Nora and Luna share a moment a few weeks ago. This is when we realized the chicks should get outside before they started exploring the house.

In addition to the normal spring activities with school, soccer, baseball, piano, friends…we also added four backyard chickens to our brood! They are about 8 weeks old now and looking like little hens. In a few months we will have the freshest of the fresh eggs for keto meals.

In other big busy news–we are moving to a new house! I have been trolling for a house that will give us more space, including a bigger kitchen, and get us on the right side of the busy street we cross daily on our bikes. We also chose a neighborhood with an elementary school that offers full-day kindergarten with a dual-language Spanish immersion program. Nora adores language and will be in heaven there, in addition to the benefits of learning a language when young. We are excited about our move, but it’s adding to an already busy spring.

And in keto-news, Nora’s big news story was intended to get the word out about the keto-diet for other families in the area and it worked! A nearby family contacted us because their little guy was getting progressively worse while on 2 drugs and they had been thinking about diet therapy. After talking with them he really took a turn for the worse and they were able to get in to Doernbecher Pediatric Neurology (the best, where Nora goes) for treatment and started the diet. We feel their suffering while watching their little guy struggle and trying to get the help that they need, and we are thrilled to be able to help them get on the right path. We delivered some keto-treats and shared our support last weekend and he is doing better already. In June we will meet with the keto-team at Doernbecher to official start a support group for families. All good work to keep us busy.

On to Nora’s latest favorite recipe! We’ve had these for months now, and it’s finally time to share. These are also adapted from The Joy of Gluten-free, Sugar-free Baking cookbook, where they are called Chocolate Pecan Cookies. I left some pecans in the recipe, but substituted hazelnuts for most of it because Bob’s Red Mill makes a hazelnut flour but not a pecan flour, and hazelnuts have a little lower carbs per gram. Nora loves them and we hope other keto-kids love them too.

We started out serving them simply with enough cream cut with water to make “keto-milk.” They hold together well enough for dipping.

On the same note, we also served them as chocolate cereal for awhile, crunched up with “keto-milk” of cream and water. Last time I was down the cereal aisle, chocolate cereal in still in fashion, although I won’t buy it for Anders!

Next we started serving them as a large snack of 2 cookies with whipped cream in the middle. It’s either like a big Oreo, or an ice cream sandwich if you prep it then put it in the freezer for awhile. Very satisfying. This would make a great snack to send to school for a special treat when there is a class birthday or some other event.

Then one day Nora needed a smaller snack so I make a little food art with whipped cream and a tower of strawberries. That was a hit! Nora took this to a friend’s birthday party because I didn’t have the time to make cupcakes. The cookies keep in the refrigerator for a week or more, so making a batch will give you the base for several good snacks.

The cookies are also fairly fast and easy. It helps to have some pecans pre-ground, but it’s a small amount to put in the food processor or coffee grinder, which is my preferred way to grind small amounts of nut or seed flour when needed.

Only 0.8 g carb per cookie, and 2.56:1 ratio! Nora gets up to 3.5:1 ratio with 2 cookies, 12 g whipped cream for 178 calorie snack. For the strawberry stack, 1 cookie, 12 g whipped cream and 10 g fresh strawberries for a 114 calorie snack, 3.5:1 ratio.

Nutrition information for 1 Chocolate Hazelnut Cookie. Nutritional analysis by www.caloriecount.com

Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies
10 g Bob’s Red Mill Golden Flaxseed Meal
100 g Bob’s Red Mill Hazelnut Meal/Flour
50 g Bob’s Red Mill Almond Meal/Flour
20 g Rapunzel Organic Cocoa Powder
5 g Baking powder
3 g Salt
20 g Pecans, roughly ground
58 g Egg
50 g European-style Butter, melted
11 g Pure vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350° F (177° C).

Combine flaxmeal, hazelnut meal, almond meal, cocoa powder, baking powder, salt and pecans. Here, I added a packet of Nora’s Cytra-K for sweetness. Add a no-carb dry sweetener of your choice here.

In a large bowl, whisk egg, melted butter, vanilla, and a liquid no-carb sweetener of your choice if desired.

Add the dry mixture to the wet and stir well until a thick, sticky batter forms.

