Saturday mornings to get coffee cake and coffees before I found out I needed to eat gluten free.  These little trips have been one of our few luxuries over the past year and I was really missing my morning cinnamon treats, so this recipe sounded like a great place to start.  I had never thought of putting blueberry and cinnamon together before, but in the description of the recipe, the author writes that cinnamon and blueberries “should be together as often as possible”.  Boy was she right!  These are delicious.  I’ve made them several times now, and they make 8 scones for the recipe.  Because this is really too many scones for us to eat, I experimented with freezing the dough and now we can make 2 or 3 scones for us and freeze the rest of the batch.  When my in-laws were in town a few weeks ago I made the dough ahead of time and then on Saturday morning just popped the dough in the oven and 25 min later or so, fresh baked scones!

Well we’ve tried a couple of other recipes out of the book now as well and they are all great.  We still have beets in our fridge from the winter CSA and I talked Jeremy into letting me make the Borscht for supper, which was a bit of a hard sell.  Borscht is a Russian beet stew, this one had beets, carrots, cabbage and sweet potatoes, and lots of dill.  She used a cashew cream in place of sour cream, which we thought was surprisingly good.  This is now one of my favorite ways to use beets, and something I had not thought of before and Jeremy actually ended up liking it pretty well.

The third recipe we’ve tried is a Moroccan Bean Salad over Baby Spinach with butternut squash.  We did not have a butternut squash but did have a giant crazy looking blue hubbard squash that we’ve been needing to use.

Jeremy has been calling this squash a “spider squash” and saying that when I cut into it he thought a bunch of little spiders were going to run out because it was so creepy looking.  It is a big squash, probably at least 5 pounds and about the size of 2 butternut squash, and just for the record, when I cut into it, no spiders ran out.  The blue hubbard squash tasted just like a normal winter squash despite it’s strange look.

Back to the recipe, the moroccan bean salad also turned out really well, the white beans and squash were very filling and the spices including cinnamon, turmeric and ginger were different than i was used to but very good.  She calls for it over a bed of spinach, but I actually cooked the spinach and mixed it up with the beans.  I’m not a huge fan of raw spinach, but cooked in the salad it was great.

I would highly recommend this cookbook to anyone wanting to cook vegan and/or gluten free, and especially if you need to cook both (for those just needing to cook vegan, be warned that you will have to purchase some specialty ingredients because of the recipes being gluten free).  This is a great cookbook for our family because it is so hard for me to find recipes that are both gluten free and vegan, and when we do find them, they aren’t always great…. but I can’t wait to try more recipes from this cookbook!  And… if I’m ever in Seattle I am definitely going to the Flying Apron Bakery.

I have been struggling this week, trying to think of new ideas for food to feed Jacob.  As you may remember Jacob has food allergies; many many food allergies and it is making it tough for me to feed him as he is getting pickier.  To be precise, he is allergic to milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish… he is also eating gluten-free because of my celiac disease.  Well, picky toddlers are hard enough to feed without all of these added restrictions and I was really starting to run out of ideas.  But this week I asked some friends for ideas, researched some things on the internet, and went back through my recipe books.  I still don’t feel like my repertoire is big enough but it is growing at least.

When I was at Whole Foods a couple of days ago, I was searching for tahini to make Jake a new hummus recipe.  Well, because tahini is sesame paste it is with the peanut butter, an area of the grocery store I don’t usually look at because he is allergic.  Right next to the tahini I discovered Sunbutter, sunflower seeds that are ground up into a peanut butter like substance.  I thought I’d give it a try, and brought it home and it’s really not too different from peanut butter.  It tastes a little more like sunflower seeds, but still delicious (I love peanut butter).  Jake would only barely try it the day I brought it home, but later I gave it to him on apples and he loved it!  As you can see he went to town with it.

For anyone else in the same boat as our family, here is our list of snack ideas so far:

Sunbutter with apples, crackers, celery, etc.

Mary’s Gone Crackers - Jacob really likes these and they have whole flax and sesame seeds so I think are pretty healthy.  They do contain soy however if that is a concern.

Hummus with crackers, chips, or vegetables - I started with hummus and crackers for him and now he loves hummus.  I’ve now started putting the hummus on vegetables and he pretty much just picks the hummus off and eats it, but he’s eating a little bit of the broccoli and cauliflower which I think is a good thing.

Hummus with vegetables mixed in - I cooked some spinach and processed it in a food processor and mixed it in with his hummus yesterday and he looked at it funny for a minute or two, and then ate it just like normal!  I’ve seen some other ideas to mix pureed beets or carrots into hummus also but haven’t tried it.

Popcorn - I pop it myself over the stove with some canola or corn oil and then add seasoned salt.  Some websites say popcorn is a choking hazard so be careful with this.  I always pick out the unpopped hard pieces before I give it to him.

Roasted pumpkin or squash seeds - We’ve had a lot of winter squash this winter and I always roast the seeds because Jake will actually eat them.

Fruit - He won’t always eat plain fruit cut up, but every once in a while he will.

Breakfast smoothies - We have these for breakfast almost every morning, we no longer add the protien powder, but have started adding liquid probiotics to them which studies are starting to show may help reduce food allergies

Kale chips - I made some this morning and then saw this recipe with paprika and garlic on them which looks pretty tasty.  Jake actually likes kale this way, so it’s a good way for him to get some greens.

Chips or crackers and salsa -  Jacob loves salsa!  He’ll even eat plain canned tomatoes if I tell him it’s salsa…. sometimes you have to resort to trickery to get kids to eat!

Avocado - Jake went through a phase where he was eating 2 whole avocados  a day!  He won’t eat that much anymore but still loves it, and it’s really easy to cut one up.  I just read that if you have half an avocado left if you refrigerate it with the pit and some lemon juice on top it will keep better and keep it from browning as much.  They are expensive so I’m excited to try this.

Dried fruit - These are almost like chips, crunchy and sweet and usually just have the fruit and maybe cinnamon as an ingredient.  These are a big hit in our house.

I think that about covers the snacks he eats now.  Please let us know if you have any other good ideas, and to my friends that already helped contribute ideas thank you, we’ll be trying the recipes soon!!