Italian sausage spaghetti squash

  I miss spaghetti sometimes. I love the simplicity of it. I also miss the noodly goodness of it. I love the slurping sounds around the dinner table. I will not claim that the spaghetti squash tastes the same as real pasta but it is easier to cook and tastes great in its own right. This serves 4 and is a pretty cheap way to stretch a dollar. I made this with a little brussel sprout side dish. They go surprisingly well with pasta sauce. 

Ingredients:

• 1 spaghetti squash
• 1 tbl Italian Sausage seasoning blend ( I like the Williams Sonoma)
• 1 cup of chopped frozen spinach
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1/2 bell pepper, chopped
• 1 tsp basil
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1 can of whole tomatoes, macerated

Cook: 

Poke holes in the spaghetti squash and place in a dish in the microwave. Nuke for 8 -10 minutes. (5 mins per pound). After done, leave in the microwave for another 5 minutes to let it keep steaming. After done, take out and cut in half length wise. Scoop out the seeds and use a fork to drag along the length making your noodles.

In a pan heat brown the meat and add the seasonings and veggies. Cook down for a few minutes while you use a immersion blender or traditional blender to mix the tomatoes to your preferred consistency  Add this to the sauce and turn to low. Cook for another 10 minutes so the flavors mix. 

Take the spaghetti squash and pour into a pasta colander  Squeeze out the extra water. If you don't it will be a bit soupy. If you don't mind that sort of thing, as my picture will attest that I don't, then move right along. Add the sauce to the squash and mangia! 

Facepalm

I keep having the same problem in the grocery store. Every time, never fails. I push my buggy (Yes, I live in the South, we have buggies here instead of carts) to the register and some high school kid asks me for my silly rewards card. I swipe it and soon the parade of comical facial expressions begins. Why am I getting funny looks at the register? Well, I am buying produce. gasp! 

Let's play a little game here. In your head I want you to quickly name all the flavors of Dorito's chips. Now think about the menu of your favorite fast food chain. Can you name at least 10 menu items from that chain and others you frequent? Can you tell me your favorite "coffee" from Starbucks? You can probably do all of those and more without having to think too hard.

Now think of what a parsnip looks like. Too easy? How about a rutabaga or kohlrabi. 

Apparently these are foreign foods because the cashiers in my town don't seem to know what they are. I bring my foods to the register and they stare at me like I have just smuggled in items that they don't sell. Where I to ask them to find a sauce, box of something or some other shelved item they can direct me to the exact spot without hesitation. If I try to ring up produce other than carrots or salad bags, I am a strange customer. 

This is how it went:
Cashier: Stares intently at food in hand. Makes strange faces while trying to decipher what must be a code generated by the German Enigma machine. Gives up and looks at me for help. "Ma'am, what is this?"

Me: Stares, incredulously. "That is a sweet potato."

Cashier: "Oh, ok." Scrolls for the register number for sweet potato.


Seriously kid, you had to look up a friggin' sweet potato. I thought this was the South. I leave both amazed and saddened. I figured that I had an isolated incident and it could be blamed on the youth of the cashier. Boy was I wrong. 

The next shopping trip- Older lady (50s)- didn't know what rhubarb was. Didn't know what to do with it.

Another trip- Lady in her 30s didn't know what a spaghetti squash was. Asked her coworker who shrugged his shoulders. They guy in line behind me, about 55ish, asked me what I do with that "yellow thing." I said that you can make a pasta with it and use it instead of the wheat noodles. He said he was sure it was healthier but it seemed like a lot of work for the same result. -Same result? Seriously? Think I am just having bad luck? The Jamie Oliver food experiment had the same results. Watch here.  

All of this has led me to start snooping into peoples carts when I go through the stores. It has become a game to try to count to 5. Here is how this works. You walk into the grocery store and are usually thrust into the produce section. Some people pick up an item or two but then they bee line for the rest of the store. My game is to try and find a cart in the store that has at least 5 produce items in it. Most days I leave the grocery store with no successful counts. Consider that most families shop once or twice a week. That means that the average family is eating less than 5 unprocessed pieces of fruit or produce a week. It astounds me. I have literally trained my brain to see ingredient lists for hazards because of our son's health. When I look at an item I scan the label for potential harm and categorize it as potential food or as poison. If you remove gluten, soy and corn alone, the vast majority of every grocery cart you see will be filled to the top with poison. That is being generous. If you remove dairy, it will be even worse. 

This is Powder. He is a Khao Manee  who thinks
 he is human.

As obesity rates continue to march us towards our deaths, even our pets are getting fat. According to the PR Newswire, "Association for Pet Obesity Prevention (APOP) found 52.5 percent of dogs and 58.3 percent of cats to be overweight or obese by their veterinarian. That equals approximately 80 million U.S. dogs and cats at increased risk for weight-related disorders such as diabetes, osteoarthritis, hypertension and many cancers." 

