Hey there! It has been awhile!

I have lost 34 pounds total now! I’m so excited. The weightloss has been slow but it has been permanent and that is wonderful. I have never had that happen before.

Today is my mother’s b day so i have spend the afternoon/evening with the most amazing niece EVER! I just love her! And my sister looks adorable 7 months pregnant with my 2nd niece.

M and I are doing amazing. He was sick all last week so i have not seen him. It will be 5 weeks on Tuesday that we have been doing so well. I can’t wait to see him tomorrow I have missed him so much.

I didn’t menu plan last week. I needed too. I haven’t made mine yet for this coming week but i will.

I still haven’t fully recovered from the glutening four weeks ago. My body is still acting funny. It’s disheartening but hopefully I will feel 100% soon.

I met a lady in whole foods yesterday that is around my age with two children with Celiac. She says that she can make any recipe gluten free! So I will be calling her VERY soon She showed me some new things there that I had missed that are gluten free.

I tried the Whole Foods 365 gluten free brand brownie mix and cookie mix and they were both very good. The  brownies were amazing!

Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll be back sooner than later!

LADYBEAMS- thank you!!!! for being so faithful!

Okay, I am NO chef! But last night i decided to make the Spinach and Cheese quesadillas a day early. Well, in doing so i opted to make tostadas. I used a skillet and heated olive oil and gf/df butter then put in gf/wf Brown Rice Tortillas, one at a time. I flipped them back and forth until cooked then took them out, placed on a plate, and let them harden. THEY WERE AWESOME!

For the toppings I sauteed onions, green onions, minced garlic, fresh spinach, and then threw in some shrimp and squash. I sprinkled in some Cindy’s Kitchen Greek Feta dressing for some flavor. Then placed the concoction onto each tostada. SOOOO Yummy!

It has been so fun to experiment lately with recipes and then making up my own!

Menu Planning is hosted by Laura at I’m an Organizing Junkie!

Monday: Tortilla Soup

Tuesday: Rotini with squash (adding chicken)

Wednesday:TBA (M’s choice;we are cooking together )

Thursday:Talapia with peas and white rice

Friday:Spinach and Cheese Quesadilla’s (using brown rice tortillas)

Sidenote: Okay, so i am a total and complete moron! I have the links all messed up! To click on the menu planning site, click on Monday; for the tortilla soup, click on Tuesday, and so forth! For Thursday there is not link and Friday’s I just cannot get to work! This is the first week i have done this so bear with me! But you get the gist of it! Plan for the week Also, any gluten free modifications needed for the tortilla soup will be made.

Tonight for supper i cooked Talapia. I cooked it in the skillet with water, balsamic vinegar, couple tsp lactose free milk, olive oil, red pepper flakes, dash of black pepper, and some Tony’s seasoning.

I also cooked white rice with frozen peas. When it was cooked i stirred the peas in w the rice and added some dairy free/gf butter and olive oil.

It was fabulous! Grayson loved it too! VERY simple meal!

I was on glutenfreemommy.com yesterday, one of my new favorite sites and she had posted a link to the recipe below:

 Mediterranean Pasta Frittata

http://glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com/2006/03/mediterranean-pasta-frittata.html

Leftover spaghetti makes a fabulous frittata. I used Tinkyada gluten-free brown rice spaghetti tossed with a little spicy red sauce. It doesn’t get any easier.

2 cups leftover [cooked] spaghetti pasta tossed in a sauce made with: roasted red peppers, diced fire roasted tomatoes, capers, balsamic vinegar, garlic, basil and red pepper flakes
1 cup thawed frozen chopped spinach, drained well
4 oz goat cheese
6 organic free-range eggs
1/2 cup sour cream
several dashes of Old Bay Seasoning, nutmeg, red chili flakes, dried basil, to taste
1-2 tablespoons Parmesan, freshly shredded, for the top

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Arrange the leftover spaghetti pasta in the bottom of a 9-inch oiled pie plate. Scatter the spinach and pieces of goat cheese all over the pasta.

