Showing posts with label Vaccines/Auto-Immune. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vaccines/Auto-Immune. Show all posts

Monday, June 7, 2021

Our Privilege: Getting Vaccinated

It's big happy news for us this week, since
Rhiannon has received her second ever vaccine and had no ill effects! 
 
We had to stop vaccinating our kids after our son had a life-changing reaction to some of his early vaccines, and suffered many years of health-issues, after that, along with severe reactions to gluten, soy, beans and eggs. We also struggled as a family as over the years, a few doctors refused us service when they discovered our daughter was unvaccinated, some people in our community were afraid of us, and the kids' special diets often caused frustration for family and friends. Later we learned that both Rhiannon and I have myalgic encephalomyelitis and other issues, making both covid-19 AND the vaccine potentially dangerous for us. So the four of us have been isolated throughout the whole pandemic, and have researched long and hard, weighing all our options. 
 
I'm so proud of my kids. During this time of extremely limited interaction with anybody (a distanced walk or bike-ride here or there; a video-call or text-chat once every few weeks), my kids have watched on social media as the majority of their former peer-groups continued to gather and socialize, building memories and friendships that left them behind. But my kids overcame this struggle with zeal! Rhiannon has developed a new job for herself, leading online book clubs for kids, as well as continuing to review books on her Reading Corner website. Taliesin has committed to building a career in 3D rendering, unschooling his way through to his first accolades. In the absence of the usual commuting stress and onslaught of seasonal flus, both kids have been in excellent health. Tali has managed to reintroduce both eggs and beans to his diet! And both have spent a good deal of time raising chickens and building my dream garden. Could I ask for anything more? 

Well yes, I'm asking for their social lives to return!!! So, obviously, the vaccine option far outweighs the option of staying home in isolation, continuing to fear a virus that could wipe us out. None of us wants that! So, one by one, as our age-groups became eligible for the vaccine, we each went in and got it--Rhiannon last of all. And she's fine! She came home from the clinic, beaming, with her sticker proudly stuck to her vaccine site.

We are one family who, though we encountered some health challenges along the way, and haven't always been served well by the medical community, are extremely grateful for the people who have invented and made these vaccines, as well as our privilege in receiving them. Thank you.

Should I turn this into a call for open-source vaccines? Sure I will! We got this vaccine because we're Canadian, and as the People's Vaccine website states, "rich countries continue to cut bilateral supply deals with pharmaceutical companies which undermine this global effort and limit supply to poorer nations." So while people in India are burning so many bodies that the death-count is no longer trustworthy, billionaires with ties to big pharma are getting richer and richer, and I'm sitting here at home having my tea and typing on my laptop, feeling safe and sound. That's nothing to be proud of. 
 
The COVAX program (90-something wealthy countries providing financial aid to a similar number of underprivileged countries for the procurement of vaccines) has run into an issue with supply. Why?? Because most of the vaccine produced went to Europe and North America. That's us. Thanks, India! Thanks Brazil! Thanks billions of people all over the world waiting for vaccines that came to us, instead! I'm glad we're vaccinated! 
 
We can't just depend on charity, because just like with blankets on cold nights, we'll only give the extra blankets to the poor. We rich people will always keep more than enough for ourselves. The only solution is to produce more. To produce enough. Sadly, scarcity makes things more valuable, and those profiting want to keep profiting! Open-sourcing our technology means sharing the wealth, and, well... greed trumps compassion.
 
Enough. We need a people's vaccine. All technology, all science, and all progress should be open-source. Open-source means fair. The time for capitalism is over.

Sunday, March 15, 2020

COVID-19: Holding Our Children's Hearts as Their World Changes

What a rough few days in my house. Meltdowns everywhere, and some of them have been my own. We took a mini vacation to a neighbouring island with my partner's mother, and it did provide a much needed reprieve from the stress, but we came back home to more stress; more cancellations; more sadness. It's hard.

Kids everywhere are suffering as the seriousness of the corona virus pandemic becomes apparent, and their worlds begin to crumble around them. Maybe their parents are fighting over pandemic measures. Maybe there's no toilet paper because the neighbours literally had every last roll delivered to their door but the shop shelves are empty. Maybe they're out of ramen. Maybe their vacation got cancelled. Maybe they just feel the existential threat of Disneyland closing. Or maybe, as in my daughter's case, the musical she's been obsessing about performing in all year is in grave danger of not going ahead, and even if it does, it's unlikely she can perform, because both she and her mother have autoimmune issues and just can't risk her participation. Maybe she feels the existential despair of knowing that her friends are getting together without her. Maybe our older kids, like my son, feel a deep fear of failure, as college courses may not be completed and academic next-steps may falter. Maybe it feels like their parents are being way over-dramatic about all this, and destroying their lives for nothing, or maybe they see our fear and ill-advised panic-shopping as a true existential threat. Maybe they just see our helpless feelings and now struggle to contain their own. And we all melt down.