Weigh out 14 grams of dough per cookie. You can roll them in your hands to make a ball then flatten into rounds, as they will not spread when cooking. Place on a prepared silicone baking sheet or parchment paper lined baking sheet.

Bake for a total of 12-15 minutes, rotating halfway through cooking. Transfer to wire rack and cool at least 15 minutes.

Enjoy!

Read the story here: http://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/high-fat-ketogenic-diet-helps–year-old-keep-seizures/article_ca7dc366-6d66-541a-8516-4e87be41c9c0.html

Photo by Amanda Cowan, Corvallis Gazette-Times

I joke that our paper loves a good human interest story more than anything else. Rivaled only by the traffic circle controversy, the plastic bag ban debate, and dog custody cases.

Joking aside, we were pleased with their coverage of Nora’s story and explaining the ketogenic diet to a wider audience. From conversations and contacts this week, I know that our story is important to tell in our community.

My goal in contacting the paper is to create awareness about the diet as an effective and doable epilepsy treatment. I think the best thing that we can do is to show other people that there is hope, and to be there to help them heal their kids. There is a big learning curve for administering this diet, but I believe in the power and dedication of parents to make it happen. By passing along our information, we can help to make a difficult thing doable and we can share the load. Our next step is to set up a support group at Doernbecher pediatrics in Portland to help other families figure out how to get started and keep it up. We are tentatively meeting with the keto-clinic staff after Nora’s next appointment–here we go!

If any other keto families out there have tips or tricks for an effective support group–from either the supporting or being-supported perspective, I would love to hear it. I feel like we have an online support group going on here and it has been so valuable to us. It’s time to pass it forward.

I’ve been crazy busy with school and work lately, but I have a few more recipes and ideas that are ready to be published–so stay tuned!

Thanks to Ted, my partner and the best papa that Nora could have. No one loves her more. You bought us a place of honor among the neurologists and residents at OHSU with your graphs. You helped us to think about the problem systematically while your whole heart was crushed by the weight of it all. We are a hell of a team.

Thanks to Anders for being the best big brother in the world. You have been caring and sensitive to Nora’s needs, far beyond your years while being a normal big brother to Nora in every way. If offered 3 wishes, one is always for Nora to be seizure free and done with her diet (he also wishes to fly and for a magic wand).

Thanks to Nora’s doctor, Dr. Carter Wray, at Doernbecher Pediatric Neurology at OHSU for showing up just when Nora needed you, counseling us, encouraging us, adoring Nora and keeping it real. Thanks for being on our team.

Thanks to Nora’s dietician, Karrie Stuhlsatz, for counseling me through ratios and diet management and hearing out my long winded questions and speculations. Thanks too for being on our team. When we wanted to move the ratio up after that last seizure instead of trying a new drug, you reassured me and supported that decision. I was am so grateful.

Thanks to our family and friends who have supported us all along, praised and loved us through it all, and have completely trusted and respected Nora’s diet restrictions. Thank you to our friends for being thoughtful by giving me the heads-up on picnic and party plans so that I could prepare a matching meal for Nora. Thanks for your patience as I and my gram scale have occasionally invaded your kitchen. Thank you most of all for continuing to invite us to your gatherings, even with all of our complications. Thanks for asking questions and listening to the (again) long winded answers.

Thanks to the other keto-parents out there who have blazed this trail for us and provided inspiration. We celebrate and mourn with you on your journey too. You are a new part of our family and our hearts are always with you. Thanks to the Charlie Foundation for bringing us together and giving us resources and hope.

We’ve come a long way, but it’s probably only half-way into the journey. The rule of thumb is 2-years seizure-free, then weaning will take some time. Even then, we will ease off slowly, so we might have more than one year ahead of us, and I anticipate always avoiding high-sugar foods for Nora. Thankfully, our long-term changes are healthy for every body.

We’ve overcome many hurdles and Nora has defied all of our expectations for compliance and clinical response. She’s the real star of the show, and she knows it! We are all just the supporting cast giving Nora everything she needs to shine.

