Category Archives: Practical Advice

Lentils I Have Known and Loved

lentilsThere has so far been no restrictive diet in our strange, medically-fraught life that did not allow for the consumption of lentils.

Green lentils. Brown lentils. Red lentils. We have eaten our weight in lentils over the course of the last nine years. Lentils in stews, lentils in soups. The sound of dried lentils hitting the bottom of a pot, the bottom of a glass measuring cup, the floor: this is the soundtrack that precipitates the lowering of my shoulders from my ears, the loosening of my jaw from a clench, the finish line of a racing mind. We can always eat lentils. I can always make lentils.

Dairy free, egg free, soy free, nut free, wheat free, vegetarian, reflux-safe, fat free — all these diets accommodate lentils.

There’s nothing more profound in my life than these tiny, life-giving legumes. That sounds silly, but it is true. When all meals sounded strange, lentils were a constant. This compilation of recipes is a love letter to lentils.

HONEY BAKED LENTILS

I found some variation of this recipe on the web many years ago. It is a dump-it-in-the-bowl-and-cook-it easy dinner, provided you can be home for 90 minutes while it cooked. I can hastily prepare the ingredients and throw it all in the oven. Half an hour before it’s done baking, I can make a pot of rice, and dinner is done. In a time when I often had to make the ingredients in order to assemble the recipe for dinner itself, this was a blessing indeed. *Dairy-free *Egg-free *Nut-free *Wheat-free (if you use tamari or coconut aminos not soy sauce) *Soy-free (if you use coconut aminos) *Reflux-safe *Fat-free (if you skip the olive oil)

Ingredients:

1 cup red lentils
2 cups water
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp soysauce or tamari or, on a six-food-elimination-diet, coconut aminos
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp ginger
1 clove garlic
1 small onion
salt & pepper to taste
Optional: add chopped carrots, sweet potato, or squash and just a little more water.

Preparation:
Bake in a covered dish at 350 until tender (about an hour and a half). OR…dump it all in a crockpot on low for 3-5 hours.

TAMARIND LENTILS & CHICKPEAS

I found the basic version of this recipe in Veganomicon, the amazing cookbook by Isa Chandra Moscowitz and Terry Hope Romero. I adapted it so that it would accommodate both a reflux-safe diet (no tomatoes, which is why I substituted pureed pumpkin) and a day when we were low on lentils (the horror!), so I added chickpeas. In an often otherwise-low-fat, low-protein diet, this recipe has lots of both. Unlike the recipe above, this is what my mother often calls a “potchke” recipe — lots of fussing, many pots, kind of time-consuming. It is outrageously delicious. Serve it over basmati rice.
*Dairy-free *Egg-free *Nut-free *Wheat-free (check your garam masala to be sure) *Soy-free *Reflux-safe

Ingredients:
3 tbsp coconut oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ginger
1 large onion, diced
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp cumin
Pinch of cayenne
1/2 cup dried lentils
1/2 cup canned chickpeas
2 cups veg broth
2 tsp tamarind paste (available in most health food or Indian food stores)
1 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp pureed pumpkin (from a can is fine…possibly pureed sweet potato would work too)
1/2 tsp salt

Preparation:
Melt coconut oil in heavy-bottomed pot with a lid. Add garlic and ginger and let sizzle for 30 seconds. Add the onion and fry until translucent and soft. Stir in garam masala, cumin, and cayenne, and stir for another 30 seconds until the spices smell fragrant. Add lentils, chickpeas, and veg broth, increase heat to high, and bring the mixture to a boil. Stir and lower heat to medium-low. Partially cover and simmer for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the lentils have absorbed all the liquid and are very tender. This will be very thick.

In a small cup or bowl, combine tamarind, maple syrup, tomato paste/pumpkin, and salt. Scrape all of this mixture into the lentils and stir completely to dissolve the flavorings. Simmer for another 4-6 minutes and serve immediately.