Our son is spending the day laying low because I left the gate open to the cat food area and he crawled faster than I could run. Being a precocious little adventurer, he immediately grabbed two handfulls of the forbidden fruit and shoved it in his face. Que paniking mom. I fan faster than a Kenyan to get to him but was too late. He had touched the gluten containing fast food and was on his way to being sick. I swept his mouth out and washed his hands quickly but within an hour he started to have red spots from his dermatitis herpetiformis. (The Celiac rash)

This is Rocky. You will never see him unless
it is 5 am  and he is dropping things on your
 face because he wants food NOW. 

It occurred to me as I was chastising myself for letting my little one get near the devil's grains that my cats did not evolve eating wheat. Maybe a little grass, some cat nip now and then but not grains. Animals in the wild are constantly being credited/blamed for the deaths of every wild critter around them. My cat Sam once took out a whole squirrel family and beamed with joy at her work. She even brought me a souvenir  How sweet. So the question is, why are we feeding our cats whole grains? The lie that we need to eat a diet loaded with these "great grains" has even reached our pets. 

So, our pets, livestock and family are all eating corn and gluten. Who is eating the food? Apparently the wild animals are. I have a feeling they are going to out live us for sure. You can't outsmart nature by applying fancy patents or chemical names. In the end it is still poison, just neatly packaged and beautifully marketed. 

Mustard chicken delish

If you haven't bought yourself a copy of Practical Paleo: A Customized Approach to Health and a Whole-Foods Lifestyle, hop online or to your local book seller and grab one. This book is fantastic. Not only is if full of great recipes, it is fancy and all purdy like. As a former artiste, I wholly approve of the wonderful images, layout and general awesomeness packed into this gem of a book. It is more than a cook book, it is sort of a self help guide. While I would love to see more breakfasts in the recipe section, I have learned to let go of what is "breakfast food" and eat whatever is in the fridge first thing in the a.m.

In the cookbook there is a wonderful recipe for mustard and sage salt chicken. I switched mine up a bit and came up with something that suits my palatte a bit more. The first time I tried it I had friends over who absolutely loved the dish. I cooked it in an enameled cooker and used the juices to then cook my vegetables and make my rutabaga mash extra lovely. I used the coconut oil which gave me a problem as I have a coconut allergy and I am not having much success incorperating it into my diet. I keep trying little doses but my body keeps rejecting it. I suppose there could be worse things to have an allergy to. 

My version of it mixes two kinds of mustards for a sweet and spicy version. I have a sweet seeded Bavarian style mustard and a smooth blend spicy German variety. I use more of the sweet than the spicy and add a couple of pinches of sage and cracked black pepper to round out the flavors. Because I wasn't cooking this with any veggies, I placed it on a tray and captured the juices in the tin foil. The cooking was reduced once I bought boneless and skinless thighs. It didn't have the crispiness that the skin on version did but for my purposes it was alright. My son loves this and makes a very cute face when I give him bites of it. I take the extras and chop it up and make it into omelettes, chicken salad and chicken lettuce wraps. The flavor can be augmented with a bit of paprika or chili powder. 

Ingredients:

• 4-12 chicken thighs. Boneless or bone in.
• 1 tbl sage
• cracked black pepper
• 4 tbl of a sweeter mustard
• 1 tbl of a spicy mustard

Preheat oven to 425F. Make a rub for the chicken out of the ingredients and coat evenly. Place on a baking rack over a cookie sheet that is foil covered. Cook the boneless version for 30 minutes or the bone-in for 45. You can also make it in a dish with your chopped veggies piled around it. The mix I used was 2 carrots, 2 parsnips and 1/2 red onion all chopped into bite sized pieces.

I served this with a side of mashed rutabaga with a dash of nutmeg on top. So good. To make it extra creamy, add a little of the chicken fat. MMMMM

Stuffed mushroom and pepper

I had previously done a recipe for a stuffed bell pepper and it was good. Now that I have to remove corn from out diet, it was time to reevaluate my recipe. This is take two and I actually like it better. My husband actually said that he would have like more veggies in his which was pretty neat since he used to be a meatatarian. 

You can make this as a mix mushroom/pepper combo or as just a pair of each. I liked having bell pepper chopped into my mushroom and I chopped a bit of mushroom in my husband's bell pepper.

Ingredients:

• 2 bell pepper
• 2 portabella mushroom
• 1 pound ground beef
• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 piece of bacon
• 1 small onion
• 1 tbl cumin
• 2 tsp white pepper
• 2 tsp paprika

Heat the oven to 350F and roast the bell pepper and mushroom while you are prepping the insides. Watch out for burning. Dice the veggies and chop the bacon into small pieces.Heat a skillet and cook the onion and bacon first. Chop the second bell pepper into bite sized pieces along with the second mushroom. Cook these down in the pan. Add the meat, spices and garlic. Once all the meat is browned and broken up, make sure it is blended nicely with the veggies. Now take the mushroom and bell pepper half out of the oven and flip over so that you can stuff them. If you have an ice cream scoop it helps but if not, use a large spoon the move the meat mix into the pepper and mushroom. Place back in the oven for 10 minutes. 

Paleo body transformation

The last few weeks have been a whirl wind of food journaling trial and error. In the last week we have cried, screamed, fussed, and generally became anxious about every food eaten. At the end of the week we came to a positive outcome but getting there was as stressful as ever.

