The boy has now spent nearly two months on the GFCF diet. He’s not quite at 100%; he’s had a couple foods by accident that contained wheat, and occasionally he’s eaten an animal cracker or two off the church nursery floor before he could be stopped. But most of the transition has been made. He eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made with gluten-free waffles (he hates the GF bread, but the waffles he adores), corn or rice or quinoa pasta with spaghetti sauce, fruit, GFCF sugar-frosted corn flakes, bacon, sausage links, peas, fruit, and Spanish rice. Occasionally I can coax him into beans, but he really has to be in the right mood; I have yet to cook baked beans that he’ll eat.
So far I haven’t seen any behavior change, but his poops are definitely more solid, which inclines me to keep him on the diet for the foreseeable.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to get into the habit of planning meals. My mom seems to do this almost automatically; she doesn’t have a rigid schedule, but she does have a few nights’ meals in mind so that she can get the right ingredients and start the prepwork at the right time. I never osmosed the skill, so I’m having to learn it from scratch.
I was a little tempted by Leanne Ely’s Menu Mailer, but given that I’d still have to put thought and energy into adapting the recipes to be GFCF and/or paring them down to feed one or two rather than four, I don’t think it’d be worth the trouble, though I might pick up a copy of Saving Dinner eventually. Besides, when I actually sit down and make a list, I have about twenty main courses that I know how to fix and like to eat, plus a pile of cookbooks with recipes I’d like to try some day. I don’t need more recipes; I need advance planning, so I can get the necessary foods on my main weekly grocery trip and have ingredients ready to throw in the crockpot in the morning or toss in the oven as soon as I get home. (It doesn’t help that both my son and I are ravenous by time we get home; if I have to take an hour to prepare a meal plus the cooking time, I’ll just fix a sandwich or nibble random leftovers or make popcorn instead.)
So I’m going to try it the slow way. My current goal is to plan one meal a week. (This week, for example, I know that I’m having a hunk of beef cooked in the crockpot with potatoes and a glug of wine tonight. Wednesday and Thursday I’ll likely eat out, and Friday and Saturday I haven’t the foggiest, but tonight it’s hunk-o-beef.) When I’ve gotten fairly consistent with that, then I’ll do two a week, then three. My ultimate goal is to eat five home-cooked meals a week, leaving two days for eating out or polishing off leftovers. And a side effect is that I should have leftovers to bring for lunch, so I won’t have to eat out for lunch as often.