allergen-free chicken cordon bleu casserole

My family voted to have chicken cordon bleu casserole for dinner this week.

Sadly, I'm not supposed to have dairy! And dairy plays a huge role in chicken cordon bleu. So I had to come up with a solution.

Here is that solution.

First, the regular recipe is: you bread chicken cubes by dipping them in a mixture of egg and milk, and then in bread crumbs. You fry them. Then you mix them in a casserole dish with 8 oz cubed ham, 8 oz cubed swiss cheese, and 1 10.5-oz can of cream of chicken soup mixed with 10.5 oz of milk. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.

So, clearly, since Nathaniel is allergic to eggs and dairy, this was going to involve some work on my part.

For the cream of chicken soup, I used this recipe and it turned out admirably. It made approximately 4x as much as I needed (I made us a mini-batch of dairy-free casserole), so I froze the rest in serving-size bags for the next time I need dairy-free cream of chicken.

I dipped the chicken in straight up coconut milk to bread it; the breading didn't stick to the chicken like I wanted it to, but it worked out in the end.

We used fresh local goat swiss cheese instead of regular swiss cheese, since we discovered on Saturday that the little man can handle goat cheese.

I made our special casserole in a bread pan, and baked it at the regular time.

Actually, I think our casserole turned out better than the normal one. I don't love goat cheese, but it worked out really well for the chicken cordon bleu!

Healthy foods

First, this is what I had for dinner 2 nights ago. That is purple heirloom cauliflower (so good!), spinach, and sausage pasta. Yum!





Second, the other day for breakfast I made sweet potatoes and apples. I sliced 'em real thin, then fried them in Pam. If you can call that frying, which I'm not sure you can. But both Nathaniel and I liked them, and they were very healthy!

food, inc., etc.

I've gotten more interesting or more boring in the past few weeks, depending on how you want to look at it.

On the one hand, I feel like I haven't actually DONE very much--as far as, I haven't worked out that much, haven't gone to very many interesting places, haven't accomplished many things.

However, I have learned very much. The past maybe 10 days have been devoted to books and documentaries, such as The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler. Movies include Fathead and Food, Inc.

Each of those four have been changing how I eat and feel about food. I was going to write all about them, but now I'm tired, so here's the first one.

Food, Inc.

This documentary was totally eye-opening. It explores where our food is created, and it is... again, eye-opening. I need to watch it again. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow. Anyway. It was just shocking to see how little off the "food" we eat is actually food--and it was horrible to learn what things can go wrong when our "food" goes wrong. For example, one woman's child died from a rare form of e. coli the kid got from eating a hamburger at a regular fast food place. And the FDA wouldn't do anything about it and the infected meat didn't get recalled for almost a month AFTER the kid had died from the infection. Whack, right?

After we saw this documentary, Carl agreed that we could up our food budget in order to buy things that were actually real. One thing we learned was that "cheap" food is not actually cheap: not only do we pay for it in other ways, as I documented in my grocery store revelation post, but it's also not actually cheap because we subsidize most food. Corn subsidies are the only thing that make our cornflakes so cheap--take away subsidies, and the food would be more expensive again. Who's paying the subsidies? You are. I am. In the form of taxes we don't get to opt out of. In other words, the cheap food isn't actually cheap. The best food for you--the local stuff, the responsible stuff--is the cheapest food too, a lot of times: it just has a higher price tag up front.

This movie definitely committed us to being more mindful about our food purchases and what we choose to eat, and how to spend our money.

adjusting to allergies

When the allergist told me that I would need to give up dairy, egg, and peanut because Nathaniel was allergic to them and I was nursing, I initially thought he was crazy. It would not have been the first time I had received gross misinformation about breastfeeding from the allopathic community. So I spent the weekend still eating eggs and butter and cheese, and researching a million things on breastfeeding kids with allergies.

Alas, the allergist was correct. I SHOULD eliminate those foods from my diet. Here are some helpful links that led me to that conclusion.

La Leche League on Allergies and the Breastfeeding Baby
Random page where someone asks about dairy allergies in relation to breastfeeding

And the most helpful one of all that I need to keep handy for reference, Life without milk! And other things. This website has a list of food you can still eat that doesn't have dairy in it. SO HELPFUL!

Now, to make my new dietary issues even more superfun, I've been feeling very strongly in the past month that I need to give up sugar. In college, I did this once for Lent, and cut out everything with sugar in the top 5 ingredients. It was awesome. After breaking the addiction to sugar, that is. That took a good two weeks. But after that, it was great. I felt great, lost weight, and basically my body was just happy.

But back then, when I couldn't just have a granola bar for breakfast or something, I would have eggs (out!) or a peanut butter sandwich (also out!). Now my options are much more limited. I'm discovering that I need to plan all my meals ahead of time, to be sure they don't involve any ingredients I am trying to avoid.

I told Carl last night that I didn't want to be That Person who goes out with other people and has really crazy dietary needs that are practically impossible to fulfill.

