Other Food Issues Menu Suggestions

[Nor-TX]

I have loved following the "What are you cooking tonite" thread although I cannot eat most of the suggestions. Cannot eat fresh vegetables or fruits, dairy, beans, tomato sauce, garlic, eggs. I am gluten intolerant, lactose and casein, egg, garlic intolerant. I have GERD and Colitis. Each and every meal is a thought issue. I know there are others who have more than just the gluten issue. Also, I do not cook with these unusual ingredients that I see suggested. Even if I could find these ingredients, financially I could not afford them. I am looking for everyday types of suggestions.

Last night I took three talapia fillets (frozen from Walmart) and put them in a pyrex pie plate. Added some salt and pepper, a dab of dairy free margarine (Smart Balance parve brand). I added thick slices of tomato and a spray of butter flavored Crisco. Covered with saran and cooked on High for 8 minutes. Had a half of a cooked acorn squash with dairy free margarine and a drizzle of honey.

So if you have more than just the gluten issue, please post your meals.

Thanks for your ideas.

[lucia]

When I was really sick, I ate a lot of congee (like you, I had severe food restrictions). It's very easy, and I found it very comforting when I felt ill. It's especially recommended for sick tummies.

Basic Congee

Ingredients

-1/4 cup rice

-9 cups broth (veg or chicken)

-1-2 inch slice of ginger (optional)

-1/2 cup peanuts or shredded chicken

-salt, to taste

Directions

1. Soak rice in water for 20 minutes (or more).

2. Put pre-soaked rice into a sauce pot with 9 cups broth. Add sliced ginger. Bring to a boil on medium heat. Turn flame down to low heat and simmer, stirring often.

3. After 45 minutes or so (about half-way through cooking) add peanuts or chicken. Simmer another 45 minutes, stirring often, until rice breaks down.

4. Add salt to taste before serving.

(Note: There are many variations of congee. You can find tons of recipes online, if you like it. I pretty much stick with this one, but will sometimes add scallions at the end with the salt.)

[lucia]

Another option. Also easy and filling. I love sweet potatoes, and ate a lot of them when I was really ill.

West African Peanut Stew

INGREDIENTS

3 cups rice

2 onions, diced

2 tbls oil

2 sweet potatos, diced

2/3 c. tomato paste

1 & 1/3 c. peanut butter

¼ tsp cayenne

8 cups veggie broth

cooked chicken (optional)

DIRECTIONS

1. Set rice to cook.

2. Saute onions in oil. Add sweet potato and enough water to cover. Simmer until almost cooked.

3. Stir in tomato paste, peanut butter, and cayenne. Add broth and chicken. Cover. Simmer 30 minutes or until sweet potatoes and chicken are tenderly edible.

[lucia]

Pumpkin Soup

-1 tbls oil or butter

-1 small onion, diced

-1 carrot, sliced

-1 can of pumpkin, or 1/2 roasted pumpkin

-2 cups stock

-1/2 cup coconut milk*

-1/4 tsp red chile flakes (optional)

-1 scallion, sliced (optional)

*may be a specialty item, but cans of Goya coconut milk are under $3 for 13.5 ounces, you can freeze what you don't use (for next time)

Makes 4 servings as starter, 2 servings as main (with rice).

1. Saute onion in oil or butter for 5 minutes in medium sauce pot. Add carrot and saute for another 5 minutes. Add pumpkin and stock. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then lower heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

2. Transfer everything from sauce pot to a blender. Add coconut milk and red chile flakes. Blend on high until a puree has formed.

3. Serve topped with scallions, if desired.

You can make a meal out of this by serving it over rice. If you can't eat dairy, it's nice to have something creamy. Coconut milk is non-dairy.

[T.H.]

Is it fresh fruit and veggies that are an issue, so that you can have canned or preserved but not fresh? Or is it raw fruit and veggies and you can have them cooked? I thought at first you meant that you could have canned, but then slices of tomato didn't make sense so I thought perhaps I should get some clarification. :-)

For one idea, there's an easy teriyaki burger recipe that works for us. Canned pineapple rings, gluten-free soy sauce (hopefully that's common enough you can get that?), ground beef, and a sweetener (brown sugar works well, but agave syrup will do, too).