A few days ago I thought this pandemic presented a really great opportunity to bond with my children, to grow a better garden and get to some long-ignored projects. Now I just see stress everywhere I look, and I worry that we won't make it through.

I ask myself what matters most to me and, as always, the answer is my children's welfare - both physical and psychological. And I see that both are now threatened. At the moment, ensuring their physical welfare means isolation, and isolation is deeply psychologically harmful, especially to a couple of teens who are just learning to make their way in the world, without me. And let's not forget: It's a world full of people who are currently stressed over a pandemic, running the gamut from panic shopping to selling off their stocks, to running for the hills, to mocking anybody who uses hand sanitizer. That's a hard landscape to navigate even for me, never mind for a kid whose existence seems to revolve around people and activities that are suddenly all threatened.

We can't change this terrible feeling, but we can hold our children's hearts close to our own. We can continue to remind ourselves that our meltdowns come from fear, and that love can't cure corona virus or bring back all the things that have suddenly been cancelled, but love is a poultice. We can take comfort in our children's heads resting on our shoulders, in knowing that our love is helpful, if not always accepted, and we can enjoy the brief moments of happiness we find in distraction. We can hold our own hearts gently. We can inch forward with discovery and invention as we find new ways of living in our quickly changing world, knowing that our children will grow from being a part of the change. We didn't ask for this pandemic, but we can ride it. Maybe right now it feels like hanging on for dear life, but let's hold our loved ones' hearts close, as we do.

Monday, July 10, 2017

Please Help Me: An open letter to doctors who help and hinder.


Well holy that was an epic day! So epic that I'm going to share this story as a totally crazy yet serious tale of how our medical system sometimes fails us, and how it also sometimes saves us.

As background to this story, you need to know that my son suffered what we and his doctor assume to be a vaccine injury at nine months of age (his third tetanus/diptheria/pertussis and second MMR vaccine), and has suffered nearly fifteen years of inflammatory reactions to food, and a frustrating inability to gain weight as a result. (Details in a separate post here.) We have a wonderful doctor who is on board with our decision to stop vaccinating after this occurred, and while unable to find any solutions, has at least been kind and thoughtful, helping us to discover some coping strategies along the way.

Unfortunately, our doctor wasn't in, today, when I took my fifteen year old son in to consult after he stepped on a nail. For obvious reasons, I was worried about tetanus, but also worried about another possible vaccine reaction, should we choose to give him a tetanus booster. And here is where my crazy story begins.

The doctor we saw was highly reactive as soon as I mentioned my concern about the vaccine. I hadn't yet managed to tell him my son's history, because he cut me off, and said "Well if you don't want my advice, why do you come in?" This is the third time I've heard that particular bit of arrogance from a doctor, and I want to bring it up here, because it's SO harmful. I felt crushed, and said quite honestly, "The reason I am here is because I DO want your advice. I'm worried about my..." He cut me off again. In fact he cut me off a whole bunch of times, until finally I told him that I was having difficulty explaining our situation because he kept cutting me off.

I was near tears by this point, with the frustration of this and all the other times a doctor hadn't listened, bursting in my heart at once. So when he stopped talking, I took a breath, and told him very clearly, my voice breaking, that my son had had a reaction to his early vaccines, so we were concerned about repeating one of them, and that I was there seeking his advice on how to manage this situation. He chuckled and waved his hand at me, and said "I don't know why you're behaving like this" - by 'like this' I assume he meant verging on tears, since other than that I was sitting calmly trying to explain our situation. I told him "this is my child, and I'm worried for him". He then proceeded to question whether my son had indeed ever been vaccinated, since he didn't have the records, or if we'd even been at that practice very long, until he realized that he was just looking in the wrong place. When he finally found the records and my story was corroborated by our own doctor's notes, he simply referred us for the tetanus antibody blood test I had requested, and also for an immune globulin shot, and a tetanus shot.

