Young chef!

Emma absolutely loves cooking and watching Masterchef.  It is one of the few tv programmes that totally absorb her.  It is sad to think she probably will not be able to be a chef when she grows up as her allergies will make it an unsafe career choice.

However, even if it cant be a career, Emma works hard at home, baking safe biscuits, cakes, desserts and helping out with dinner.  Yesterday Emma and Sarah made some yummy afghan biscuits.  Then Emma made this yummy tuna pasta dinner pretty much by herself. 

Afghan Biscuits (adapted from the edmonds cookbook)
200g olivani
1/2 c Sugar
1 1/4 c flour
1/4 c cocoa
about 4 weetbix crushed
Creamed butter and sugar until light & fluffy.
Stir in sifted flour and cocoa then fold in weetbix.
Roll into balls and flatten with fork.
Bake at 180 C for 15 minutes.

The Tuna Pasta is a quick and easy dinner for when you dont have much time.
Saute a chopped onion and garlic in some olive oil until soft.  Then add a tin of tomatoes and some herbs (Emma likes fresh basil) when you are nearly ready to serve, add a tin of tuna and warm through.  Serve over cooked pasta with a salad on the side.

Green Smoothies

Trying to build Emma up is hard, but we need to make her resistant to as many winter bugs as we can.   Lots of vitamins and energy type drinks contain things she is allergic to.  But a really good thing for her is Spiralina cocktails.  They are quick and easy to make, just throw half a banana and about a cup of apple juice in the blender with a couple of teaspoons of spiralina powder and blend till smooth.  Spiralina is meant to be a complete food so can really boost her immunity.  Emma absolutely loves them for breakfast or after school as a pick me up.  Be warned, you need a straw to drink them or else you are left with a dark green moustache that is hard to get off!

Eczema chaos

Well, Emma's poor skin has been so bad this year.  In January we spent a couple of days in starship with massive skin infections.  It turned out she had contracted MRSA, the penicillin resistant superbug. 

MRSA is a staph bacteria that lives on the skin and runs quickly over to any patches of broken skin and causes infections.  Loads of people have it and it causes no problems, most people's good bacteria will fight it if it tries to take hold.  Unfortunately Emma's skin is so red, dry and broken that the bug is continually infecting her.  Her immune system is low and her good bacteria almost eaten away by the bad.  She has had dose after dose of antibiotics, steriods, antihistamine, not to mention the creams we have been putting all over her for years.

Over the last week or so we have noticed that her skin is getting worse than ever.  Her face, normally clearish is red and splotchy, her hands are a weepy mess.  We got an urgent referral from North Shore Paediatrics to Pediatric Dermatolgy at Starship and today we got seen by Dr Purvis.  She took one look at Emma and said things were obviously not working any more and we had to do something serious.  So we are going to try Emma on Methotrexate which is an immunosuppresant drug.  Dr Purvis talked about doing this a couple of years ago, but her skin came right after a focused couple of weeks on skin care.  This time it is the only option available.  Today we had the first blood test to see if she can tolerate it, then if that is all clear we will give her the first dose tomorrow and follow that up a week later with another blood test next week to see if it is causing problems or not.  If we get the go ahead she will be taking it once a week for the forseeable future (maybe 6 months, maybe 2 years.....) but it should give her skin a break and a chance to heal and hopefully break the eczema, itch, scratch, infect cycle.

As a parent, it is a horrible thing to have to subject your precious baby to taking serious drugs but we cant leave things as they are, her quality of life has deteriorated this year.  I want my daughter to be as happy and healthy as she can be and this drug could be the lifeline we have been looking for.

School Lunches

Emma likes the most unusual fillings in her sandwiches.  Today she has tuna, red onion and black olives; The two days before it was lettuce, basil, red onion and grated carrot (she liked it so much the first day she wanted it again!).  Monday she had a potato salad with potato, red onions (notice a theme here...) and mint sauce.  A lot of people say she has really mature tastes for an 8 year old and I agree she does, but we have exposed her to these foods at an early age.  When you aren't able to eat what everyone else does, you have to find new and exciting things all the time.  She has been eating olives for ages and now she has added jalapeno's to her list of special treats. Strange kid eh?

