Taking the Scenic Route

If you have weird dietary restrictions, eating out can be really challenging, especially if you don’t want to draw attention to yourself as the weirdo.  Here are some of the places I have found great success.  The Mongolian style grills are great because they can accommodate just about any dietary difference, from vegan to carnivore, from gluten free to any other niche allergy/sensitivity.  Hu Hot is the easiest to go to, even without information about their sauces, because they have more single/pretty plain ingredient sauces alongside the prepared ones.  For both of these places, they clean a place off on the grill and use different utensils for your dish.  They really “get” the concept of cross contamination.  I love them both for it.

Zane requested apples with peanut butter and pumpkin seeds.  Weird, but healthy enough for us to happily comply.

The saga began the day before Christmas. I made toffee to give as gifts to my family, and another batch to send to family living at a distance with the photos that didn’t come in until right before Christmas. That batch of toffee was sitting there waiting for me to have the funds to mail it, and then Zach lost his job and I realized I had 3 pounds of toffee on my hands and no way to get it to the intended recipients.

I can’t eat it, and I don’t really want it fueling my children, and was debating what to do with it since the local recipients already had a bunch of toffee from my first batch. Some online friends suggest I hold a short auction on it at the parenting forum I participate in (and where the recipe came from), and since the toffee still looked beautiful and Zach confirmed that it still tasted great, I did. I pulled it out to start boxing it up and saw this —->
The chocolate bloomed and had that funky looking white stuff on it. AAACK! So, when the bidding was done and the paypal in my account, I ran to the store to get stuff to make more for the generous winners. So, they will get fresh toffee, but now I have UGLY toffee that I am not sure what to do with again…maybe take it to the University again…there is a new batch of students, and college students might not care as much that is is ugly.

Making the new batch:

mmm…still warm.

And I can not tell you the monumental amount of restraint it took to keep from licking the spoon. (but last time I ate some of this toffee I totally obsessed and craved it MASSIVELY for over a week, and I don’t want to do that again.)

#119 Healthy Pop. (Zach would say “Soda”, but this is my blog) It is a sad, sad thing when the “healthy” pop is the stuff with normal sugar because most pop is made with High Fructose Corn Syrup.

#84 Ketchup as finger paint. *sigh*

#63 Vitamix fail. Kale and Raspberry are, apparently, not a good combination. Hey, if it had been turnip greens the drink could be called “you can get blood out of a turnip”

#57 I think he likes them.

#54 Today I got fresh Mandarin Oranges for the first time ever. Yummy!

Zora’s most requested snack (usually with mustard or ketchup, but she tries to talk me into grape jelly too)

From the 24th

Zora helping make the cherry pie filling (before the stove got hot, btw). I hope to post a video of this later because it was really cute.

Gingerbread People and Gingerbread Houses for Santa, cooling off from the oven. (the cooling rack is over some of the freshly made fudge…I was running out of counter space for hot things)

Helping make the bread

Happy Anticipation as they get ready for bed, hang their stockings, and put out the cookies and milk.

Neither of them could get to sleep, they were too wound up. It was too short of a night for the parents. (Although I did have a glass of wine, and I determined that is a new Christmas tradition I might have to continue…so much less stress. lol)