I left his office with my son, and got in the car. I felt broken. Just broken. I felt unheard, and unhelped, and uncared for. But because I had my beautiful child limping into the other side of the car, I collected myself up and said we'd go get some tasty lunch at the grocery store before going for the blood test.

Remember how his vaccine reaction caused serious food intolerances? He can't eat gluten, soy, eggs, or beans. Not too bad, except that gluten and soy are dumped liberally everywhere. There are few options other than fruits and veggies that we can buy, but I wanted to get him a treat, after that doctor ordeal. The grocery store didn't have the one type of bread he can eat. So I checked out sushi: all of it contained "soybean spread" - whatever that is. So I asked about the homecut fries in the deli department. I know they come from a bag. "Could you tell me the ingredients", I asked her. She looked at me like I was crazy, so I repeated, "could you please tell me the ingredients in the fries?"

"Potatoes."

"Well, yes. But I wonder what's on them. It will say on the packaging."

"Probably spices, for sure." She said.

"Yes, I'm sure. But could you check the packaging for the specifics?"

She rolled her eyes and said, "What - you have allergies?"

"Yes", I said.

"Don't buy it," she said, and she turned away.

I bought some popcorn, cheese, and a soy-free chocolate bar and returned to the car, deflated again.

So off we went for a quick and nearly-painless blood-test, and then I parked the car in a two-hour spot and began my search for a doctor who might discuss some possible solutions for our dilemma. I phoned or walked into four offices, and in each was met with the same thing: We have vaccines on site. We won't discuss another option. Finally I managed to get an appointment for later in the day with a doctor I knew nothing about, but at least I hadn't already been turned away by his receptionist.

So I went back to the car, to tell my boy we'd have an hour to wait until the next appointment. He looked a little nervous, and said, "but you can't drive. You got this ticket. You didn't renew the insurance. A policeman came by and you can't drive anywhere." CRAP! So not only did we forget to renew, but the car and insurance are in my husband's name, and he was on the island.

This is when my day turned around. I asked a nearby bank employee who helpfully found me the closest insurance office. I walked a few blocks to that insurance office, and explained my dilemma. I called home to the island but my husband had recently left the house. I phoned my brother, who then drove to the building centre to find my phone-free husband and have him call the insurance office. Then the insurance broker in the city wrangled the ICBC workings with the broker on the island, and between the two of them, they resolved the issue. Except the printer wasn't working, and I was due for that final doctor's appointment.

Off I ran to the doctor. He sat down nonchalantly and looked straight at me. He listened to my whole story. It took me at least a minute to describe my son's situation, but he just ... listened. Then he asked some questions, and he listened some more! Then he made some wonderfully helpful suggestions, and also reassured me that while tetanus is a very serious disease, it isn't very common. I had very little time to thank him for his wonderful supportive and helpful manner, because the insurance office was closing imminently, and without my insurance I would have had to leave the car in that two-hour parking spot overnight. Of course... I'd already been parked there for three hours at that point. So I started running.

Half way to the insurance office, a woman motioned for me to slow down. It was the insurance broker! She smiled, and said she figured I was definitely over the two-hour parking limit, and thought she would just try to find me with the new insurance papers. She handed them to me and I nearly hugged her.

Here's the thing. Vaccines are a wonderful invention. For most people they are, anyway. And it's definitely prudent to do the thing that works for most people. Like you treat your garden in the way that will work for most plants, even though you know you'll lose some along the way. But what if one of those little seedlings came to you and said "hey - I need something slightly different." Maybe you'd call it collateral damage. Or maybe you'd stop and ask it to explain.

Please, doctors, listen to your patients. If we are in your office at all, it's because we respect you and hope your knowledge and experience can help us. But you can't help us if you can't even hear what we're asking. We feel so alone when you shut us up. We feel thrown to the gutter. We feel uncared for. If it takes an extra two minutes of each visit to just listen, please do it. Today I had a really terrible day, and it was saved in the end by people who took a moment to really listen to my problem, and help me find a solution, even when it wasn't the same one that everybody else needed. As doctors, you have the opportunity to change and save lives. Whether or not you do depends partly on how well you listen, and demonstrate compassion.

It turns out even insurance brokers, bylaw officers, and grocers have the ability to make or break someone's day. All of us do. Can we, please?

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Easter with Allergies!


We've been having a lovely day and I thought I would share some of the successes. Now that we have a bunch of food restrictions, holidays like this one are particularly challenging, since I want both kids not to feel like they're missing out. So this Easter was a collection of traditions and experiments and I thought I'd share it.