Ted says:
I’ve mixed feelings.  At once sad for the memories of what was — and the possibility of relapses, however remote — and also deeply grateful for what we have now.  This year has felt like many, but at the same time it is short in the course of epilepsy.  There are many contradictions.  But one thing is true: in December of 2011, when Nora was having many seizures and there was no improvement in sight, I would have given almost anything to be here now, with a healthy, happy, spirited, seizure-free, distinctly-Nora girl.  Christy did a wonderful job thanking everyone.  I echo that.  And thanks to Christy.  Nora doesn’t yet understand what you are doing for her, but I do, and it is written into Nora’s branching path, which every day advances further to a brighter place.

I promised to post a bread recipe long ago. I wanted to try this out a few times before posting it, and it’s finally time to share. Note that a stand mixer is required to make this batter. I don’t want to be responsible for the loss of another hand mixer. (Click on pictures to see larger image).

Having a bread on the keto diet seems to be really important to a lot of kids. I can imagine that it would be critical for older kids who remember “normal” food and see sandwiches around them at school. Nora’s biggest loss when she first started the diet was toast, although we don’t think she really remembers “toast” as the rest of the world knows it.

Nora has especially enjoyed this bread as peanut/almond butter (and butter) and keto-jam sandwiches, but it also holds up well enough to make grilled cheese or toast!

To be clear, it does not have the consistency of wheat-based loaf bread. It is a quick bread and even smells like banana bread to me, even though there is not a hint of banana in it!

This recipe is adapted from the “Toasting Bread” recipe in The Joy of Gluten-free, Sugar-free Baking. There are several similar recipes in that cookbook. The key to this one appears to be the egg whites, which give it a dryer texture after toasting. But after I substituted heavy cream for milk, it’s not exactly a “dry” bread.

I have to address how to use a loaf recipe in the ketogenic diet, because our typical procedure is to pre-weigh the batter and then cook accurate single servings. In this recipe, you will bake the loaf then cut servings of varying weights, and you have to know how to account for that. I’m using these calculations for Nora’s meals because I have verified it myself and we have had no problems. But if your kid is very sensitive or just starting the diet, you probably want to stick to recipes that weigh the batter into servings rather than these batch or loaf recipes that rely on good estimates. I want to be very clear about my procedures here so that you can make the best choices for your kid’s diet. If you are using LGIT or MAD, you are probably just fine with this bread. For the keto diet, you may want to pre-weigh the batter and post-weigh the bread when it is done and do your own calculations. Or weigh it out into smaller loaves so that it is all pre-weighed and adjust the cooking time accordingly. (I also explained this in the Holiday Cookies post, but eventually decided it was much easier to pre-weigh the cookies. Slicing bread to a certain weight is easier than weighing and calculating for each baked cookie.)

The recipe and nutrition information is for one whole loaf, 1169 g of batter. To convert this to nutrition information per gram of baked bread, I weighed the loaf when it came out of the oven and cooled, which was fairly consistant from loaf to loaf: 1057 g. It is lighter than the batter because water cooks out during baking, while the macronutrient breakdown remains the same. Therefore, I take the nutrition information for the full 1169 g of batter and divide it by 1057 to get the per-gram nutrition information (sorry, no fancy nutrition panel for this):

Nutrient             Per gram               40 g serving
Net carbs:         0.033 g                     1.31 g
Protein:              0.117 g                     4.67 g
Fat:                      0.357 g                   14.28 g
Fiber:                  0.075 g                      3.0 g

Ratio:        2.39:1

To calculate it into a meal for Nora, I choose an amount that will fit into her meal, usually 30 to 40 g. Then I cut a piece of bread to that weight. See above for the breakdowns for a 40 g slice (or 2 very thin slices). It packs in a good amount of protein and fiber! A typical meal would be 35-40 g of bread, equal parts natural peanut butter and butter (8 g each, could use almond butter instead), 8 g keto mixed berry jam (could also use crushed raspberries), and 30-40 g of heavy cream steamed with a touch of cocoa for “hot chocolate.” Hits the spot for a kid!