So, let me back up two weeks. Two weeks ago I took my 8 month old into the doctor's office covered in hives an horrible skin boils. We were pretty much ignored and sent to another doctor to be her problem. I was sort of grateful since our doctor had been less than helpful anyway. I had been telling him for months that the large blister like things across our son resembled a gluten rash. He said that there was no way. I went home frustrated and decided to look for answers. After tons of research I found Histamine Intolerance. The next morning I woke with a purpose and started the zero histamine diet. First day was a resounding success. He was happy, healthy and sooo happy to be feeling well. Second day, repeated success. Third day, failure. Fourth day had limited success and so it went. I wasn't changing anything to much but I kept food journaling and the days rolled on.

More research later and I find out that some people are sensitive to corn. Apparently our son is one of those people. We had been doing a paleo type diet but since I am not a chef and haven't had a lot of time to research all the reasons why corn and rice were taboo in the diet, I kept using them. I also married a man from a corn growing family. We love to sit around with a big bowl of grandpa's popcorn and enjoy a little beer or two. Since I had cut out the beer (gluten) I had switched to gluten free beer. Well folks, that is full of crap, just not gluteny crap. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was in my beer! Ewwwwww.

So day one of histamine intolerance cooking was fantastic. Alton was healthy and no rash. He was energetic and seemed to be a normal kid. It was like he was miraculously healed. I barely ate all day because I was checking everything on that sheet of histamine levels. It worked out though because by bed time, no problems. Day two was the same. Day three, not so much. Day three was a disaster, so was day four. What happened? I double checked everything I ate with the print out of histamine levels in foods. I then realized that I had eaten corn. According to the histamine charts that was perfectly fine. His body said other wise. I then pulled out the food journal and went on a trip back in time...every single time he had reacted to food in our post gluten, dairy and soy days, he had had corn, HFCS or other corn derivative. The worst days were days that I had either fed him corn directly or let him have a bite of my corn chip or corn tortillas. I thought I was doing everything right. Now I have to reexamine if histamine intolerance was even real or if he did better because I had no processed food so that removed the chance of having a corn product in our food. Lots of checking and finger crossing later we decided to try a high histamine food. ...toe tapping, nail biting, etc later....no problemo! So corn is the missing ingredient.

Que cleaning the cupboards take 5!!! Good thing I didn't throw any food out from the last clean sweep. I got to put back some of the canned fruits and veggies and my rices. So, a few days of awesome baby later I then have spots showing up on our son. I have made everything from scratch so now what? Well, rice is what.

Que cleaning the cupboards take 6. So now we are officially the most Paleo family on the block. I could be sad that junk food is out but I am so ecstatic  Every single night my husband tells me that our food tastes great because I am cooking real food now. Every single night we are members of the clean plate club. Every night I don't have to make baby food because our son eats what we eats and loves it. Our kid has the most adventurous palate and will eat anything you put on his tray. He loves veggies, fruits and meats in all shapes, colors, textures and sizes. To top everything off it was garbage time and it occurred to me that going paleo has not only changed our diet, it has changed our whole lives in the most beneficial way.

Don't I look tired? That is the OMG I just pushed out a 10 and a half pound ginger giant. Someone please get me an ice pack and let me sleep for a decade. 

Pre-Paleo. Before we were a normal family. We ate from the food pyramid, the drive-through and had a small back yard garden. My husband complained about all the nasty veggies like onions, brussel sprouts and asparagus that I tried to sneak in food to up the healthy quotient. When we went on trips we got up early to make it to a breakfast drive through for a delicious egg sandwich. We assumed they were healthy because you could see that the whole egg was there, not some lab creation. We assumed that our weight issues were a calorie issue. I assumed that my chronic headaches were just because I get headaches like every other female I know. I assumed that we got lucky getting pregnant because the doctor was sure my polycystic ovaries were faulty and that I might need them removed. I was waiting for them to officially diagnose me with MS because I had all the signs. I kept refusing the spinal tap because I refused to believe that I had MS. I had my thyroid checked every single year because I has symptoms of both hypo and hyper hyperthyroidism  My numbers were never that off so eventually I was just sent to a psychiatrist. I had chronically achy joints from childhood and assumed that I would be on medication for joint inflammation for the rest of my life. I had asthma that no matter how many inhalers I had prescribed never seemed to get better. I couldn't run without a terrible pounding in my chest and no matter how much I ran I couldn't seem to get good at it. Everyone said that you have to practice to make your body respond to working out but I could never work out without having the need to stop the burning in my chest and sleep off the fatigue later. Oh, and don't get me started on sleep. I needed lots of sleep. I could sleep all day and never feel rested. It took me forever to fall asleep and I woke up groggy and cranky. Coffee was necessary and I would have sold a kidney for an IV of french roast right into my main line. Should I go on? I could go on forever with all the problems that my body was having. I had seen doctors and they just answered each item as individual problems that were "mostly in my head" or a by-product of not eating enough grains and other "healthy foods" mixed with not enough exercise (in spite of my working out). Oh, an I nearly forgot the brain fog. The horrible feeling like my brain wasn't functioning like it should be. I had myself tested by a doctor for a learning disability at one point because I was in a constant state of brain fogginess. I couldn't find the words, couldn't remember things and generally suffered from a case of the dumbs.