Our son is allergic to wheats and various other grains as well as eggs, soy, and beans. Luckily... the Easter Bunny has access to locally-crafted soy-free chocolate eggs, thanks to our amazing local chocolaterie, Cocoa West. But we all like to have an egg for breakfast, and that is the one food that our son dearly misses. So for the past few years I've been making him "bacon eggs"... which consist of potatoes, apple, sausage and herb-stuffed woven natural bacon.

Our daughter is on a strict auto-immune diet to heal her Hashimoto's disease... which unfortunately includes no grains at all, and no sugar! Not even honey. Needless to say, the Easter Bunny's chocolates are not sugar-free. So this year we improvised on those, as well! I based her alternative Easter Eggs (right) on this recipe by Sami Bloom.

And the wheat-eaters in the family do love their traditional hot cross buns, so my mother has obliged once again with a delicacy that smelled delicious. Rounded out with some freshly-invented coconut/almond "hot no-cross buns", some spring flowers and the beautiful eggs the kids dyed with friends yesterday, this was both a beautiful and delicious Easter breakfast. Now onto a dinner of lamb, wild maple blossom salad, and fresh-picked wild nettles. Happy Spring, beautiful world!




 




Tuesday, January 20, 2015

My Girl Can Cook!


Rhiannon has always been fond of creating beauty: Beautiful spaces, beautiful stories, poems, and music, and - lucky for us - beautiful food.
 
Thanks to Julie, from Mennonite Girls Can Cook, for the basis of this wonderful recipe. We basically substituted yogurt for the milk, and flax seeds and water for the egg, which Rhiannon blended up thoroughly with the liquid ingredients and let sit while we mixed the flours, etc. It worked very well: voila egg- AND gluten/soy-free perogies!

The recipe-finding and adapting was my job, but, other than a bit of help with perogy-folding (because it's way more fun to do it over a good conversation!), this was Rhiannon's inspiration and effort. She made the dough, created a filling of potatoes, green onions and cheddar cheese, rolled, cut and folded about half of them, and also cooked them for us, for dinner! Delicious! I love that my girl can cook!


fold

press

The flax gave the perogies a warm, pinkish whole-grain look. Beautiful!


Lughnasa ate with us as usual. But kitten food; not perogies.





Friday, January 2, 2015

Why We Don't Vaccinate

At the risk of losing readership, I'm going to broach a topic I've avoided here, before. And I have asked my son's permission to post this. Please consider him as you share or comment about this. Here goes:

We don't vaccinate. There. I said it. And we're also - GASP! - gluten intolerant.

Over the past few months my feeds have seen a marked increase in intolerance of gluten-free dietary restrictions, vapid rants by servers and restaurateurs, supposed "proof" that non-celiac gluten intolerance is all in our heads, and the ever-interesting "my kids eat gluten and so can yours" ditties.

Don't even get me started on the vaccines. The rants about non-vaxxers are worse: We're putting vaccinated children and the whole global population at risk, we're harming our children, we're selfishly benefiting from the herd-immunity hard-won by generations of parents who had more sense than we do...

Halt. Let me tell you something about us. Because I am not going to offer you a story supporting one side or another on these issues; I am going to tell you the story of my son: How we became non-vaxxers and what it's like.

My son was born in 2002, by emergency c-section, into the hands of my capable midwife and obstetrician. Despite his rocky start (he was strangling in his umbilical cord), he nursed up a storm, and by 9 months was at 99th percentile for height, and off the charts for weight. He hit all his milestones nearly to the day (my Mum was an infant development consultant, so we watched these with great interest). By 9 months he was super engaged with life and loved all sorts of different foods, excluding, of course, those not recommended for introduction at that early age. At the time there was still much talk about Wakefield's study, so we took the precaution of spreading out and delaying his vaccines. He had his first MMR vaccine at 9 months, along with his third Pentacel.

You keep hearing that age: 9 months. That's because it's when everything changed for us, although we didn't realize it, at first. His reaction to the vaccines was pretty typical: he developed a fever, and seemed to have some kind of flu, which we wrote off as coincidence. He seemed to develop an intermittent diarrhea, which we chalked up to flu-season (it was December/January). Then over the next 3 months he appeared longer and thinner, and was tired and cranky all the time, and I thought he was having an extended growth spurt. At his first-year checkup, when we intended for him to receive his second MMR vaccine, the doctor informed us that although he had grown a little in length, it was not nearly enough, and he had in fact lost a full pound in weight. In just a few months, he fell from an off-the-charts weight to 9th percentile. And we had no idea what was wrong. He was still nursing, he ate plenty, but he seemed to be shrinking before our eyes. That was when our doctor suggested we hold off with the vaccines until his health was recovered.

