Our Elimination Diet – Day 1

Today was the first day of our whole family elimination diet.  I think I jumped into this before I was ready…

When I arrived in the kitchen this morning to make breakfast, I realized the only pineapple we had was in the little tubs.  Okay, no problem, those will be fine in a fruit smoothie for breakfast.  Until I read the ingredients.  ’Citric Acid’, it said.  Drat!  That’s another word for ‘corn’, which is a no-no on our new regime.

Well, okay…but see, cantaloupe and blueberry doesn’t sound very yummy for a smoothie combo.  So…what else is there?

No, seriously.  What else is there?

I ran out to get some small steaks from the freezer to quick thaw and cook up with some potatos, but guess what?  No steaks.  I’m full-up on roasts, but not a single steak to be found anywhere in this house.

So, I decided we’d do an ever-so-healthy all-fruit breakfast.  In fact, I thought a melon breakfast sounded pretty good.

Cantaloupe?  Check.
Honeydew?  Check.
Watermelon?  Er…nope.

OK, so cantaloupe and honeydew will just have to do.

Mr. Charm refused to eat a single bite.  He wouldn’t even smell it or touch it or lick it.  It was as if the sight of the fruit offended him.

And I had absolutely nothing else I could feed him.

So, he went hungry this morning.  Which made for a l…o…n…g morning, if I do say so myself.

Right after I finally got the chance to eat (between Mr. Charm being a horrible version of himself and Mr. Happy needing diaper changes and bottles, I finally ate at 10:30 a.m.  We were up at 7:00 a.m.) I grabbed a pound of ground beef and a roast out of the freezer.  Threw them into the microwave to start defrosting.

Got the ground beef defrosted and chopped up some onion, started making patties.  Grabbed a few potatos and cut them into fry strips.  Hamburgers and french fries for lunch, everyone!

I had the fries in the pan cooking, and had just gotten the hamburger patties in the pan when – wait for it – all the electricity goes out.

I have an electric kitchen.

This sucks!

Well, the Geek got a late start this morning because of the bad nights sleep Mr. Charm gave us, and before he could leave for work he got busy solving a problem for a client from home.  He spent so much time here taking care of the problem, he finally called his boss and said he probably wouldn’t be physically in the office today because he couldn’t get enough downtime between catastrophes to allow for him to drive in to work.  B was okay with that, so here was the Geek, working from home.

On the computer.

And we have no electricity.

Break out the generator, guys!

Somehow, and I don’t know how because *I* wasn’t involved in this in any way, but somehow all the gas cans were empty.

So the Geek drove down to the store to buy some gas, leaving me at home, in the dark (we were finally getting rain and had little ambient light) with Mr. Charm, who was like the Tazmanian Devil on crack, and Mr. Happy, who was in the middle of a complete FPIES reaction.  Nice.

After being vomited on twice and doing my best to console an inconsolable Mr. Charm as he screamed in pain, the Geek came back and got the generator going.

He pulled down the electric skillet that he owned before we met and I wisely decided not to throw away when I was merging households.  Plugged in the electric skillet, started cooking again, and less than ten minutes later we all feasted on a really good meal.

Because the potatos got interrupted in their cooking, they were basically fried twice.  I had heard that technique makes for the best french fries, but never had tried it until now.  Let me verify for you that it DOES, in fact, make the best french fries to fry them twice!

Since we had power again, I went ahead and finished throwing everything into the pot for the roast.  It will be a little late tonight, but we will, at least, have dinner.

I felt like I was scrambling all day long to find foods.  Every item on the list that we made tastes good to me, and I thought I would have no problems putting them together into yummy (if limited) meals.  I think I was overconfident.

So for tomorrow, I’m already cooking up breakfast goodies.  I browned off some ground beef that I didn’t use in today’s hamburgers, and I’ll make some mashed potatos.  Mix the ground beef in with the mashed potatos, and cook them up like pancakes for Breakfast Potato Pancakes!  Hopefully, Mr. Charm will like them.  <cough> Hopefully, I will like them!

I really have no idea for lunch tomorrow, because we have to be in town for my dentist appointment at 1:00 p.m.  And dinner, I guess, will be roast.  Again.

Our cow will be butchered next Monday, so hopefully by the end of next week or first part of the week after we’ll have a little more variety in our meat.  Steaks and hashbrowns would be a nice change for breakfast some days.

Tomorrow, though, I’ll be heading in to town to buy diet necessities – such as some quinoa.  I’ve been looking up some recipes today, and one of the FPIES Mommy blogs I read talked about a 4-ingredient muffin she makes for her son.  I’m thinking I can experiment and find a ‘safe’ ingredient quinoa based blueberry muffin for breakfast.

Not to mention there will be the possibility of using quinoa in place of rice in my stuffed pepper recipe, plus some other options to use quinoa in things like flatbreads.

I think quinoa is going to be my unexpected saving grace this month.

I have a tray of oven baked potato chips going right now for a snack for Mr. Charm, and tomorrow or Friday I’ll try to make Kale chips.

I’m scrambling, but coming back quickly!  I think I can figure it out.

_____

In other news, the Allergist called back and said she’s going to mail me two cans of Ele-care to get started on that as soon as possible.  She’s also researching more into why Mr. Happy is like this; apparently a mother passes IgG and IgA antibodies into the baby when pregnant, and they hang around for a while after birth, so she and a colleague are exploring the possibility that something in my body set his immune system up to be sensitive and reactive.

Honestly, I don’t really know what that will do for him, treatment-wise.  I’m more concerned, at the moment, with getting him on a baseline.  <shrugs> We’ll see what she turns up.  Maybe there will be something useful in this information.  Still, it seems to me that she almost wants to prove that he is allergic to my breastmilk – not something in my breastmilk, but the milk itself.  Wonder if she gets a kickback from Ele-care??

I also called the manufacturer of Culturelle, a probiotic maker, and asked questions about their ingredients.

Turns out, their childs probiotic has a corn-derived ingredient in it but their adult probiotic does not.  So she suggested double checking with my doctor, but breaking open the adult capsule and only dumping half of it into the kiddos bottles.

The allergist agreed, so now we can start rebuilding Mr. Happy’s gut flora, which will hopefully help him reduce inflammation from his FPIES trigger foods, and thereby reduce reactions.  Yippee!

Here’s hoping I can find some yummy stuff to make with the quinoa!  And if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!