GREEK LENTIL STEW

This is a staple dish of my whole community now, after my friend Clare began making it for every potluck. It’s cheap, it’s tasty, it’s open to endless variations, and almost anyone can make it. The smell of the bay leaf is a signal to my younger daughter that it’s cooking and also that she can count on several days of it in their lunches. A big batch of basmati rice rounds this out. This recipe initially came from Laurel’s Kitchen, an iconic cookbook.
*Dairy-free *Egg-free *Nut-free *Wheat-free (check your garam masala to be sure) *Soy-free *Reflux-safe (if you omit the tomatoes *Fat-free (if you omit the olive oil)

Ingredients
2 cups dry green/tan lentils
8 cups water
1/2 onion, chopped
1 small carrot, chopped (sometimes I add more because I love them)
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 small potato, chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
2 bay leaves
1 to 2 tsp salt
1 can or about 2 cups chopped tomatoes (omit for a reflux-safe diet)

Preparation:
Put everything except the tomatoes in the pot and cook until the lentils are soft, about an hour. Add the tomatoes for about 3 minutes. Mix, cook for a few minutes more, eat over basmati rice.

Finally, a lentil story:

Once, when I was sick with the flu and strep throat at the same time, a friend showed up at my door, unbidden, with a steaming glass dish of lentil stew. Gratitude is not a powerful enough word for what I felt as I spooned this concoction into my mouth from under a mountain of blankets on my couch. It was sweet but not cloying, savory and soft and tart all at once. I’ve come to associate the taste of it with the feeling of being cared-for without asking. Few people mother the mothers when their own mothers are far away. This dish made me remember the soup I ate as a sick child — not in flavor, but in sentiment and healing properties.

It was the Stewed Lentils & Tomatoes recipe from Smitten Kitchen, who in turn adapted it from The Barefoot Contessa at Home. I have never made it as well as my friend did — but it’s still fantastic. *Dairy-free *Egg-free *Nut-free *Wheat-free *Soy-free *Fat-free (if you omit the olive oil)

Lentils are little tiny round magic-beans to me. Thank you, lentils!

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Practicalities of the Six Food Elimination Diet

snackI never wanted to write a recipe blog.

Now I feel that I have an obligation to share the practical, actionable things I could do to make tolerable the previously-unthinkable diet my daughter had to endure during the summer and early fall of 2010. As I say that, I am assaulted in my mind by the knowledge that right this moment, mothers are at their stoves faced with the dilemna of how to make a meal out of rice, bananas, and apples — not because they didn’t make it to the store or because they’re low on money, but because those are the only foods their child is able to eat without serious illness. Eosinophilic esophagitis can — and sometimes does — rob families of the very basic ingredients of any normal meal.

I write this knowing that to call it hard is to make it relative to a normal diet — and in that case, it really was hard. In relation to a diet with even more restrictions, it was easy. Relative to the fat-free diet Sammi would need to follow four years later, it was also easy. In the moment, however, for us, and for other families managing it after an unrestricted diet, it was daunting. We were given a packet of information from the gastroenterology practice that assumed, for one thing, that we ate meat, which we did not and which Sammi’s doctor did not want us to begin doing, lest we contaminate the experiment of this elimination diet entirely. So we started with the foods she could eat, and quickly learned which of the newly forbidden foods (dairy, egg, soy, nuts, and wheat) we could substitute with analogous items on her “yes” list.

One day, tired of using recipes to make the ingredients I would use in other recipes (imagine a precise blend of flours to make a gluten-free flour blend, or the chemistry experiments I did to make something that would approximate a matzo ball), I threw a handful of finger foods on a platter in the living room and told my kids that it was lunch. Hearts of palm, baby corn, olives, cubed soy-free nut-free gluten-free vegan cheese, dried plaintain, and rice crackers. It bought me an hour before I had to start conjuring dinner out of vegetables and rice, again.

And it was hard.

It was never not-hard.

