Grain-free Banana Pikelets

A friend of mine recently sent me a recipe for banana fritters, which was basically 2 eggs, 1 banana.  Sam and I tried a batch almost immediately and they were very good but I decided to experiment to see if I could make them into banana pikelets.  My Mum used to make us banana pikelets when we were kids and I've always loved them.  Anyway, two iterations later and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Recipe

Ingredients
1 banana
2 eggs
2 tbsp arrowroot
1/2 tsp baking soda (bicarb)
1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar

Method

• Mash banana. 
• Add the two eggs and mix well.
• Add the rest of the ingredients and mix until well combined.  Use an electric mixer if it ends up a bit lumpy.
• Heat a bit of coconut oil (or your preferred oil) in a fry pan on medium heat.  
• Drop spoonfuls of mixture into the pan and cook just like you would pancakes.
• Serve immediately.  Very good just on their own or try some toppings like cinnamon, maple syrup or honey.

Making Ice Cream and Ice Magic

One thing I miss being on a grain-free diet is ice cream. Grains in ice cream, you might say?  Well yes and it didn't occur to me at first either. I now check the ingredients of everything!  I missed ice cream even more over Christmas when my husband and father-in-law were eating Magnum after Magnum. My two big loves all in the one packet: chocolate and ice cream!  So, I was very excited when my new ice cream maker arrived this week, purchased with some money that I got from my Grandfather for Christmas, bless him.  It's lovely and red, very simple to use and clean, plus the box has been doing a very good job of keeping Sam occupied.

Sam is dairy intolerant and I'm off dairy while I'm breastfeeding, so I'm now on a mission for the perfect non-dairy ice cream recipe. I've tried two so far, a vanilla one and a coffee one, and while I was quite happy with the flavour, the texture definitely needs work. My husband said the vanilla one was too coconutty and requested some dairy ice cream just for him.  Both versions were quite icy and a little bit lumpy. I will keep trying. I used an organic coconut milk and would have preferred a coconut cream, but my local supermarket only had "light" versions as if that was somehow healthier! (A topic for another post.)

This brings me to the whole point of this post. I made my own Ice Magic! If you're not from Australia, Ice Magic is a chocolate sauce that goes hard once you pour it on ice cream. I think it may be called Magic Shell in other countries, because I got the idea from The Paleo Mom's Monkey's Lunch Eskimo Pies and that's what she calls it. I adjusted the quantities to work with the size of the chocolate block that I had, which was Lindt Roasted Almond Dark Chocolate, which is the only bought chocolate I've found that I can eat, along with their plain 75% or 85% Dark Chocolate. It turned our rather icy ice cream into a yummy dessert.

Homemade Ice Magic sauce.

Ingredients

100g block of Lindt plain or Roasted Almond dark chocolate.

70ml of coconut oil.

Method

Melt chocolate and coconut oil together over low heat until the chocolate has melted in, stirring occasionally.

Let cool and then pour into a glass jar or bottle.

Store in the cupboard.

If it's Winter, it might solidify, in which case I would just stand the bottle in a bowl of hot water until it goes runny again. Not much chance of that happening in this part of the world right now.  I'm not sure how long it would keep for, we eat it much too fast for that ever to be an issue. 

Heal your gut, heal your body

Do you get a lot of headaches, aches or pains? Are you lacking energy and motivation to do anything? Are you depressed or grumpy, stressed and tired-out? Do you suffer from anxiety, ulcers, joint pain, asthma, rashes, bronchitis, hay fever, insomnia, diabetes, diarrhoea, chronic fatigue, acne, sore throats or pretty much any illness you can think of? If you're anything like me, you may not have linked it to a possible food intolerance and ultimately a problem with your gut and digestive system.