The two of us rooting for our Niners. Better luck next year. 

The Paleo solution. Since switching our lifestyle to a more paleolithic friendly one, our lives have improved greatly. Not only is every single one of the problems I just listed gone, they are long gone. I fall asleep and wake up with ease. I don't have any caffeine and I feel great. I don't need naps to survive the day and take on with my little man sometimes just for fun. (I never used to be able to nap so this is great.) I stopped snacking because I feel satisfied with my diet. I make an omelette for breakfast that fills me up until I have a light lunch. I have a mid afternoon piece of fruit then a delicious dinner. I don't have that evening sweet tooth but occasionally indulge in a bite of fruit sorbet or some dairy and soy-free chocolate chips from the freezer. I have rekindled my love of teas and my husband is actually asking for more veggies in our food. The first time he said that the only thing the dinner needed was more kinds of veggies my jaw hit the floor. We noticed something interesting which has permanently shaped our opinion of food. We both used to be very specific about which foods we did and did not like. Once we removed the junk form our diet and reset our taste buds and receptors, our bodies responded with a genuine love of plant foods. While my husband still treats brussel sprouts like pod creatures come to steal his soul, he loves all the other foods on his plate. A trip to the grocery store is an adventure in finding new foods to eat. We used to go to the store with our list of what we though was food and stop in the produce section to buy fruit and salad. Now we are googling recipes for every kind of produce on the shelves.

The second biggest change is the family day-to-day tweaks. Our weekly garbage can used to be full. Nothing crazy, just the normal stuff. Now it has a bag, two tops of trash. What is there to throw out? Maybe a meat wrapper or two but other than that, our food is made out of food now. We have a nice compost pile starting and our garden is going to love the extra boost in nutrients. Family time has gone up because we now eat together and go out less. A trip to a restaurant was a regular thing and now we eat in. With all the great recipes to try, who wants to eat the same old crap at the restaurants? Exercise has become a joy. I have started jogging and I feel great. I feel better than great. My joints function like those of a 20 year old, not a 90 year old. Not only do we feel better but our bodies function better. No headaches and more importantly, more blood sugar regulation. I had been diagnosed with hypoglycemia and had to watch my blood sugar to keep from passing out between meals or getting serious vertigo. Dizzy spells were blamed on something different every year. My energy level stays even all day now and that helps me keep up with out little man. We switched off the t.v. and spend more time being a family which is making us better parents to our little man. Bed time still gets pushed past when it should be but I don't get that awful feeling of exhaustion first thing the next day. I hear that setting an alarm clock for bed works. Maybe we will try that.

Now that we all feel better family activity time is here to stay. I am actually looking forward to bike riding to the grocery store or just going for runs around the lake. I never used to like the summer humidity but I am not dreading the mist now. I feel hopeful for the future which is strange since I never realized how depressing bad food had made our lives.


My only complaint....well, it is a big one. No one told me that I would need to go shopping after making the switch. Both my husband and I lost weight. I tipped the scales at 198 the day I gave birth. One 10 1/2 pound baby later, I had 187 pounds to work with. My pre-baby weight was 155 and I was struggling to keep it that low. Now I am 130 and feel amazing. I went from size 14 to size 2 in six months after having a baby. I could fit in a 0 if I wanted to but spray on jeans is not a sexy look for me. Even my husband has lost weight and he is only eating 1 meal a day paleo plus weekends. We are literally going through our closet this weekend to consign the vast majority of our clothes. He is shopping for men's slim cut shirts now. So did I have to do a ton of working out to loose all that body weight post pregnancy? Did I have to cut my calories? Nope. I pretty much do't work out except for 10 minutes a day of push ups and other household exercises. I actually almost doubled my calories and I feel so amazing.  Some people might argue that nursing takes extra calories away and that is why I lost weight post baby. I would argue that is not true. I know plenty of people that breastfeed and the weight just sticks to them. I have had to get over the public guilt of saying I am a size 2. People are flat out rude now. Being thin in America is something that you either "have good genes", are European or must starve your self to achieve. I don't understand how being thin is supposed to be a bad thing. People get upset if you tell them that you are losing weight and need smaller clothes. Like being healthy and having my body respond well to real food is something that I should be ashamed of. Like because I didn't count my calories or order my food from a high priced food company I should be quiet. Like having a great post baby body is something to consider lucky about and not normal about. Well, I feel great, look great and have tons of energy so watch out! I love being able to do pull ups and push ups and my kid loved being my bar bell. He giggles while I do a few sets of baby lifts. I am not starved and eat better than anyone I know so no regrets here. I will happily shop in the skinny bitch section and let my vegan and vegetarian friends complain about how I am eating too much meat and I need to cut back to stay healthy. I have had my levels checked and I am better than ever. On top of that, my eco-footprint is better than ever. I shop local, grow most everything I need, don't make enough garbage to even justify half of the size of container we have and support our local communities with our free cash and time. For those people that think that you must cut calories to drop weight..read this article from Shape. A study showed that American's have lowered their caloric intake and are still getting fatter.