I didn’t want to write a recipe blog, but it was exceedingly difficult finding recipes that worked without fish, dairy, egg, soy, nuts, and wheat — a diet also known as the “six food elimination diet” because it also forbids fish/shellfish (something we didn’t have to test, since she’d never eaten either of those foods). The best things we discovered during that time were soups and rice & bean dishes, and also the Easy Whole Grain Flatbread (using any flour — we liked it with chickpea flour) by Mark Bittman. You can also find some links to products we could use on my Food That Helped page. We were not thrilled about adding junk foods with artificial flavors and colors to Sammi’s diet, but there was so little we could give her that qualified as a treat — and precious little that didn’t make her feel freakish among her new friends in kindergarten. If a packet of Betty Crocker Fruit Snacks would help, we bought them.

If you have come across this page because your child is on a restricted diet, the steps you need to take to determine whether a packaged product is safe for him/her are:

  1. Check the ingredients. Read them at least twice, checking for derivatives of the off-limits food, too.
  2. Check below the ingredients for a statement about shared equipment and/or facilities with your off-limits item. Sammi was allowed to eat products made in the same facility with her forbidden foods, but not products made on shared equipment with those forbidden foods. Find out what your doctor recommends.
  3. If there is no “shared equipment/shared facility” listing on your product, or if what your child is restricting is not one of the top-eight allergens (wheat, dairy, egg, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, regular fish), call the manufacturer. Most food/beverage companies now have a customer service person dedicated to allergy issues. You need to ask about the production facilities and the content of their “natural flavors” if they list any in their ingredients.

It is an exhausting experience. I got quicker at identifying foods we could use, and I came up with a handful of reasonable meals during that time, but it was nearly a full-time job. The most important meal that we created, with much trial and error, was a replacement for Sammi’s favorite food: macaroni and cheese.

It wasn’t the same, but it was close.

Six-food-elimination-diet people: hang in there.

Macaroni & Cheese, Sort Of

1 lb Tinkyada brand gluten-free noodles
3 cups Pacific brand oat milk
1 small onion, minced
1/2 tsp pepper 1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 bay leaf
4 tbsp Soy-Free Earth Balance margarine
3 tbsp brown rice flour
3 cups Daiya brand shredded cheddar cheese (or two packages Daiya cheddar “wedge”)

Cook the pasta until just before it’s done. Drain quickly. Work fast.

While it’s cooking, melt the soy-free earth balance in a saucepan. Add the brown rice flour and mix well, then slowly add the milk and onions, whisking all the time. Add the bay leaf. Cook until thickened a little — maybe five minutes. Remove the bay leaf. Add the cheese, stirring until melted.

Add the cooked, drained pasta to the cheese sauce in the saucepan and mix together. Pour into a lightly-greased casserole dish and broil for 2-4 minutes, until the top is browned.

 

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Summer Lunch, “Free”

For many mothers of school-aged children, suddenly having to create on-demand, in-the-moment lunches during the summer is a rude awakening after the school year’s relative ease in school-supplied lunch or the mindless morning drop of sandwich/chips/apple/cookie into the lunchbox. Because of the economic diversity of my town, I know that the added complication of having to stop a day in the middle to prepare a meal still pales in complexity to the added stress of not having anything with which to prepare that meal. Some 60% or more of the children in our neighborhood elementary school qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch. When the summer arrives, all of those parents lose a third of their child’s weekday allotment of sustenance.

I am extra aware of the heartbreak of this situation after the summer of my daughter Sammi’s diagnosis of eosinophilic esophagitis. To calm the raging white blood cells in her esophagus, a progressive elimination diet had been prescribed for her. From her already vegetarian diet, we had to remove dairy, soy, egg, nuts, and wheat, and any foods prepared on surfaces that touched those forbidden items. In early July of 2010, I pushed carts through the Whole Foods grocery store, then the local multi-ethnic grocery store, then a smaller health-food store, attempting to put together a palatable and nutritious set of meals for her and us, who would be journeying through it with her so she wouldn’t feel alone.