Over the next couple of years we fed him as much whole grain, meat, fat, fruit and vegetables as he would eat. He had a voracious appetite. He was active, happy, and outwardly apparently healthy - except for the pervasive diarrhea. By the time he was 4, he was into what would become a 9-month-long bout of often-bloody diarrhea. He lost more weight. His cheeks were still chubby, but under his shirt, his ribs showed all the way around to his back, and one of our friends said he looked like he'd been in a concentration camp. He endured many medical tests, and all sorts of food-changes, as we attempted to figure out the cause of his problems. He reminds me, as I write this, that we even kept a bottle of special, pure, store-bought water, just for him. Finally, when he was 4 and a half years old, our doctor asked if we had tried taking him off of gluten.

Gluten? What's that?
Wheat? Oh that would be a pain, but just to be sure, we cut it out. Three days later, for the first time in nearly a year, his diarrhea stopped.

That is when I began reading labels. Gluten was in almost everything. I purged every product that had anything even slightly related to gluten from our home. It took a couple of years to figure out the details of his allergies, and we now know them to be gluten, wheat and wheat-relatives, buckwheat, amaranth, millet, beans (including soy), and eggs. As long as there aren't any accidents, he's fine. Small, but healthy.

But there are accidents. Like the time a well-meaning friend let him help make wheat-flour pie-crust, and he endured three days of profuse nose-bleeding from the flour, or the time I took him out for lunch at a restaurant that was reputed to cater to dietary needs, but then discovered black beans throughout his "deconstructed taco". They shrugged and exchanged his dish for mine, which they assured us had no grains other than corn, no beans, and no eggs... and he went home with a miserable few days of intestinal reactions. In the beginning there were also some disbelieving friends and family who secretly slipped him gluten to prove to us that it's no big deal. But it is. And they didn't have to sit with a crying child at night as his guts wrenched with agony and his body kicked into its inflammatory ultra-immune-response mode to get rid of those "few sprinkles of flour". He tested negative for celiac disease, which at first seemed good, but we have now learned that "non-celiac" is (to some people) alternative language for "a-little-wheat-is-OK", and when we're out we just say he's celiac. This means people generally tell us they have nothing for him.

He's small. At 8, he had a bone scan that determined he was on track, size-wise, for a 5-year-old. Not too bad, they said. It could be worse. The various doctors we've seen don't know what's wrong. They don't know how to help him, and they don't know what caused his growth to curb off the way it did. They can't say for sure that the issues began with his vaccines, but considering the time-correspondence and the immune-related issues, they can't rule it out, either. They are very understanding of our decision not to vaccinate our daughter, who came along just after all of this came to light, and is now a very tall, healthy, unvaccinated 10-year old.

Other people are not so understanding. You know those articles being passed around on social media - the articles that demonize non-vaxxers for compromising the safety of everyone due to sheer ignorance? Those affect us a lot. They increase the likelihood that we will be shunned in social groups, that parents will literally turn away and cover their children as we go by, and that my children won't be allowed to participate in group activities if their unvaccinated status is discovered. We will be outcasts. THIS is why it took me so long to write this article. The word "unvaccinated" does not even register with a spell-check on this computer.

And it's not just in our community, either. My daughter once got a very deep splinter, and after I took it out, I brought her to a walk-in clinic to ask about tetanus. Since she wasn't vaccinated, I worried, and wondered what signs of tetanus I should look for, or whether it would be possible to give her just a tetanus vaccine, instead of the cocktail she would have received as a baby. The doctor yelled at me and my young daughter. He told me (wrongly) that there are no visible signs of tetanus, and furthermore that I was reckless, abusive, and irresponsible. He stomped out and slammed the door, leaving the two of us sitting stunned in the little exam room. My daughter laughs at the memory of "the doctor who slammed the door", but I feel haunted by the threat that we can be refused medical care because of ignorance.

