To: All parent, grandparents, carers and special friends of a child who has a gluten allergy or intolerance.
If you are stressed about being able to cater for a child who can not eat any foods that contain Gluten…
Or you are having difficulty planning meals and you need some guidance and ideas on how to cope with this…
… Then this is will be a very important message you will need to read. Big call! Well heres why…
Meet my son James, my youngest son. When he was two, day in and day, out he was continually complaining of having stomach problems: pains, cramps and he was generally feeling unwell. When I think back over the last 2 years, I can identify times when he was also seemingly unwell, constipated, always catching the flu, ear infections and the list seemed to go on. We saw our local GP and was given access to the pharmacy to try and settle the never ending symptoms that seemed to raise their ugly head. It was not until we saw a natural therapist and got a food allergy test that we realised that the main culprit in this story was a protein you are now familiar with Gluten.
This little protein was now my worst enemy or worst nightmare and if you are here I am guessing that you have a child that needs to avoid foods that contain gluten.
If you are anything like me I am a busy mum, but I always prided myself in feeding my children well as it was my responsibility and I was always more than happy to do this task. I am a wheat farmers daughter so wheat and wheat products were part of every day meal planning and filled up the shelves in my pantry. I have two other happy healthy children that eat what ever they were presented… well within reason…
Woooow… what do I do now? I tried to ignore it for a while to see if the problem would go away, but you guessed it… the problem got worse… now I knew I was making him sick intentionally as I knew what the problem was.
I jumped onto the internet and found a bottomless pit of scattered online information, people selling their products around the world and recipes… lots and lots of recipes… All I wanted was to quickly get some facts, tips and recipes that were kid friendly to get me going…
My first thought as the cook and the household shopper was that I do not have time to get my head around this, let alone now source food for some family members and different food for my son. I now found myself laying awake at night wondering what I was going to put into him lunchbox for daycare and how was I going to communicate to my family members that help take care of him that he needed to avoid certain foods. This was of course all foreign ground for them too……
So I started to gather as much as I could find. Now I consider myself to be a fairly technologically savvy person but even I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information I found on the web.
My recipe books gathered over the years were no help either as they were all traditional books using wheat as the main ingredient. Once our friend now my enemy.
My son was terribly upset realising immediately that every time he went to the cupboard he was stopped dead in his tracks with an enemy product in his hands. My other children were happily eating as they normally would whilst poor James was getting a limited selection of safe foods, eg. Fruit, vege`s and meat. Murphys law this child is also the pickiest of the three and these choices were not making him happy. James became increasingly unpleasant, unsettled and whiny which only caused me more stress.
My kitchen once a place of peace and order now resembled a basket full of scattered magazine clippings, printed documents, hand written recipes that were passed to me …
We needed some foods, recipes and ideas that would give him variety and not make him feel as though he was different to others around him. The recipes had to be made from ingredients that were readily available and everyone had to be happy to eat them, as after all I do not run a restaurant!
I decided the only way was to stop panicking and put all of my research together, categorise the recipes I had gathered and collate all the other resources I had found.
Once I had done this life started to settle down, and remarkably I found I was easily able to make just one meal for the whole family that was tasty and enjoyable for us all to eat. No more unhappy James, no more unhappy mum.
Voila… 8 months later, many sleepless nights and two laptops later ….. Ive done it. And dont worry…. This valuable resource is suitable for ANYONE AROUND THE WORLD!!!!
As the stomach cramps and other various symptoms he was experiencing subsided he became more motivated to stay on the diet but when it came to choosing or trying foods he knew were different he would not even put a morsel in him mouth.
Thankyou for the wonderful recipes in the book. I have used almost all of them and have had wonderful results. It is great to find healthy foods that still taste great. Normally healthy also means a compromise in taste but not with yours. I have two children with food sensitivities. One attends kindy and she loves your muffins that I put tinned pears and carob buttons in."
So there you have it……I dont know about you but I wish I had access to all that information before I started, if I had I may have been able to avoid many tantrums in my kitchen.
As a person who is dealing with…
Gluten Free Recipes for Kids Gluten Free Recipes for Kids
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