Work- is a continual challenge and I love it!

What a week. I have reworked my timetable so many times this week just to find time for a lunch break. Finally come up with a timetable that will hopefully work. I am seeing classes in a flexible timetable so this is always a challenge to get the timing equitable. Time will tell if I got that right.
Things are starting to  look more organised and tidy there too. It is always good to get a neat workplace.

Our challenge today - to go to a restaurant and be gluten and dairy free.

We were invited to have lunch with some friends today. They were going to shout us to Sizzlers. Nice but we really were unsure of the menu. So I rang Sizzler and asked about the options. We could have no soups, no salads with dressing, no chips, no bread and only specially prepared steaks and fish with salad minus dressing. As we are used to indulging in the full salad bar I found this very unappealing. We decided instead to go to a local pub. Here we had 2 GF options.I had a vegetable stack with halomi cheese and DH had the lamb skewars with halomi. We traded and had half of each and enjoyed our meal. Challenge passed with flying colours.

After this adventure DH was feeling quite negative about this and wondering if he could go the distance. ( we are just intolerant not cealiac), however tonight we had a beautiful meal of Cyndi's slaw, left over vege hash with quinoa added and chicken thighs on the webber. Life is good again and we think if food can taste that good we can stick to it.

Gluten Free Flatbread

I am cooking up some GF flatbread at the moment in my quest to find some substitutes for the now missing wheat products- bread etc in our diet.
Time will tell if this is a wonderful eating experience or not. It uses quinoa which is fast becoming one of my favourite foods. It has so much nutrition. This is also a personal goal to produce homemade food that has good quality nutrition instead of empty calories.
Later...it was good and I will be making it again soon.

New challenge letting my little girl grow up.

Isn't it hard to let go. My daughter is starting to make her own decisions and do all her own stuff in life. It is hard for all mums when this happens- whilst we are glad that we have prepared them to take this step we are sad that they no longer need us as much any more. I find this challenging.
....and the adventure....the life that my husband & I can now pursue as we really no longer need to consider the children in our every plan :)

Australia Day

No big challenges today....
I celebrated by watching the movie Australia, swimming with a friend and generally recovering from our big day yesterday and getting ready for the first day of school students) tomorrow.
Meals- B-Bacon eggs mushrooms and tomato, L-Gluten free pizza base with pepperoni, mushrooms and baby spinach leaves, D- Salmon steaks BBQ'd in a butter,basil,lemon & parsley packet, chips from takeaway (my son was going) and green sala.
Snacks- overindulged a little with my new Raw cacaoa treat balls ( thanks Jo) and corn chips, nuts and fruit trail mix. It is easy to do this when at home and watching a movie.

Second challenge today.

I tried making my first gluten free pizza base using the flour substitute mentioned previously.I just put the flours in a previously tried dough recipe with some  xanthan gum and guar gum. Wasn't wonderful....sigh! I thought that we are pretty much used to cardboard pizza bases so it could't be too bad.Should start taking some photos- getting used to this blogging stuff.

This was our challenge today- to issue all the resources to the primary teachers for the start of school on Thursday and at the same time issue textbook hire to some of our secondary classes. What a day!
 We started the day with our tables overflowing with maths  and English games and resources and by the end of the day the tables were empty. We issued 3535 items- 590 an hour. Now we need to get ready for the classes to start in 2 days in the library.