Since discovering that a Paleo diet is not my friend (a recent visit to the ER with a diagnosis of kidney stones got my attention) I am reintroducing foods that I abruptly abandoned about 8 months ago on a misguided pursuit to jumpstart a weight loss regimen and to perhaps identify the culprit in my two year battle with hives. On a Paleo diet, all dairy, all grains, and all refined sugars are verboten. I thoroughly embraced the program and enjoyed discovering lots of new foods that I hadn’t previously tried. And some old favorites like spinach, sweet potatoes, and nuts, especially almonds and in particular, almond butter became daily staples. But many of the foods on a Paleo diet, including those I ate regularly, contain high levels of oxalates that can combine with calcium in the body to form kidney stones, so in essence, I brought this on myself. The good news is that I can have dairy, grains, and sugar again and the hives were determined to be the result of a Vitamin D deficiency which has been eliminated with mega doses of Vitamin D.
So, I am reintroducing dairy and grains and even some refined sugar to my diet and enjoying every bite. Wednesday, as I looked at three over-ripe bananas which in my Paleo days would have gone into the freezer for use in Paleo-friendly smoothies, I suddenly craved my Mom’s banana bread, something I haven’t baked in probably 15 or 20 years. It contains dairy, grain, and refined sugar! As the loaves baked, the house filled with their enticing aroma. When I sliced the first couple of slices from the still warm loaf, I thought I could see a tiny wisp of steam escaping from the slice…a photo op for sure. Of course the minuscule wisp of steam was gone by the time I got the loaf and slices before the camera but I used a small beeswax candle to create the illusion of steam. When I blew out the flame and placed the candle between the slice and the loaf, voilà, “steam.” This was more difficult challenge than I thought because controlling an unpredictable wisp of smoke is impossible. This is the only shot I got that bore the slightest resemblance to steam escaping from a hot out-of-the-oven loaf.
