Basic tomato sauce

Tomato sauce is a staple in our house.  It is a reliable tastey 'dip' for toddlers, as well as a perfect fast meal with a bit of pasta.  We also use it as pizza sauce, and as a base to add things to and make barbecue sauce or even a mild salsa.  We like to make big batches and store a lot of it in jars in the freezer, then whenever our jar in the refrigerator gets low, we bring out a new one to defrost.

The key to making a sauce that is so versatile, though, is to keep it simple.  No adding oregano or basil or other spices, which would be great as a pasta sauce, but if you use it on beans and eggs with cilantro might not taste entirely right.

Simple pasta sauce recipe:

Six 28 oz cans of whole tomatoes
teaspoon of salt
splash of olive oil
5-6 garlic cloves, diced

Open your cans of tomatoes and add them (two at a time for us) to a food processor or blender to puree them, and add the salt.  (or we just recently bought an immersion blender, so now we put them in a big pot and puree them there!).  Take the biggest pot you've got, heat it up on medium heat, then add the olive oil, maybe a tablespoon for the whole batch.  After it's hot and sizzling a little, add the diced garlic cloves.  Sautee the garlic for maybe a minute, then add all your pureed tomato and stir it around.  Then keep heating the sauce until it's as thick as you want it.  For instance, we like our pizza sauce pretty thick, but our pasta sauce more thin.  So we will make it more on the thin side, knowing we might have to add some tomato paste to it on pizza night.  The higher you turn the heat, the faster it will thicken up, but the more often you need to stir it to keep it from burning.  A lower heat requires less stirring, and is fine for a long day that you'll be hanging out at home, anyway!

The face of a pasta lover

Fancy desserts part two

My husband requested a fruit tart for Father's day - a buttery crust, creme pat/ custard filling, with fruit on top.  So I made an additional one for my LPLD girls!

I mixed graham crackers crumbs with an egg white for the crust (baked it at 350 for 10-20 min), filled it with instant vanilla pudding (with skim milk), and beautiful fruit on top, and even microwaved some strawberry jelly to brush on top to make it shiny and fantastic.  I dare you to try to tell which is which!  My eldest requests a lemon pudding next time, for some contrasting flavors.

I continue to struggle with the pie crust, though.  It stuck to the pie plate so horribly that most wasn't eaten, sigh, and it made a mess of serving it.  The leftovers the next day came out quite easily, as the pudding had softened the crust a bit - so not as crunchy, but prettier?  Maybe I'll add some crushed almonds for a bit of crunch (and fat, sigh), and plan to serve it the next day?  I've also tried graham cracker crumbs combined with apple sauce and had the same issue.  I will find a good fatless crust solution one day!

Can you tell which is fat free?

Fancy Desserts in a Time of Pandemic

I've been hooked on watching the Great British Baking Show for a few years, now.  In Germany I had to see the episodes slightly illegally on Netflix (apparently if you live in Germany you don't have access to the show, but if you live in the States you do).  It's much easier here, and I love to watch it on my phone while I pump breastmilk at work.

Sometimes they have great low fat options.  Because of them, I am learning about fatless sponges (cakes) and ALL the different varieties of meringue.  And I have some time between shifts at work, with the Covid Quarantine, and my kids could definitely use a fancy dessert as a pick-me-up in this weird and stressful time!

I made my first meringue layer cake last week, after inspiration from the GBBS, using a powdered egg white that we had leftover from Christmas gingerbread house frosting/glue.  It got rave reviews!  I put raspberry jelly between the first two layers, fat free whipped topping and cherries between the second two layers, and a few stripes of chocolate syrup on top.  Oh! And I put drops of blue food coloring in with the meringue while I piped the layers out, to give it a pretty blue stripe.  The occasion was the Annunciation, so it needed some blue for Mary!



The first batch that I made, I cooked for too long and didn't add sugar to the meringue, so it tasted awful and curled up into an unusable mess.  Luckily, our chickens still liked it!

But the second attempt turned out well.  I used a silicon baking sheet to weight it down and prevent curling.  Monica said I put too much jelly on, but it was otherwise good.  Darn near impossible to cut cleanly - we ate it all in one night!

Previously I tried making Jaffa cakes from the GBBS, but I think the chocolate on top has a bit too much fat.  I also bought some Jaffa cakes off of Amazon from the UK, but we haven't tried them yet.  Apparently they have 1 g of fat per cookies which isn't terrible...  Since Snackwell's stopped selling our favorite chocolate cookies, we are in desperate need of another chocolate treat.



We discovered some greek yogurt ice cream bars that everyone LOVES - and just 2 g fat per bar!

