Huge pot of turkey stock on the boil #gaps

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Last of the turkey leftovers - with roasted squash, onion, raisins and coriander. #gaps

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Easy dinner - turkey leftovers with roasted beets, carrots, leeks and garlic. #gaps

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Home-made sugar-free cranberry sauce #gaps

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Yay - my grain-free, sugar-free pudding came out of the mould perfectly!! Now it's Christmas!! #gaps

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Last-minute Christmas pudding. It's never too late!! #gaps #scd

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Ginger Christmas-Tree Cookies

Christmas baking has started already! I had great fun making these even though I don't have a proper Christmas-tree cookie cutter. I found an old plastic tree decoration which came in two halves, so I used one half as my cookie cutter. It was a bit more fiddly that using a proper cutter but the results were great! I love anything with ginger in it and the kids love cookies so these are a big hit with everyone in the house. Happy Christmas everyone!

Ingredients:

120g Butter, melted

1 teaspoon water

1 egg

75g Honey

330g Ground Almonds

3-4 teaspoons Ground Ginger

1 teaspoon Ground Cinnamon

1 teaspoon Allspice

½ teaspoon Ground Cloves

½ to 1 teaspoon of freshly peeled and grated root ginger (optional)

1 teaspoon Baking Soda

1. Turn your oven on to 170 degrees C, or gas mark 3. Line two cookie sheets or oven trays with parchment or greaseproof paper.

2. Put all the ingredients into a large bowl and mix well. You don’t need a food processor or hand mixer to do this, it will come together easily with a large spoon.

3. The dough will look quite wet but as you work with it, it becomes shiny and manageable. Dough made with ground almonds is quite sticky though, so when you’re working with it, roll it out between two sheets of parchment or greaseproof paper. To make your Christmas trees, roll out the dough to a thickness of 5mm. Use a cookie cutter and carefully lift the cookies and lay them on your lined trays.

4. If you don’t have a cookie cutter, you can simply form small balls of dough in your hand and flatten them on to the oven tray to make round cookies.

5. Bake for 15 minutes until the edges are turning golden brown.

6. Cool on a wire tray. Store in an airtight container. This recipe makes about 25-30 trees!

Steak sandwich for lunch with some home-made chutney. #gaps #scd

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Thanks to @dailyspud for mentioning me in excellent article on fermented foods in today's Sunday Times! #gaps

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Just filled up the freezer with a quarter of a cow! Beautiful organic grass-fed Angus-cross beef. Lucky me! #gaps

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The big storm last night had one happy side-effect: windfall apples! These were right at the top of the tree! Going to make lovely chutney from these beauties. #gaps

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Can't wait for dinner today. Roast lamb shoulder. Mmmmm.... #gaps

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Lunch! Almond and coconut flour bread. #gaps

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Nothing like a proper Sunday roast. #gaps

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Raw milk makes the best kefir and yoghurt. So creamy and rich! #gaps #rawmilk

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Limerick Food Trails

Sometimes we all get into a bit of a shopping routine, which in fairness, is necessary. Especially if you're doing any kind of special diet. You need to be organised, you need to plan your meals. You need to make shopping as easy as possible, to make up for all the time spent cooking! But when we get too set in our routine, we can forget about the nicer shopping experiences. Personally my shopping routine has been pretty boring lately and I had almost forgotten about the delights and delicacies available at Limerick's Milk Market. Up until this year I would make a trip to the Market every Saturday morning, always early, to get the best of what's on offer, from bags of apples and raw honey to organic vegetables and freshly-caught fish. I had slipped out of this habit, partly from laziness, (who doesn't love a lazy Saturday morning?) and partly because I'm now getting my organic veggies from a co-operative that I'm involved in.

