It's been one of those days...

Black & white & coloured all over…

I’ve put my creative hat back on, I’ve been busy with other stuff but it’s time to pick up the laptop, place it aside and make room for coloured bits of paper and,well, other coloured bits of paper.

Currently I’m working on some classes, but while I was procrastinating, while I was looking through some images of layouts I’ve completed this year I came across this one.

I don’t think I’ve shown it yet.   It was the “pink version” of the layout below, created to show the students in Autumn Escape class “Black & white & coloured all over” how easy it was to swap colours around.

Both these layouts were really quick to do, with a whole lot of fun with rub-ons,stamps, paints and other creative stuff.  I’m hoping to find that creative fun again now.  I’m not the only one this happens to, right?  Struggling a little.  Wish me luck.

laters

In pursuit of sugar-free … with a bar of chocolate in my hand

I’m kidding.  No chocolate in this home.  Well, not since we bought a snack-pack of the Whittakers L&P chocolate because we just had to try it.  My verdict?  I love chocolate.  Would I buy it again? My answer, I love chocolate.

Anyway, many of you have been emailing asking about how Jacob has been getting on since my 6-in-a-row posts of 2 weeks ago, in pursuit of sugar-free. 
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6.

Posts did stop after 6 days, right about the time Jacob went and stayed on a dairy farm in order to get some work experience.  His hosts were fabulous, he remained relatively sugar-free, worked hard, played hard and learnt not to stand too close to the back end of a cow.  Not what you are thinking probably, he has bruises (still!) to show the real reason.

Jacob loved it.  It’s what he wants to do.  We were incredibly lucky to have friends that would take him in, give him a bed, feed him and include him in their busy daily lives on the farm, all with the aim of helping him choose his NCEA subjects next year.  He’s a lucky kid.

But that aside, Jacob is STILL sugar free and doing awesome!  He’s had a check-up at the naturopath again and his body is starting to respond.  He is more energetic, calmer and has even thinned out.  His boxing trainer even noticed it after not seeing Jacob for 10 days.  This is all from a kid that didn’t really eat much sugar in the first place.  (Seriously, my kids eat barely any, no nasty cereals, nothing). But taking out refined sugars and replacing a lot of the other foods such as white flours etc with more natural stuff has made a huge difference.  I was somewhat ‘brainwashed’ by the thoughts that all fats were bad meaning my kid’s diets had barely any.  I didn’t realise the damage I was doing and now that we are all enjoying more healthy fats and less refined foods, we are all healthier.  I realise I’m risking sounding like a total food-hippy here so stopping there BUT seriously, it’s done amazing things for us all.

Here’s an idea of the kind of things we are eating now:

(this is a treat, we’d have this kind of thing 1-2 times a day max, after dinner for example).

No-Bake fudgey sugar free can’t stop eating it slice.

(Made and cut into small squares for treats, this recipe is an adaption of a few other recipes and has a dark chocolate taste)
* 1 cup whole almonds
* 15 Pitted Dates
* 2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
* 2 tbsp. melted coconut butter/oil
* 1 tbsp. honey
* 2 tbsp. water.
* Add almonds to food processor & pulse until ground.
* Add dates, cocoa powder, honey, coconut oil & water.
* Blend until it's a sticky mass. If it won’t stick well, add tiny amounts of water and blend some more until it sticks.  Press into a tin and cut into small squares. Alternatively roll into balls.

For those that want a sweeter version, add in less water and add:
* 1/2 very ripe banana
* 1/2 cup shredded coconut
* 1/4 cup cranberries
* 1 tsp xylitol (or equiv of other natural sweetner such as stevia 1 bitty scoop)
or 1 additional tbsp honey

If you like it superdark chocolately, add 1/3 cup additional unsweetened cocoa.
Play with the recipe, it is easily adapted!

(note this is an adaption from a recipe you can find here)

I have other tried and true recipes too.  Along with many failed ones. 