We are not ignorant. Our journey probably means we know more about vaccines, adjuvants, and immunity than most people do. And our children are not a danger to vaccinated children. In fact, our children, who don't have the benefit of vaccines, are more at risk than vaccinated children. We are grateful for vaccines, and for the high percentage of our population who is willing to risk their children's future health (as we once did with our son), in an effort to curb harmful diseases for all of us. We benefit from the risk vaxxers are taking, every day. We are not ignorant.

It is ignorant to ignore that reality. It is ignorant to protect vaccinated children from unvaccinated children, and to spread pro-vax rants all over the internet. In doing so, people ignore the welfare of the part of the population who were harmed in the process of protecting the rest. There are at least a few vaccine-injured children in every community, as well as some, like our daughter, whose parents made an informed choice not to vaccinate, for very well-considered reasons.

It's easy to write off vaccine-injured children as unfortunate collateral damage in our culture's battle against disease, but as long as we don't have to look upon these children's faces, we might not work hard enough to prevent such injuries.

This is the face of my vaccine-injured child. This is his laughter, as the sun shone off the ocean and into our car, one recent winter day. We are grateful every day for the herd-immunity that keeps him and our daughter safe.



Most people don't realize our son has health issues. They see him out walking with his sister and some assume he's a healthy 9/10 year old, tagging along with his older sister. Except he's nearly 13, and is there to keep her safe, because she's only 10. He learned to read complicated words very early, so that he could check food labels, because too many friends' parents and ice-cream servers didn't understand the language on packages. He knows what maltodextrin is, and lecithin. He knows what happens when an adjuvant provokes a strong immune reaction. He remembers the taste of eggs, and longs for them even more than cake, but finds ways to satisfy his longing when everybody is eating eggs and he can't: He loves bacon. He loves climbing trees and riding out to hang with friends. He loves babysitting, photography and animation, and none of these as much as he loves theoretical physics. He's a kid in our community who is walking evidence that non-vaxxers are not freaks, not reckless, and not to be feared. We will never know for sure whether his vaccines made his body the way it is, but we are glad that he makes the best of what life gives him, and I hope we all can do the same, with all of our different lives and the choices we make. 

UPDATE: January 2022

This beautiful, brave boy will be 20 in a month. He's a happy, healthy, fully-employed digital artist. Our journey with him and the medical system has been eye-opening, to say the least. He's been denied medical care on multiple occasions, due to some doctors' misconceptions, fears, and failure to listen to patients. And yet, I'm happy to report that, after much work on building up his gut biome, our son began growing in his mid teens. He's now taller than his father, and healthy like a big bull moose. Just a very skinny one. He'll probably always be skinny! And... both he and his sister have received two doses of COVID vaccines. They're absolutely fine, and are now due for their boosters. Following this pandemic, and when his sister recovers from what is suspected to be long-haul COVID, they will likely begin updating their other vaccines, as well.
So that's our happy story. Not everyone's journey to immunity and a healthy body is the same, but our kids are lucky to be coming to a place of health.

Friday, February 15, 2008

no-sugar, no milk, no wheat, no eggs: Fruit-Nut Cookies

We just invented these to share with Taliesin's class, which includes a few other kids with allergies/food restrictions. We're quite happy with them! The delightful part is that all the fruits and nuts and spices (or not) are interchangeable, so really the variety is endless.

Taliesin's Fruit-Nut Cookies
  • Finely chop about 2-3 cups mixed dried fruits -- it's important to chop them, even if they're small, like currants or raisins, so that they soak up the liquid faster and become stickier.
  • Pour about 1-2 cups very warm fruit-juice over the fruit mixture and soak for 15 minutes.
  • Chop finely and mix in 1-2 cups sweet raw nuts. If you use 1/2 - 1 cup ground nuts you will need less rice flour, later.
  • Stir in about 1/2 tsp salt.
  • Optional: Add spices.
  • Add enough sweet white rice flour (glutinous rice flour) to make the mixture very heavy and sticky. It should form balls. This is usually about 1/2 - 1 cup, depending on the fruits.
  • Using a spoon, pack the mixture into balls on a baking tray lined with baking paper. They don't expand at all, so you can pack them pretty tightly onto the tray.
  • Bake at about 350 for 15-20 minutes, until the cookies bounce back when pressed (elastic as opposed to mushy).
Flavour combinations we've enjoyed:

dates, figs and fresh apples
prune juice for soaking
1 cup chopped pecans and 1 cup ground almonds (use less rice flour)
fresh grated ginger or (but it's cheating on the no sugar rule) chopped candied ginger

raisins, currants and dried apples
powdered cinnamon stirred into fruits
apple juice for soaking
pecans and hazelnuts

dried apricots, dates and fresh oranges, chopped
bit of nutmeg, stirred into fruits
press the juice out of the oranges for soaking
thinly sliced almonds, and ground almonds

apricots, figs, and dates
apple juice for soaking
fresh grated ginger and freshly-ground cardamon, soaked with the fruits
pecans

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

gluten-free gingerbread circus!