Toasting Bread
(nutrition info for batter, whole loaf)
227 g Bob’s Red Mill Organic Golden Flaxseed Meal
227 g Bob’s Red Mill Hazelnut Meal
32 g sesame seeds
32 g sunflower seeds
20 g baking powder
3 g Bob’s Red Mill xanthan gum
3 g salt
340 g Organic Valley Heavy Whipping Cream
285 g egg whites (about 6 eggs)

Preheat the oven to 375. Line the bottom of a 4.5 x 8 inch loaf pan with parchment paper, then lightly coat with oil.

Weigh the sesame seeds and sunflower seeds, then grind to flour in a clean coffee or spice grinder. You could opt to leave some of each whole if you prefer whole seeds in the bread. Combine with remaining dry ingredients: flaxeed meal, hazelnut meal, baking powder, xanthan gum and salt, and mix well.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the cream and egg whites. You may add a non-carb liquid sweetener here if desired. Blend with paddle attachment thoroughly. Add the dry ingredients, and mix on medium for 2-3 minutes, until you have a thick, sticky, aerated batter.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan. Bake for 45 minutes, then rotate and bake for another 35 to 45 minutes until golden and springy when pressed in the center.

Transfer to wire rack and cool for at least 5 minutes before turning out of the pan. Loosen around the edges with a thin nice. Cool at least 15 minutes before slicing. Store in the refrigerator.

Because Nora eats so little at a time, I cut the loaf in half to use half and freeze half. She can eat sandwiches for awhile, move on to other foods, and when she asks for bread again I can just get the other half loaf out of the freezer.

When you read the ingredients, you probably thought (as I do), “what about the egg yolks!?!” I’m always trying to use a whole egg. This recipe is the perfect match to keto ice cream on a big cooking weekend! That recipe requires about 6 egg whites. So there you have it. Bread and ice cream. You have everything you need for a very happy keto kid, and no wasted eggs parts.

We ordered these great keto t-shirts through http://www.ketogoods.com/SHOP.html. Proceeds from each order go to The John M. Freeman Pediatric Epilepsy Center at John Hopkins Hospital to support research and efforts for the ketogenic diet.

They came with 5 stickers with the same message: “Please don’t call me cupcake and DO NOT feed me cupcakes. I’m on a special diet for epilepsy.” The stickers will be great to put on Nora’s lunch boxes, just as an extra reminder to everyone.

Nora got another purple shirt (more her size) that says “Hey, I’m on a magic diet for epilepsy so please do NOT feed me.” I like that one, but Nora preferred the cupcake one, of course.

My t-shirt says: “Someone I love is on the ketogenic diet for epilepsy.” Because it’s true.

Going out for sushi feels pretty safe because the food is minimally prepared. Both of our kids love salmon sashimi and edamame is awesome for Nora. Have I mentioned that before? Edamame is awesome! I forgot about it for a long time until I found some in the freezer earlier this week. Here’s the nutrition snapshot of 30 grams of Cascadian Farm shelled edamame. It’s not high ratio but it’s low carb, and you don’t find even that much fat in most veggies. This is fairly representative of the nutrition information from other brands and generic versions that I can find listed online.

Edamame in the shell is also awesome because it keeps Nora busy and happy.  Last night she got 30 g of edamame, pretty much all of her dinnertime carbs. We calculated her portions before leaving home then brought along the gram scale to measure it out. To serve it, I estimate the number of beans she can eat in 30 g then count out the beans in the shells.

After the edamame is ready, I pop some beans out of the pods and add them to the scale until I get up to 5 g (it’s usually 6 to 7 beans, depending on the size). To serve 30 g, I need 6 times that number of beans. Then I count out the beans in the shells for her. Last night she got 40 beans, so at 2 or 3 beans per pod she ended up with about 15 pods. Doing it that way is an estimation, but it averages out the variability in the bean size by weighing a sub-sample of the beans in the serving. Nora loves popping them out of the shell and it keeps her busy at the restaurant or kitchen table.

For the rest of her meal, she got about 1 slice of salmon sashimi (25 g). We brought some flacker (6 g) with butter (7 g) and some “hot chocolate” (steamed cream and cocoa powder) to round out the fat in her meal. Everyone was happy. Anders loves sashimi too. We got 1 order of sashimi to split between the kids because Nora gets only 1 slice. We could have weighed more for her and compensated with more fat when we got home, but she was feeling “fat and satisfied.” Anders ate the rest of that order of sashimi, the miso soup, some edamame, and most of another order of sashimi because he was still hungry. He’s not a cheap date!