This is me about 5 months into our paleo diet. I feel AMAZING!

Going paleo has made me a better members of our community. Seriously. We used to purchase our meat at the grocery store. I couldn't tell you where our meat came from if my life depended on it. I assume it was raised and slaughtered regionally and with good practices  I know better. Most likely the poor animals were fed a steady supply of genetically modified corn and other grains mixed with the leftovers of their friends who have gone before them. Then they were taken from their horrible living conditions into a room with a truck on the other end. At some point, once the pink slime, antibiotics and hormones had their way later, I bought it at my local store. No thank you! Now we buy our meat from the guy at the farmer's market. He has a name and a family. He is a really nice guy. He raises an older breed of cattle and hogs and they live on wild grasses and soak up the sun. They are humanely slaughtered and are frozen immediately or sold fresh. I am also growing more veggies than ever in our garden so pretty soon we wont be buying anything at the store. What about the cost? Well, all we eat is good food which is worth paying for. We also save a ton of money because we don't eat out and we aren't buying pain medicines, headache medicine, spending our time generally crabby and otherwise disengaged in our lives. Our eggs come from a friend who is glad to have someone who enjoys farm fresh eggs. My son can tell the difference too. It is amazing how having grain free eggs can make a big difference for a Celiac person.

After I am no longer nursing my little man will I be returning for the Little Debbies of my past? Not a chance in Hades. This is it for us. Does that mean that I don't indulge in a little treat one in a while? Nope. I love a glass of wine and a small scoop of Haagen Daz. I am satisfied easier now and don't need a huge bowl of ice cream to make me happy.

I asked my hubs if he felt any different physically and he said that not really. But then he realized that he does in fact feel better in little ways. I have noticed it but he is convinced that he always felt great. I am pretty sure that the difference between how we feel can be attributed to gluten intolerance. I certainly had it and his is just waiting for the gene to activate. I know it is there. Our son didn't get two copies from just me.

Histamine Level Scale

While attempting to reset our son's histamine levels my husband and I have come across a few challenges. The first challenge was getting a diagnosis from a doctor. Following that, the second and more important challenge is finding out what direction to take medically and nutritionally. In America the idea that your nutrition is your health is assumed to be the focus of patchouli wearing people and not the sane. While I am not a patchouli wearer, per se, I must admit that over the years my life has become more crunchy than the average bear. We have become avid gardeners  sought out non-GMO seeds and even have our own compost and rain barrel system. This list of things really shouldn't qualify us for any special "green" status but should instead be a normal thing...but that is my patchouli scented kumbaya world talking. 

Getting a diagnosis. I went into that fiasco in an earlier post but as a little update I will continue it here.

Our allergist decided that our son did not have Chronic Urticaria and does indeed have Histamine Intolerance. I asked her if it was Histaminosis but she was so unfamiliar with the HIT diagnosis that she couldn't say. She did want to do lab work, which we are still waiting on the results of. I asked her to check his DAO, diamine oxidase levels but the lab technicians had never even heard of it. Not only had they never heard of it, they called dozens of labs around the country and none of them had either. So, how in the world do I get his DAO levels checked? Good question. This is the problem we seem to run into. It goes like this.

Our son has symptoms that they don't understand so they put him off to another doctor to deal with. That doctor has nothing so Mom (that is me!) gets to keep tweaking the diet until results appear. I also get to keep scouring the online medical journals and web sites until I find plausible explanations. Next step, bringing in medical journals to appointments with doctors who don't even take the time to look at them and simply stay narrow minded. Next step...well, the next step is the hardest part. Making our decision to move forward with "treatment" and continuing the search for either a great European doctor who happens to practice in North Carolina or one who is up on his international journals and is open minded.

Our treatment. Our treatment is to have a zero tolerance policy to histamine for 30 days straight. That is going to be mixed with serious food journaling and detailed records of our son's bodily functions. What a fun thing to do! Every runny nose, bout of constipation or other will be noted. We have to figure out which foods are making him sick. Luckily for us his skin is a red herring. He shows very clear signs of physical distress by breaking out in hives or having large red welts appear. We are scheduling a biopsy to see if there is an underlying mast cell disorder at play with those. More to come on that. 

The food journal will not only include meals, meal time, symptoms and his daily schedule, it will also include all ingredients in a product. That is the key. I used to write down things like omelette in my journal. Little did I know then that the egg whites were a problem and the tomato, spinach and mushroom inside as well. Now I am very specific. I write 3 egg yolk omelette in olive oil with pepper, and turnip greens. 

How will we keep to 0 histamine levels in our food? We have been working for 1 week now on a strict protocol and there have been tiny mistakes nearly every day. We finally figured out that guar gum and xanthan gum are in a lot of things. That means that every single thing that is processed in some way is now out. He seems to be extremely sensitive. Perhaps that will diminish with time but for now he has a zero tolerance policy to histamine. We are going to simplify our cooking for a while and stick to 5 ingredient or fewer recipes. Additionally, those ingredients should be things we rotate around so we don't have to be confused if something was good once but bad another time. Last night I made a 7 Spice chicken soup and today I am using similar ingredients to make a chicken salad. 