Good old fashioned scones

Monday was one of those days when about to make school lunches I realised there was no bread!  Something to do with being kicked out of the kitchen on Sunday since it was Mother's Day.

So I quickly whipped up a batch of scones which were enjoyed by all.  "Can I have them again tomorrow?" was asked by my usually scone hating allergy kid.  The recipe is from the good old Edmonds cookbook and adapted for Emma.

3 Cups plain baking flour
6 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
50g Olivani
1 1/4 C Rice Milk
About 1/4 C water

1. Sift Flour and Baking Powder into bowl, add salt.
2. Rub in Olivani until it resembles breadcrumbs.
3. Add milk and mix into a dough, add more water as required to reach soft dough consistancy.
4. Knead lightly.
5. Turn out onto floured oven tray and cut into pieces.
6. Bake at 220C for 10 - 15 Minutes until golden brown.

7. Serve with Jam (We used the Morello Cherry Jam from Barkers.  It has whole cherries in it and tastes yummy!)

Sometimes I add dried fruit to the mixture before adding the liquids.  My favourite ones are with about 3/4 C chopped Dates, 1 Tbsp sugar and 1/2 tsp Cinnamon added to the dry ingredients.

The best cake ever!

Yesterday I was looking for some new recipes on the net.  I find that the vegan websites have some great recipes and this was seriously one of the nicest cakes I have ever had.  It is chocolatey and not too sweet and fudgey and yummy.

Chocolate Blueberry Cake

225g sugar

4 dessertspoons cocoa powder (mine were really heaped)

pinch salt

225g white flour

85 g wholemeal flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

170 ml oil (I use Rice Bran oil)

2 tsp vanilla essence

4 tsp vinegar (I used Malt)

340 ml cold water

115g frozen blueberries (can use fresh)

1. place the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix well.  Add the wet ingredients and mix thoroughly but do not beat.

2. Gently stir in the blueberries and pour into prepared tin.

3. Bake at180C for about 30-40 minutes.  Cool in tin (Very soft cake, mine broke when I took it out)

4. Can also bake in sandwich tins and add chocolate spread/icing/jam to sandwich together.

I served it dredged with icing sugar and with Apple puree on the side and a couple of blueberries to garnish.

Shop bought goodies

After having to throw out many ingredients due to the infestation of pantry moths in my pantry, I thought I would  post about some store bought goodies that we  use.

Real Foods Corn Thins are high up on the family favourites list, spread with Olivani and vegemite they are a yummy after school snack.  (We find they go a little bit soggy in the lunch box though).  The other crackers we use are Carrs water crackers and Ryvita's.  Other savoury snacks we keep in the pantry are plain rice crackers, pretzels, Bluebird potato chips (as well as ready salted, the new sunday roast flavour and the honey baked ham are also dairy free but they do have the  "may contain traces of Dairy" disclaimer), Mexicano natural corn chips and also Abes bagel crisps (again carries the may contain traces of dairy & sesame due to the presence of sesame seeds and parmesan cheese at their factory).   

Sweet snacks are harder to find but Emma likes Orgran outback animal biscuits. Also Golden crumpets are on the safe food list and good with honey on them.  We also buy Florida Fruit nuggets and occaisonally nice and natural fruit strings and marine mix.

We always keep a supply of the small tins of tuna as these are great to take with us when we go out and arent sure if we will be able to find anything for Emma to eat.

Also new to the market are the Wiggles range of snacks from Healtheries.  Although they do state that they may contain traces of Dairy, this is due to being made on the same production line.

Check out this great allergy foods website which lists all the foods available that are guaranteed free from certain allergens.  The biggest problem I find with it is that it only has peanuts in the search engine so some of the foods will contain other nuts, but it is a good base to start from when trying to find premade allergy friendly snacks.