Sunday, May 4, 2014

Menu Planning Can Be HARD

My 16-year old has been having increasing stomach pains, but has also been eating an increasing amount of wheat lately. Although in the past some activated charcoal did the trick, it doesn't seem to be helping the pain. Whether the pain is from something else or whether it's just so prolonged and she keeps eating wheat so it's not going away, we're not sure, but it's time to do something. Add to that, I've been feeling the need to go wheat-free for a while again, so with the two of us wanting to work on it, it's definitely time.

She wants to just cut back on her wheat; last time she had these pains, it took a few days of being wheat-free for them to disappear completely. So, I want to encourage her to at least go three days wheat-free and see if it helps. But that means having a menu plan. And although we previously did a couple of weeks straight of wheat-free, I'm sitting here trying to plan a wheat-free supper plan for the week and struggling! It's kind of sad that wheat is that much a part of our lives again, that we're that dependent on it.

Ideas I've come up with so far (and given they are for me, too, they are dairy-free, or able to be made dairy-free):

*chicken piccata (from the Wheat Belly 30-Minute or Less Cookbook) with potatoes and veggies
*a veggie or chicken and veggie stir fry with rice
*tacos (without the wheat tortillas; the Wheat Belly 30-Minute or Less Cookbook has a wheat-free recipe I could try or I could see about a traditional Mexican corn soft tortilla)
*pizza, with one of the crusts made with the recipe from Cooking for Your Gluten-Free Teen
*chili or spaghetti with gluten-free noodles
*skillet rice, kidney beans and tomatoes

This felt very hard to come up with. And it only covers 6 days, not the next 7. AND this is just for supper, not the other meals. She has already requested that I make the stuffed peppers recipe from Raw Food: A Complete Guide for Every Meal of the Day for lunch. I'm not sure I have what I need to make it, although I modify it anyhow because I can't eat one of the nuts in the recipe. But she'll need more than stuffed peppers to make it through even a few days of wheat-free eating!

Why does this feel so hard? It's not like we haven't done it before. But it's like a vague memory. I will have to see what I can dig up from this blog about what we've eaten in the past!

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Cookbooks mentioned above:

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