For our future we are heading to a gastroenterologist to see what kind of progress we can make. Our allergist is wonderful but in my logic it makes sense that if the DAO is produced in the gut then we need to see a gut specialist. Additionally, we have read that HIT is typically a secondary problem. We have been treating our son for Celiac Disease based off of his symptoms and have been waiting on a diagnosis. If that is accurate, that would help us explain his super sensitivity to gluten and temporary dairy intolerance. After 6 months without, we successfully trialed milk with no adverse reactions. While I don't drink milk anymore because it just seems strange to drink another animal's milk, I have that as my only  option. Rice milk is fermented so we know it is high in histamines. We had been using almond milk but it contains guar gum. Another day, another attempt. Wish us luck!

Zucchini pancakes

Zucchini pancakes is one of those recipes that I would have totally laughed at until a few months ago. I was totally used to the sugar filled, refined white flour pancakes from the box. Don't get me wrong, I would love a big old bite of Bisquick but since that isn't happening any time soon, these lovely ladies do the trick just fine. To make me feel even better about the health factor of them, they are also filling. I used to eat a huge stack of regular pancakes and would be full but not satisfied. These don't leave you dissatisfied. 

As far as histamine levels go, this recipe is a 0. I skip the egg whites and don't use traditional flour. That means they are also gluten free! 

Ingredients: 

1 zucchini

1/4 cup sweet sorghum flour or coconut flour

3 egg yolks if HIT or 3 whole eggs if not

salt and pepper to taste

Prep: Heat a skillet with your choice of oil or grease. If cooking paleo, use bacon grease for added yum. Since I had to say a tearful goodbye to my jar of bacon grease, I am using cooking oil. Shred 1 zucchini using a food processor. Separate three egg yolks from their whites in a bowl. 

Mix the two together and add a 1/4 cup of sweet sorghum flour or coconut flour. Add a dash of salt and pepper. 

Cook: Place a heaping spoonful of the mixture into the skillet. Allow to brown then flip. They are done when they are no longer shiny runny oozy things and look like a ridiculously too healthy pancake. Serve with a touch of maple syrup. (My husband likes a little powdered sugar on his.)

HIT research and support

Finding information on Histamine Intolerance (HIT) has been really rough. I can find information on Chronic Urticaria which suggests a low histamine diet but does not require such a strict dietary regiment. As I find web sites, blogs, research papers and more, I will post them here. This is what I have found so far:

Histamine Restricted diet from the International Chronic Urticaria Society http://www.urticaria.thunderworksinc.com/pages/lowhistamine.htm

A great introduction to HIT and Histaminosis 
http://nucleusbooks.tumblr.com/HistamineIntoleranceHistaminosis

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition- Histamine and Histamine Intolerance 
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/85/5/1185.full.pdf+html

So what can I eat?

Food. We need to eat and my first panic was..what do I eat now? I was already strictly excluding gluten, dairy and soy so the Paleo diet was a perfect match. What the HIT diet requires is way beyond paleolithic eating. Searching for lists of diet restrictions comes up with a list of citrus fruits, dairy, gluten, soys and other foods to avoid but not a list of why or how bad they are. This list has most foods rated from 0 to 3. 0 means contains no histamine, 3 means high levels. It also lists foods that are histamine liberators..foods that release more histamines in your body. For my purposes, I am only eating off of the 0 list for 1 month in an attempt to reset my son's body. Considering pollen season is around the corner, this is great for any allergy sufferer as well. 

Great list of foods- Print this out and keep it with you when you shop or eat out. http://www.histaminintoleranz.ch/download/SIGHI-FoodCompatibilityList_HIT(EN).pdf

Fresh is best. 

The difference about cooking for a HIT diet vs a Paleo diet is that for HIT, slow cooking is the enemy. With the Paleo diet there are great recipes for slow cooked ox tail, pulled pork, chicken thighs in the crock pot...with the HIT diet, time is not your friend. The longer an animal spends waiting for consumption, the higher the histamine count. For example, a fish that has just been caught and cleaned has little to no histamine. By the time it reaches your store, sits in waiting for your spice cabinet, then hits the plate....loads of histamine. The same goes for canned goods. To beat this, buy fresh and freeze until use. I like to buy the bags of individually frozen fishies. These are usually caught, cleaned and packaged in no time and delivered frozen to a big box store near you. As for land critters, well, local is better anyway. I have switched to buying our beef and pork from a local grower. He raises the beautiful bovine on green pastures then when their is is up.....straight from the slaughter house to the freezer. I buy it from him and keep it frozen until use. I also no longer get to slow cook or use my crock pot for daily help. You can still cook large batches of things but instead of keeping leftovers in the refrigerator, freeze individual serving sizes. 

Cleaning house.