"You already are that person," Carl told me, not because I'm super picky or something (I'm not), but because as of Friday, I guess I AM that person. For Nathaniel, I have to be that person.

leftovers recipe: chicken and cauliflower

Last night I had to make dinner. I only thought about it about 45 minutes until dinner was needed, so it had to be quick. I had to use a bunch of leftover chicken. Bonus points for using leftover cauliflower that had been blanched and then drenched in cheese (the cauliflower doesn't reheat well, so it's rarely eaten as a leftover).

Normally, I use leftover chicken for chicken alfredo lasagna. But we were missing about half of the other ingredients for that.

So I made up this fun dish, which I guess you could call Leftover Chicken and Cauliflower Pasta. Or something like that.

I cut up the leftover chicken and the leftover cauliflower and heated it up with just a little bit of oil. I added some garlic and crushed red pepper. Then, after everything was heated through, I added a can of cream of mushroom soup. Then I rinsed the can out with milk, adding the milk to the mixture.

Brought it to boiling, then reduced the heat and let it keep cooking until the pasta was done.

Then I put them together.

It was great.

I think next time I would add more red pepper and garlic, and I might use a can of condensed cream of chicken soup instead of cream of mushroom. But it was a good meal and only took something like 20 minutes? Not bad!

buffalo wing popcorn

This stuff was good.

I popped popcorn. Then I opened up the bag partway, poured in some buffalo sauce, and shook the bag up.

Then I poured it into a bowl and ATE IT and loved it. You should try some too.

s'mores bars

I discovered these on Pinterest and they swiftly became my family's dessert of choice.

You need:

- 5 tbsp butter
- 1 12-oz package of mini marshmallows
- 6 cups Golden Grahams
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- chocolate chips.

Put the chocolate chips in the freezer (so they don't melt when you mix them into the rest of everything later).

Melt the butter and 4/5 of the marshmallows with the vanilla extract.

Pour the melted mixture into a bowl with the Golden Grahams, the leftover marshmallows, and the chocolate chips.

Stir, and transfer to a casserole dish.

Enjoy hot or cold.

ready to change

The past year has been a very body-centric year for me. Between pregnancy and birth and nursing, I think that makes a lot of sense.

This year, I resolved to take control of my body. I've never been really overweight or anything, but I've never been fit either. I decided that this year, I'm going to be fit.

It's involved some changes. I've had to start changing mindsets. For example, the mindset of rewarding myself with food. If I have a hard day, I'm always tempted to go out for dinner. But I am coming to conclude that food is not the proper way to reward a person who lives in a country where obesity is prevalent.

Source: Uploaded by user via Allie on Pinterest

Another change is the mindset of working out. In high school I never worked out intentionally. In college I started running and I would go to the gym somewhat regularly, but not as regularly as I should have. After moving home I started doing nightly workouts with my girls Emily and Julie, but only until I got pregnant, and then I had to stop because I was so morning-sick all the time that I couldn't afford to expend any calories on exercise (I lost like 15 lbs during my first 6 months of pregnancy).

For the past three months I've been doing Insanity, and it's been a real paradigm shift to plan on doing those workouts once--and sometimes twice--a day every week. It was hard to plan on working out at first, but now it's harder not to plan that part of my day. Today I did a wimpy lame workout in the morning and now I'm kind of itching for something more intense.

I've been noticing what I eat more, and being more mindful of my dietary choices. I know that has made a big difference too.

I'll just add here that I have lost over 5 lbs in the month of January. The month isn't over yet and I wasn't really aiming to lose weight. I've been aiming to live more healthfully.

I'm ready to change.

Source: Uploaded by user via Allie on Pinterest

spicy tuna wrap recipe

Let me preface this recipe with the side note that while I love fish, I don't particularly adore tuna. And in addition to that, I find mayonnaise super disgusting. Everything about it just creeps me out. But this recipe was actually good and I'm excited to have it for lunch today as well.

INGREDIENTS:
- 1 can tuna
- 1 spoonful mayonnaise
- bunches of hot sauce (I used Sriracha, but I bet Cholula would be great too)
- a little bit of chopped onion
- 1 tortilla
- 1 cup brown rice

Mix everything together and stick on the tortilla. Bam. Done.

I think I ended up using half (or 3/4) hot sauce and half mayonnaise to hold the tuna together and it was good. And spicy. But that's good.

on food, part 2

Read the first post on food here.

Since I wrote that blog entry, several things have happened!

Notably, there was Halloween. I know I, for one, ate WAY too much Halloween candy. However, I excused it because I am nursing. Bad excuse, but oh well.

Next up, Shawn T caught up with us. We've all been doing the Insanity workout. We just started the second month (we did the first month for 6 weeks because I went out to that funeral so we did one week twice). Six weeks into the workout, we can really see a difference. And, I think, feel a difference. I can do way more pushups now, and I can see more muscles on myself than I could before. I can see WAY more muscles on Carl, now.

Anyway, yes: Shawn T has caught up with us. In the past, we've done a 40-minute workout with Shawn and then sat down with bowls of ice cream while we literally cooled down. But recently, I have felt strongly enough about eating nutritional food to actually 1) buy it and/or 2) make it.

