Eating on a diet without wheat, corn, rice, oats, lamb, green beans, chicken…. it gets boring.

Really boring.

Fortunately we are starting to successfully add foods back into Clara’s diet (Hooray for tomatoes and cane sugar!) but it’s a slow process.

As exciting as tomatoes are the food we are eating is still pretty boring. Venison roast with vegetables sounds great, unless you eat it at least once a week. Poor Ivy has been begging, for pizza, noodles and dessert and so I’ve been looking and sleuthing online trying to come up with something different. Trying to do a regular Google search for recipes was frustrating. Even using different cooking websites and their recipe sorters was hard, lists of recipe names that I then had to open and double check ingredients seemed like a great idea but was tedious to carry out. Then I found Pinterest. While I’m still a little sketchy on the point of the whole thing and have no plans of creating my own Pinterest account (because what would I do with it?) I discovered you can look at things just from the Food and Drink category. There you can see pages and pages of good looking pictures of food. The brilliant part?  I can glance at a picture and make a much better quick guess if it will work than looking at a recipe name. So as long as I can avoid drooling over the oodles of lovely looking food we can’t have I have been able to sort through and find some new ideas.

We’ve tried Honey Chipotle Turkey Meatballs, which were excellent though next time we’ll be making the sauce separate on more of them, it was “too spicy” according to Ivy. Then I found Chocolate-Covered Katie and Clara friendly dessert made a more regular appearance and life was good.

Previously making dessert was more of an ordeal, we had found a good chocolate cake recipe and a few good cookie recipes, but very few quick desserts or easy snacks. Last week we made Chocolate-Covered Katie’s Cookie Dough Dip with just a few differences to make it Clara friendly.  Clara and Ivy helped me dump the ingredients into the food processor and blend it up. I opened the top, told Clara that yes she could taste it and turned to get a bowl. When I turned back she had two handfuls of it.

Needless to say the Cookie Dough Dip was a hit!

I feel I should also mention that this dip has a base of chickpeas.

I have never willingly ate more than a single bite of a chickpea containing food before.

Of course I also never had them with chocolate chips.

Chocolate, it makes everything better!