Last Saturday, my love of the Milk Market was re-invigorated by attending a new venture by Valerie O'Connor of valskitchen.com. You can check it out here Limerick Food Trails and I can't recommend it highly enough. Val knows her stuff, she told us the history of the market and introduced us to wonderful food producers, most of whom I hadn't met before. We sampled a great range of foods, from sushi and oysters to chocolate and baklava! Oh how my taste-buds rejoiced! It wasn't confined to the market either, as we visited the oldest butcher's in Limerick and finished off the tour in Limerick's wonderful Hunt Museum. Even if you're on SCD/GAPS you can totally enjoy this trip. Most of the producers we met were only too happy to describe in detail their ingredients! My highlight of the day were the amazing marinated herrings at the Silver Darlings stall. This is perfect SCD/GAPS food. Irish herrings marinated in a Nordic style with fresh herbs, spices and vegetables. I've never tasted anything like it, its so fresh and of course its totally healthy!

Party Food for Healthy Kids!

Another birthday has come and gone. I can't quite believe this has been the third time we've had a sugar-free healthy birthday party for our little man. I also can't quite believe he is EIGHT! How did that happen?! He has grown so much over the fantastic Summer and is really quite tall now. He looks so strong and healthy and tanned, its a joy to behold! He went back to school without any problems, he was really excited to see all his friends again, and he was really looking forward to learning more and doing more advanced maths, his favourite subject!

His birthday comes early in September so its always a bit hectic with the madness of getting them all back to school and then having to organise a party, especially organising party food, but somehow it all came together really well this year. Maybe, just maybe, I am finally getting a little bit organised. Probably just luck! This year we went a bit crazy and hired a bouncy castle for the first time ever. We're lucky to have a big back garden so we went for a BIG castle with a slide. It was SO much fun!! The faces on the boys when they saw it blown up were priceless! It was really wonderful. I even had a sneaky bounce and a few slides myself!

We've had a couple of parties over the last few years, where some of the invited kids were a bit disappointed when they arrived in to discover that there were NO sweets, NO crisps, NO fizzy drinks and not even ice-cream, so each year I'm trying to make a few more bits and make it a bit more like a regular party, without giving in to eating rubbish!

This year I made LOADS of mini-muffins. They were a big hit! I made chocolate flavour ones and raisin ones and there were only 2 left at the end of the day, which I promptly scoffed! I made the old favourites, toffee and the home-made chocolate. I had a display of dried fruit, which was also devoured. My fab sister made her famous gingerbread men cookies, all grain-free and sugar-free. And of course there was a fab cake covered in chocolate flavoured meringue icing. I didn't see any disappointed faces this year, so hopefully I got the balance right! Or maybe the kids were just too busy bouncing!!

GAPS/SCD Grain-free mini-muffins


60g butter, melted
3 eggs
100g honey
225g ground almonds
1 tsp baking soda
pinch salt

For chocolate flavour muffins add 2 tbsp cocoa powder (be careful about using cocoa if you're on SCD/GAPS, we avoided it for well over a year)
For raisin muffins add a few drops of vanilla extract and 2 handfulls of raisins

Put all the ingredients into a large bowl, mix it all together with a hand-mixer for a minute or two, spoon into mini-muffin cases and bake for 12 minutes at 170, gas mark 3. Totally divine, easy-peasy, and very appealing to little ones, and their parents too!!

Had a lovely evening at our GAPS talk in Skibbereen as part of A Taste of West Cork Food Festival. #gaps

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Aunty Claire's almond-flour ginger biscuits, made with love for a special boy's birthday. Thank you to the best sister in the world!!! #gaps

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Braised beef cheeks - simmered for 3 hours - meltingly tender! And very affordable! #gaps

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Raspberry ice-cream today - amazing colour! #gaps

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It works! Jamie Oliver's instant strawberry ice-cream - just frozen strawberries, gaps/scd yoghurt and a drizzle of honey. Divine!! #gaps

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Going through an awful lot of ice-pops in this weather! Refilling every night! #GAPS

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I even met the cows! #GAPS

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Just back from the milk run! 6 litres of raw organic milk direct from the farmer! Can't wait to try the yogurt that this milk makes!! #GAPS

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Just got my delivery from The Little Milk Company. Three beautiful organic cheddars, 2 made from raw milk. Only ordered them yesterday! #GAPS

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What a Day!!!

