"One of the most delicious things I've ever eaten!" 

- Lusia after I had dropped some granola off at her house. You could tell she was a bit skeptical when I first told her what it was. But when she called me later, she said she was having a hard time stopping herself from eating it. 

When we first went gluten free, I started eating Udi's gluten-free granola for breakfast. I had never been a huge granola fan before that, but I found Udi's granola addictively yummy. Then we changed over to a GAPS diet which doesn't allow for any grains at all. Granola was out... until recently when I discovered PaleoKrunch - Grainless Granola by Steve's PaleoGoods. We tried the Apple Pie version and fell in love. But at $7 for a 7.5 oz. bag, it really did a number on our food budget. So I decided that I had to learn to make something similar at home. I fiddled around with the recipe until I finally settled upon the following. Feel free to adjust adding more of less of your favorite nuts or seeds.

Ingredients
2 cup Almond flour/meal
1 1/2 cup Dried coconut flakes (unsweetened)
1 cup Walnuts
1/2 cup Pecans
1/2 cup Honey
1/2 cup Coconut oil
2 teaspoon Powdered cinnamon
1/2 - 1 teaspoon Ginger
1/2 - 1 teaspoon Nutmeg
1/2 - 1 teaspoon Cloves
1/2 - 3/4 c. Raw sunflower seeds
1/2 - 3/4 c. Raw pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup Almond slivers
1/2 cup Raw cashews
1 cup Dried apple slices


Directions
1. In a food processor, blend the almond flour, coconut, walnut and pecans until you have a course powder.
2. Add the honey, coconut oil, and spices and blend until the dough starts to form a ball.
3. Add the sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, almond slivers, cashews and apple slices and blend for about one minute more until these ingredients have been added in and somewhat chopped up. The apple slices don't always blend in very well. You may want to chop them into smaller bits before adding.
4. Spread the mixture onto a cookie sheet and cook for about 30 minutes at 250 degrees. The finished product should be lightly browned on the bottom. I often stir the mixture a few times while it's cooking (in which case I don't always get that browned bottom).
5. Let the cooked granola cool and then break it up into smaller chunks.
6. Once the granola is entirely cooled, store it in a glass container.

My husband likes to eat the granola over his yogurt. I prefer it in a bowl with lots of raw milk over it. You can adjust the recipe to better suit your tastes. Enjoy!

Viola and Pansy - our new chicks

Well, we've (mostly) stuck it out for 6 months now. We still eat a primarily GAPS diet, though I haven't made soup nearly often enough lately, and we've started to include some sprouted oats, rice, and potatoes on occasion (mostly because grains and starches are cheap and our budget couldn't afford being GAPS-only any more).

On the whole, I have nothing but good things to say for the diet. Although we had started a gluten free - casein free diet in July, and that had a noticeably positive effect on my son, it wasn't until we'd been on the GAPS diet for probably 4 months or so that I really started to see the positive effects with my daughters. (I should note that when we started GAPS we ended the casein free part of our previous diet. GAPS allows for many yummy dairy products, which I think is a huge boon over the Paleo diet.)

I think our improvements have been most notable when we have a minor lapse. (It follows that old adage that you don't know what you've got until it's gone.) We must have eaten something last week (we think it might have been the Pad Thai that I bought for the family only because we had an incredibly long track meet to attend and Pad Thai was the only at-least-its-gluten-free item available) that effected us all negatively. First one of my daughters came up to me and complained that something was wrong because her acne was back. (More on that in a moment.) Then my son said that he was experiencing some of his over-thinking-things problems. Then the kids started to have spats that ended up in one kid or the other stomping off. It was a clear sign that something was amiss.

Resting in the car on the way home

But the fact that it was so clear that something was wrong just acts as proof to me that the diet has been helping us. The kids used to have fights all the time. They used to have horrible acne. The kids had regular headaches and the girls would come home from school early on occasion with migraines. My son had trouble sleeping, trouble controlling his temper, and issues with depression and over thinking problems. But our trip to Boise for spring break made me suddenly realize that the whole tenor of our relationships as a family had changed.

When we travel, we've had to put our son in the front seat and I'd sit in the back with the girls. That kept the three of them from fighting non-stop during the trip. Tempers would often still run high and by the end of our "vacation" I'd be in serous need of a vacation. But this time I went to put my stuff in the back seat like I usually do and the kids told me, "No mom. Nathan's going to sit in the back this time." And he did! And they had all talked it out between them before hand and come to that agreement!! And they did fine during the whole trip and there wasn't any arguing!!!  It was phenomenal and a huge indicator to me that the diet wasn't just helping Nathan, but it was helping the girls as well.

Then came the pad thai and the slipping a little back into our old problems. One of the incentives I had used with the girls to get them to try this diet with us was that I thought it might put a stop to both their headaches and their acne. After a few months on the diet they whined that the diet wasn't really helping with either. So when Naomi came out and told me that something was wrong, her acne was back, I said, "Oh! So you mean it had gone away?!" Immediately she realized that the diet had helped keep her skin clear and she hadn't even really realized or acknowledged that until that moment. Naomi also had a headache this past weekend. And she and her brother had a fight just last night.

Pretty drink from cafe in Nampa, ID

I've got to say that when we slipped back into our old problems, they still didn't reach the scale or scope that they had reached before we started the diet. It's still clear to me that the diet has helped, even when we've messed up. I imagine it like a bottle that used to be full of dirty water. The diet has helped us get to a point where the water is slowly filtering. We're not all the way cleaned up yet, and any dirty inputs still put us right back to looking yucky, but we're clearing back up faster and over time growing gradually cleaner and cleaner as we stick to the diet. It's been incentive enough to keep us all going on this diet despite the difficulty in having enough snacks on hand for munching. (That has been, hands down, the kids biggest struggle. What we eat isn't a problem. But having quick and easy "grab and go" food on hand requires work on my part (or theirs) and has been hard to fit into our daily routines.)

I haven't talked about my own improvements lately. One of my hopes had been that the diet would help to free me from spring and autumn seasonal allergies. And I can tell it's working. It's still like that bottle of water analogy where I'm still on the dirty side. But I know that I'm cleaner than I was because the symptoms, while still there, are manageable now. Before I'd wake up and within a minute my nose would itch and run so badly that it didn't matter how tired I was, I'd have to get up and blow my nose for almost an hour straight until the Zyrtec would kick in. But now I get up, my nose itches a little, I might blow it once or twice, and then it's over. I might sneeze a couple of times a day compared to the several times an hour I've experienced in the past. And my nose itches a bit, but then it goes away. So I'm certainly not out of the woods, but I can at least see the meadow through the trees.