Cinnamon buns and rollercoasters

I don't know how other allergy moms have dealt with it, but I've been in a total baking funk since we realized the full scope of Andrew's allergies. Yes, I'm confessing to almost 3 years of buying safe pre-packaged stuff full of chemicals because I can't figure out what -- and how -- to safely cook for my kid.

But now that Andrew's in kindergarten, there are all sorts of treat days and birthdays and other opportunities for other parents to bring in not-so-safe food that he's not allowed to have, so I'm kicking myself in the butt and trying out a bunch of recipes.

And here's my total plug for the cookbook in the photo below: What's to Eat? The Milk-Free, Egg-Free, Nut-Free Food Allergy Cookbook. (And now that I've found the link for that cookbook, I see that she's got a new cookbook out too -- it's going on my shopping list!)

She's got a cinnamon roll recipe in this cookbook that's so good, only one survived past the first hour out of the oven. I forgot to get a shot of them when they came out, and that's Geoff's hand stretching out as far as he can reach (anything that's a few inches onto the counter is out of his reach), to get another one.


Last Friday was Tim Horton's donut day at school for the kindergarteners, so we made another batch of cinnamon bun dough on Thursday, and deep-fried it for Andrew to eat instead of donuts. They were really good, he reported that evening, and he didn't even seem sad that he hadn't gotten the Tim Horton's ones.

I've also gotten the kindergarten teacher a bag of mini-Oreos and a box of Transformers fruit snacks for the random birthday parties. Apparently that's gone over well -- some of his friends have wanted his Oreos over the treats that the birthday kid's folks provided. Oh, and apparently Andrew was kissed by a girl in kindergarten last week. :-)

The other thing Andrew's been doing is asking us to cut his rice cheese up into thin slices. He's been seeing all these ads for cheese strings on TV, and I guess he's also seeing cheese strings at school, so he wants his cheese to look long and stringy too. I have such mixed feelings about this. I'm glad that he's so resourceful and creative, but I hate that he's feeling like he wants his food to look like everyone else's food. And I'm sad that he might be feeling left out.

And there are the boys in car #3 of the kids' rollercoaster at Playland. They're both such adrenaline junkies that they would get off the ride and run back to the beginning of the line to do it again. I think they rode this one about five times before they finally wanted to move on to the mini-golf. We went yesterday, on the second-last day of the season, and they had a fabulous time.