I'm just home from the Tipperary GAPS Seminar and I feel elated!! I met so many wonderful inspiring and motivated people today and yesterday. What a weekend. Natasha Campbell-McBride was charming and gracious, and so generous with her time. She spoke to so many people individually after she was finished her presentation. She is incredibly knowledgeable and had something to say on many many different illnesses and chronic diseases. Even though I've read her first book many times, I still learned a lot and came away with some serious food for thought! Ballykisteen Hotel and The Horse & Jockey Hotel really pulled out all the stops in the food they served us, which was all GAPS/SCD friendly.

It was great to hear other parents' stories. We heard from parents of children with Down Syndrome and autism who have had huge success with the GAPS protocol. We even heard about the diet helping a lady who has had narcolepsy for 20 years, her family's story was amazing! I spoke myself at both events and it was a very fulfilling experience, other than my hand shaking uncontrollably and the microphone deciding it didn't like me!!

Thank you so much to everyone who approached me afterwards and thanked me for my own presentation. I was so glad to meet you all and hope we can stay in touch. Thanks so much to all the other speakers, especially Eleanor, who moved us all to tears. And of course, thank you so so much to Anne Maher for organising the whole event. Hopefully it will be the first of many!!

Two Years Later

It has been over two years since we started the GAPS/SCD adventure and it has been quite an adventure. I use the word adventure a lot, I admit, but it seems appropriate for what we've been doing. We went down this road without having any guarantees that it would work. I knew nobody else who had tried this particular diet, other than strangers on an online help forum. I had few places to turn to when the going got tough. And it was tough at times. But sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. You have to trust your "gut".  You have to decide to have an adventure! And somehow, when I read the GAPS book, I believed it was worth the risk.

There have been ups and downs. There were times when I wondered had the progress stopped. There were times when I was exhausted and worn out from the extra work load. There were times when I wanted to throw the yoghurt maker out the window! There were times when I would have given my left elbow for a Dominos pizza.

And then there were the ups. The first time he asked "why". The hugs and kisses. The looking me straight in the eye and saying "I love you Mummy". The "guys, guys, guys!!" to his brother and sister. The constant talk about his new best friend Charlie. The playing in the school yard. The birthday parties where he was so excited to see each and every one of his school pals arrive. The incredible eye contact. The insanely stunning photos of him really looking AT me. The huge improvement in his general health. The positive test results. The lack of vomiting bugs. The end of nappies. The lack of worry. The freedom. The happiness.

Take a leap. It is SO worth it.

Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride

It has been a long time since I've blogged. My only excuse is that last year was a difficult one for personal reasons. But here I am now! And I have great news to share. Natasha Campbell McBride, the author of  "Gut & Psychology Syndrome", the book which got me started on this diet and blogging adventure, is coming to give a seminar on the GAPS diet in March. She will be speaking in Ballykisteen Hotel on Sunday 3rd March. To say I am excited is a gross understatement!! I am really hoping to actually meet her and thank her profusely for her wonderful book and for giving me so much hope for my little Einstein. I am also nervous about it as I am going to give a little speech myself! The organiser has asked some of us mothers to talk about our experience of the diet. How could I pass up that opportunity?

I have seen Dr Campbell-McBride's speeches on YouTube and she is warm and encouraging so I hope it will be a good day, full of positive, motivating stories. The main reason I started this blog was to try to encourage other parents to give the diet a try. This seminar aims to do the same thing, to spread the good news and hope others will join in the experiment!

If anyone is interested in attending, the tickets are 55 euro which includes a GAPS/SCD lunch which should be interesting for anyone who is unfamiliar with the diet rules! It takes place on March 3rd from 10am to 4pm. For tickets e-mail GAPSseminar@gmail.com or you can e-mail me deirdremacmahon@gmail.com as I have a few tickets too.