hi jane land from navigate autism with a lead and welcome to my home i thought that we would bring you home with me and introduce you to my husband yes our there we wanted to talk to you today about the importance of healthy eating and i want to tell you that i learned so much about this over the last thirteen years through our journey with autism because we didn't used to eat very healthy and back the things we ate were really quite gross from the exact i don't think we ever looked at in the gradient we were both working we were finding whatever was quick and easy we had two small children and we were just doing what we could to get by but when william developed autism and we started hearing about different diets that we should try we started with the the gluten free case and free diet and we saw a dry link between what you eat and how your body responds so we started exploring and doing a lot of reading and that's one reason i have just here because he really has a photographic memory but we started learning as much as we could and tried so many different diets and what was really interesting is in addition to the diet we also did just about every day or you could think of over the state doing all those therapy right because it was more important to really homeschool him and what we found was really interesting a year later we noticed he was so healthy but not only healthy internally he was showing up more his brain was more alive he has less foggy eyes he was more interactive and because of what we were eating and what he was putting into his body right through this journey we've tried like a so many different things in different diets and we also completely understand the overwhelm how hard it is to make an as big shift in your life and with your children so we wanted today to show you some simple really delicious recipes to help you if you're interested in changing your diet i was going to share one additional thing because this is what sparked my interest in doing the show we've been healthy for a long time eating healthy right right this summer my daughter and i decided let's try a vegan diet for four days because we can do anything for four days now and i never ever thought i was in a vegan diet because i love me to love cheese and yogurt all that but as we said let's do it and at the end of four days which was really really hard we sent our here we're going to keep doing this and i was so ready to say no but then i realized wait a minute i had developed hypertension after breaking my finger six months ago it was gone the hypertension was gone my digestion was better i had more energy right right there were so many great things that were happening i said of course i'm going to continue and then i says jim what we try this for william because in the whole family right because i felt so great we should try it now i don't know if you remember this but i think you through and don't worry our research at all to look at what's he like last because he does most of the cooking but we we did it and it made me think less to share with you how you can do this it's not that hard and we're go share three really simple recipes that you're going to love and if you're interested in trying to to change your diet hopefully you'll learn something from us today so we're going to teach here how we make tofu parmesan and my new way to food i used to hate here i know you a lot about you have it right in your background but i would love for you to share let me so good at cooking well as you know my background is in the wine industry and the wine industry is all about and flavors and part of my job you know i've spent time in new york city and philadelphia washington d c was calling on some of the great restaurants in those cities talking to some of those great chefs and matching the flavors of my wine with the flavors of their food and one of the things i always did because i've always considered cooking a hobby and i love to eat and eating in those high class restaurants would have bankrupted us i mean they're great to go out for a special occasion so i started to ask questions about how chefs put together various dishes and learn various little things from them and so having my background in wine and dealing with flavors and matching foods to wine i was quickly able to take recipes and modify them so that we could put healthy ingredients in them cook them gluten and casein free you know no we know milk products and then the ultimate which you described a few months ago which was a huge shift because i love using you know cheeses and meats and things like that was going to be going to be an ism and so you know it wasn't as difficult as i thought yeah i miss a few of my dishes and yeah there dishes i can't modify you know the how do you modify a steak you can't and that's one of our favorite my favorite meals so you know through that process of trial and error and using my background in wine i've been able to figure out a lot of recipe these and then through a lot of reading on the internet finding great sites that i like i have tons of books that i like to comb through and find recipes and kind of make my own so to speak and the recipe today we're doing hemp tofu parmesan is really an adaptation of a recipe i found that we really kind of the size i would like to say tofu and drain out the liquid and by that i mean just pour out the water that comes in the package top with this is a fourteen ounce package of tofu and you can see it's nice and white what i've done is i've sliced it into eight even slices about a quarter of an inch thick if we can make a layer of tofu from there what we're going to do is we're going to take the tofu and we're going to dredge it in just a flour mix not a flour mix or excuse me it's a corn starch  a tablespoon of torn starch a teaspoon of garlic powder to add some flavoring to it we love garlicky at