Whisk the eggs with the sour cream till smooth and frothy. Season to taste with spices and herbs. Pour the egg mixture all over the pasta and using a fork, shimmy the pasta a bit to allow the egg mixture to seep in and around. Sprinkle with extra red pepper flakes, basil, or your favorite seasoning. Dust the top with shredded Parmesan.

Bake in a hot oven on a center rack for 35 minutes or so until the frittata is puffed and golden brown, and the center is set.

Allow the frittata to cool for ten minutes before slicing and serving. A crisp salad of baby greens would be perfect with this. Unfortunately, we were salad-less. But we had plenty of Italian vino.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

So I looked at what i had at home and made a few modifications….and YUM YUM YUM!

I used brown rice penne pasta. I layed it out uncooked (too lazy to cook first! lol!) then barely covered the pasta with water. Then sprinkled the frozen chopped spinach on it. Then I sprinkled feta cheese on top of the spinach. Instead of topping it with parmesan, i had sprinkled mozzarella cheese. The tomatos i used were from a 28oz can of diced tomatos. I also added onions and green onions also to the egg/sourcream/spices mix. It was sooo good! Not as light as we probably need, but eat a smaller portion if you need too

Tonight was dollar scoop night at Baskin Robbins. I LOVE dollar scoop night! I know, i know, not condusive to weight loss but yummy! So back to the yum yum ice cream….so we have been going there some weeks as a treat and i get the same thing everytime…peanut butter n chocolate. Well, after my mishap friday with Blue bell adding wheat flour into their milk chocolate i had this nagging feeling that i needed to re check the ingredients bc ingredients can change at anytime, hence my mishap. Well, the manager/owner was not there tonight so i got to deal with the teens/early 20’s and their lovely and helpful customer service skills After much convincing, i was able to get my hands on the list of ingredients and voila…still gluten free! Yay me! Then i look at the bucket nextdoor to mine and it contains wheat. So i tell the girl to please use a different scooper from that container bc it would contaminate it. She looked at me like i had two heads! But she did it and i feel fine. Yay! So i think i am definitely having my one week out of the month where i crave sweets bc i have certainly tackled them this week now that i am slowly starting to feel better.

Gray and I ate at my favorite Greek and Lebanese restaurant tonight. I had rice pilaf, chicken swarma, and eggplant parmesan yum!

So I’m feeling a little better today, and what do i do LOL! I ate potato skins for lunch and had a pumpkin spice frappucino for dessert! And I am happy to report that I am feeling fine after both! Yay! FINALLY! Of course I made sure they were all gluten free first. My face is still bloated from all my mistakes lately and so is my belly but it takes several days to heal.

 I made gluten free Pumpkin Pancakes last night from a recipe I found at Glutenfreemommy.com  That is an awesome site! Worth checking out if you need GF recipes. She is great! The pancakes turned out great. I used Arrowhead Mills Pancake mix which already had the flours and baking powder needed. I put in brown sugar as well. They were so yummy. I also topped them with cool whip. Yes, i know, not the most dietary meal BUT in my defense it has been quite a while since I have eaten dessert and i generally eat pretty healthy meals now so I splurged last night. My son ate them plain and loved them.

I’m still trying to decrease the coke. It is supposed to be gf but it is bothering me for some reason. Maybe the acid! Who knows. I had two cans yesterday and two cans today. That is a major decrease for me! Hopefully it will continue and i can kick the cokes and the rest of this weight!

Okay! So it has been a straight week today now that I have been sick. Last week it was the accidental ingestion of gluten from the taco seasoning. Then Friday it was the Milk Chocolate Blue Bell Ice Cream that they suddenly decided to put wheat flour in!!!!! And then over the weekend i felt bad and today I feel bad. So that leaves me to wonder if it is the ingestion on Friday or did I get cross contaminated over the weekend. Well, whatever it is, it has prompted me to be super safe right now and i am reeducating myself on going gluten free. It’s been nine months but maybe i need a refresher course. Also, it feels SOOOO GOOD to feel better that when i get CC’d or glutened I just get so upset. Because feeling sick SUCKS! Okay, so I’m off to figure out what to cook for dinner. I guess i’ll make it bland till I feel better.

