Missing Food and Keeping It Real

This post is all about keeping it real and admitting that I recently had a really tough day.

I was really worried about the holidays this year, but we made it through gluten and nut free just fine. I thought we would miss some of our favorite candies and desserts, but we experimented and found some new favorites.

Overall I was surprised that November and December went so well. I know those are always tough months when you have food issues to deal with.

Because the holidays went so well, I was very surprised that I recently had a brief melt down over a salad. Yes, a salad.

I was eating a salad and all of a sudden I missed croutons. I have gone almost a year and a half without a crouton, but all of the sudden I really wanted one. I missed the crunch that croutons gave my salad and I felt deprived that I could not have one.

I looked around the house and I had nothing crunchy to put on my salad. We have no nuts in the house and haven’t for almost a year, so that was not an option. I had no gluten free bread, so I could not even make croutons. Yes, I could have made some bread and then made croutons, but whenever I make gluten free bread, everyone is so glad to have bread, there is none left for things like croutons and bread crumbs.

I had no gluten free crackers either. Gluten free crackers are a whole different issue with me. Gluten free, nut free, and sesame free crackers are hard to find, and the ones I have found are not very good. So, I ate my salad without the crunch I was craving, but I still wanted croutons and felt deprived that I could not have them.

But after my brief meltdown, I realized that I did not really want a crouton. I knew what one crouton would do to me. It was not worth it for one crouton. It was just a crouton after all. I knew I needed to focus on what I could eat and what I could use to replace what I was missing.

I also felt kind of silly for missing croutons. Who misses croutons? A piece of chocolate cake or a piece of pizza, yes, but croutons?

So, the next time I went to the grocery store I bought some sunflower seeds, (which was a chore to find a brand that did not the cross contamination issues with nuts), and I also bought all the makings of a salad.

I went home and had a very nice salad,  made with ham, vegetables, homemade lemon dijon dressing, and  full of sunflowers seeds. The sunflower seeds were a great addition and it helped replaced what I was missing.

My point of sharing this is not to whine and complain, it is to share that dealing with food allergies, no matter what they are, is not always easy. We all have tough days. We all have times where we miss certain foods. It is normal. It is part of it.

But if you try hard, you can almost always find a replacement for what you are missing. It may not be quite the same, but it will usually fill help fill the void of the food you miss.

Is there something that you have been missing? Did you find something to replace it?