Ani wrote:I spend 2-5 hours/day in the kitchen cooking for myself and my kids. Because of my allergies and theirs, this is non-negotiable no matter if I am sick or exhausted. I know exactly how much sugar they get. I'm not trying to raise my kids keto, but they don't have sugar every day. Ice pops and juice are rare treats -- if they weren't, I wouldn't expect them to work as bribes right?
That's great, I already expected as much because of your location and allergies, that's why I wrote that you probably already tried what I suggested! As for American food, you're definitely right about regions and all that, but one thing I definitely noticed consistently when trying to adapt recipes from American paleo websites or SCD / GAPS groups is that they are consistently unbearably sweet, no matter which region they are from. That's why I mushed it all together into "American food", even though I'm aware that the specifics of everyday food really differ a lot from region to region unless you look at people who simply don't have money to eat a decent human diet. With recipes from the US even when I put half the honey, it's usually way too sweet for me, since I really have no sugar at all. Same was the case when my dad baked cake recipes from American friends when I was younger and eating sugary stuff every day. Too damn sweet! And then what most people call "juice" is usually just some kind of syrup with added water - in the UK too, it's appalling. There is also a lot of hidden sugar in all sorts of stuff, even 100% juice sometimes has added sugar, even though that's already super sugary even when it's natural! Basically reading the American SCD group was always a bit of a wtf experience, since people would accidentally poison themselves by buying meat that had injected seasoning with gluten or had the worst reaction from some other thing that wasn't even appearing on the ingredients list. It seemed so much more difficult to find non-contaminated food over there! But then, if you're hunting your own food in your parts you're probably in the very best region for your particular needs!
And boy do I know the cooking for three hours despite being ill part. My life exactly
If I don't cook, I simply starve. I can get DH to cook half the evening meals and if I'm really really sick he might cook other meals too, but most of the time I'm wasting an awful lot of time with all that pesky survival stuff. Ani wrote:And if my big kids sit that long, they don't burn off their energy outside, which is what I need. So, when the 2 year old is finally occupied, I spend my time with the big kids either getting school done or just giving them attention. They have this idea that I actually care about their ideas and want to talk to them LOL. So it isn't attention span, or behavior (except for 2 and sometmes 5 year old), or being bratty, but just that there are a lot of them and only one introverted me who'd rather hide in a corner and read a book.
Hah, I think the key thing is that "there are a lot of them"
I really don't know how you manage with so many, especially if they are still at an age where they want attention all the time! I find cohabitation with one adult difficult enough because I'm really very introverted and need my peace and quiet. Getting that sort of need across to children without leaving them with abandonment issues is almost impossible I suppose! In our case we both work from home, so we see each other a lot more than couples with regular 9-5 jobs, but I think over the years we've found a good balance of leaving each other alone or being there as needed. Not sure how it would work with kids ...!
I wasn't intending to claim that the US has diverse food cultures simply because of its size. That wouldn't hold up in Alaska, as there are only 700,000 of us in that huge area. I was just pointing out that people easily think about German food, Italian food, Spanish food, and even are comfortable discussing cuisine in the north, south, east or west of these countries, but so often lump America together under one label despite all our regions and differences. If you are familiar with the food here, you know that people in southern California eat totally differently than those in Georgia and coastal Maine cuisine is completely different than New Mexico. And then there are, I guess, people in flyover country who serve something called jello salad with their dinner most nights. (I don't know what jello salad is but yuck..) When you average over a large area, or large population, it doesn't account for the diversity of individual areas.
And of course, turning down your relatives cooking is so difficult, it's almost impolite. They just try to force feed visitors, it's a cultural thing. My mum and my aunt play this game where my aunt puts more food on my mum's plate and my mum puts it back. One reason why I haven't visited in a long while: That food would literally kill me and turning it down is a somewhat tricky procedure 
. As a kid I hated borscht (борщ) and any other soups. Many kids did. Now I eat the soups but at rare occasions (and, btw, I'm not sure if I know the "true" recipe of borscht). At the same time I like pelmeni (пельмени), bliny (блины), plov (плов). The latter isn't Russian food actually. I doubt that anyone of Russian would consider plov as Russian food. But in fact in my everyday life I don't eat too fried and fat foods. And I eat a small portion. Since early childhood I've had a bad appetite, so I've never eaten too much and always refuse to eat more. I think in nowaday Russia it's a quite common thing. Yes, there's a tradition to serve guests with the best possible food, a lot of the food. And I guess that if the guests are foreigners, even if relatives, the things would be worse. The same is with an alcohol. I'm not a big fan of vodka and I definitely wouldn't drink full glasses of vodka, not by free will 
(literally: Do you respect me?) But... I don't know, maybe it's more common among men, I can't remember if I've ever heared that line in my real life. Maybe I do, but just haven't paid attention. I've always been able to refuse to drink and never, or very rarely (in college years), drink too much, too.
Btw, I see myself as a typical Russian despite the fact that I don't drink vodka and don't cook borscht 
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