My future baking plans include a rolled cake for Easter, with either meringue or a fatless Genoise sponge.  When they say fatless, they mean there's no butter, oil, or cream - there are still eggs as a source of fat, but it's better than many cakes!  I'll let you know how it goes.

Two Week Meal Plan

Someone asked on Facebook the other day about a 2 week menu for LPLD, which has me curious as to whether I can provide that with the recipes I have!  Which is apparently the motivation I needed to get blogging again.  So, let's give it a try!

I love meal planning, and consider it essential to keep my family eating healthy, with plenty of vegetables, and to avoid daily trips to the grocery store, as well as avoiding high costs of convenience meals.  I find time between other chores to look at the calendar with my husband and write on our family dry erase board the basics of what's going on that week, and what meals would likely fit where.  It helps a lot to be able to look what's for dinner when it's still the morning, and plan when to start defrosting meat or start rice (or other things that require long cooking times) during the day!  This meal plan is mostly from scratch, which can admittedly be exhausting - convenience foods are indeed hard to find for LPLD!  But real life is full of leftovers, anyway.  One loaf of banana bread or batch of pizza yields many meals, which is where most of our 'convenience foods' come from ;).  Yay leftovers!  Plus, we usually have hamburgers every week on our busiest day.  Pick a meal that you don't mind eating weekly, and run with it!

Hypothetical meal plan, with fat in parentheses:
*Note on MCT oil: most folks with LPLD are able to eat MCT oil with impunity, as MCT oil passes through cell membranes without the need of the lipoprotein lipase enzyme that they lack.  So that's why I don't count MCT oil in total fat, but make note of it just in case you do.

Also, in our family, we try to average 10 g of fat per day.  Sometimes there's more fat, sometimes there's less, but it seems to average out OK.

Monday:

• breakfast: Banana bread (assuming 15 slices,1 g per slice from eggs, plus 3.6 g from MCT oil*)
• lunch: Frozen pieroggies, sauerkraut, mustard, and oven roasted butternut squash (3 g for olive oil for the squash)
• dinner: Bibimbap (10 g, assuming an 8 oz serving of meat, plus a little oil from sauteeing)
• snacks: Potato chips (1 g)
• Total fat: 15 g/ 18.6 g counting MCT as fat

Tuesday:

• breakfast: Crepes (1.5 g per crepe from eggs, plus another 2.5 g per crepe from MCT oil*)
• lunch: Hamburgers (quarter pound patty has 5.75 g of fat if 95% lean, 2 g from whole wheat bun) with steamed green beans
• dinner: Pizza! (4 tablespoons of MCT oil in the crust with nonfat cheese and vegetable toppings, each crust making 15 pieces, and you eat 4 slices; 15 g of from MCT oil*)
• snacks: Pretzels (1 g from MCT oil each) (roll in cinnamon sugar for a sweet treat!)
• Total fat: 7.25 g/ 25.75 g counting MCT as fat

Don't let olives fool you, they have 10 g of fat in 3 ounces!

Wednesday:

• breakfast: Pumpkin muffin (1 g from egg and pumpkin seeds; plus 4.5 g from MCT oil)
• lunch: curried chicken salad without nuts and fat free mayo, on 1 slice whole wheat bread (6 g)
• dinner: whole wheat pasta with jarred sauce, maybe some sauteed zuchini (3 g, depending on sauce)
• snacks: fruit pizza (0 g with fat free cream cheese and yogurt)
• Total fat: 10 g/ 14.5 g counting MCT as fat

Thursday:

• breakfast: Huevos Rancheros (7 g fat, or 2 g if you use nonfat egg alternative like EggBeaters)
• lunch: Frozen tuna steak with stir fry sauce and carrot sticks (1 g)
• dinner: Beef and cabbage stir fry (7 g fat if 95% lean beef and no cooking oil; sesame oil is so flavorful!)
• snacks: air popped popcorn (0 g! unless you top it with MCT oil, yum)
• Total fat: 15 g

Friday:

• breakfast: German pancakes (1 g from coconut oil or MCT oil)
• lunch: Veggie bean burritos (1 g per corn tortilla you eat, or nonfat served over rice!)
• dinner: Banh Mi sandwiches (13 g, use nonfat mayo mixed with sriracha, whoo!)
• snacks: lemon (or another flavor) sorbet! (0 g)
• Total fat: 15 g

Saturday:

• breakfast: Pancakes (1.25g, 3.5 from MCT oil or coconut oil)
• lunch: Peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread (4 g, depending how much powdered peanut butter you use)
• dinner: Fish tacos (3.25 g with tilapia and a corn tortilla)
• snacks: One chocolate cupcake (3 g MCT oil) 
• Total fat: 8.5 g / 13.75 g counting MCT oil

Sunday:

• breakfast: Bowl of cheerios with skim milk and sliced banana or blueberries or strawberries... yum (0 g)
• lunch: Chicken tacos (6 g without avocado, on a corn tortilla)
• dinner: Pasta fagioli (scroll down, past other good recipes :) ) (3.2 g)
• snacks: Kettle corn (7 g if you eat half the batch, muah ha ha)
• Total fat: 16.2 g

WEEK TWO!

