~seizure FREE me~

~seizure FREE me~

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Almond flour pizza crust

So in my last post I mentioned the GAPS friendly pizza... so here is the recipe! :)

I unfortunately don't know the source for this recipe, someone wrote it down for me on paper awhile back and it didn't work for Atty at the time on his MAS diet, but wow am I glad I kept it!

Almond flour pizza crust

makes two med thin pizzas {12" pans}

Dry
2 cups almond flour
1/2 tsp of salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp basil

Wet
3/4 cup mashed white beans {that were soaked the right way and cooked prior}
3 eggs
3 tbsp olive oil

Preheat the oven to 350 and line the pans with parchment paper. Mix all the dry together in a bowl and then make a well in the center. Mix the wet quickly in a blender and then add to the  dry and mix thoroughly. Will be wet, spread evenly onto the parchment using a spatula, wet if sticking {it didn't need to do this} Bake for 10-12 minutes. Then drizzle some more olive oil over the crust and spread a layer of tomato paste over the whole thing. Add a sprinkle of sea salt and what ever toppings you like. We used some veggies/black olives/pineapple/chicken and cheddar cheese. Any GAPS approved cheese would work. Bake for another 10-15 minutes.

The only thing I will do different next time is I will bake the crust for a little longer, but I like crunchy thin crust pizza so it's a personal taste thing. :)

Remember that these recipes are just suggestion, I am in no way an expert on the GAPS diet and you should always research for yourself the foods that you eat. That being said, my whole family loved this pizza, well worth making!

Switching over to the GAPS diet

April 24th 2012 Atty was release from care at Children's hospital and no longer needs to be on the Modified Atkins for Seizures diet!!! Next month on the 26th he will be seizure free for two years! Amazing!!! The doctor and dietitian at Children's are really impressed with him, and someone is going to be writing paper on his case which is really awesome! Also we might be able to help in the future with a case study his neurological doctor wants to see happen, some sort of gene testing. Because apparently he has notice that kids who have the drop seizures that Atty had respond best to the diet for seizure control and he wants to know if there is a gene connection with these kids. If they found a link that would open the door to genetic testing for kids who are having no luck with medicines for seizure control. I would hope they would do genetic testing from the beginning and start with the diet, but that probably won't be the case. It would eliminate some of the wasted time trying different meds that don't work... hopefully. It was such a mixture of emotions driving home from that appointment. I cried thinking back on how far we have come. It's truly wild how fast these two years flew by! So we are now switching over the the GAPS diet full time and will do this for probably two more years and then take it from there. When I told the dietitian this she was excited and said that a different family had mentioned that diet to here and wanted to know if she could put them in contact with me. I said absolutely yes! She also wants to keep in contact so she can get more recipes from me... :) I've had the Gut and Psychology Syndrome book for some time but I recently got the GAPS Guide and the Internal Bliss cookbook and I've been experimenting with more recipes. It's like starting all over again. I have been debating starting from the introductory diet for him so he can have optimal healing but so far it hasn't worked out. It's very restrictive and intense and I wanted my husband around to help out but the weekends are always full and it's hard to make it work during the week. So I'm starting with the full GAPS diet and then I will do the introductory if needed and where ever it fits best.  We have been gradually adding in GAPS foods for the last 6 months or so. I felt more comfortable with a gradual introduction to new foods and unlimited amounts of fruits/veggies. I started with unlimited amounts of veggies and he was fine with that, then slowly started in with larger servings of fruit and just recently unlimited amounts. We also recently switched over to local honey as the sweetener. Makes everything yummier! :) We have come to find out {it seems} that our oldest boy might be sensitive to food in the rag weed family. He had been complaining of headaches for a while, close to two years. We tried chiropractic care which helped for other things but didn't seem to make the headaches go away and we also took him to get his eyes checked {they are perfectly fine}. To make a long story shorter  we made a connection to the stevia that we have been using for Atty for the last TWO years {his headaches had been going on for about the same amount of time}. It was the only sweetener Atty could have and I'd gotten in the habit of using it for the other kids as well. Especially in the lemon water that my kids have daily. So anyways I took the stevia out of his diet {as well as some other food that I found connected to the ragweed family} and his headaches pretty much went away! Wow did I feel awful for taking so long to figure that out. But no one mentioned the ragweed connection to me when they told us to use that for Atty's sweetener, in fact they didn't mention any of the side effects at all. I think because I was already so overwhelmed I started using the stevia with out researching it well {very unusual for me} and now I feel frustrated that I did that. Not everyone has reactions to it, but the people that do really suffer! So all that to say that we are now cutting stevia out of our diet and going to local raw honey. :) I was the most scared when introducing honey to him. I felt like I was holding my breath for weeks before I relaxed! I no longer keep track of the amount of honey and he's had no reaction what so ever! I really want to introduce homemade yogurt the GAPS way but I've yet to figure out how to keep it at the right temp for 24 hours. I will be posting more GAPS friendly recipes now on this blog as that is what we are focused on now.  Starting with a GAPS friendly pizza recipe that I made the other night, wow is it good! The whole family scarfed it and Atty was so excited, he hasn't had pizza in over two years after all! So far I am really loving the GAPS diet for him and I feel strongly that this diet would have been the right one for him from the very beginning, but I guess we will never know for sure... what I do know is that it's the perfect one for him now! :)