My best friend's daughter has Celiac disease, and one day when we were chatting about school snacks and lunches, she mentioned the difficulty of finding really tasty gluten-free "grab and go" snacks that were also nut-free. The wheels in my head started turning, especially after talking with another friend whose daughter is allergic to dairy and sugar cane, in addition to gluten and nuts. I was thinking about them both as I found myself in the kitchen, trying to create an energy bar that would fill all those needs. Was it possible?
Here we are, mid-summer, and I feel like I've reached the "kitchen fatigue" point. It seems as soon as I clean up the kitchen from one meal, the children are raiding the refrigerator or rummaging through the cupboards looking for snacks. Chalk it up to extra activities and growth spurts, I suppose.
Telling someone that you are a vegetarian guarantees that you will be asked the following questions: a) Do you eat fish? and b) How do you get enough protein? If you're like me, you field the second question with a ribald joke of an answer that will make everyone around you blush awkwardly and be forever unable to look your husband in the eye.
Forget the mom wars, I'm more interested in the cookie wars. I am a die-hard chewy cookie person—I purposefully under bake my cookies just the teensiest bit, so that they are soft and chewy in the centre.
A few weeks ago I was at the BlissDom Canada conference, and one of the lunches was sponsored by Canadian Lentils. I feel that lentils do not get the attention that they deserve. They don’t have the sexiest reputation; you say lentils and people conjure up images of macramé owls and orange wallpaper and some kind of vile concoction bubbling on the goldenrod coloured stove in the corner. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.