our new normal

I thought I'd better post a 6 months on update in our low fructose experiment. It really is our new normal.

Our shopping habits are established.

We know what we prefer when we eat out - I must admit we haven't attempted Thai food - it seems the one thing which might just be too hard.

Giggi asks for a ham and cheese sandwich or a green apple if he's hungry (not a biscuit, cake, chocolate etc.)

I've become an expert at home ice cream making.

My cake of choice if we're having visitors or if I need to bring something elsewhere is David Gillespie's butter cake with a handful or two of frozen blueberries.

I might eat too many croissants...

I'm not sure what else I have to report. I'll get back to you in another 6 months or so... But I can't see us ever going back.

three months on - still good

Well it's the beginning of a new month which means another month on our low-fructose adventure. At this stage I'm not sure what to write. I'm not sure what the fuss is about. I don't miss all the sugar laden treats. This really has become our new normal. 

In the interests of full disclosure I did enjoy a Windsor Hotel high tea - it's a Melbourne institution. At the kind  invitation of my sister-in-law's future in-laws we had a lovely sunday lunch in town. There were small hot pies and pastries, sandwiches and scones on the three tiered stands and a buffet of sweet treats. You can see a beautiful selection below. It was a lovely one off and didn't upset the apple-cart. 

I think I can handle a once a month treat (quality not quantity, see here) - so much better than a daily or more often treat. Now this really is a treat.

The other thing that I really noticed is when we put some tomato sauce on a sausage roll. If I'd been more organised (see here) we wouldn't have succumbed to our old ways. But it was seriously sweet. I used to think tomato sauce was savoury. Now it almost tastes as though it belongs on ice cream...

I'm starting to wonder what we're going to do about easter chocolate. I think I might put the word out that if you'd like to buy something for our kids choose a gift that has more to do with easter (i.e. remembering Jesus's saving death and resurrection) or otherwise something dark chocolate - the darker the better.

I'm thinking about making our own easter eggs. I'm not sure that a block of 85% Green and Black's will cut it. There's a recipe here that looks like it has potential or I could melt said Green and Blacks. And I can pick up some easter egg moulds pretty easily I would have thought. Maybe here (although 1/2 a kilo of chocolate per egg might be a bit much) or somewhere like spotlight. 

Any thoughts???

some low-fructose life savers

I thought I would mention some products that have been real life savers for us over the last 2 and a bit months as we've quit sugar. I'd love to make everything from scratch and one day when I can justify a thermomix I might just do that but in the mean time here are a couple of yummy products which are low sugar particularly for their category.

Dips: Most are very high in sugar. We stick to this yumi one or otherwise the basil and pine nut ones are usually ok too.

Sauce: BBQ sauce is over 50g sugar/ 100g food. Most tomato sauces are around 20g sugar/ 100g food. This pasta sauce, however, is around 3g sugar/100g food and while it takes a bit of getting used to, if you have a sauce addict in the family it's not too bad on a sausage roll, as a pizza sauce or even a pasta sauce :-). Thanks to my sister-in-law for this recommendation.

Chocolate: I know this chocolate at 14g of sugar/100g of food doesn't quite fit in to the schedule but if you just eat one square it's 0.5g of sugar, which isn't too hard to fit into a low-fructose diet (less than 24g of sugar per day). Plus it is yummy! Love the madagascan vanilla... mmmmm. And it's certified fairtrade and organic so you can feel good about that too :-)

Breakfast Cereals: It's very hard to find a cereal with out honey, dried fruit, out and out sugar etc. So you pretty much need to stick to weet-bix or rolled oats without all the additives. We prefer weet-bix or toast.

Spreads: Here's another difficult one. Jam, honey and nutella are out. If you're Australian you're in luck as you can have Vegemite (Marmite and Promite however are high in sugar. There's also quite a variation in the amounts of sugar in peanut butters. This one without added salt or sugar is our favourite. It comes in at 5g sugar/100g of food.