Day 1 Foods & Lessons Learned

I started my morning with some oatmeal for breakfast:

yummy oatmeal!

Then I ran all over town to gather ingredients so I felt prepared to tackle this first week.  I read LOTS of ingredients labels and discovered many surprises, like you can’t get sun-dried tomatoes in oil without garlic.  The most pleasant surprise I found was that Trader Joe’s carries goat milk yogurt!!  And it was a reasonable price!  I decided to give it a try, since I’m eliminating yogurt for a few weeks.

goat milk- who knew?

I did a quick taste test of it and well, I wouldn’t recommend it plain!  I mixed it with some berries and maple syrup to bring for lunch this week and it seemed more palatable with the maple syrup.
**FOLLOW UP**  So ya know how I thought goat’s milk was lactose free??  WRONG!  Darn it, I had it in my head that this was okay on the FODMAP diet, but it’s not!  Boooo..  I will aim to give it a try at the end of the week and see how I feel.  I suppose I might not be able to stand the taste anyways! But definitely a bummer, I thought for sure I might have found a reasonable, lactose-free yogurt, but no dice.  I might end up biting the bullet and buying a yogurt maker.

For my lunch today, I had some spaghetti squash that I cooked up earlier this week with my homemade marinara, spinach, tomatoes, and feta.  Feta supposedly is lactose free, so I’m keeping it in the diet at least this week.

yuummm

A sad lesson I learned today from my cupboard is that I do not have as much GF flour as I thought.  My homemade coconut flour went bad!!!  I should have known better, next round will definitely be kept in the freezer.  Also, I bought a big bag of GF flour mix from CostCo a few weeks ago, before I had started thinking about this diet.  Well, I looked at the ingredients closer and it unfortunately has flaxseed AND buckwheat in it!  Argh..  I haven’t opened it yet, so I might see if it is returnable.  What a bummer though, it was a pretty good deal.

I just made up one of my favorite pumpkin bar recipes, using GF flour from Trader Joe’s and Ener-G Egg Replacer and they sure are smelling good!  That will make a nice treat to have on hand when I need something sweet.  I did use brown sugar because I wasn’t sure how well replacing it with maple syrup would turn out.

Dinner is a  little tricky because we are bringing food to my friend who is in the hospital.  She requested pizza, which since she is GF, narrows down the locations to buy from.  Since we will be downtown, I knew that Fong’s Pizza has a GF crust option, so I checked to see if any of them would be something I could have.  My main concern was marinara sauce since it is a 100% guarantee that would have garlic and onions, but they have a Mediterranean pizza that just uses olive oil and all of the toppings are things that I can have except onions, so that’s an easy fix!  Yay, I thought I was going to have to get a salad or bring my own food which would have been a bummer.