For those of you that thought this was a scrabooking blog, it still is – I’ve got plans to share over the next week or so – inbetween trialling new sin-free chocolate recipes.  ‘Cos I can. ;)

Laters

School holidays, time out and my new red batphone

School holidays are awesome.  No pressure to find time to fit a thousand things into each day, no pressure to kick the kids out of the house on a cold winter’s morning and best of all, no notices from school asking for money or time or for me to remember school trips, appointments or other things that despite having a calendar on the fridge I never remember. 

This week I got a red bat-phone direct line installed to talk to Prima about ArtVenture.  Well, not really but I wish I could, I spend a lot of time on the phone organising what we need, what they need us to do, all that kind of stuff – lots of those conversations have the words “Just go downstairs to the warehouse and get some of those boxes of pretty stuff and walk across and put them on the pallet of stuff headed my way”.  Nothing like pretty stuff being sent my way. 

Next mission is to get class supplies on their way from the USA to us, so it seriously starts to get busy.  Sneaks will be coming out soon, people will start emailing asking to swap classes or book in the ones they wish they’d book in but didn’t… we’ll get the last minute sign-ups to ArtVenture, those that originally decided they couldn’t come but then realised today IS a rainy day and they should dip in to their birthday money.   

So that is how my school holidays is being spent.  Phone calls, skype, playing with pretty papers and glue.  Creating samples, completing assignments, arranging classes. 

Not a bad job.

No “In pursuit of Sugar-Free” posts for a few days, Jacob is on work experience and isn’t here.  I miss him LOTS.

Leaving you with a little assignment I did for Prima a while back.  It has hard to see pockets & hiddey places made from Julie Nutting Prima tags.    I originally put this little mini book somewhere safe to fill with pics from this school holidays.  If you know where my safe place is, let me know, I know it’s cliché but the place was so safe that I can’t find it. The part of my memory that stored where I put the mini-book is probably full of all the info from school notices, what to do, where to be and when I need to pay by.  It’ll turn up.

Laters.

In pursuit of sugar free. Day 6.

Today, as a family, we ascertained there is no substitute for pancakes (pikelets) made the refined sugar, flour, eggs and milk kinda way.
In fact, chickpea maple flavored pancakes served with natural yoghurt, berries and honey may just cause one to burst into tears if one is a 9 year old girl that at first thought it was whipped cream and jam.

3 out of the 4 family members thought the substitute was ok. We'll try again next week with the less ambitious banana/egg white recipe we have.

Jacob is currently out on some work experience on a farm, missing him already.

Laters

Day 5: The pursuit of Sugar Free ..and fish oil?

One of the biggest hurdles when Jacob first started this journey was stomaching the Omega 3 oil prescribed to him by the Naturopath.  Not designed to be a forever-thing, the oil he is taking is a super-mega-concentrated ‘grenade’ approach before moving onto a less concentrated, less expensive one later.  It’s so thick it crawls out of the bottle on to the spoon.  Masked with a peppermint flavour, it’s meant to taste Ok, but as these picture testify, it’s not pleasant at all.  Ain’t nobody really going to get past the fact it tastes like fish and it’s breakfast time, and eating fish at breakfast ain’t really that appetising.

Psyching himself up to swallow the dreaded peppermint fish oil.  
Breakfast ready to scoff down straight after.  Check him out.  He’s giving the same look to that spoon as I give to the leg press at the gym. 

 

Booyah, get it in!  The bulldog on his top kinda reflects the attitude, really. 
He always let’s go of his nose afterwards and says “Thank God you taught me to hold my nose” and scoffs into his breakfast.  Which happened to be homemade oat-quinoa muesli, unsweetened yoghurt & berries this morning. He’s seriously loving all this good food.

It’s a big day tomorrow as Jacob gets ready for a few days working on a dairy farm.  He is fairly set on working in dairy when he’s older so we’ve told him we’re happy for him to go down that path as long as he gets a taste of it.  4.30am mornings, here we come.

Last word from Jacob:

The Good: Talking myself into believing that the peppermint flavour repeating on me all day is really Peppermint Bubbly chocolate, not peppermint flavoured fish oil.  (it’s all in the mind, right?)

