They’re having a giveaway, so if you’re curious about the gluten-free oats, or a cookbook called “1000 Gluten-Free Recipes,” head over to the Bob’s Red Mill blog for more information.

So, at the current time, while we’ve reintroduced a few things successfully, some of the “big” ones haven’t worked.  We’re still avoiding soy, pork, and wheat, in addition to dairy, which still limits things quite a bit.

This week we’re trying regular oats; we’ve been ok with the certified gluten-free oats but haven’t tried regular ones.  I’m hoping oats will work, because that will open up a shelf of cereals that’s been on hold, making breakfast and snacktime much easier.

Rice will be the next big one to try, and a success there would allow us to have most store-packaged gluten-free products, which tend to heavily use rice as an alternative to wheat.

The bread machine has been really nice; I make loaves of (good) gluten-free bread, slice them, and put them in the freezer so I can pull them out easily for school lunches and day trips.

We’d like to do some traveling this summer, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to manage a roadtrip.

We returned to the doctor this week and he said we’re on the right track; we can retry soy and wheat in another three months.

The biggest success of all of this is that our son’s eczema has been mostly clear in the three months since we started this diet.  Instead of daily steroid creams, we’ve only had to pull them out twice, when he showed reactions to the soy and wheat.  On a daily basis, we’re using only Cerave, and he has the softest, clearest skin he’s ever had.

My husband consented to me getting a new bread machine for this endeavor.  (He loves fresh bread, so it didn’t take too much convincing.)  My goal was to find a machine that had a traditional-shaped loaf, and that would work well for gluten-free breads, in case we need to continue on that road.

I settled on the Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine.  Several gluten-free websites said this was a good model for gluten-free breadmaking.  Although it does not have a preprogrammed gluten-free cycle, it can be manually programmed to work well with gluten-free blends.

To assist with programming and to find some good gluten-free bread recipes, I bought Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine.  The benefits of this book were two-fold for me:  the author explains exactly how to program this model of bread machine for gluten-free baking, and her flour mix of tapioca, millet, sorghum, corn starch, and potato starch makes use of ingredients my son can have (and that I had in my kitchen).  The only substitute I made was using almond milk in place of dairy milk, and it seemed to work out fine.

UPS dropped off my packages at 3:30 p.m., and by 10:00 I’d made my first two loaves of gluten-free bread, impressed with the results.  The white sandwich bread came out beautifully and was a hit with bothy my husband and son, who snacked on it before bed.  The cinnamon swirl bread left a wonderful smell in the house, and a slice went to school in my son’s lunch today.  Both loaves are much better than anything I had made by hand previously.

I also bought The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread: More Than 200 Wheat-Free Recipes, but that one’s going back.  It was written in 1999, before millet and sorghum flours were readily available, and relies heavily on rice and bean flours.  Since my son can’t have rice, this is not useful for me.  It does have a lot of recipes, however, so for bakers who like to use rice or bean flour it would be a good book.

Today I’ll try some traditional bread for the rest of the family so I can put the gluten-free slices in the freezer.  I need to get to the store and get more millet flour and tapioca flour so I can keep baking.  It’s nice to have good bread for my son to eat again.

Ups: It looks like chicken, basil, almonds, and Blue #1 are ok. Everything we can cross off the can’t-have list is a victory.

Downs: We’ve tried soy twice and saw reactions right away. Pork is not looking good either. We’ll wait a while and then try again, but those are two that we’d hoped to reintroduce with good results, just to create more options.

Gluten, rice, and beet sugar are on the docket in the coming weeks.

Chewy Brownie Cookies

• 1 package Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free brownie mix
• 1 1/2 c. gluten-free oats
• 3/4 c. chocolate chips (opt.)
• 1 c. water
• 2 eggs

Mix thoroughly.  Drop by spoonfuls onto greased baking sheets.  Bake at 350 degrees for 13-16 minutes.

The problem with most hotdishes is that cream soups are a common ingredient.  I searched through my files and finally found a recipe that I could modify.

Here’s what I came up with, and the kids cleaned their plates.  (My growing nine-year-old had thirds.)  This one’s a keeper.

Hamburger-Macaroni Hotdish

• 1 lb. hamburger, browned
• 2 c. macaroni (before cooking) cooked until almost done  (I used DeBole’s corn macaroni.)
• 2 cans (15 oz each) tomato sauce
• 1 can whole kernel corn, drained
• 1/2 c. ketchup
• 1/2 tsp. chili powder
• 1/2 tsp. onion salt
• 1 T. sugar

Mix all ingredients and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

• 1 c. Sorghum Flour
• 3/4 c. Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour
• 1/4 c. Flaxseed Meal
• 1/4 c. Sugar
• 1/2 t. Sea Salt
• 2 t. Baking Powder
• 1/2 t. Baking Soda
• 1/2 t. Xanthan Gum
• 1 egg
• 1/4 c. Canola Oil
• 1/2 c. Water
• 2/3 c. Unsweetened Applesauce
• 3/4 c. Frozen Blueberries

Mix dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in another.  Stir until just moistened; do not mix too much.

