As I worked through my nutrition course, I continued to change our overall diet at home and worked to incorporate new foods and use more of the healthy foods we already enjoyed. Nuts and seeds were a big one that we were underutilizing. We switched Tony off of peanut butter and worked through several nut butter alternatives until we found that tahini butter was best. Through this process we found that he was more sensitive to almonds and peanuts, but other tree nuts were fine. So I started using other nuts and nut butters in the house more often.
Fast forward a few years, and Nolan’s now eating up a storm. He started teething really early, so by the time we arrived at him eating more than nursing, he had a full set of chompers, so we continuously introduced harder foods to see how he would handle them. He loved cashews, just like Tony and I did, but sadly this was one of the foods I noticed would have an impact on his body. Just as fast as he fell in love with them, we had to remove them from his diet. After removing all tree nuts from Nolan’s diet, I did some experimenting with loading days with other tree nuts, and each time his little body would give me the signs that it was unhappy about it.
This was extremely discouraging. I was trying so hard to teach my son to enjoy a wide variety of foods in their natural form, and his body was rejecting them. Luckily we still had seeds and seed butters, but being a hungry little boy that somethings inhaled his food, it was not always a great snack option since most of the time they came out the way they went in, whole.
I still want to give my family a great variety of food and make it in a way they can enjoy it, so I’ve been leaning more towards no bake bars, chocolates, and energy bites made with seed butters. To this day, sunflower seed butter is the family favourite. It’s a little more cost effective and has a nice subtle taste, plus the added benefit of the nutrients that sunflower seeds bring to the table, such as vitamin e, selenium and magnesium that come with a good dose of healthy fat and fibre.
Nut and seed butters do tend to be a little pricier than that no name peanut butter you can get by the gallon, but there is a good reason for that. I’ve been recently trying to make more nut and seed butter from scratch to try and cut down on costs, and reduce packaged products we buy. But mostly it’s about the cost savings. Lol. Nut and seed butters are made from 3 easy steps, as long as everything goes to plan. Buy raw nuts or seeds, roast them to give them yummy flavour, process them until smooth (sometimes adding some coconut oil to get the oils to start coming out). The first two steps are simple and take very little time or effort, the third step can sometimes go really well (cashew butter for my cookies the other week went off almost seamlessly), and then you can end up with a disaster like my sunflower seed butter that’s still in my fridge half done. It’s somewhere between sunflower seed flower and sunflower seed butter.
I am grateful for the options that do exist to help substitute tree nuts from our diet at home, but getting the right taste and texture can be tricky sometimes. I am excited to try some new options to give that peanut butter taste, without the peanuts. Stay tuned for new experiments, such as Roasted Baru Seeds.
Let me know if there is a recipe with tree nuts or peanuts that you want a better alternative for. I’m always looking for new recipe ideas to do substitution experiments with. I’ll do the trials, you get the final result. That’s my idea of a perfect win-win situation.
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