Monday:

• breakfast: Instant oatmeal (3 g)
• lunch: Lettuce wraps (9.5 g from 95% lean ground beef and a little oil)
• dinner: Pasta primavera (2 g from the olive oil, top with fat free feta)
• snacks: Rice pudding (0 g)
• Total fat: 14.5 g

Tuesday:

• breakfast: Bagel with fat free cream cheese (1.5 g)
• lunch: Vegetable Lo Mein (0 g)
• dinner: Shepherd's Pie (if you eat one sixth of the recipe, 9 g)
• snacks: slice of apple pie! (6.75 g for an eighth of the pie, serve with fat free whipped topping?)
• Total fat: 17.25 g

Wednesday:

• breakfast: Nonfat yogurt with fruit (0 g)
• lunch: wrap with sliced turkey, nonfat cream cheese, slices of apples, banana peppers, and fat free ranch dressing (~3 g, but depends on the tortilla you use)
• dinner: 2 California sushi rolls with edamame beans (7 g of fat per roll)
• snacks: strawberry ice cream (2.5 grams if you eat one fourth of the whole batch, don't forget chocolate syrup!)
• Total fat: 19.5 g

Wraps are a favorite picnic meal

Thursday:

• breakfast: Sauteed vegetables (onion, zuchini, mushrooms, peppers with a tiny amount of olive oil) and an egg (8 g)
• lunch: homemade pizza rolls (0 g)
• dinner: Can of nonfat soup
• snacks: Angel food cupcake from a box (0 g! eat a few... top with fruit or jelly!)
• Total fat: 8 g

Friday:

• breakfast: Smoothie with fat free yogurt, bananas, strawberries, other fruits and veg of your choice (0 g)
• lunch: boiled shrimp with cocktail sauce and steamed cauliflower (4 g)
• dinner: 3 oz sirloin steak with sweet potato with marshmallow and cinnamon (12 g)
• snacks: Pumpkin cookie (1 g per cookie)
• Total fat: 18 g (you're going to have more than one cookie...)

Saturday:

• breakfast: French toast  cooked in 1 teaspoon coconut oil, topped with maple syrup (4.5 g)
• lunch: salad with a hard boiled egg, shredded carrots, shredded cabbage, green apple slices, sliced red bell pepper, nonfat Italian dressing (5 g)
• dinner: grilled cheese sandwich with fat free mayo or cream cheese, fat free cheese, and roast bell pepper, with a side of canned tomato soup (2 g)
• snacks: fresh whole wheat bread dipped in balsamic vinegar (1 g per slice of bread, usually)
• Total fat: 12.5 g

Sunday:

• breakfast: homemade cinnamon rolls (1.8 g each) 
• lunch: Cheesy chicken quesadillas (5 g in each, you'll want 2 though!)
• dinner: Baked chicken nuggets (1.5 g in 8 nuggets)
• snacks: pretzels in a fat free dip (0 g)
• Total fat: 13.3 g

Whew!  That was harder than I thought, I need to post more recipes!  This was a good exercise for me.  It made me realize how much LPLD is easier to manage with one meat per day; there's all sorts of other reasons to cut back on meat intake, from environmental to health to money saving.

And just to reassure the parents out there, a lot of these are adult servings.  Kids tend to get more restrictive daily fat goals (10 g or less is what we first heard), but kids also just don't eat as much as adults.  It's not impossible!  We went through months of weighing the food on our daughter's plate before and after every meal to gauge her fat intake, but it only took a few weeks for us to get a good feel for it, and it hasn't been that bad ever since!

We've moved!

Well, our time in Germany has ended.  It was so lovely living in Europe!  But it's also good to be back around the grocery stores with more fat free cheese, fat free cream cheese, and fat free vanilla ice cream - I was never able to find those in our little German town.

But have you bought a package of Snackwells lately??

What used to be our mainstay supply of nonfat chocolate goodness, the closest we could let our LPLD girls overindulge in chocolate... now has fat???  SIGH.  We are a little heart broken.  Definitely not the greeting I was expecting upon our return to the states!

