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Not Drowning, Mothering.
I went to Veronica’s yesterday and watched Amy bounce on the trampoline as Vonnie pressed refresh on the bloggie’s twitter page.
I am thrilled to bits to be writing out a congratulatory blog post to the NDM, as her blog is well written and very funny. She writes about her life with humour and honesty and I find myself nodding along in recognition. You really should do yourselves a favour and go on over and check out her blog, I have no doubt you will add it to your favourites.
I had a small visitor for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon and together we went outside and played in the mud.
Then we went down and fed the pigs and had a bit of a chat about how delicious they are going to be.
We went and raided the fruit trees and Amy found that she didn’t like the furry skin on the peaches but was more than happy to munch away on the plums.
This year has been a really good year for most of my fruit trees, due to a wetter than average winter and spring. We normally struggle for water up here and I am really pleased with how much fruit my trees have produced. Amazing what a bit of water does for a plant.
The whole time that Amy and I were pottering around outside, Harry the dog was at our side. Harry loves the apple trees as he is sure that those green balls are just for him.
And finally here is a photo of my latest garden project. The spouse cut an old water tank in half for me. This autumn and winter I will be busily filling it up with sheep poo, mushroom compost and whatever else I can get my hands on. I am going to turn all the vegie garden into a series of raised beds over the next two years, as sitting on a milk crate and weeding is just so much more civilized that kneeling down on my dodgy knees.
Once Amy had gone home I went to turn my laptop on and found that my grand daughter had decorated it for me. That was my day yesterday, how was yours?
So Dominos Pizza has jumped on the gluten free bandwagon and is offereing a gluten free pizza. Fantastic, until you read the small print that says your meal may contain traces of gluten. Now I find this disclaimer to be very confusing. Does the gluten free base contain traces of gluten? Or will only the toppings have gluten? Is a trace amount of gluten supposed to be ok? Possibly gluten free, certainly doesn’t sound as enticing as gluten free.
Veronica is up on her soapbox talking about Dominos and coeliacs. I was more than happy to leave this debate in her capable hands until I received these tweets.
@frogpondsrock @Pizza_Dominos is doing the best they can in providing meal options 4 a variety of target groups.
My grand daughter isn’t a target group. She is a little girl with Coeliacs. Gluten damages her intestines, it gives her stomach pain and diarrhoea.The damage to her intestine takes three weeks to heal during which time she cannot absorb any nutrients from her food at all. Can you imagine not being able to eat for three weeks? How ill you would become? How much weight you would lose? A target group bah.
Then there was this @ reply that I only saw by chance.
@Pizza_Dominos @frogpondsrock thank you for your comment. Someone will be in touch on Monday to discuss
Ok? How exactly will they be in touch with me to discuss? I dont have an email address listed on my twitter account. Will @Pizza_Dominos tweet at me once or twice and think that is enough? Will they hope that because I don’t respond to their tweets that I have forgotten, or that I am busily ordering takeaway poison for my grand daughter right this minute.
Gluten free means gluten free. It doesn’t mean sort of gluten free-ish, or we would like it to be gluten fee so we can capture a niche market. I smell a marketing ploy that hasn’t been properly thought out.
Talk to me Dominos and we will see what comes of this. Explain your position and I will publish it here. My teenage son loves your pizzas but as I am the one that pays for them, I think he will be going through a bit of a Dominos free stage.
*edited, it has been brought to my attention that Dominos wasn’t responsible for the tweet referring to target groups. It was Andrew sticking up for Dominos and he would like me to get my facts straight.Or my tweets straight in this case.
In our family one of the must have foods at any celebration is a cheesecake. The recipe is Mum’s and over the years I have made this lemon cheesecake my signature dessert.
I normally use a packet of biscuits as the base but now that Amy has Coeliacs I needed to make a gluten free base. So I simply adapted a basic biscuit recipe and made a baked crust instead.I was thrilled with the results.
I didn’t really follow a recipe for this biscuit mix I just flew by the seat of my pants and unlike the hommous disaster this worked out really well.
Cream 4 tablespoons of butter with a 1/2 a cup of sugar, add a few drops of vanilla essence and then beat in an egg. Then slowly add a 1 and a 1/2 cups of flour to the mix.(I mixed together equal parts gluten free plain flour with almond meal) keep on slowly beating in the flour until it is well mixed. This makes a soft dough.