Now that you have a list of foods to avoid, what do you do with all the food in your cupboards?  I took everything out of our cupboards and put it in bags. I keep those in the garage for a while until I know the limits of the food restrictions. Once we are settled into having fewer problems, I will try re-introducing some foods a little at a time. If I realize that I simply cannot use a product, I find someone to donate it to. Before we realized that we had to go gluten free I had stocked up on pasta. Two grocery bags of pasta and pasta sauce found a new home that week. Canned food is generally bad, even if it is a food that you should be able to eat. Pickled, canned, jarred, preservative filled items are out. Thing fresh..fresh...fresh.
The refrigerator houses so many bad foods for the histamine intolerant. Get rid of the ketchup, the mustard  the deli meat, smoked/cured meats, citrus fruits, leftovers etc. Once your kitchen of clean of all the food you can't eat you can stock it with foods you can eat. This helps avoid the depressing moment when you open a door looking for food and stand ten minutes staring in depression at things you can't have. Don't forget the tea/coffee/soda cabinet. Black and green tea are out along with all colas and coffee. 

Beyond the check list, here is a great list of basics: 

Avoid or reduce eating:

• canned foods and ready meals
• ripened and fermented foods 
• only buy and eat fresh products
• don't let foods sit outside the refrigerator – especially meat products

Low histamine level foods:

• Fresh meat (cooled, frozen or fresh)
• Freshly caught fish
• Chicken (skinned and fresh)
• Egg yolk
• Fresh fruits -avoid oranges and tomatoes until you know your threshold 
• Fresh vegetables
• Grains – corn and rice are safe but avoid gluten and lentils
• Fresh pasteurized milk and milk products
• 
  

High histamine level foods:

• Alcohol
• Pickled or canned foods – sauerkrauts
• Matured cheeses
• Smoked meat products – salami, ham, sausages….
• Shellfish
• Beans – chickpeas, soy beans, peanuts
• Nuts – walnuts, cashew nuts, macadamia
• Chocolates and other cocoa based products
• Most citric fruits
• Wheat based products- gluten in general
• Vinegar
• Ready meals
• Salty snacks, sweets with preservatives and artificial coloring

Histamine liberators:

• Most citric fruits – kiwi, lemon, lime, pineapple, plums…
• Cocoa and chocolate
• Nuts
• Papaya
• Beans- soy family
• Tomatoes
• Wheat germ
• Additives – benzoate, sulphites, nitrites, glutamate, food dyes

Diamine Oxidase (DAO) blockers:

• Alcohol
• Black tea
• Energy drinks
• Green tea
• Mate tea

Searching for answers

Along the way towards a diagnosis and treatment for out son we have come across many unhelpful medical personnel. Not all, but the majority of people simply don't know what to make of a child that looks healthy but is not. We are a culture that believes that looks are reality. We know better but yet we choose to be ignorant. For our son that has caused a huge delay in diagnosis.

Alton was born 10 1/2 pounds and 23" tall. That is a big baby. From the start he was "that huge baby" to the doctors. When we started having problems with red spots appearing on him after feedings we brought it up to the doctors. It was ignored because he was just so healthy looking. Never mind that he was too large at birth so he had a broken clavicle and had been given antibiotics and monitored. I was coerced into supplementing by the night nurse and things started getting henky. Wheezing occurred  spots appeared and he became irritable. Really irritable. Being a first time parent I figured that all babies cried and I just needed to learn how to soothe him. When we took him back and forth for appointments he would scream in the car seat. Scream after scream was followed by tears. Tears flowing down the face of a one month old child. It was heart breaking. We mentioned this to the doctors and they said that most babies get used to car seats and not to worry. That in combination with the spots, having to sleep propped up, screaming fits, inability to urinate in the evenings and wheezing made us nervous. We were cautious but things took a turn for the worse at two months. We had thrush. No doubt it was a side effect of the antibiotics we were forced to have for no reason at the hospital. Once the doctors figured it out, after I self-diagnosed and begged to be taken seriously for 3 weeks, they prescribed 2 rounds of antibiotics and anti-fungal creams. That is when the flood gate of problems broke.

The next and most persistent problem developed overnight. A light switch flipped on in our son's body and he developed diarrhea.  This continued for months until I removed gluten from my diet. At this point I removed gluten, dairy and soy. I assumed that the gluten intolerance was causing the dairy and soy because of his damaged villi but when his stool got better and the intolerances to soy and dairy got more sensitive I knew we really needed help.

At this point Alton is 3.5 months old and the doctors are ignoring us. Babies can't have Celiac. Babies don't have milk and soy intolerances. This mom really needs a life. I could tell if I had made a dietary mistake because our son would scream bloody murder in his car seat. Every day was a cycle of either mucousy diapers, occasionally bloody, but always diarrhea. When he ate solids it always passed through with no digestion present. We cleared the house and made an overnight leap into eating Paleolithic. It was a little miracle. I felt amazing after the switch and he got a little better. I didn't have to adjust recipes from other books, I could simply cook as directed. I also loved that unlike my vegan and vegetarian cookbooks I had no soy issues. This same time we noticed that Alton was triggering to other foods. Triggering really hard. We took him to the allergist for blood and skin prick tests which all came back negative. His skin would redden  get scales, bumps, lesions etc but then go away when the food cleared his body. We were told to see a gastroenterologist for FPIES. Food protein induced enterocolitis syndrome. That was a scary one. Thankfully I had started my food journal and we realized after some trial and error that the same foods didn't always make him sick. We found hidden gluten in some of the foods and successfully re-introduced foods that we had banned on the FPIES diet.