The Bad: I’m getting sick of swallowing heaps of vitamin pills, especially the disgusting herb one. 

Tomorrow’s mission: Getting a few things sorted to take to the farm.

Laters

Related articles

In pursuit of sugar free, day two.

Day 3 in pursuit of sugar free. Chocolate bound...

Day 4 in pursuit of free sugar. Uh... sugarfree

Day 4 in pursuit of free sugar. Uh… sugarfree

Last day of term was always going to suck.  Even at high school they have shared lunches, none of this “Choose two items and sit down on the mat and eat it”, it’s more like an all you can eat of cake, chocolate, chips and Mountain Dew before sending the kids off for two weeks with their parents. 

Even before the last class of the day where said shared lunch was held, each classroom that Jacob went to was a battle of the sugar-free wills as he turned down treat after treat.  Five different teachers offered fruit bursts, chocolate, favourites bars, by the time he got to film club last thing in the day there were a few ‘choice’ words arriving in my phone via text. Should I be happy my son feels comfortable enough to do his venting so openly to his mother? Not something I would have done as a youngster.  But then no one ever took away my shared lunches just when I got old enough to pile that plate as high as I wanted without the teachers stepping in.

So, what did we do to prepare Jacob for the shared lunch battle today?
I quietly stressed and Jacob told me to harden up.  Should have been the other way round but then Jacob’s a sensible kid like that.

 I sent him packing with a full lunchbox, a big bag of plain popcorn and plain potato chips and told him to be sensible. 

So these were the glorious foods in his lunchbox today.
(Totally trying to talk myself into believing this stuff is nice).

* Almonds with some of the choc coated walnuts we made yesterday.

* Mandarin (at least they are natural sugars)

* Egg savoury (made with egg, greek yoghurt, spinach & coriander, cooked up in muffin tins while pretending I know what I’m doing)

* Sandwich: Grain bread, chicken, cottage cheese, carrot, lettuce and some homemade chilli stuff that doesn’t have sugar added.  Yep, we are still making him sandwiches.  I know there is refined sugar in breads, it’s something we are choosing to keep at the moment.

And then came the shared lunch.

You’d have to have a will of iron to resist the kind of stuff high school kids bring to these things.  They walk into the supermarket on the way to school and present the purchases on the table for lunch.   The popcorn and chips were a good option to save being laughed at and he had some of each, but felt awful missing out on lamingtons, cakes, chocolates, glasses of sprite, mountain dew, numerous other choices of fizzy and orange drinks, crackers, pies, sausage rolls, brownies and biscuits.

Just being honest.  Like I said, will of iron.

Last word from Jacob:

The good: Being able to swallow the mega-grenade type fish oil without gagging. 

The bad: Lamingtons, cakes, chocolates, glasses of sprite, fanta, mountain dew, numerous other choices of fizzy and orange drinks, crackers, pies, sausage rolls, brownies and biscuits.  You know how hard it is not to eat that crap while avoiding being classed as a weirdo by your friends?

Laters

Related articles

Day 3 in pursuit of sugar free. Chocolate bound...

In pursuit of sugar free, day two.

In pursuit of sugar-free, day one.

Day 3 in pursuit of sugar free. Chocolate bound…

Oh yea, we had fun today.  We surfed the internet for crazy recipes, spent a small fortune on groceries and saw what a mess we could make in the kitchen.

When I said a small fortune, I really meant a small fortune.  This much hasn’t been spent on our grocery bill in one week since the ‘cheese’ incident where I sent Paul to the supermarket for some crackers and a ‘few nice cheeses’.  Apparently he heard that as “Go to the supermarket and spend a manly amount on the most expensive cheese and buy lots of it and get some of that expensive meaty stuff and other olives and feta stuff and whatever else you think looks yummy but we can’t normally afford”.  Because that is what he did.

But I digress.

These ingredients were king of the kitchen today.

Yes.  I know there is probably cheaper ways to do things.  I’m starting off easy and then finding the cheaper easier budget way later.  Ease is important right now.

