Necessity is the Mother of Invention - Pancakes and Puddings

We are now well into our second week of our #fewfood journey, I'm delighted to say that my daughter's symptoms are very much improved. They are far from gone - but given the she has Ehlers Danlos Syndrome as well as food allergies it was never going to be a complete cure, but it's really significant progress and she's delighted - as am I!

She is, however getting a little bored of her six foods, and has almost completely rejected chickpeas other than as gram flour which a bit of a blow. It means protein will be high on the agenda for trials. I promised I would try and make some new desserts, other than just pears.

I've bought some rice porridge flakes from Marks and Spencer which have been a fantastic success mixed with pear puree. I also tried my own rice pudding, with pudding rice and rice milk. I loved it - K prefers the porridge!

I also decided to experiment making "pancakes'. I figured that I could use olive oil instead of the margarine I would normally use, brown rice flour, and some pear puree instead of an egg since fruit does have some impact as a raising agent. It was actually pretty successful! 

I made the "pancakes" like drop scones, or scotch pancakes. I followed the quantities for the fat and flour and then added a tablespoon of puree instead of the egg and whisked with a hand balloon whisk. Some people have had good luck with sparkling water and flour alone, this recipe here uses millet flour and  sparkling water with good success.

The key to living with only a handful of foods we've discovered, is to keep an open mind. These won't taste like the best Shrove Tuesday pancakes you've ever tasted, or the best stack of scotch pancakes your grandma makes.... but they DID taste good and by experimenting we've added another meal to the list and staved off the boredom of life with six foods.

Our Few Food Diet

After ten years of unresolved, unimproved reflux and with a known gut allergy process at play we are embarking on a few food diet with our daughter. I should point out that this has been suggested by an expert paediatric dietician and proposed after much consideration and discussion with our paediatric gastroenterologist. It's not something you should EVER do without professional support since it is potentially quite dangerous since the child's nutritional status is obviously at risk. It's also pretty hard to do without the child's full agreement if at all possible. Our daughter is desperate for improvement, her reflux is hugely life-affecting and she's losing adult teeth already. So.... I'm gritting my teeth and going with it.

My reason for sharing this is that my first port of call for advice was our Facebook group. It is home to some truly inspirational mums, dads and carers, who have all been battling strict exclusion diets with their children. Many have come up with some phenomenal recipes on virtually nothing - whilst I wallow in the luxury of baking with egg. Seriously, I am not of their league......

So I'm going to be sharing our journey, and the wonderful suggestions that my friends have come up with in the hope of showing you that few foods - and we are talking SIX foods here - need not be quite so difficult and monotonous as you might think.

So here are our big six:- courgette and pear as the fruit and veg, cashew nuts and chick peas as the protein and rice and potato as the carbohydrates.

The reason for these choices are many, you can't pluck them out of the air and I cannot stress enough how you MUST only be doing this with medical advice. Our dietician worked with our daughter's chewing and swallowing limitations, her likes and dislikes and obviously the who manageability of the diet.

But of course all these foods come in so many forms. 

Potato - crisps (plain), chips (with my air fryer at home), jacket potatoes, potato cakes (here) and potato flour.

Chick peas can been whizzed in a food processor with some oil to make houmous, or used as gram flour which together with fizzy water can make little patties or a batter to fry with.

Pear - pear crisps, pear puree, dried pear, and pear spread as well as pear from the tree.

Cashew nuts - I have the mother of all cashew butter tubs at the ready, it's wonderful for whizzing up in the food processor with dried fruit (that will be pear) and more cashew nuts to make something like this 

Rice - obviously the possibilities are endless. Rice porridge, rice, rice balls, rice pudding with rice milk, rice cakes and rice flour, even rice mochi which I will tell you more about later!

Courgette - supermarkets sell it as "spaghetti", you can food process it with potato cakes, or mashed potato balls, make fritters with the gram flour.... it's pretty versatile.

Obviously to stay nutritionally safe we will have to include all foods every day, so I've got my thinking cap on!

We start when school ends, in just over two weeks - makes life a bit easier! Then the plan is that once we (hopefully) see an improvement in symptoms, we start trialling foods one at a time, as per our dietician's recommendations and see if there are any triggers which make symptoms worse. It's not just reflux for us so we are keeping a diary to be sure we don't forget anything!

Incredibly simple two food birthday cake!

A friend has a son who is mostly tube fed, but is allowed rice and is ok with a small amount of sugar. She couldn't let his birthday pass without some kind of cake, but on two foods that's pretty tough....

However, she created this beautiful little cake from large rice cakes, it worked a treat and cut neatly too - no crumbling.

It is rice cakes layered with icing from icing sugar and water, and decorated with jelly tots. 

It's that simple!

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best!