Green Smoothy and Halloween

Last night, we did Trick or Treating at a lovely street party run by one of the mums at school, you know who you are!  The issue with this sort of activity is that Miss A cannot eat most of her haul.  This leads to the night being fraught with emotional highs and lows as we try to guide her to make sensible choices about the lollies she can and cannot eat, without crushing her little spirit in the process.

The way we managed this was to take our usual picnic for the shared dinner, this week's selection was GF lepinja rolls with homemade schnitzels and salad greens, with a salad and some strawberries.  We also took a selection of chocolates and some lollies from Sue Shepherd's gluten free and fructose friendly lollie collection.  I highly recommend these lollies!  Anytime we are going to a party, fete or gathering where there is likely to be lollies and other sweet foods we have a small bag of these for Miss A.  They are not recommended in large quantities, this is always a no-no for people with Fructose Malabsorption, but a small handful so she doesn't miss out is fine.

Given that all of Miss A's friends and school chums are really understanding, I love our little school for how inclusive they are, she had no problems swapping her lollies for chocolates so she still got a pretty nice selection of sweets without making herself sick.  It was, as always, a lovely night, and we walked away from the experience with renewed confidence that we can live with this lifestyle and still raise two well adjusted, normal children who have not missed out on all the fun things due to circumstance.  If you put in the planning, anything is possible, regardless how difficult your eating plan needs to be.


Green smoothy time!  Because of how educated my kids have become through this process, they have both been really eager to try a green smoothy for a healthy breakfast option.  All the recipes I have come across either have ingredients that Miss A cannot tolerate or are outright allergic to, or things that are not readily available in Adelaide or I have not heard of.  This has led to us not yet giving this a try.  Even a search on the web for Fructose Friendly recipes came up with recipes that are not ok for us, for example, they all call for banana as the main ingredient, a big no-no for Miss A, or nuts which we have to avoid completely.  One even called for cherries which are on every High Fructose list I have ever seen!

Once again, invention needed to be my saviour.  We gave this a go, and it was drunk by both kids and only uses ingredients that we can consume readily.  There are a couple of moderate fructose ingredients in there, but with the high percentage of low fructose ingredients, I think the balance works.  It is not an attractive looking drink, being a muddy orange colour, but is packed with nutrients and tastes pretty good.  If too strong for your taste, add extra coconut juice/water to thin it out.

GREEN SMOOTHY
INGREDIENTS
1 cucumber
2 sticks of celery, with leaves attached
2 tangelos, peeled
1 punnet strawberries
1 carrot
2 cups coconut juice or coconut water

METHOD
Put all ingredients except the coconut juice/water through a juicer.  Add the coconut and mix to combine.  Serves 4.

Give it a try and see what you think!  You could try some spinach leaves to improve the colour and boost the iron as well.  Let me know how you went in the comments.