Fill 12 muffin cups 2/3 full.  Bake 13-15 minutes at 400.

My son says they’re a hit.

This week, we’re putting garbanzo beans (chickpeas) into the mix of things. It’s not that we eat a lot of chickpeas here, but there’s a packaged flour mixthat contains garbanzo flour as well as other “safe” flours. Having another flour mix to put in the rotation will keep us from having the same ingredients day after day, as well as give us some experimentation options. Does one work better for bread and another for cakes? As I write, I’m waiting for the oven to warm up so I can try a new muffin recipe.

We successfully did an overnight outing, eating in two restaurants (TGI Friday’s and Famous Dave’s, which were both very good in working with us) and bringing cereal and muffins for our son because the hotel’s breakfast buffet had nothing he could eat. It’s good to have an overnight under our belts to know that we can get away with some advance planning.

The only problem we’ve had lately is fluoride. We reintroduced fluoride using the “giving him his fluoride pill” method. After seeing what appeared to be a mild reaction, I remembered something: the fluoride pills are prescription, so we don’t have the actual bottle showing all of the ingredients. Was the reaction (if it was a reaction) caused by the fluoride, or could there be Blue #1 or soy oil in the pills (as there is in the kids’ regular vitamins)? I need to make a trip to the pharmacy to ask more questions before trying fluoride again.

Other than that, we’re sailing along. I made monster cookies for the school valentine party and they were a hit with kids and teachers alike. I love that my son got to have the same thing as everyone else, and that the kids enjoyed his modified treats. We had agreed ahead of time that I would buy his valentine candy, and we made a price list ahead of time so that when he brought his valentines home, he did the tally and figured out how much I owed him. His siblings even bought some candy from him; I’m surprised he didn’t auction his treats off to the highest bidder!

I’m hearing so many people say, “I don’t know how you do it” or “I could never do that.” We do for our kids whatever we can to keep them healthy, and I’ll bet anyone else would do this if it meant their kids could be healthier and happier. It takes some extra time and planning, but in the long run it will be worth it.

This new diet posed a problem, but once we got the OK for gluten-free oats, they came back on my to-make list, and since they contain no flour, I didn’t have to modify the recipe any more than I already had.

Warning:  this makes a BIG batch.  I can mix the wet ingredients in my stand mixer’s largest bowl, but the addition of the dry ingredients requires a really big bowl, or even a dishpan.  I use a 9-qt bowl, and it just fits, with no room to spare.  Do not under-estimate the size of this recipe!  It’s also not cheap; using Sunbutter, gluten-free oats, and Enjoy Life chocolate chips, it was about $53 for the batch.  On the other hand, that works out to about $.27/cookie, which is cheaper than any bakery cookie.

I use a medium-sized Pampered Chef cookie scoop and it makes about 16 dozen cookies.  I made a batch of these yesterday, and this morning my son’s teacher called to inquire about safe snacks for the school Valentine party.  I was able to volunteer to bring these yummy cookies for three classrooms’ worth of kids, and I’ll still have plenty in the freezer to keep us in cookies for a while.

Monster Cookies

• 1 lb butter, softened (partly melted ok)
• 3 lb Sunbutteror Soybutter (or peanut butter)
• 1 dozen eggs
• 1/4 c. light corn syrup
• 1 T. vanilla
• 2 lb brown sugar
• 3 c white sugar
• 18 c oatmeal(old-fashioned better than quick-cooking)
• 8 t baking soda (cut this in half if using Sunbutter)
• 4 lb chocolate (chocolate chips, candies, whatever your diet allows)

Cream butter and sun/soy/peanut butter, then sugars.  Beat in eggs, one at a time.  Mix in oatmeal, baking soda, and chocolate.  (I mix by hand, so I’m literally up to my elbows in cookie dough.)

Drop on well-greased pans and bake 12 minutes at 350.  Let cool a few minutes before removing to wire racks.

Freezes well.

Note about baking with Sunbutter:  Because of a natural ingredient of sunflowers, baked goods made with Sunbutter may turn green.  This does not affect their safety or taste, but it’s kind of unnerving to be eating green cookies.  To avoid this, the Sunbutter customer service people advise cutting down the amount of baking soda in a recipe by as much as half.

I adapted this recipe from one at Allrecipes.com, using my flour mix and some of the reader comments to come up with this combination.

First, mix up a batch of the flour mix that I got from the Gluten-Free Goddess:  1 c. sorghum flour, 1/2 c. potato starch, 1/2 c. millet flour, 1/2 c. buckwheat flour, 1 t. xanthan gum.

Mix the dry ingredients:

• 2 c. flour mix (see above)
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

In a separate bowl, mix:

• 3/4 c. brown sugar
• 1/4 c. unsweetened applesauce
• 2 eggs

Add:

• 1 c. canned pumpkin
• 1/4 c. water

Mix the wet and dry ingredients, then stir in:

• 1 bag (10 oz)  miniature chocolate chips (I use Enjoy Life chips.)

Spoon into 18-24 paper-lined muffin tins.  Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

These muffins are moist and tasty.  This recipe’s a keeper!