Article Contributed on: 8/9/2007 10:13:26 PM
Eating a low-carbohydrate diet is a lot of work, and especially when you have children. You can't eat your kids, so you have to learn to cope with them.
In the interrim, while you're making changes to your lifestyle, you find you're trying to hide the Poptarts so that you don't inhale them (you found out that eating them with the wrappers on didn't mean they had no carbs), or you don't buy them at all, and the kids are having a fit.
Trying to switch them over to eating a lower glycemic load diet overall for their health and changing their tastes in a world filled with carby carbness is a feat in itself. Kids make the most interesting faces. You tell them it's healthy and immediately it's like poison to their sugar-laden bloodstreams.
Give them licorice or give them death!
So I've had to become a geurilla cook. No, not a gorilla. My knuckles don't hang that low, even if my chest does.
I cook meals and make small substitutions without saying a word. Changing Jell-o to sugar-free jell-o? A success! Changing flour to thicknthin/.not starch? A wonderment!
Changing mashed potatoes to mashed cauliflower? Stop the car! The kids are getting out. You don't mess with mashed potatoes. Ever. We're partially Irish, and the kids know that without the potatoes, they may as well be beating the Blarney stone with their heads, for there is no luck of the Irish when
the Irish be sufferin' troo caulofloower and noot pootatoos.
I gave it a shot anyway. Why not, right? I made the standard buttermilk biscuits (high-carb, I didn't want a mutiny on my hands tonight), and the gravy with with thicknthin/not starch. I boiled up some frozen cauliflower and threw it in the blender with some full-fat sour cream and butter. I also placed a pan of regular cauliflower to the side.
The kids looked at me and yelled, "WOOHOO! Mashed potaotes!" and they did their Irish jigs. Milk schlopped on the floor, and mugs were raised in a toast to mother, who
didn't dare keep their wee lasses and laddies from their mashed poootatooos!
They scooped heaps of the white vegetable, mashed to sour cream perfection on their plates, poured on the gravy and dipped their ever-lovin' biscuits. I asked if they wanted any of the cauliflower in the pan and they all winced. "Why have cauliflower when we can have potatoes!"
Aye! Potatooooooooos!
What they don't know won't kill 'em.