Breakfast

It is a bit of an understatement that I am not a morning person. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. My work schedule regularly requires me to be "on" until 10 or 10:30 at night. Throw in the post-concert high and I don't get to bed until around midnight. Hey, that's better than a lot of my colleagues who stay up until 2 or 3 am! Many musician's kids keep musician hours, aka late to bed and late to rise. WG is not one of them. Tim and I value our couple time (and WG has a tendency to really wear us out) so she is in bed every night by 7 or 7:30. She gets up at around 7:30am.

The hardest thing about this for me is what the heck to give the child for breakfast. In the good old days of gluten, things were much easier. (Think about traditional breakfast fare. With the exception of eggs and meat, it ALL has lots and lots of gluten.) As I mentioned, WG is NOT picky. She LOVES instant oatmeal and bananas and would happily eat them every single day. Oats don't have gluten per se, but it is very difficult to find a source that hasn't been contaminated by some grain that DOES have gluten. Our neighbor, who is also gluten sensitive, can eat regular oatmeal every day and not have problems. We re-introduced oatmeal into WG's diet a few months back and it was disastrous. All of her symptoms came back full-force.

This left us back at square one for breakfast. There is exactly one "normal" cereal that is GF: Cocoa Pebbles. All the rest have malt, which is made from barley, which has gluten. GF cereals are okay, but the kid-friendly ones are still full of sugar and not much else. And with the expense it kills me to buy a box of nutritious GF cereal only to throw most of it away because it goes uneaten. I do like to bake (which is a very good thing since I have to make all the baked goods we eat!) but I have a hard time keeping up supply with demand on busy work weeks. WG will eat the occasional egg. I expect she would also like a rice porridge but that is something that is too complicated for sleepy me to put together in the morning. Breakfast lately has been some dry Gorilla Munch (basically GF Kix), a glass of milk and a piece of fruit.

When I was shopping for GF flour I discovered that Bob's Red Mill now offers GF oats. So today I made a big batch of my dad's granola. I, unlike WG, was a picky eater as a child. My dad's granola was the only breakfast cereal I'd eat for years. I had to tweak it quite a bit because his original recipe calls for cream of wheat, wheat germ, and wheat bran. I just added extra of the other stuff. Even with the extra cost of the GF ingredients, I casually calculate that the HUGE batch (it fills the pan that we roast the Thanksgiving turkey in) only cost around $10. GF granola runs roughly $5-6 for 2 or 3 cups. And I *know* that it is more nutritious than Gorilla Munch.

WG was so excited about the granola she tried it fresh from the oven. Then she asked for more. The granola is officially a hit.