Cooking Challenge

I feel like I am on one of those cooking challenge shows and all of a sudden somebody took away half of my favorite ingredients.  My husband saw the nutritionist (for the first time) yesterday and after hearing his various symptoms, she stripped down his diet to bare bones.  

For at least the next month, he is supposed to be dairy-free, gluten-free, and low-acid.  This translates into no cows milk, no butter, no wheat, no Balsamic vinegar, no ginger, no curry, and many other no-no’s.

Last night I found myself making two versions of stuffed peppers -- mine with the curry, tomato paste, and hot peppers and his without those things.  It means we now have to keep track of his and my leftovers.  How complicated!

He is allowed to have goat products.  So I made goat milk yogurt yesterday.  The good news is he can eat goat cheese, instead of avoiding all cheese as he has been doing for lactose-intolerance.

I have found recipes for gluten-free bread, gluten-free cake, gluten-free turkey stuffing.  There are obviously a lot of people out there who are trying this alternate diet.

But it does call for a lot of extra planning and the purchase of ingredients like xanthan gum (helps to bind ingredients like gluten does) that I had never even heard of.

I must say my husband is embracing this with the determination to follow the new diet 100%.  He’s making god use of the Vitamix to make things like cucumber juice and pear-parsley drinks.  For the next month, I can guarantee he won’t cheat even once.

Hopefully some of those missing ingredients will be introduced back in over time, but for now we will simply adapt to keep him honest and hopefully more healthy.