Raw walnuts, natural Cacao powder, an egg and Stevia.  Stevia is a sweetener but it’s natural.  Nothing chemical about it.  It’s all natural, low GI, no calories, nothing to it but sickly sweet.  20 times sweeter than sugar, infact.  I’m trying it because it was easy. Except for the part where I paid for it.  That was hard.

Before I start this incredibly easy recipe, I have to say I have no idea where I got it.  I’m sure I have browsed 800,000 blogs over the last week, I’m now making a note where I get recipes but for now you’ll have to suffice with the apologies that I’m not linking the original source.

Choc-walnut treats.

The word ‘Chocolate’ in the name of this might indicate this tastes yummy.  Actually it does.  Jacob had some almonds as a snack today and I threw in a few of these choc-walnuts as well.  He loves them.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup walnuts
1 egg white
pinch salt
1/8 teaspoon vanilla
a dash of Stevia
2 teaspoons cacao

Directions:

Whisk the egg white until frothy. Add everything else except the walnuts and whisk again.  Add the nuts and fold through.

Spread the choc covered nuts on a foil-baked sheet that has been sprayed with cooking spray. 

Bake at 160C for 15-20 minutes until the coating is set and crisp.

Not the prettiest picture but I took it quickly on my phone as we were losing light.

Store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Imagine if you got creative with that idea, what else could you coat in this kind of mixture, how you could change the flavours up a little, the mind starts ticking…

Anyway.  Day 3 was good.

The last word from Jacob:

The Good “I feel so much better all round, so much energy.”

The Bad : “Someone offered me chips”

Overall, a really good day.

Laters

In pursuit of sugar free, day two.

Day two should have been a fairly exciting day I would have thought, new recipes, new ingredients, me in the kitchen making coconut butter in order to create even more yummy stuff.  It was the opposite though. 

There was the sherbet turned down at school, not really being able to eat anything when he was hanging-out with his friends at the fish’n’chip shop but the worst thing?  The realisation that film club were having a shared lunch on Friday.  Kids should be able to be kids, I feel a little bad Jacob is restricted but then we just need to remind ourselves that it’s all for a good cause.  This full-on stage is only meant to be two weeks to clean the system and load up the vitamins & minerals.  He complains but he’s a good kid and he is taking this like any other challenge.  Full on.

It wasn’t all bad though, he did find his new favourite breakfast.

 

The point was to take out as many refined sugars as we could from his breakfast.  So this is what he had.

Super yummy almond porridge with berries.

* 1/3 cup oats
* 1/3 cup water
* 1/3 cup unsweetened almond milk
* a pinch of salt (because my Mum’s Scottish and that is the way we were bought up).

Cooked in the microwave.

Then some frozen berries, thawed & warmed. 

Serve the porridge with the berries & unsweetened yoghurt.  There is also the slightest drizzle of runny honey and a tiny bit more nutty almond milk on top.

Now the trick is in the milk, I believe.  The almond milk makes it nutty, less need for sweetness and if the tastebuds were complaining of a lack of taste then there is always the berries & unsweetened yoghurt to wake them up.

Yes, technically there are sugars.  But it’s cut back from the weetbix & sugar mix he used to eat, at least the limited amounts here are nutritious.

So there we have it.  Day 2.

Good times:"”I think I feel like I have more energy”

Bad times *imagine Homer Simpson drooling here* “Shared lunch…….”

Poor kid.  Laters.

In pursuit of sugar-free, day one.

Jacob is the coolest kid.  He’s the hard-working one in our family.  Ask him to do something, he’ll do it. Set him a challenge, he’ll achieve it.  Give him a goal, he’ll reach it.  He was the one that used to get up with me at 5.15am to go to spin class or strive to beat his run record time after time.  Energetic kid, right?  Eeeeh, not so much. 

This boy trains like a beast and sleeps 10 hours a day but just isn’t well.  He’s constantly tired, pale, sick and can’t focus, and following a quiet comment from his trainer last week, I set myself the goal of figuring it all out.

