High Maintenance Mom

I had gum surgery 10 days ago and am still recovering. In my quest to find things I can eat (drink?), I've been revisiting many of the foods we gave to our kids when they were younger. My favorite appliances, not including the TV/TiVo which provided entertainment for three days of icing my face, have been our Waring Bar Blender and Cuisinart Smart Stick Hand Blender. I use each of them at least once a day. I started with smoothies and from there have been looking for additional nutrients in a blended form - much like I did for my kids. One of the challenges I face is that I can't digest dairy foods or handle lots of sugar. Many smoothies, puddings, and soft comfort foods contain a lot of sugar so I've had to work hard to find things that won't make me miserable. Below are a few of the foods I've been eating. The next post will cover other comfort items...

My idea of a smoothie is throwing frozen fruit into the blender with unsweetened soy milk to make an ice cream-like treat. I keep the freezer stocked with lots of frozen fruit in it, including bananas since my kids won't eat them once they have a few brown spots on them. Below are a few favorites. For all the smoothies I add the frozen fruit, cover with soy milk, and blend.

1. Banana-strawberry-cinnamin (plus peanut butter for protein). I have tofu in the fridge but haven't added it yet.

2. Banana mango (plus acai - found at Whole Foods).

3. Mango pineapple applesauce.

I also liked to add soy ice cream once a day to make them sweeter or soy yogurt to make them "smoother". Some of the berries I tried had too many seeds, which didn't go well with my stitches. So I only recommend blueberries and raspberries if you don't have the same issues.

After two days, I got very tired of eating smoothies and soy yogurt and I really wanted "food". Unfortunately, most food was too hard to eat. I thought very seriously about buying baby food but was able to microwave sweet potatoes and blend other soft foods. Plus I had a bunch of pureed vegetables left over from making recipes from Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food. As a quick aside, I like the idea of adding vegetable purees to desserts and I will publish some of my variations on the recipes soon. For example my version of green eggs is adding spinach puree to eggs since I don't cut out egg yolks.

In addition to eggs, I've also enjoyed Baba Ganoosh, hummus, oatmeal (I had to grind my steel cut ones because I don't like instant oatmeal), egg noodles and udon, soups (such as Brad's Root Soup, Jacques' chunky lentil soup, carrot soup, potato-leek-kale, plus store bought ones like Amy's Organics), ground up Indian dishes (chick peas, eggplant, etc.), orzo with goat cheese and avocado, 365 (Whole Foods) Organic Animal Cookies dissolved in soy milk (they are by far the best animal cookie), and muffins. I also used quinoa or ground up brown rice as a base for the other items. I recently started to buy softer breads, instead of my sprouted wheat ones, and grind up foods I wouldn't normally grind. My kids were able to eat chicken I put in the blender and I found that I could too, if I mixed it with something. I'm still looking forward to tortilla chips and non-mashed apples but I'm happy with the variety I've been able to find.