household and god has a lot of wonderful antiviral antibacterial properties to it i had a pinch of salt and a little pinch of freshly ground pepper to add some more flavor then what we'll do is we'll put it in the frying pan and you see i've already melted some i love coconut oil for cooking and for several reasons when you cook and especially when you're cooking with high heat you wan use either something like a coconut oil or not macondo well you don't want to use olive oil and the reason being is when you heat olive oil it introduces free radicals into the oil and it kind of turns rancid and free radicals  rancidity is really bad for your health olive oil is great to use for salads and things like that when you're not going to heat it but when you're heating olive oil and we're going to cook this at a medium heat for about five minutes per side after we dredge it so we really want to use a coconut oil our not because a while so today we used coconut oil which you could also use of caught of oil and the thing i love about coconut oil it in self has a lot of antiviral antibacterial properties to it that help heal the got it has a lot of healthy things in it like omega three s and six is so it's really great and the same thing with the avocado all the avocado oil imparts a little different flavor the coconut oil is a little more neutral in flavor there's a great  not the rest to here that we were using just call for bread crumbs first of all i like to make my own bread crumbs because it's much more cost effective i just take a piece of we use what's called the sprouted grain bread which does have gluten in it but unlike breads when you sprout it it makes the gluten much more easier to digest so if you're looking to get rid of the gluten and you're not a celiac suffering from celiac disease you can certainly use a spread of grain bread and what i like about sprouted grain bread has more protein it has a lot of b vitamins and a lot of vitamins and minerals and sprouting it makes a much more lol and it makes the glue and i just like a vegetable i just have to say this is true because i started eating a lot of this and i started to eating began and i was losing weight and i was eating at least two or three pieces of bread yeah a and i thought bread losing weight didn't make sense because just like a vegetable exactly so what we do is i just take a piece of bread like this to rip it apart i have a spice and not grinder i throw it in there and kind of crumb it up and again you get this nice thing so i've used one slice of bread in here and then what i do is i added three tablespoons of hempseed parts hence the heart and the great thing about hempseed heart they're called the perfect protein because they contain all twenty amino acids and then they also contain a lot as a ink a lot of some iron some manganese and these are all great essential vitamins they have antiinflammatory properties they're rich in omega three sprees and six's which are great for brain development there's been a lot of research not an autism but a d h d and i think a lot of that research if they ever did it would probably cross over to autism the graded the great thing about it is i mix three tablespoons with one size of bread teaspoon of basal and oregano again for flavor so we'll sprinkle this on top of the of the tofu then we'll take about a half a jar of just a tomato sauce i happen to like this garden vegetable sauce it's one of my favorites right now we get a little benefit from the flavor of the vegetables with the tomatoes so it's going to give it a little more depth to our flavor will spread that on top and then what i call the coup de gras is nutritionally slags nutritionally flakes are really great because they have some protein they have some b vitamins again that that's a real concern if you're big and because a lot of the vegetables you're eating in the lot of the food you're eating are very low  b vitamins so you're really want to look for ways to add it so i would take about a tablespoon of this i generally just use my hand because i know about what a tablespoon the kind of sprinkle it on the top of the think that also if you have some when you're trying to fool like a young child it can look a little bit like she was with autism if you can follow them but but it adds a wonderful nutty flavor and that those b vitamins and it's been proven to be an anti inflammatory it adds a lot of qualities in terms of some vitamins and minerals to it so it's a great little addition we cook this in the oven at about three hundred fifty degrees or thirty minute and then we're going to show you the finished product which to it and they have a really great meal yup so thank you yeah now i'm to show you how to do a piece and i i like to do this because as you know i talk a lot about interactive games and how to inspire our kids sit with us this is an easy one to do that i like to start with a pre made crust you don't have to but this is my favorite and there are many but i just get this one bought this got to pizza crust in it and it's  took but the it comes like this you get two and then one plastic container i put a little oil on the tray here and then put the crust i precut a lot of veggies and just put them in these little bags and this easy now you can cut these with your child i'm not really want to do the sharp knife right now with will have this focus isn't quite there yet so i would prepare this and then i would just take it out i ha actually one of the things you want to do with these vegetables because when you cook a piece it's not really going to cook the vegetables so again you want to take some coconut oil or avocado oil put them in the pan at about a medium heat about ten minutes saute them in that pan to put all your vegetables you take your zucchini onions your peppers and throw them in the pan and if you want to add a little garlic towards