As most people know, Tal is allergic to wheat and wheat-related grains (basically, he can eat rice, sorghum, corn, quinoa, and other starches such as tapioca and potato). So Christmas time is a time of marathon baking, now. We not only need to bake all the usual fare (but gluten-free), to be shared at the (yes, DAILY) festive dinners we'll be attending or hosting for the next couple of weeks, but we also need to have enough on hand so that at every gathering where cookies/cakes may be presented, we have a suitable (and exciting!) alternative or two. That's all on top of the breads, buiscuits, pies, cakes, etc. that we bake, regardless. It should be renamed: Standing in the Kitchen Month.

So for those interested, here is the latest: a Gingerbread Circus! It was Tali's idea, and thank goodness Rhiannon was also excited about it! It took us about 8 hours, spread out over two days... phewf. This thing better be delicious when we devour it! We also have about 50 individual cookies, iced and ready to be packaged up for various events.

The recipe is adapted to be gluten-free from my friend Miki's (and her Mum's) family recipe

Gingerbread Boys
1 ½ cups white rice flour
1 cup tapioca flour
½ cup corn flour
½ cup potato starch
2 tsp guar gum
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 cup butter
1 cup natural cane sugar
½ cup molasses
1 egg

Combine flours, guar gum, salt, baking powder, and spices in a bowl.


In a separate (large) bowl, cream the butter with the sugar and molasses until fluffy. Add egg and dry ingredients, and continue mixing until thoroughly combined. Shape into a 1-inch thick, flat puck, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate approximately 3 hours, until firm.

Preheat oven to 350° F. Lightly grease cookie sheets.

Roll 1/4–inch thick, and cut to desired shapes. For curved walls, engine cylinders, etc., drape a rectangle of dough over a clean (label- and glue-removed) tin can. If the dough does not reach the bottom to stabilize the can, place small bits of dough around the bottom to stabilize. Some small shapes (cones, etc.) will hold their form during baking.

In this photo you see Tali's original design specifications (the drawing with the orange roof and circus performers dressed in blue), as well as our scrap-paper model (on the right, by Tal's hands), and all the pieces, carefully cut out on the tray and on the table.

Bake until lightly browned on the edges. The darker you let it get, the sturdier will be your gingerbread construction!

Frosting Paint:
for gluing and decorating gingerbread constructions

2.5 cups confectioner’s sugar
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
2 egg-whites
1 or 2 drops of 100% essential oil of your choice: vanilla, orange, and peppermint are our favourites!

Beat all ingredients until just mixed, then continue beating until stiff (on high with a mixer). A knife drawn through should leave a clean path. This time we added a little butter to the icing, to make it softer... mmmm...


Separate into bowls and tint with natural food colourings. We typically use:
turmeric (yellow)
spirulina (green)
beet powder or juice (red/pink)
cocoa (brown, or black when mixed with spirulina)

This time we actually just blended carrots into one part, and beets into another, and found the textured colours we got quite beautiful! And they were tasty, too! Here's Tal's explanation of the colouring:



Add water ½ tsp at a time to thin frosting paint, as necessary. Keep covered and refrigerated when not in use.

We also used some melted dark chocolate to attach the walls, tightrope standard, and standing people to the base.

What did the kids do in this??Obviously, this required a lot of adult help. The kids planned it all, with some architectural-stability advice from me. Taliesin helped make the dough while Rhiannon was at preschool. Then we worked out the pieces together; I cut the papers, they cut the gingerbread. Day 2: We all mixed the icing. Then we tried propping it up, together, but it was just too fickle for the 3 sets of hands together, so then the kids painted individual cookies while I (with plenty of guidance and a few holding-up assists) stuck all the main pieces to the board with melted chocolate. We popped it in the freezer multiple times with various (cups & bowls) supports to hold it while the chocolate hardened. When it was all pretty stable, they finished the circus implements (Tali made a hamster-wheel and trapeze, which are inside the tent), and iced and decorated the whole thing. The white-chocolate path was my addition. :--)