Coconut!

This past week has been dedicated to trialing coconut in Ellie's diet and I am super excited to say it passed with flying colors! Horray!

I can't believe it's been since June that we last trialed coconut. It didn't go well. For a long time we thought Ellie was sensitive to or allergic to coconut but through a looooong discovery process we realized she wasn't able to digest foods high in saturated fat.

Things have been crazy since then and it just was never the right time to try something so risky. But Ellie's been doing great and we decided to take the plunge.

I started out very conservatively. I made homemade coconut milk so there was zero risk of confusion - canned coconut contains guar gum and I didn't want to complicate things. Did you know you can make coconut milk out of dried coconut flakes? This is the method I used - it worked great. For the first three days I just gave Ellie about 3 Tbsp. of the milk each day. And she did fine! No tummy aches! No rash! No waking in the middle of the night! Amazing.

After that was successful I incorporated some coconut butter into the rotation. I made this pumpkin cream cheese recipe from our nutritionist and offered Ellie a slice. She was so excited! I called it pumpkin cheesecake to up the excitement factor. Adding the coconut butter (which contains the flesh of the coconut, and therefor the fiber) lead to some mild digestive disturbance (code for lots of poop) but beyond that she did fine so I decided to continue. Today was our second day of trying some and she's done great today.

We haven't tried coconut oil yet - that's stage 3 in the plan.

I am just beginning to imagine all the possibilities this opens up for us. There are tons of raw food recipes that utilize coconut and then there's coconut yogurt, and coconut-based drinks ... yum, yum, yum. I can't wait for us to try them all. :)