Just make burger patties and brown them (but don't cook all the way). Pour the pineapple juice from the rings into a bowl and mix with gluten-free soy sauce and sweetener until you like the flavor. Then pour this mixture into the burger pan and finish them off in the sauce. When burgers are done, remove the burgers and then put in some of the pineapple rings to cook them until soft - just takes a couple minutes. Serve the burgers with pineapple rings over them.

We don't thicken this sauce, but you could probably do it with corn starch or arrowroot sauce at the end, after the rings are cooked, if desired.

[Nor-TX]

Because I have so many gastro issues.. see my signature. Fresh fruit and raw vegetables irritate the Colitis. I have found I can have a little tomato once in a while even though it causes the GERD to react. I have tried canned vegetables like asparagus but quite honestly I just don't like them. I sometimes buy asparagus when it is on sale and cook it and eat only the most tender parts. Colitis is a whole other ball of wax compared to Gluten. Also the lactose and casein intolerance means I can't eat any dairy products. I have not been able to tolerate the consistancy or flavour of coconut or soy milks. Haven't had any milk in 38 years. My GERD makes every meal an issue. I can get heartburn from water in the morning. I take Prilosec once a day and Rantidine after almost everything I eat. I also have gastro paresis which means very slow digestion. I almost never eat beef because it digests so slowly. I have hiatal hernia which causes the GERD.

Mostly I eat chicken, talapia, haddock, tuna, shrimp, salmon (major heartburn), sardines in water, Udi bread. (I buy mine at Jason's deli... much better than the Udi bread at Whole Foods or other markets. It is more expensive, but larger and more hearty - bigger slices. Beef and chicken broth. Baked potatoes and sweet potatoes and squash. I make my own soups with broth and cooked carrots and thickened with potato flakes. I also eat cooked rice. I use the rice wrappers to make little spring roll types of meals. I fill them with leftover rice and shrimp or other fish.

Your recipe with ground beef would be difficult because of the acid in the pineapple and the beef.

For instance, tonite I will make 2 fillets of talapia, salt and pepper, in a spray of butter Pam, with a baked potato or rice. I have some canned pears for dessert.

For lunch after swimming, I reserved half my Udi bagel which I will toast and have a bowl of beef broth and some Rice Chex to munch.

As you can see my list of foods is short and leaves much to be desired.

The only real treat I have is going out for sashimi and sticky rice.. not often because it is so expensive, but a couple of times a year we splurge. After all at almost 62... I gotta have some fun!

[T.H.]

Phew, wow, that's a tricky diet to keep to! Will they be operating on your hiatal hernia at all soon? A friend of mine has that, but his is milder, and he couldn't afford the surgery so he's getting buy on medication they gave him. :-(

Can you have any seasonings, spices, herbs?

Okay, foods that I eat that might at least be adaptable to something you could have, hmmm...

Sweet potato and potato dishes.

meat loaf - I used to make a kind of meat loaf with baked sweet potatoes that I cooled and mixed with salt, a grain (like rice) and a ground meat (I used beef, but I imagine you could use ground chicken). When I could use herbs, I put those in, too, but I first had it without any other additions. It made a slightly sweet meatloaf, much milder than those used to sugar, but it sounds like you can't have that either, so might be nice. :-)

Sweet potato fries - my most basic, I just peel, chop, and put them in the over at 400F for 30-45 minutes on a piece of tinfoil over a cookie sheet. You can peel them off that way without having to use oil. If I use oil and salt, I heat a skillet to med-hi with 1-2 Tb of olive oil, put the cut fries in and sprinkle with salt. Preheat the oven at this point, with the cookie sheet in there. Brown sweet potatoes for just a few minutes, flipping sides, then pull out the cookie sheet and put them on it and bake until done, about 30 min. This works with regular potatoes, too. Might be able to pull off a squash fry too, come to think of it.

sweet potato pancakes - I never quite got it to work, as I started reacting to flours, but mixing sweet potatoes with, say, ground rice flour or something, and then baking or frying in a pan, is kind of like a sweet latke. You might look up potato latkes and see how they do.

gnocchi pasta - haven't tried these either since going gluten free, but we've been thinking up recipes lately. Usually, these are made with potatoes and flour, but we were thinking that potatoes and potato flour might work fine, or potatoes and a starch. Which would give you some homemade pasta you could maybe have with your shrimp or fish, potentially, yeah? Maybe with a little olive oil and some herbs, if there are any you can have.