Then we went home and finished off our Japanese-themed evening by watching Ponyo together. A fun and easy night was had by all and Nora was happy to go to a restaurant. She loved the room with the traditional short tables. She kept exclaiming that the room was so small. She felt like a giant! And the waiter was super tall and skinny because he had to crouch down to serve us! It’s always fun to see the world anew through a child’s eyes.

I like to let her experiment, so our usual procedure involves Nora looking in the fridge and picking out some ingredients. Then I apply my food knowledge to help her combine them to create something edible. While I was on the phone and barely supervising, she took out sticks of string cheese and sprinkled liberally with cocoa powder. Hmmm, interesting start.

We learned from G’ma Margie that string cheese is good when microwaved until gooey and taffy-like, so that’s what we did with her string cheese and cocoa to get Choco-Cheese. Microwave then mix! Nora ate hers up. Mine was…ok. I’m not sure that Nora will ever request it again, but it was a safe and fun experiment! We weighed hers out at 14 g of string cheese and 1/2 g of cocoa powder, which I built into a morning snack for her.

Our next experiment built off of the first recipe that Nora concocted, Blueberry Monster Mash. Today we made Choco-Strawberry Monster Mash. I’m tempted to call it Frankenberry, but that name has too much baggage! It’s simple and Nora loves to run the food processor. She enjoyed some with lunch and extra strawberries.

Choco-Strawberry Monster Mash
(Makes 10 servings at 18.9 g each)

60 g strawberries
100 g macadamia nuts
10 g coconut oil
1 g salt
15 g water
3 g Rapunzel Organic Cocoa Powder

Process all in a food processor until smooth and enjoy! Remember, if you use a different brand of cocoa powder, you must update your nutrition facts. As always, this is an approximation for your reference based on the ingredients and brands listed.

Monster mash has been a very nice addition to Nora’s line-up. We don’t have it made up all of the time, so it’s kind of a treat. She also likes to eat whole macadamia nuts, which she calls “crunchy munchies” and are a staple of the keto diet at a 5.4:1 ratio. Getting some extra coconut oil in here and adding some other sweetness with the berries packs in a lot of flavor and goodness, and still makes a 4.7:1 ratio that helps to round out a meal.

Our last experiment was in the breakfast realm. Nora gets tired of her same breakfasts, but it’s hard to have several things on hand. It’s also hard to let her choose in the morning because on work/school days we build her meals the night before from breakfast through afternoon snack and don’t have the time to change it up in the morning.

Today she decided that she wanted to go back to gingerbread for breakfast, but I’m giving it a new life as cereal, ala my Re-Purposing Recipes post. I decided to go for a cereal again because she was watching Anders eat Chex recently and said, “I can’t wait until I can eat that when I’m done with my diet.” She’s amazingly mature about it, but it also breaks our hearts a little bit. Giving her keto cereal is the least that we can do.

You could use Dawn’s original gingerbread recipe from ketocook.com. I realized that I did not post my adaptation here yet, so here it is, in cereal form.

Gingerbread Cereal
(Makes 2.4 servings of cereal at 28 g each)

15g european-style butter, room temperature
20 g Bob’s Red Mill Hazelnut meal
5g Bob’s Red Mill Flaxseed Meal
5g Bob’s Red Mill Coconut Flour
20g egg, raw & mixed well
1g cinnamon
0.2g ground cloves
0.3g ground ginger
0.5g pure vanilla extract

Mix all ingredients well in a stand mixer or with a hand mixer until smooth and well incorporated. Place dough in a ball in parchment paper and flatten, then refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 300. Divide dough into 28g portions (it doesn’t come out even. I made one odd-sized cookie and calculated it into Nora’s snack today, or use it as a taste tester for the rest of the family). Space the dough balls 0n a silicone mat and cover with parchment paper, then roll quite thin with a rolling pin. Because you want to get it thin, I find it easier to roll it right on the cooking surface to avoid losing it in the transfer. You see here that I made a double batch, so I had 4 servings. No, they are not a uniform size or shape, but they are a uniform weight!