A few weeks after my son was born I decided to find out whether I had any food intolerances. According to Wallace (2012, p. 32), food allergies and sensitivities are behind most of the health issues in children today. As I was breast feeding I decided I should get myself checked out just in case it could somehow affect my son, Sam. To be honest I didn't think I had any intolerances, so it was quite a shock to find out I had intolerances to grains (wheat, rice, corn, etc), baker's yeast and tomatoes. And so, my grain free journey began, but also my interest in the gut and the digestive system.

After a few weeks of discovering just how many things have grains as ingredients I was left with a diet of salad, vegetables, meat, eggs, nuts and seeds and anything I baked for myself with grain-free flours and ingredients. At the same time I was becoming more alert, less tired, and experiencing hardly any headaches. I used to get quite a lot, which I had usually put down to stress. Turns out it was food intolerances.

I then discovered this interview with Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride (2013):

This was a real eye-opener and confirmed a lot of things I had been recently discovering. It's 49 minutes long but I would recommend that everyone watch it. Some of the main highlights are:

• Food is the most powerful way of dealing with and treating disease.
• 85% of the immune system is located in the digestive track, in the gut wall. The digestive system is the biggest and most important immune organ in the body.
• Digestive disorders are causing neurological conditions and autoimmune diseases.
• Children with learning difficulties and behavioural issues have damaged gut flora.
• Antibiotics are the number one destroyer of gut flora

You can either nourish your body with real, natural food or pollute it with processed rubbish. The latter will destroy the delicate balance of good and bad bacteria in your gut and digestive tract which will in turn make you sick. See the above list of potential problems!

I will write more posts on this topic as I gather more and more information. I'm quickly discovering a huge community of mothers on the Internet making the same journey as I am and I'm so very thankful for all the recipes and articles I'm coming across to make the journey easier.

References
Wallace, Hayley, N.D 2012, Infant Health, The Print Group, QLD, Australia.
PasturePromise 2013, Food is the Best Medicine: Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride, video, 4 March 2013, viewed 9 January 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cONYR7vAD-A&sns=em

Frustrated

I feel the need to write and I'm not sure that all my friends on Facebook really need to be subject to my ramblings.  I was woken at 4:30am to feed my gorgeous little boy (after staying up till midnight) and have been awake ever since, thinking about something I read and believed yesterday which turned out to be very misleading and bordering on untrue. Which you do need to expect if you're reading something on the Internet, but this was in an actual printed book that I purchased and to protect the author, who's heart is in the right place and I'm sure means well and is passionate about her subject, I won't name any names.

I guess this has just cemented my feelings of frustration and growing belief that you really can't trust anything you hear or read these days. So much for the Information Age. Maybe we should have called it the Misinformation Age. Now that we have Sam I have an even stronger drive to do everything I can to keep this family healthy and that really is easier said than done.

For example, doctors. I'm talking about the medical profession and the general practitioners that we all entrust our lives to. At least I did until a few years ago when I started realising that not all of them really know what they are doing. My husband, diagnosed with high blood pressure, prescribed high blood pressure tablets and told that he would be on them for life. Really? Even common sense tells me that losing some weight, doing some exercise and the right nutrition will go along way to fixing the blood pressure problem and we are currently in the process of proving that.

I've had my own health issues in the past which I've now been able to prevent by learning about diet, nutrition and the pH level of the body.  Doctors prescribed me course after course of antibiotics, which in the end did a lot more harm than good and are probably part of the reason why I now have food intolerances. I was referred to a specialist who wanted to send me to hospital for a treatment to supposedly fix the problem. Something told me to do my own research and I discovered the procedure had quite a poor success rate, something the specialist neglected to tell me.

So, while I know that there are a lot of very good doctors out there, I've realised they don't know everything and do get it wrong sometimes. I've realised that nutrition can prevent and fix a lot, maybe most, health issues. And I've realised I need to know a lot more so I can make my own educated and informed decisions.

I want to document  and share the truth as I discover it, I want to be as open-minded and unbiased as possible and I want to help others who don't have the time or inclination to do all this learning, research and studying themselves.  Feel free to join in and contribute if you have a similar mission. Or just follow along and comment when you feel the need.