***For potato flour, as it's kind of expensive and hard to find, I found a website that shows how to make your own sweet potato or potato flour from the root vegetable itself

(Open Original Shared Link ). So, possibly affordable, as long as you have a little time. :-)

potato pancakes - We modified this recipe: Open Original Shared Link She uses potato, corn starch, onion, and garlic. We've made it without the starch and just used the potato and spices other than onion and garlic. It turned out well, but you had to form the potato pancake on a plate and slide it into the skilled to keep it firm, without the starch. Rice flour might work okay, if you could make it...or maybe just grind up rice in a blender for a while for homemade. I know there are recipes to make rice babyfood that give ideas on how to do that, ya know? I've tried this with sweet potato too, looking at other flavors/herbs to use for a good taste. I haven't found it yet, but...maybe a combination of sweet potato and squash might work?

Some others -

My daughter loves to get brisling sardines and stir fry them to serve over rice. She uses gluten-free soy sauce, but I imagine there are many things that could be used. We've served this with asparagus tips before, so you might be able to use that, too, when you can have them.

We've made a kind of shepherd's pie with potato and beef, but perhaps you could try one with chicken and chicken broth, maybe a few canned tomatoes, with the mashed potato on top. We can't have dairy, so we make our mashed potatoes with broth, anyway.

Ooooh! Can you have oil at all? One thing I've heard with the spring wrappers that sounded awesome, although I've never tried it, was to brush them with oil, each side (dry), and then pile them up together and cut them into a shape - a square of piled up, oiled pieces, or triangle, whatever. You bake it and it would make a kind of pastry-like concoction. It was listed in a recipe I found once looking for gluten-free baklava, where they stuffed it with nuts and honey, but I bet you could do it with something like fish or chicken if you experimented, you know? Supposedly, the oil with keep the wrapper from soaking up most water so you can bake it and keep it crunchy, even if it gets a little softer. Sounded very interesting!

Since you do okay with potatoes and sweet potatoes, do you do any better with some of the root vegetables? Celeriac is one we came across that we make a 1/3 cooked celeriac and 2/3 cooked potatoes and mash them for a flavored mashed potatoes.

I just heard of something called carrot fries...I think one or two pages back from the end on that 'what are you having for dinner' post. Looked good, honestly.

Hmmmm....since you can have rice, you might want to check out on-line recipes for polenta fries (I know you can't have polenta, but hear me out. ) I just heard of this, where someone makes polenta porridge, pours it into a bread pan, and cools it. When it's a nice big solid mass, they cut it into fry shapes and...I think baked or fried it. I know someone who did this with ground sorghum, instead, and it seemed to work well. So perhaps if you made a thick rice porridge, that solidifies when refrigerated, you could make something similar? Maybe add something like broth or fish or something, to make it more flavored? (I just found a recipe for polenta fries that might be adaptable for rice, maybe. :-) Open Original Shared Link )

Can you have any sweetener? I know of a few recipes that might work, if you can.

[missy'smom]

My list of no-no's would take up too much space ;)I can tolerate an egg in baked good or some mayo and I have chickpeas on a 4 day rotation.

Today:

B-cornbread-no flours, just cornmeal, egg , ricemilk etc. and sausage patties Open Original Shared Link I use lean ground pork.

L-brown rice pasta, "sauce" of olive oil-sautee onions 'till soft, add tuna, frozen peas and carrots or fozen mixed veg., parsley(if desired) and salt and pepper

Yesterday:

B-ore-ida hashed potaoes(cube style) sauteed w/ onion and ham

D- oven baked chicken breast minus the garlic powder and butter, just S+P

Open Original Shared Link

homemade oven fries(potatoes)

frozen italian cut green beans tossed w/ sauteed shallots

I often have a microwave sweet potato for B

This is not fabulous but still tasty and simple and good with brown rice on the side. Open Original Shared Link

[Nor-TX]

Phew, wow, that's a tricky diet to keep to! Will they be operating on your hiatal hernia at all soon? A friend of mine has that, but his is milder, and he couldn't afford the surgery so he's getting buy on medication they gave him. :-(

Can you have any seasonings, spices, herbs?