I was e mailed yesterday by a lady in my state also. She has been gluten free for 3 weeks. This was my reply to her. I’m posting it b/c hopefully it can be helpful to others.

Okay, here’s the deal about why taking all that vitamin d did not help u….u couldnt absorb it bc of the celiac. BUT now that u are on the gluten free diet, u will begin to absorb it. I cannot tell u how sick i was from no vitamin D! I was so sick! I had my short term disability papers ready to go, i was being diagnosed with lupus, i couldnt care for my son, it was horrible! Then i went to the rheumatologist and he discovered that i had NO vit D in my body. My level was 9 and they consider u severely deficient at 30! I had been on the gluten free diet about 3 or 4 weeks at that point and i started taking the vit D. After 4 weeks we re-took my bloodwork and my level was up to 25. So that meant i was finally absorbing. All that severe boin pain i was having went away, my hair is now down to the middle of my back. I am no longer losing enormous amts of my hair, and my spiral curls i thought were fading with age (33) are now back in full force. Also my hair is no longer course, it is soft. All my friends and co workers are like, what on earth did u do to ur hair! And im like, well, im not sick anymore! Who knew how important vitamin d was!!!! I didnt! So now u should be able to begin to absorb it. Begin taking some over the counter (check ingredients). I took 3 pills 3 times a day. The rheumatologist had recommended only one pill a day but i needed to feel better asap so i took more! And it worked! I just bought some gf vit d last night at whole foods bc i had stopped taking it and should probably still be. So that’s the deal on vit d! I can make a long story LONG

Also, your bones are thin bc u havent been able to absorb anything bc of ur sick intestines from the celiac. Start taking calcium (again, check ingredients). Now that u are gluten free u should begin to absorb it. They have gf vitamins at whole foods. Oh! Also start taking probiotics (acidopholous and some other ones i cant pronounce). U must make sure they are gf and milk free (if needed) but they help so much. They must be refrigerated. But replacing the good bacteria is a must and it helps!

Also, i use activated charcoal (gluten free and from whole foods) to absorb the gas and yuck when i make a mistake. It helps! It will also absorb any meds u are tking so u only tk it as needed and two hrs a part from any other meds.

Its great that u are proactive! Thats what it takes! That and a good attitude! And as u start to feel better and better ( i seriously didnt think it was possible) ur attitude about this will improve.

So i wouldnt expect the docs to be too helpful. They dont know what its like to have this. So continue to educate yourself and visit the messageboards and ask me questions. It will get easier i promise. I was so scared to shop anywhere or eat when i was diagnosed! I ate the same things daily! Bc i felt better and i kept making mistakes in the beginning. Never thought i would get it down but i did. And then u will still make mistakes or get cross contaminated but it will be fewer and fewer times.

I never knew how bloated i was from celiac until i went gluen free! My six month pregnant belly that never ever went away….well it went away! Now,its the perfect tool to know i ate something wrong bc it will swell right back up and i look pregnant again! At least i now know what to do about it!

Also, people around u are just “not going to get it.” Its just a fact. So i filter out the comments. I was real sick this week bc i used taco seasoning i thought was safe and it wasnt and my mom and my best friend were like, “cant u go to the doctor”, “there has to be medicine u can take” “maybe u just have a bug”, “this just doesnt make any sense”…well ur right it doesnt make sense but its the truth!Hope this helps! Its a lot of information i know! But it will all come together and start to make sense to u in the next couple of months.

So i stayed hm sick AGAIN today! i hate being sick! Not sure what i ate this time. The only thing i have had with gluten in it is Sunday i had one spoon full of baked beans. Turns out they had barbque sauce in them. And i have been sick ever since! I went over to M’s today and met Attie. She is so adorable. She is sweet and cuddly and yet soooo curious and adventurous at the same time.