Yet with all this close monitoring I still had problems cropping up left and right. The doctors were useless and we were clearly on our own to sort this out.  Every night Alton would be a fight to get down because he was covered in red bumps that hurt. Every night he would have to urinate and couldn't. Every night he would scream in the tub. Every night he scratched his face and head. Every night he had to be held or propped up to stop what we figured out was reflux later. He barely slept. During the day he barely slept. Our poor son had bags under his eyes and was so irritable. In the car he screamed when the light hit him. He would only be held by me and wouldn't let me put him down day or night. It was become a nightmare situation. I was beyond burnt out. Where were the doctors? Off in la-la land. I kept making appointments and bringing him in to be told that he looked fine. Clearly he was a healthy boy. He was off the charts with his skill development so what was I complaining about? Just because a baby can crawl at 4 months or talk at 7 doesn't mean he is well.

We saw our first pediatrician who failed to take us seriously. I had done HOURS of research into childhood food intolerances, Celiac  gluten sensitivity and FPIES. He said there was nothing wrong with our son, just look at him. He offered a can of formula to us that was for soy/dairy allergic kids. The top ingredient was soy.  Because it was hydrolyzed he figured it would be fine. Apparently he doesn't know how proteins work. The only good thing we got from that meeting was a prescription for acid reflux medicine. He gave it to us as a way to shut us up but it turned out to be helpful. At least there is that.

Plugging away....day by day of what should be such a wonderful time. Day after day of agony. No sleep for any of us, I can barely eat anything without a guilt trip of what if this or that is making him sick. Agony.

Month 8....Alton's whole body-and I mean whole body- covers in red bumps. He is an unhappy boy. I take him to our doctor first thing in the morning and beg for help. He says that he sees that all the time and it is just a virus. It will pass nothing to worry about. Seriously? I thought the wtf would end there...but it didn't. I had admitted that I was having postpartum depression because of feeling so alone with everything. His answer was to call a psychologist into the situation. He then dumped me off to a pediatrician (thank goodness, we had been asking for one for months and they didn't see it as necessary) to deal with.

The psychologist explained to me that life was full of pain and if it wasn't this it would be something else. I just needed to learn how to work little 10 second happy moments into my day. She then went on to tell me how she loves hand lotion and ringing a bell to find calm when her day gets rough. So that is what I needed, hand lotion. Since I can't find the time for a shower most days, hand lotion is kind of out, lady. She dug her hole even deeper when she saw me tending to my child who was in obvious pain. 

Dr.Frankenfreud asked me why I picked him up and coddled him.
- I said he was in pain. 
She said how do I know?
-I explained. 
She said that Alton needed to learn how to deal with his own issues and that I needed to let him. He was getting too much attention and would never be able to deal with his own problems if I coddled him so much. 

As if I wasn't already dreaming up a murderous end to this nut job, she continued to accuse me of enjoying my son's pain because it supposedly made me feel more motherly to be able to comfort him. I told her I had places to be. (Run away from the crazy lady!!!!!)

After the utter failure from the doctor I went home and hit the research harder than ever. I stayed up into the dawn hours looking at medical journals. I was up anyway since Alton had to be held and was crying in his sleep because he was in so much discomfort. Heart breaking. I hit on something that gave me goosebumps. I found something that would explain why he was triggering to foods on top of gluten, dairy and soy. HIT. Histamine Intolerance. I scoured the forbidden foods list and cross checked it with my food journal. It was a perfect match. You can read the symptoms here.

8:00 the next day I was the first person to welcome the allergy clinic crew to work. I had so many questions. I described my son's body and what I thought was going on. They looked at the constant failed allergy tests and went back and looked at the fact that each time I had asked for test to be done for bananas, mushrooms, tomatoes, chocolate, nuts and shellfish. (All HIT foods) The doctor had a light bulb moment and sent us over for labs. She said he has Chronic Urticaria. After some discussion she said that chronic urticaria is the US version of HIT. The US hasn't done research into HIT yet since it is a European problem. All the medical journals and research I found was in German and there were passages about it being a German genetic problem. My husband is 1/2 German so this made sense. She recommended that I run to the store and pick up a bottle of Children's liquid Zyrtec. 2 mL later and my son was feeling so well that he speed crawled around the house chasing cats for an hour. He was a pain to put to sleep not because he was ill but because he felt so good. He was talking up a storm and slept through the nigh for the first time since he was 2 months old. He didn't need any reflux medicine and didn't need Benadryl. He was a new boy.

What really got under my skin is the fact that a trained medical professional sent us home with a child covered in hives. Not just a few spots...covered in hives. He was on the verge of full anaphylaxis and this doctor wrote us off. I am so grateful that I had been giving him Benadryl because he very easily could have needed more than a Zyrtec to feel better.

More to come as we head back to the allergist to confirm the blood work, look into additional GI problems and heal our little man. I am elated that we are making progress.