Okay, foods that I eat that might at least be adaptable to something you could have, hmmm...

Sweet potato and potato dishes.

meat loaf - I used to make a kind of meat loaf with baked sweet potatoes that I cooled and mixed with salt, a grain (like rice) and a ground meat (I used beef, but I imagine you could use ground chicken). When I could use herbs, I put those in, too, but I first had it without any other additions. It made a slightly sweet meatloaf, much milder than those used to sugar, but it sounds like you can't have that either, so might be nice. :-)

Sweet potato fries - my most basic, I just peel, chop, and put them in the over at 400F for 30-45 minutes on a piece of tinfoil over a cookie sheet. You can peel them off that way without having to use oil. If I use oil and salt, I heat a skillet to med-hi with 1-2 Tb of olive oil, put the cut fries in and sprinkle with salt. Preheat the oven at this point, with the cookie sheet in there. Brown sweet potatoes for just a few minutes, flipping sides, then pull out the cookie sheet and put them on it and bake until done, about 30 min. This works with regular potatoes, too. Might be able to pull off a squash fry too, come to think of it.

sweet potato pancakes - I never quite got it to work, as I started reacting to flours, but mixing sweet potatoes with, say, ground rice flour or something, and then baking or frying in a pan, is kind of like a sweet latke. You might look up potato latkes and see how they do.

gnocchi pasta - haven't tried these either since going gluten free, but we've been thinking up recipes lately. Usually, these are made with potatoes and flour, but we were thinking that potatoes and potato flour might work fine, or potatoes and a starch. Which would give you some homemade pasta you could maybe have with your shrimp or fish, potentially, yeah? Maybe with a little olive oil and some herbs, if there are any you can have.

***For potato flour, as it's kind of expensive and hard to find, I found a website that shows how to make your own sweet potato or potato flour from the root vegetable itself

(Open Original Shared Link ). So, possibly affordable, as long as you have a little time. :-)

potato pancakes - We modified this recipe: Open Original Shared Link She uses potato, corn starch, onion, and garlic. We've made it without the starch and just used the potato and spices other than onion and garlic. It turned out well, but you had to form the potato pancake on a plate and slide it into the skilled to keep it firm, without the starch. Rice flour might work okay, if you could make it...or maybe just grind up rice in a blender for a while for homemade. I know there are recipes to make rice babyfood that give ideas on how to do that, ya know? I've tried this with sweet potato too, looking at other flavors/herbs to use for a good taste. I haven't found it yet, but...maybe a combination of sweet potato and squash might work?

Some others -

My daughter loves to get brisling sardines and stir fry them to serve over rice. She uses gluten-free soy sauce, but I imagine there are many things that could be used. We've served this with asparagus tips before, so you might be able to use that, too, when you can have them.

We've made a kind of shepherd's pie with potato and beef, but perhaps you could try one with chicken and chicken broth, maybe a few canned tomatoes, with the mashed potato on top. We can't have dairy, so we make our mashed potatoes with broth, anyway.

Ooooh! Can you have oil at all? One thing I've heard with the spring wrappers that sounded awesome, although I've never tried it, was to brush them with oil, each side (dry), and then pile them up together and cut them into a shape - a square of piled up, oiled pieces, or triangle, whatever. You bake it and it would make a kind of pastry-like concoction. It was listed in a recipe I found once looking for gluten-free baklava, where they stuffed it with nuts and honey, but I bet you could do it with something like fish or chicken if you experimented, you know? Supposedly, the oil with keep the wrapper from soaking up most water so you can bake it and keep it crunchy, even if it gets a little softer. Sounded very interesting!

Since you do okay with potatoes and sweet potatoes, do you do any better with some of the root vegetables? Celeriac is one we came across that we make a 1/3 cooked celeriac and 2/3 cooked potatoes and mash them for a flavored mashed potatoes.

I just heard of something called carrot fries...I think one or two pages back from the end on that 'what are you having for dinner' post. Looked good, honestly.

