Day Seven-One Week Down!!

One week free of wheat, corn, soy and dairy! Yeehaw! To be quite honest I'm feeling pretty good. My energy is up, my face is clearing, the bloated belly is gone...its enough to encourage me to keep going for sure!

For breakfast I had Silk Chocolate Almond Milk blended with a banana and a scoop of peanut butter. It was mighty tasty but a bit too sweet. The chocolate milk had 21 grams of sugar in it!! What's up with that? I'm finding that a lot of the ready to eat alternatives have lots of sugar, perhaps in an effort to make them taste as good the original. I'll keep looking and will eventually get in the groove of things. I also had a handful of raw cashews to keep that zinc supplement in my stomach.

For lunch I had the last leftover hamburger patty and a baked sweet potato with a drizzle of olive oil, salt and pepper.

For dinner, I tried a recipe from my new cookbook, Against All Grain by Danielle Walker. I made her Orange Sesame Chicken in the crock pot with steamed broccoli and rice. The recipe has potential. It didn't taste like orange chicken though, more like General Tsos chicken. The sauce was too salty even though I halved the amount called for. The rice helped cut the saltiness. I'm not ready to abandon this one yet. It's easy to throw together and it doesn't use any weird ingredients.

I also whipped up a loaf of allergen free banana bread. My family loves banana bread and I had the perfect recipe. My own recipe would be difficult to adapt so I looked again to Mrs. Walker's cookbook and used her recipe instead. I used ingredients I never have before, mainly almond flour and canned coconut milk. My loaf doesn't look anything like the golden, fluffy slices in the book but it does taste good. The knife came out clean but its still gooey, almost like there was too much moisture in the batter. It didn't rise well either. Perhaps it's time for a new box of baking soda.  I won't consider it a total fail since it is tasty but it needs some work. I'm not sure where it went wrong. I've heard coconut flour is finicky and maybe I made an error when I added it to the batter. Either way, I'm still a little disappointed. I was a damn fine baker pre-allergies and now I feel like a novice again. Practice makes perfect but I may need to get another job to afford all of these new ingredients!