If you happen to find a source for the fat free cookies of yore, please let me know.  And mail us some.  Lots!  We've checked Amazon pretty thoroughly.  Monica is planning to write a letter to the company, which is adorable and I'm pretty excited about.  SIGH some more.  If you feel the way I do, you should look at the Snackwell's facebook page - the comments are tearing the company apart for changing their cookie.  At least we're not the only ones sad about the change!

Potato Chips

Have you seen or heard of Pampered Chef's chip makers?  They look like this:

and are meant to make fat free chips in the microwave. 

Being a Pampered Chef fan, I knew about their existence since about the time Monica was first diagnosed.  But for some reason, I was wary of them.  My mother in law kindly made some potato chips in the microwave for Monica, on a paper towel to absorb moisture, and they turned out great!  But they used far too many paper towels for me to love them.

Our local thrift store even had a box of the Pampered Chef chip makers, and I still resisted buying them!  I think they sat on the store shelf for years.  And every time I went in, I chose NOT to buy them.

Until last month.  I finally spent the $2 to get them and feel silly I waited so long.

I think the best part about them is that it's a healthy (enough) snack that Monica can make entirely on her own.  We turned two large potatoes into chips last night to go with a rather celebratory Peruvian inspired dinner (to celebrate St Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo from a favorite meal planning book, Feast!) and Monica did almost all the work!  Since I got the mandolin out, anyway, I cut up most of the potato (with fancy gloves that limit how much I can cut myself on the sharp blade that Luke sweetly insists I wear!), but we also tried just peeling layers with a vegetable peeler that Monica can easily use, and that worked just great.  A sprinkling of salt, a rather ridiculously long time in the microwave (5 minutes), and a fat-free snack is created!

Now we need to try apple chips and sweet potato chips.  Maybe I waited so long to buy it because that way Monica could learn to make these on her own right away!  Or maybe I'm just weird.  Or never eat potato chips myself so I thought this was silly.  But I'm so glad we bought it finally!

The magic maker herself!

Book Review - French Kids Eat Everything

Upon the recommendation of a good friend, I started reading this book.

And then I kept talking about it, and so my husband read it.

And then this morning I made a recipe from it.  And later this week I plan on making 3 more.  And I am shocked at how all these classic French recipes can be easily adapted for LPLD!

I have adored French food for years - the small serving sizes at restaurants, yet perfectly plated and beautifully displayed; the outrageous ingredients to try; the rich flavors; the smooth sauces.  I can't speak French to save my life, which is a challenge for traveling there, but we have had many lovely trips outside the main city centers where we can get by and enjoy the food.

French Kids Eat Everything opened my eyes to the day-to-day aspects of French family life- quite similarly to my favorite parts of living in Germany for 3 years.  Some of my favorite parts of travel include going to local markets, watching families of various cultures at playgrounds, and eating the foods that are everyday staples there.  Because of this book, my husband and I have been working on enjoying cooking instead of unconsciously thinking of it as a chore, setting the dinner table more thoughtfully so that we don't have to get up during the meal, sitting at the table for meals instead of rushing through a meal to dash off to our next thing to do, and talking with our girls about how their food looks, smells, tastes, and feels in their mouths.  I hope to remember this book to reread in a few years, after its lessons have faded from my memory.

In the meantime, we are trying some of the recipes.  This morning I made pain d'epices for breakfast (I used skim milk and MCT oil instead of the butter), this afternoon with lunch we plan to have Sophie's Spinach Surprise soup before our egg sandwiches, and later this week I want to try Baby's Vichyssoise.  Eventually I will buy some endive and learn to cook with it.  Maybe I can make a quiche more often (crustless, and with lots of egg whites), and the stuffed tomatoes sound good, too.  I have big plans!  And I am so surprised to find the soups are so fat free!  They are basically just pureed steamed vegetables.  I'll let you know how they go.

Pain d'epices!  Just don't ask me to pronounce it, it won't be pretty.  But tastes like gingerbread, yet it has rye flour!

I have been working to lose the baby weight from my 3 month old recently, and reading this book definitely has helped.  I think its lessons would benefit anyone trying to eat better.  Changing our mindset to enjoy and actually relish good food, rather than just view it as a utilitarian fuel, seems to satisfy a deep desire that is essential to being human.  That desire being filled in other, disordered, ways leads to mindless overeating and mindless snacking, which never really satisfy.  But sitting down to a meal, carefully (but still often quickly!) prepared, with good company, and considering each attribute of every bite is immensely satisfying, and helps me not WANT to snack or overeat.

I highly recommend the book and wanted to share.  Even though many French flavors use significant amounts of fat, oil, and lard, they are also expert at displaying the other flavors of food.  I will keep looking for good LPL-friendly French recipes!