Fun and easy frozen grapes

I know some people are allergic to grapes/raisins. BUT if you aren't allergic to them, you can freeze them for a delicious addition to any meal.

All you need to do is buy seedless grapes, wash them, pick them off the stem and lay them on a piece of wax or parchment paper on a baking pan. You can continue layering in the pan if you have room in the pan. When done, put them in the freezer and freeze for a short time. When semi to all the way frozen, take them out and put them in a plastic freezer bag.

I personally like the red seedless grapes for freezing. Each fall when the prices of grapes are low, I will buy 15+ lbs for our family to eat. I will freeze them in quart size bags for easy serving. Then, when the nights are cold and we want to add a little pizzaz to our meals, I pull out the grapes. They are a hit to eat - whether you are little or big!

It's HOT out there...

Whewy! It's one hot day! Ok, if you heard that the high today was 82* you'd probably laugh. But, for where we live that's really hot!

So on days like today, popsicles are my kids' highlight of the day. I use three of popsicle makers (similar to the picture above) to make popsicles. It's easy, it's cheap and best of all I can fit it into our dietary restrictions.

Here's the low down on how to make them... if you've never tried it.

You need:

1 packet of Kool-aid (or a similar type of product)

1 quart of water (or if you're like me and can't remember what a quart is... it's 4 cups)

1/3 cup sugar

Mix all ingredients well in a pitcher. Pour into popsicle makers. Freeze.

When frozen, my kids happily run downstairs to the deep freeze and pull them out. However a word to the wise, if you want to avoid stains on carpet, send them outside. (smile)

If the allergic person can't tolerate dyes, you can try juices or fruits blended together in place of this recipe. The goal is to make something cold, tasty and fun.

Also if you don't need as many popsicles as I do and still want to make this treat, add more water and turn the rest back into Kool-aid to drink.

It truly is a treat on a hot day!

Easy Salad Dressing

Here's an easy salad dressing:

1 part sugar

1 part vinegar

2 parts oil

salt & pepper to taste

You can use what you are able to tolerate as far as vinegars and oils.

Just grab a measuring cup and a container a little larger than 3 times the size (the sugar mostly melts in to the mix). For 1-2 salad servings, I uses a 1/8 measuring cup. Mix together well.

Toss on lettuce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix into lettuce well.

You can add additional ingredients of your choice. I personally like to add fruit, sunflowerseeds and onions to the lettuce.

Enjoy!

First Zucchini of the Season

Today I had the privilege of picking my first zucchini in two years! Last year between the ground squirrels and hail, I lost all of my garden. So this year, I tried again and I was rewarded today with one zucchini. YAY!

Because I'm in the mood for zucchini, I thought I'd pass along my recipe for gluten free, egg free zucchini bread... and, yes, I do realize that it was only one zucchini. (smile) But, I've already started dreaming of a huge bounty of zucchini, which for now is only a dream. (sigh)

Let me preface the recipe with a little bit of information going into it. I ALWAYS grate and freeze zucchini before I make zucchini bread. I've found that freezing the zucchini breaks down the cell walls. So when I defrost it, I squeeze out as much zucchini juice into a measuring cup as I can and add the necessary "milk" to it to complete the required measurement of liquid.

This does two things for the recipe. 1 - It dries out the zucchini, which if not drained makes the gluten free bread mushy and hard to completely bake. 2 - It lowers my need to add rice milk (more expensive than the already present zucchini juice) to the recipe.

If you find that you have all the zucchini juice needed to replace the milk in the recipe, add 1-2 Tablespoons of additional oil to make the bread moister, as zucchini juice has no fat in it.

Zucchini Bread

1 ½ c. frozen, shredded zucchini, drained

2 c.GF flour + 1 ½ tsp. xanthan gum (or 2 c. flour)

½ c. sugar

1/8 c. brown sugar

¾ tsp. cinnamon

¼ tsp. salt

2 ½ tsp. baking powder

¾ c. milk of choice/zucchini juice

3 Tbsp. oil

1 tsp. vanilla

1 ½ tsp. egg replacer + 2 Tbsp. apple sauce (or 1 egg)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 3 mini loaf pans.

Mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl. In a separate bowl, combine milk/zucchini juice, oil, vanilla, egg/replacer (and apple sauce). When both sets are mixed, combine both until well mixed. Gently add the zucchini stirring until moist. You want the mixture to be mixed, but not smooth textured. Pour evenly into the three mini loaf pans. Bake 40-50 minutes. Poke a toothpick in the zucchini bread in several places to make sure that it comes out clean. If not, continue baking. When finished, let cool in pan a few minutes before taking out of pan. Let completely cool on wire rack.

Note: Because this is three mini pans and one kid with allergies, I will freeze the extras to use at a different time.

Going on a trip without us...

We let our three boys go to Iowa with Papa and Oma this week. As hard as it was, we finally felt like the boys were big enough to go with them. As you know or are finding out, going somewhere is not as easy as jumping in the car and going.

So, what we did was send food with them. I always have homemade prepackaged chocolate cake/muffin mix and gluten free, egg free, dairy free pancake mix on hand, so those went along. I also added muddy buddies, rice crackers, sunbutter and jelly.

We remembered to send the medicines and epi-pens in case of an "incident".

The other thing Kevin did for each of the boys was create an id form for them that we had laminated. The id forms had front and side pics of the boys, their name, their age and weight, our family contact info. Then, on the back of Kaden's, we added the foods he is allergic to and what to do if he begins hiving or if he has trouble breathing.

Thankfully, my Mom is good at understanding Kaden's allergies and how to feed him, but it's always hard to let them go...

Hungry kid

Ok... so, my son Kaden has an overwhelming amount of food allergies... nuts, eggs, dairy, wheat, yeast, soy, garlic, peas, beef. Yeah, that pretty much limits everything off the shelf.

So, there are days... like yesterday... where he just wanted to eat something "new". Mind you, not only does he have food allergies, but he has these odd moments where he doesn't want to eat what's already in our house. So, I offered to make him some sunbutter oatmeal cookies?... nope, that didn't work... gluten free graham crackers?.... nope, that didn't work. Do you know what he decided? Muddy buddy's which is gluten free and we modified it. You can find the recipe for Chex's muddy buddy's at: http://www.chex.com/recipes/RecipeView.aspx?RecipeId=19919&CategoryId=342.

Ok, so how did we do it? We used Chex's rice cereal (gluten free). We've used ghiradelli semi sweet chocolate chips for the chocolate chips in the recipe, which we've found Kaden can tolerate. And we replaced the peanut butter with sunbutter (http://www.sunbutter.com/), which we purchase from our local health food store.

We let him toss them by himself and he was as happy as could be to have his own treat.