I don’t like sugar. At all! So it seems fitting that my first post should be about tackling my daughter’s fourteenth birthday party in a world where sweeties are synonymous with parties. But first, a little history: At the age of one and a half my daughter, Kharma, lost weight instead of gaining weight. It was scary! A little boy in her play group was experiencing similar symptoms and after a brief trip to a nutritionist, recovered almost immediately.
I made my appointment and subsequently had my life turned on its ear! This crazy lady was telling me that my daughter was probably gluten intolerant and threw in the concept of food combining just to further complicate things! She also said small children often test inconclusively in allergy tests so the best thing to do was to exclude possible problem foods and see what happened. So off I went, clutching my list of do’s and don’ts like a ticket to another planet! Within a week she stabilized and by two was back to normal. It’s been roller coaster ride fraught with terrible recipes, inedible birthday cakes, unpalatable dips, sticky pancakes, and a veritable smorgasbord of expensive experiments. Thirteen years ago, things were very different!
We’ve come a long way since that first gluten-free birthday cake which was, once you took away the pretty name, mielie meel koek ! It was so bad, not even the dog would eat it! And there was ample to sample, since all but one kid had licked their koek clean and chucked them in the bushes! I have made great friends with dates and honey and found that when you add a teaspoon of cocoa powder to something it suddenly becomes very popular! But my daughter was having none of this, she wanted ‘normal food’, chocolate cake, mocktails. She’s had her fill, you see. She thinks I’m too radical and my husband thinks I’m not radical enough! But my son is my trusty culinary sidekick! Fully prepared to taste anything I come up with!
So this is what I was up against and here’s my menu of goodies and baddies for the day:
For snacks I gave them a platter of raw fruit and veg, pickles, tinned fruit and some toothpicks and the idea was to come up with the best and the worst combinations. I buy Offenau Gherkins and Rhodes tinned fruit coz the only dodge ingredient they use is sugar.
The Mocktails were hard in the beginning coz many online recipes use soft drinks and I can’t actually feed that stuff to my kids so I just made up my own using mostly fresh homemade juice, soda water, homemade coconut milk (recipes to follow!) the frozen grapes were a hit!
I waved a white flag at the birthday cake and the ice cream! Time, dedication, and budget only allow for so much! But I don’t have a white flag for preservatives; colourants etc. and my kids thankfully know to stay away from anything they can’t pronounce!
Next day we kept it simple with Super delicious greens and yellow pear tomatoes out of the garden!! My daughter didn’t complain!
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