Hmmmm....since you can have rice, you might want to check out on-line recipes for polenta fries (I know you can't have polenta, but hear me out. ) I just heard of this, where someone makes polenta porridge, pours it into a bread pan, and cools it. When it's a nice big solid mass, they cut it into fry shapes and...I think baked or fried it. I know someone who did this with ground sorghum, instead, and it seemed to work well. So perhaps if you made a thick rice porridge, that solidifies when refrigerated, you could make something similar? Maybe add something like broth or fish or something, to make it more flavored? (I just found a recipe for polenta fries that might be adaptable for rice, maybe. :-) Open Original Shared Link )

Can you have any sweetener? I know of a few recipes that might work, if you can.

Wow... what a lot of suggestions and great ones at that. I love the ideas of sweet potato fries, first in a pan and then on the cookie sheet. I do believe there are frozen sweet potato frozen fries that are gluten free. The burger place nearby has a dedicated "fries" fryer. They only do regular and sweet potato fries in it. Sometimes I will splurge and we will go for a huge platter of fries.

I do know about latkes very well. I grew up eating them. I have made them with cornstarch and also from gluten-free potato buds and they came out good. Couldn't eat the sour cream though with them. Sometimes when I am making mashed potato from potato buds I make a double amount and the next day add an egg, mix them up and cook them. I can't eat very much oil so I use Pam types of products. They come out pretty good. Not like my memory serves, but edible. I do have some very good rice pasta that is now carried at Walmart. It is called Homeland and is about 2.00 a package. I sometimes mix it with shrimp, salmon or chicken along with Smart Balance parve margarine. I had forgotten about that until now.

I am familiar with potato flour and potato starch. I grew up in Toronto Ontario and lived in an area that had stores that carried these products all the time. I now live in Dallas, but could probably find these items at Whole Foods. Can't do polenta. Just discovered my body does not like corn in any form. This is something new. I used to dry fry slices of polenta with margarine.... used to be very yummy.

I saw the post about carrot fries. I thought one day I might try that. I can and do eat cooked carrots from time to time. I have never eaten a celeriac... not too adventurous these days.

Last night I had shrimp, rice and some cooked frozen vegetables. Tonite I am going to chop the leftover shrimp, add the rice, soy sauce and leftover veggies and do a rice wrapper spring roll. I will probably dry fry with a little Pam. They come out crispy and delicious. I make a delicous teriyaki dipping sauce with soy sauce, sesame oil, brown sugar, dry mustard and rice vinegar. Actually looking forward to dinner tonite.

I love sardines. Yesterday I had a tin (the kind in water) mixed with some Hellmans light on a toasted Udi bagel.. very yummy and easy on body.

I don't eat sweetners (those packets). They are hard on Colitis. When I need something sweet, I use sugar or honey. Sometimes for dinner I might have some defrosted frozen fruit they sell in bags in Walmart with a little honey drizzled over. It is strangely comforting.

What is really strange is that in my earlier career, I actually taught cooking, was a product consultant, ran a cooking school and wrote for a gourmet food magazine in Canada. Daily, I would develop recipes, write for other publications, once wrote the English version for a French product microwave manual. Cooking, experimenting, eating was my life. When I got ill back in the 90s, and everything I ate made me sick, my love for food, and being creative just died. As time went on and I got sicker, had other health issues I just let food be food, rather than try to make it something wonderful. I still get calls from clients/associates about adapting recipes for one reason or another, and usually I just bow out and confess my lack of desire to get involved.

Recently I entered a recipe contest with my rice paper wrappers. (It was about gluten free cooking), and although I didn't win anything, they did feature my explanation of what coping with a gluten free diet meant to me.

I know it may sound like a cop out, but my creative, experimental days with recipes and being involved with food development is gone. I am now concentrating on trying to get this old body moving and acting a bit more youthful through water exercises and some plain food. I once read a great diet tip. It was something like, you should eat to live rather than live to eat.

You must have put a great deal of thought into your suggestions and I will definitely try some of them. I appreciate your creativity... keep it up. Your family obviously appreciates you so much! Thank you so much for your time and suggestions. If you have more, I would love to read them. Your kindness is appreciated.

[Nor-TX]

My list of no-no's would take up too much space ;)I can tolerate an egg in baked good or some mayo and I have chickpeas on a 4 day rotation.

Today:

B-cornbread-no flours, just cornmeal, egg , ricemilk etc. and sausage patties Open Original Shared Link I use lean ground pork.

