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A week at the beach, our gluten-free and dairy-free menu plan and some kid-friendly tips

Dreams do come true. I’ve been dreaming about the ocean and the beach, literally, for the past couple of years. I was pregnant two years ago and traveling wasn’t very easy so we didn’t go. And last year, we went to the mountains in California but weren’t able to visit the beach on that trip. But this year we took our 21 month old toddler to the beach in North Carolina and we had a ball.

We went with a beautiful family whom we have only recently befriended this past spring. But with some friendships, doesn’t it seem like you’ve known each other forever?

My friends have three kids, ages 2, 5 and 8. So counting all the heads, that made eight people to feed, breakfast, lunch and dinner. To make things more complicated, Jana and I are both gluten-free and Elijah and I are dairy-free. So before our trip, we did a little gluten-free and dairy-free menu planning and came up with the following ideas for our families:

For dinner:

Turkey Burgers and Sweet Potato Fries (one of my standbys)

Meatloaf (Made with Grass-fed Beef) and Steamed Broccoli (I used almond meal in place of breadcrumbs)

Chicken Burritos with Lime Guacamole (I use Food for Life Brown Rice Tortillas for the gluten-free people)

Lasagna with Ground Turkey (I use Tinkyada Brown Rice Lasagna noodles)

Pasta with “Cheese” Sauce and Green Beans and Peas (I use Tinkyada Brown Rice Noodles)

For breakfast:

Gluten-free pancakes (made one batch with coconut flour and one with buckwheat flour)

Grain and Gluten-free Apple Muffins (made with quinoa flour)

Omelets with Mushrooms, Onions and Tomatoes

Eggs and Toast

Smoothies

Fruit Salad

Lunch:

Chicken Salad with Celery and Raisins (I would have added chopped apples but they made faces at me when I mentioned this!)

Sandwiches and other snack items

Leftovers

Some kid-friendly tips that I learned on the trip:

I learned a lot this week about what a lot of parents struggle with daily – how to feed a children new and different foods they aren’t used to. Luckily the toddlers are not very picky – my little one is used to my “weird” cooking and doesn’t question me about if cheese is real or not. Jana’s toddler Zack is also a champ at eating unless he’s not hungry.

Gluten-free pizza crust recipe, tarte style

Gluten-free pizza crust, tarte style

Notes: I’m having some quirky problems with my website so I am using bullets to separate the paragraphs in this post. I am also submitting this post as part of the Tuesday Twister Carnival at GNOWFGLINS. Please visit Wardeh’s site to see all the other wonderful weekly posts.

As promised, I am posting a recipe for gluten-free pizza crust. However, this is a different recipe than the one that I mentioned in my review of premade pizza crusts. The following recipe is for a tarte style gluten-free pizza crust that I adapted from a recipe in Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon. I have been slowly transitioning to more traditional methods of preparing and making baked goods, as suggested in her book. The main step that is added in traditional methods of preparing baked goods is to soak the flour for 12-24 hours in yogurt, buttermilk, or water with lemon juice or apple cider vinegar if you can’t eat dairy products.

This extra step (though it takes planning and time) makes baked goods much more digestible than if they are baked without soaking. Through soaking flours, the process of lacto-fermentation begins, which is a natural process that creates healthy bacteria like the ones in yogurt and traditional sauerkraut.

I have to say I’ve been somewhat resistant to transitioning to this new “lifestyle” of soaking flours ahead of time. I usually end up wanting to make something right before I’d like to eat it, which doesn’t work so well for this process.

But after making my muffins, and then this pizza dough, I am becoming sold on this way of preparing baked goods. And it is mostly due to the way these baked goods make me feel verses ones that aren’t soaked first.

When I ate this pizza crust, I didn’t get that “carbohydrate rush” that comes with most baked goods. Instead, I felt nourished and fulfilled. My blood sugar remained “stable” and it also felt more like a meal than regular pizza makes me feel. I didn’t have any digestive upsets from it at all, which I normally have even a little bit of after I eat non-soaked flours, even if they are gluten-free. On the contrary, I felt like it was nourishing food for my body.

A week at the beach, our gluten-free and dairy-free menu plan and some kid-friendly tips

Gluten-free pizza crust recipe, tarte style

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