Sunday, February 28, 2010

Dairy FREE Oatmeal Pancakes

Filling, very easy, and HEALTHY!

Ingredients

2 cups oatmeal
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp salt
1 T baking powder
1 T brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 cups water
1 T veg. oil
1 T honey
1 egg (beaten)

Process 2 cups oatmeal until fine (it will always have some sort of rough texture), you can leave the oatmeal as is but the pancakes will be very thick.

Mix together oatmeal, flour, salt, baking powder, b.sugar, and cinnamon. Add water, oil, honey, and egg to dry mixture and combine well. On greased skillet pour 1/4 cup batter for each pancake, flip when bubbles start to appear (a few minutes, be careful not to flip too early as they can be fragile), once flipped cook approx. 2-3 minutes longer. Serve with your favorite syrup! Enjoy, this recipe make 12 pancakes.

**TIP** between batches cool the pan so the next batch doesn't cook too fast and become too thick.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

I wanna have my cake and eat it too



Seriously! My "cake" is health and I still want to eat cake! Mainly talking about sweets and sugar, contemplating another diet change. I am feeling amazing with my dairy-free diet change, to me that was easy but I know I can still feel better. I've come across various diet change personal success stories and in most of those stories MORE than dairy was cut from their diets. As a baker I am honestly scared and being a big baby, I know the right answer but I am just plain chicken! My goal from the beginning of being diagnosed was to do EVERYTHING that I can, hitting MS from different angles and yet I know certain things I am putting into my body are bad ideas and a little further into that day I'm not gonna be feeling as good as I could be. So WHY am I having trouble with this? I am considering maybe a slow transition, but whats the point of that when I already know!

Friday, February 26, 2010

Everyone knows someone with MS

MS has come out in the open for me as if it were the ultimate 60 foot monster (why 60?, *shrug* its a # why not LOL), its a very complex and surprising monster that always has something up its sleeve, and MS has become so common that everyone know someone who has it, kinda hard to miss a monster that big. Its kind of like when we found out we were having twins, twins didn't seem as common to us at the time but now everyone is having twins or had them and we have a good amount on both sides of our family! MS on both sides too, yup that sucks doesn't it :P

We have 3 boys and often are asked are you going for "that girl next?".....hmmmm...probably not, I feel a bit selfish just wanting to work on bettering myself these days but also I feel as if I'm protecting "that girl" that might have been in our future. Studies have shown that MS effects women more than men, in my family alone there are 3 women living with MS! I'd rather not risk something like that for "that girl". Everything happens for a reason and I like to think things through and analyze, it makes sense to me :)

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Forget about the backburner

I was thinking the other day about how MS is truely appart of me, it doesn't control me, I am still very much capable of being my active and busy self. I just need to be more aware...esspecially with my lack of ballance, falling sucks! LOL Everyday I feel like I am improving and to keep that going I can't just forget I have MS, I need to be active with staying healthy, sticking with my tight medicine schedule and dairy free diet (which I also learned the hard way I CAN'T cheat on....that leads to numbness in a surprise area lets say...could be my knee, could be part of my stomach?). So far I am doing very well with never missing a day that I need to give myself a shot, good thing I don't mind needles, I think my tattoos already showed that :) which I'm wayyyy overdue for another one.

My dairy free diet has led to some fun kitchen experiments; I now make my own dairy free cream soups to use in casseroles and other recipes. I've also had fun creating new recipes for healthiER desserts like brownies and other bars. Its actually quite easy to substitute dairy in recipes, I'm not really deprived of too many flavors at all.