I spread the mix, which was quite sticky onto the base and up the sides a bit of my spring form cake pan. I then baked it in a hot oven until it went not quite golden brown. I had a bit left over so I put dessertspoon sized blobs onto a baking tray squished a hole in the centre with my thumb, plonked some jam into the hole and baked them for about 12 minutes or until they were golden brown. These were really yummy little jam drops and I am pleased that I have found an easy, gluten free biscuit recipe to cook with Amy when she comes to visit.
Now back to the cheesecake. Here are the ingredients.
1 block of philadelphia cream cheese (250 g), 1 cup of sugar. 1 can of carnation milk, 1 packet of lemon jelly, 1 tsp of gelatine powder. 1 fresh lemon.
Put the carnation milk in the fridge the night before as it needs to be really cold.
Before you start put a large mixing bowl in the freezer to chill down.
Add one teaspoon of gelatine powder to a packet of lemon jelly crystals, stir well. Then add one cup of boiling water to the jelly, mix well and put it aside to cool down.
Soften the cream cheese in the microwave for 30 seconds. Add one cup of sugar to the cream cheese and beat to a smooth consistency. I also add the zest from one lemon to make it a bit zingy.
Now quickly put the cold carnation milk into the chilled bowl and beat until peaks will almost stand up by themselves.
Add the philly cheese mix and beat on slow
Add the jelly mix and beat on slow for a minute. Then finish mixing by hand.
Pour it into the cake pan and pop into the fridge to set overnight.
If you like a really lemony cheesecake you can add the juice of a lemon to the cup of boiling water before you make the jelly.
There you go. Enjoy. Any questions just ask me in the comments and I will answer them.
*Make sure the baked biscuit base is cool to the touch before you put the cheesecake mix into the pan.
In the little over two weeks that Amy has had to eat gluten the change in my grand daughter’s behaviour has been quite extreme.
We went to visit yesterday and found Vonnie and Nathan cleaning up poo in Amy’s bedroom. Amy had pooed on the carpet and then played in it.There was shit everywhere, on the floor, on the toys, up the wall and all over Amy herself.
After Amy had been cleaned up and allowed out of time-out up she came to snuggle on my lap and we had a bit of a talk about how dogs poo on the ground and people poo in the toilet but I am not sure it sunk in at all. As Amy wasn’t really there and had difficulty making eye contact with me. *sigh*
Later when we were reading a book together and talking about the pictures in the book, it was also glaringly obvious that Amy’s speech patterns have regressed as well. Half of her sentences were a nonsensical babble.
If I didn’t know that gluten was causing these issues I would be inclined to think that Amy was destined for a life on ADHD medication and/or a classification of being on the Autistic spectrum.
I know that last sentence is a huge call BUT I cannot stress enough how drastically different Amy is. She is all over the shop the poor little darling.
Amy has lost her ability to concentrate for longer than a few seconds. She has a rash on her face and her back. Her speech has regressed. She doesn’t listen and wont make eye contact.She has stopped using the toilet. Her sleep pattens have changed and the tantrums and meltdowns are back with a vengeance.
As I left Veronica yesterday I hugged my daughter and we both said the same thing, “Six more days.” Six more days to go and then the evil gluten can be eliminated from Amy’s diet again and we will have our little girl back. I am looking forward to hearing some happiness in my daughter’s voice again as well, because I am sure that Veronica is only just hanging on by her fingernails.
The calendar says it is spring. The fruit trees are blossoming, so the calendar is probably correct but the dead giveaway that we might just be edging away from the gloomy greyness that characterised this winter is the behaviour of the birds.
The behaviour of these two sex obsessed Superb Fairy Wrens to be precise.
These two little wrens have been flying around the house for three days now,singing their little hearts out. They spend ages trying to chase off their rivals which also happen to be their own reflections. Silly birds.
They are singing outside the window right this minute.Their chirpy twitters make me smile and I have had my camera close to hand for the first time in weeks.
This photo also reminds me that I might just need to wash some windows.
But who can be bothered washing windows when there are kites to be flown?
The rainbow coloured kite made me smile. I had bought the children various kites over the years but we have too many trees and the wind is too swirly for successful kite flying here at home. So it was with great delight that Veronica’s paddock proved to be the perfect spot to fly a kite. We all had a turn and it was lovely fun.