I started making bread for us (using this recipe). We go through 2.5 loaves per week of my homemade bread, mostly because it is way better than storebought bread so we eat more of it. But making it from scratch saves money and is just generally better. I should have taken a picture of my bread from yesterday; it was beautiful.

I've been reading through health blogs for recipes and I tried one yesterday that was actually pretty good. I'll post it on here in a bit.

We are the only people who control what goes into our bodies. So it's worth it to be intentional about that.

crunchiness and conservatism

Last night I had a dear friend come over, and we talked about our mutual crunchiness, and our mutual conservatism. I'd kind of felt alone in being both, but my friend had a really good point:

Conservatism is all about taking responsibility for yourself. So is crunchiness. Both of those philosophies are about taking responsibility for your body, your health.

Conservatism is also the philosophy that everything is best local--same as crunchiness.

Anyway. I thought that was a great point. I no longer feel quite as weird being a cloth-diapering, breastfeeding, bedsharing, babywearing, former-vegan conservative. All of those things go hand in hand with being responsible, staying local, and being a good steward of the earth.

on food, UPDATED

UPDATE: This post posted prematurely due to my weird computer doing bizarre things I don't understand! But I finished it. Here it is, finished.

Over the past week, I've found myself redefining my relationship with food.

Food is a funny thing. We all need it. There isn't anyone alive who doesn't eat, who doesn't need to eat to live. Sorry to be controversial, but the Breatharians are lying! We all eat.

But we all eat different things. And in different amounts. And at different times. We've got vegans and vegetarians and fruitarians and straight up carnivores and people who only eat at Subway and people who only eat at McDonald's. Then you have the people with eating disorders: people with bulemia and anorexia nervosa and compulsive overeating.

The way we relate to food really colors our entire lives.

A few days ago I was watching one of my friends eat--we were eating together, PS, I don't just like watch people eat--and I noticed how when everyone else got up for seconds, including me, she didn't. She just wasn't hungry for more.

That was the first time it ever occurred to me that I, myself, might eat more than I need to at mealtimes, just because. Maybe that makes me stupid, that I never thought about it before. But oh well. I'm twenty-three years old and I just realized that at dinnertime, I usually eat more than I need.

And then I came across an article in the NYT about how junk food is actually way more expensive than home-cooked food, despite the rumors to the contrary. Honestly, I'd heard the same lines over and over myself: that junk food is far cheaper than healthful food. But it turns out, that's a LIE! And when you think about it, of course it's a lie. You can make healthy food for cheap, if you actually bother to make it.

I know in my life, I've had strange relationships with food in the past. For the first six months of my first pregnancy, I couldn't keep down a single meal, pretty much. I lost 15 lbs from the whole ordeal. I had to force myself to eat in the hopes that my body would absorb a few nutrients before the morning-afternoon-night sickness kicked in.

In high school, since my schedule was jam-packed from 5:45 am until 9 pm at night, with literally no breaks (I skipped lunch to take extra class... yeah. not my whole high school career, but a significant portion of it), I would do nothing but eat from 4:45 am until 5:45 am. Then I would snack a little around 1 pm in between classes. That was pretty much how I dealt with food. Tons and tons of food in the morning, and then nothing all day.

Then I went to college, and had an opposite problem: as the opening baker, I had to be up too early to eat before going to work (on campus, the cafeteria wasn't open when I left... for obvious reasons. I was the one opening it, basically). So I had to put off eating until the afternoon, and that changed up all my eating habits, also for obvious reasons.

One year for Lent I gave up sweets: chocolate, sugar-based things like cake and cookies, anything with corn syrup in the first five ingredients. For the first week it was killer but then after that it was so easy. I was going to do it forever but a few weeks after Lent I got back into my old habits. A few candies was all it took to bring back the "need" for them in my life again.

I've always had the problem of when I get super stressed, I stop feeling hungry--but then I force myself to eat more than I need, because I know starving isn't healthy but I can't always sense when my body is satiated.

Now that I'm a stay at home person, it's both surprisingly easy and surprisingly hard to eat whenever I want. Most of the time when I'm hungry, it feels like, Nathaniel gets hungry too, and he comes first most of the time. So there are days when I spend all my time nursing and don't get my first meal in until the afternoon, sometimes even late afternoon. On the other hand, I am the captain of my day now, and if I wanted to tell my baby to suck it up and take a binky, I could probably spend the whole day eating if I wanted to.

Food is complicated.

Our relationships to it are complicated. And even worse (or better?), they change over time. It's kind of like reading your scriptures every day. Some weeks, or months or years, you can be really good at daily scripture study. And then sometimes you lapse and forget to be intentional about it, and the lapse can last just as long as the disciplined times did. With food, sometimes we're good about it, and sometimes we're not. As we saw in the last season of The Biggest Loser, a person can go from being an Olympic athlete to being hundreds of pounds overweight in a single lifetime. That is amazing to me. Every person has the potential to go to extremes with food. Just because you took care of your eating habits for the first 25 years of your life is no guarantee that you'll continue for the next 25.

This whole synchronicity of food thoughts popping up in my life has got me thinking: I'm going to be more intentional about what I eat. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thoughts, anyone? Do you have any thoughts about food you'd like to share?