the end you don't want to cook garlic too long because you really want to maintain that flavor and that pungency of the garlic which is so wonderful to soft that and while that's cooking but will do is we'll get some pizza sauce again really easy and take a stance and put it on the pizza these are all things that he loves to do it has a very easy to do but what is my special treat for him is he loves to paint so i get something like this in the kitchen that he can then spread the sauce on if you can see this very well that we spread the sauce with something that looks like a paintbrush again this was motivate him to participate and help me cook then once the vegetables are a little bit softer and we're going to pretend that they are coming out of the pan we just sprinkle them on top  it looks like so this is the on the left this is a cheese pizza that we've added some hempseed and actually some nutritional use too again we want to get those b b vitamins it really doesn't impact the taste except in a really yummy why and here is what i call our garbage veggie piece which is mushrooms of teeny peppers and onions so again we've added hempseed and nutritional yeast just so we can get that additional nutrition in there for william and the family so we get that balanced diet of a lot of protein and b vitamins make sure we get a good amount of those in our diet you know if you  there's two things that i see on the at the end of my pizza and actually everything i've learned and you housing of us but the value of salon trash and i don't sometimes we cook up a sometimes i just like it to be fresh because it detoxify heavy metals and also what i've been reading a lot about is it attaches itself to mercury and does not let it go until it leaves the body so we give this two million every night no matter what we cook we make sure that he gets much diet because we know that mercury is something that actually we all struggle with and learned a few weeks ago that we pass on mercury from generation to generation so every single one of us has and our bodies and this is one way we can the time high and really this stuff is really great if you've ever had sushi where they wrap the sushi with the seaweed is a similar texture taste profile it's a little different taste of the seaweed you get for sushi but not much and it's really a pleasant neutral taste that especially you want to buy the flakes let me tell you don't want to buy the long strand because it is tough to make it into flakes again but if you can't find it you can always find rip it off your handy dandy spice grinder is ss and taste better right so i like that what i like to do with this is i'll take some of a cot or a coconut oil add a little garlic and i saute just the olive oil and the and the garlic and i turn it off wait a few minutes and i put the the dulce am and i stir it up so we don't heat the dulce a much we just barely warm it but it will take on the flavors of that garlic and it really gives it a nice smooth really interesting texture to it in a lot of eating is bread that we told you about earlier and it takes about a tablespoon of hummus hummus is made from chickpeas and some oil and some spices is a very healthy protein and then it takes half an hour convo which again is gives us all of your good fat that we need during the day and you just spread it on like this and it's very tasty now some people might actually put some chopped tomatoes on there but i just had this and it was really delicious and and it filled me up i didn't need to eat a snack middle of the morning like i sometimes there all of these recipes as you can help you can see the very easy to do and we're actually creating something like a cookbook for you because we knew how hard it was for us as you've heard us say to start a new diet without recipes without a plan so we're put together a document where it gives you actually a week of what you can eat for breakfast lunch and dinner as well as links to some of our favorite recipes and we're actually putting together what we're calling a coastal for you because we know how hard it is to make this big change and you don't know what recipes to make what food to have in the house so we're creating a document that will give you a meal plan for a week so you'll know ideas of what you can make for breakfast lunch and dinner and then you'll see some recipes as well as links to these recipes because then they're not all ours but we're giving you the link so that you have a quick and easy way to get a handle on these healthy meals if does something you like to do and i also want to let you know that i do consulting with people if you're interested in making a lifestyle change or just creating a diet plan i work with people to do that so you can find out more about that on my web site at navigate autism dot com and  it's just excited to share with you that next time we're going to get a chance to revisit with heidi rome she was my guest on my last episode you heard her talk about her son who is a teenager and in her words was violent towards himself and others she and her husband had to make really tough decisions because they couldn't handle it and they decided to send him to a school in another state that really tore them up inside i so she's going to share a little bit about that journey with you and how he's doing as well as how she's taking that strength and clarity to help other mothers along their journey but what kind of special is we're going to love her share with you a message that her son gave to her before he left he communicated this through a communication device and it's a message of hope that talks about he how he is ready and knows that this is the next part of his journey and that she made the right decision and i'm getting chills just talking about it so i know you will too so i look forward to seeing you next time on navigate autism with