L-brown rice pasta, "sauce" of olive oil-sautee onions 'till soft, add tuna, frozen peas and carrots or fozen mixed veg., parsley(if desired) and salt and pepper

Yesterday:

B-ore-ida hashed potaoes(cube style) sauteed w/ onion and ham

D- oven baked chicken breast minus the garlic powder and butter, just S+P

Open Original Shared Link

homemade oven fries(potatoes)

frozen italian cut green beans tossed w/ sauteed shallots

I often have a microwave sweet potato for B

This is not fabulous but still tasty and simple and good with brown rice on the side. Open Original Shared Link

Hi. I didn't know the Ore-Ida hashed potatoes cubes were gluten free. I am going to drop by the supermarket today to look. I must admit, I love fries. I love those hash browns too. As a kid, a treat was a plate of fries with gravy (brown), vinegar, ketchup and a coke. Nowadays, I still cook a plate of fries, no gravy, no ketchup and still love them. We dip our fries in mayo.... have you heard of that? I think it is a "northern" thing.

I do make a lot of chicken. Never thought of making it stuffed with apple. I would have to adapt it a little - leave out the spices and onion, but it might work. Although I would rather bbq a piece of chicken and eat a baked apple for dessert.

I think the "sauce" with the tuna, veggies sounds interesting too. I can't do onion but I do like tuna. I know the tuna in water is healthier, but I just accidently bought the Starkist in oil and it was so much better. Had a great flavor.

A good thing about eating more fish lately (almost every day), my blood tests have improved significantly. I always loved fish but in the last 15 years since moving to Dallas and because my DH didn't like fish I stopped eating it other than when we went out to eat.

My favorite dining out meal is for Sushi and Sashimi.... I just informed my DH this morning that we would be going out for Japanese Sashimi in January for my birthday dinner. He looked at me perplexed and said, "Oh, who are you going with?" He thought he was being funny. It is expensive, but once a year I eat all the raw sashimi I want!

Thanks for your suggestions. They sound great!

[T.H.]

I don't eat sweetners (those packets)... When I need something sweet, I use sugar or honey.

Totally different meaning than I intended for sweetener, LOL. I was just thinking of foods that make things sweeter, so honey and sugar totally work. :-)

But since you can have honey or sugar, honey glazed fish might be good, yeah? Do you use brown sugar? That's worked well for us to make a teriyaki sauce, with just a little gluten-free soy sauce and brown sugar mixed together.

We use it on the sardines sometimes, and my daughter was just experimenting with it over rice noodles, too.

Re: corn, though, just how sensitive are you to corn? You mentioned you react to all the corn you've tried, does this include corn derivatives. I was just thinking of what you mentioned in your diet and I wondered about that. Have you ever looked at eliminating more corn to see if it might help anything? I doubt the gastroparesis would be affected, but perhaps the GERD might be a tiny bit less?

I have to avoid corn as well, and it's been in just everything. Eliminating it all has helped me significantly. But it's often used in the processing of white rice (but not brown), in the making of citric and lactic acid (citric acid washes are commonly used on beef, and is sometimes mixed in with the ice used for fish on the boats). It is sometimes added between paper plates and to the inside of plastic shrink wrap packages (Tillamook does this with their bigger blocks of cheese, for example, as of last month when I emailed them. One gal I was reading a post from said she called her local organic chicken company and they put it on the inside of the plastic wrapping for that). I've heard that it is sometimes added to bags of baby carrots with a little water to keep them shiny. It's in our iodized salt and almost everything vitamin fortified, to keep the vitamin from breaking down until after it passes the stomach lining.

So if you think you might be sensitive enough to have a reaction to these, it might be worth while checking out a corn allergy site. They have lots of good information about what to look for, and what to avoid.

I know it may sound like a cop out, but my creative, experimental days with recipes and being involved with food development is gone. I am now concentrating on trying to get this old body moving and acting a bit more youthful through water exercises and some plain food. I once read a great diet tip. It was something like, you should eat to live rather than live to eat.

I can TOTALLY understand that. I don't think it's copping out at all. I think it's just, hmmm, understanding what you can cope with and focusing on that. When there's a lot of pain associated with something, it's pretty frustrating to focus SO much energy on activities that ultimately just make you feel bad. I think shunting that to the back of the priority list in your day to day life is a pretty smart thing to do, just to stay sane!