With my mother-tiger hat on, anything for my boy, I did do something a little alternative, but also incredibly scientific.  Jacob had a blood analysis done, which means we got to see his live blood cells under magnification.  HUGE magnification even.  All on the big screen.  It was the coolest thing.

Straight away we saw amaaaaazing stuff, like big red blood cells and different types of white cells but we could see lots of nasties too.  I’ll save the details since Jacob is 14 and probably wouldn’t appreciate his whole medical history outlined on a blog post but in summary it’s surprising that Jacob gets up in the morning.  Among other things, his white blood cell count was low, his red blood cells were weak and unstructured and the amount of zig-zag or stressed out cells was alarming.

I won’t tell you what the arrow is pointing to, but it’s not good.

I wish I could draw on here like a big blackboard because this, although obviously not cool, was amazing and I feel compelled to draw big diagrams to show you.  The doctor could tell us so many things about Jacob’s history by looking at the state of his blood.  What a mess.  Longer story short, Jacob is eating nutritionally well, but none of that nutrition is getting anywhere.  His systems are super weak.

Straight away we moved to causes.  Experience, tests and feedback from Jacob have all pointed towards a hypersensitivity to sugar for a start.  Not the fabulous natural fruit type, or the gorgeous organic honey type, but the no-use-to-anyone-nutritionally-only-there-for-comfort refined white sugar type. 

Sugar has no real nutritional place in our systems.  I see so many of you cringing.  I am too!   We don’t need it.  It serves the purpose of taste and comfort only.  It’s extremely addictive, don’t I know that for sure, and is about as good to us (I want to use the farmer’s expression my Dad uses because it’s the only one I can think of right now but I won’t).. it’s about as good to us as a useless thing that’s really really useless.

And as the doctor is saying this, Jacob is hiding behind her invisibly mouthing “HELP ME!” and doing the cut-throat sign.  He was never a kid that got many treats but he could see the last of the Oreo biscuits and sugar on his weetbix, plus infact the weetbix themselves, slipping away as she was talking.

And so today we start the difficult journey towards getting Jacob healthier.  Step one.  Two weeks entirely sugar free.  And no. I’m not just another person that has jumped on the Pinterest-fuelled bandwagon in order to do something that seems almost cool to do. We’re doing this because we have visual scientific evidence that it needs doing.  We are doing this for health.  For fitness.  For waking up refreshed, for getting rid of dark circles under eyes, eliminating sore tummies and getting a little colour in our cheeks.

So today is day one, and tomorrow will be day two, I'll be posting recipes, updates and poking a little fun at ourselves just to make light of the fact that OMG we really are giving up sugar!  Did I say we?  Not sure I meant to say that.  Jacob is keen, 100% dedicated and looking forward to feeling better.  Today was the day we made lists and figured out recipes.  Tomorrow the plans turn into action. Hope you can tag along.

Laters.

Winners!

Quick post – here are the 25 winners of the Stampin’ Up! post from last week.  If you are one of these people, please email me (Link in the sidebar) with your postal address so I can pass them all on to Stampin’ Up! and they’ll send a catalog directly to you.

If you know any of these people – please make sure they know their names are here, the sooner I get everyone’s address, the sooner I can send all the details in to Stampin Up!

Congrats ladies!

Ann-Marie Campbell
Rebecca (Comment July 3rd, 9.40pm)
Fiona Angus
Tanya Leigh
Kim Theyers
Shani
Sue Alexander
TopKatNZ
Lynda Bagnall
Tanya Watson
Alisa (comment July 01 9.09pm)
Lainie T
LeeAnn (comment July 02 12.49pm)
Jayne (Comment July 01, 3.28pm)
Lianne (comment July 01, 5.24pm)
Nic C
Jenny (comment July 01 4.25pm)
Kirsty W
Neroli F
Brenda (comment July 01 1.59pm)
Julie (comment July 01 2.02pm) There were a few so make sure it is your comment!
Sheree Silson
Carmel Keane
Vicki Parker
Annelie Maddock