After they are rolled out, push the edges up to avoid a thin crumbly edge. Then use a knife to press down into the dough to score them into pieces–squares, rectangle, triangles, trapezoids  whatever has straight lines! Don’t drag the knife through or you will lose a lot of dough. My serrated-edged bread knife worked well.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until very dry and crisp. When they have cooled, it is very easy to snap them into squares. They were surprisingly sturdy little things! Now we have 4 servings of cereal. The nutrition information above puts them at 1.34 net carbs (precisely, from my spreadsheet) and 2.8:1 ratio. I will add 8 g of Organic Valley heavy cream thinned with water to make “milk” to serve a 3.5:1 breakfast of 156 calories. Serving this with 13 g of heavy cream will get you to a 4:1 ratio and 174 calories.

The longer we go on with the diet, the more I come to believe that it’s all about keeping Nora happy. When she starts complaining in the least, it’s time to get creative again.

Hot out of the oven and still poofed up!

This one is adapted from a recipe shared by my friend Karen, who also keeps a lookout for Nora-friendly recipes for me. I didn’t have to do much to modify it; the original is from Primally Inspired’s Breakfast Fruit Souffle.

It was pretty easy to make, particularly if you have a stand mixer. I was burnt out on recipes with whipped egg whites until I got my stand mixer. It takes a bit of experience and persistance to get them fully whipped if you have a hand mixer, and lord help you if you are doing it by hand. I was intimidated by the notion of a “souffle,” but Nora eats it after it is cool anyway so no pressure to serve it before it falls. And you will see below that I whipped them all together then divided into 4 measured servings, which reduced the time in the kitchen.

Deflated after cooling, but still delicious!

Best of all, it was a smash hit! Nora ate hers so fast that I didn’t have a chance to take a picture. I always use a first-batch serving for the rest of the family to taste test, and when Anders tried a bite, he did his dreamy “this is so good I’m going to faint” eye flutter and smile. I agree, it was excellent.

But it is not high ratio. It’s only 1.5:1. If used as a snack or breakfast for Nora, I would pair it with 24 g of heavy cream (steamed or in tea) to get it up to a 3.5:1 snack totaling 170 calories. I think it is possible to sneak more fat into the egg mixture, but it’s also nice to have some food that are not so fat-laden on their own. I might experiment with upping the ratio another time. For now, it’s nice for the LGIT or MAD diet and works if paired with another fat to reach the desired ratio for the ketogenic diet. Gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free.

Nutritional information for 1 serving (50 g) of Fruit Souffle. The recipe makes 4 servings. Analysis from www.caloriecount.com

Fruit Souffle
makes 4 servings

40 g strawberries
20 g blackberries
20 g raspberries
20 g coconut oil
32 g egg yolk
60 g egg white
6 g vanilla extract
2 g cinnamon
No carb sweetener to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Measure 10 g strawberries, 5 g blackberries, 5 g raspberries (all cut or broken into pieces) and 5 g coconut oil into each of 4 ramekins. If you use frozen fruit, put them in the oven while it preheats to thaw them and melt the oil.

Separate the whites and yolks from 2 large eggs. Weigh the whites, then whisk on high in a stand mixer or with a hand mixer for several minutes, until stiff peaks form.

While the whites are whipping, measure the yolks into a separate bowl and add the vanilla, cinnamon, and a bit of no carb sweetener of your choice. I used 2 g of Nora’s Cytra-K, which I use to sweeten everything for her. Mix the yolk mixture well. It turns out super cinnamon-y, which makes it light brown and extremely fragrant and delicious. I think a touch of sweetness is nice to balance it out if you use a no-carb sweetener, but it doesn’t require much.

After the whites are whipped until stiff, carefully mix in the yolks. I put them into the mixer on low for less than 1 minute and it turned out fine. You could also fold them in by hand.

Take the ramekins with fruit out of the oven if you have not already done so, and mix it up. Spoon 25 g of the egg mixture into each ramekin on top of the fruit. Place them in the hot oven and bake for 12-15 minutes, until browning slightly on the top.

They came out beautifully puffed up, light brown and smelling of cinnamon. I let them cool on the counter so they deflated before serving, but we aren’t uptight about that kind of thing around here. I tried to max out the amount of fruit while keeping it under 2 g of net carbs, but it is still just a bit of fruit on the bottom. The egg mixture was so delicious though that it was very nicely balanced. A real treat with a good amount of protein and some precious fiber.

I just said that I haven’t been developing new recipes lately, didn’t I? Didn’t I say that we have our happy rut and Nora is pretty happy with her regular foods? Well, the only constant is change.

Nora had been happy eating her pumpkin cheesecake bars for breakfast for at least 2 months. Before that it was the hazelnut breakfast cookies. I would make up a big batch then freeze some and take them out as needed. I could get away with baking a breakfast about once per month. And there is nothing better than pulling out an all-in-one breakfast in the morning. When we started this, we were making scrambled eggs everyday, but that just wasn’t sustainable.

But Nora is tired of her pumpkin cheesecake bars now so it was time for a new recipe. I thought about going back to the hazelnut breakfast cookies, but my sister just sent me this recipe for Peanut Butter and Jelly Breakfast Bake. She’s a good cook and nutritionist, so she can spot a recipe that could be modified for Nora’s needs. I played around with the recipe this morning and found another winner! At 3.5:1 and 167 calories, we can pull it out of the fridge and plop it own at breakfast time.

You can see that the original recipes is dairy-free, using almond milk and coconut milk. I substituted heavy cream and coconut oil, but if you are doing dairy-free but still want a higher ratio, you could use coconut milk or almond milk where I used cream here. My version is also gluten-free, whereas the “Uncle Sam” cereal in the original is made primarily from whole wheat. The psyllium husks and flaxmeal seemed like a natural substitute and packs in a lot of fiber. Nice way to start the day.

PBJ Breakfast Muffins
(makes 12)
50 g Bob’s Red Mill hazelnut meal
12 g Bob’s Red Mill Organic Golden Flaxseed Meal
12 g Whole Psyllium Husk (from our local natural foods co-op)
18 g Ultimate Nutrition whey protein powder
0.5 g salt
2 g vanilla extract
1 g Baking Powder
3 g ground Cinnamon
50 g Adams 100% Natural Peanut Butter
190 g Organic Valley Heavy Whipping Cream
60 g coconut oil, melted
72 g raspberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Measure and mix the dry ingredients into a bowl. Measure and mix the wet ingredients into a separate bowl. Be sure to get the peanut butter well incorporated, along with the melted coconut oil. It needs to be evenly distributed.

Pour the dry ingredients into the wet and mix very well, until even. The psyllium husk needs a few moments to absorb the liquid, and when it does it will be a thick batter.

Measure 33 g of batter each into 12 silicone muffin cups. Place 6 grams of frozen raspberries on top of each–you can break them up and push them in a bit to get them nicely distributed.

Bake for 15-18 minutes. The fat will bubble up while the edges brown. The bubbles will subside when you pull them out of the oven to check them. All of the fat re-incorporates into the muffins as they cool, and they should come out of the silicone cups easily when they are completely cool.

You could certainly add a few drops of no-carb sweetener if preferred. If you need a higher ratio, it would be lovely with whipped cream on top. Or with greek yogurt mixed down with English Double Cream for more calories.

Or if you need to use a non-dairy version and get a lower ratio with coconut milk or almond milk (you will probably need to decrease the liquid, or it may be too runny), you could boost the ratio by adding non-dairy whipped cream as well.

I just tried one, and I would eat these for breakfast myself. I think I’ll make a pan of them and cut into bars (substituting coconut milk for the cream for myself). To make this part of a MAD diet, I would back off the coconut oil and eat it with full fat Greek yogurt. Mmmm.

This is especially timely for us, as we are contemplating the idea that Nora might be on long-term diet therapy of some kind. But seeing other Emily’s video about traveling, smuggling her food into concerts, working in restaurants, applying to 15 colleges across the country (or so, I lost count)… I see that Nora’s future is no different from any other bright young girl who lives life to the fullest.

I also wonder what Nora would say if we turned on the video camera and asked her about her diet. Hmmmm, stay tuned.

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