Here’s how it went: I picked up an item — say, a cracker, labeled “gluten free” and “vegan,” which covered the dairy, egg, and wheat portions of the restrictions. Scanning the ingredient list, I searched for the presence of nuts, quite a common replacement for wheat in many gluten-free products. Finding none, I read even more carefully for soy; since Sammi only had to avoid the protein and not the oil or starch, she could still eat a food that contained soy lecithin or soybean oil. In the first weeks, I would allow myself to get excited if my reading had lasted this long without finding an offender, only to be crushed when, at the end of the ingredient list, I found the poisonous statement that made me shove the box angrily back on the shelf: this product is produced on shared equipment with products containing dairy.

Or nuts.

Or egg.

The first week’s grocery excursions cost us over $400, which bought us such strange things as wide variety of gluten-free flours (chickpea, tapioca, brown rice), hemp milk, rice pasta, coconut yogurt. To their odd and unfamiliar ranks I discovered I could add some common, cheap, everyday items that fit our needs and, when I did, I nearly wept with joy despite their chemical makeup being nothing like our previous diet. Post Fruity Pebbles! Betty Crocker Fruit Snacks! Lays Stax Potato Chips! Even so, the price of the diet was staggering, both in direct cost for ingredients and in the time it me took to shop and cook.

One morning about a week into this overwhelming experiment, I found myself near tears trying to imagine a lunch that would be appetizing for my daughters and a child who ate with us three times a week while her mother was busy. Carefully, I spread sunflower seed butter on thin, dense slices of a strange brown bread that had met our criteria. I added fruit in the shape of a face. I spread potato chips — also fancy and unusual — around the edges.lunch

It was the best I could do. My children, having sat through the difficult conversations and understanding the expectations and the experimentation we’d all have to endure over the coming months, gamely picked up their lunch and gave it an exploratory nibble.

The visiting friend, however, was not nearly so accommodating. “Oh,” she said, looking at the plate with a sneer. “My mom should have told you. I only eat white bread.”

I wish I could write here that I was understanding. I wish I could write that I brought her into the kitchen and made her a PB&J on white bread. Unfortunately, there was no food in my kitchen that wasn’t safe for Sammi. I had spent an hour scheming and hoping to build that strange little plate. I lost my temper with that child, telling her she could eat it or go hungry, leaving my children to manage her disappointment and confusion. I walked out of the room, locked myself in the bathoom, and pressed my head into the tiled wall, panting with anger.

Now, years later, I regret my behavior largely because I realize one of the reasons that parent may have left her with us for the day was that she may have been one of those children left without school lunch — and as a result, perhaps without any lunch — in the summer. I think about our astronomical grocery bills during that phase of the diet and wonder what would happen to the children like her if they’d had Sammi’s diagnosis. What on earth would a parent on a limited income do with orders like the ones we were following? I shudder to think of it.

Sammi’s lunch was dairy-free, egg-free, nut-free, soy-free, and wheat-free, but it sure wasn’t cost-free.

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The Soup

soup & ladleThere were several points in her life when we thought Sammi might end up with a feeding tube — when she couldn’t gain weight after her first cardiac surgery; when she was diagnosed with eosinophilic esophagitis and an unhelpful parent told me that’s what happens eventually to all of those kids; and when eating became such a chore that we thought it might be better than the daily fight to feed her. Expecting it to happen on and off for nine years has made me at least peripherally aware of the vocabulary around tube-feeding — NG tubes go in the nose and down to the stomach, G tubes are surgically installed right into the stomach with a button that opens and closes to insert the tube. It’s one of the reasons why Sammi’s soft, white belly is my favorite place to kiss: I secretly always worried it would end up marred by that button.

But it didn’t. Instead, I became the MacGyver of cooking for every crazy restriction she had, self-imposed or medically required, and a combination of luck and persistence kept her from ever needing a tube. Foods came in and out of her life depending on how she felt and the diagnosis we were managing, but a few choice dishes survived nearly every restriction. The first food I learned to make that she really, really liked was a very simple chickpea soup I adapted from a recipe I found in Vegetarian Times magazine.

It has become such a staple that we call it The Soup or Sammi’s Chickpea Soup. From experience, I can tell you that, aside from the fact that it’s delicious and very cheap to make, it also works for all of the following dietary restrictions:

  • Soft foods only
  • Vegetarian/Vegan
  • GERD diet (no citrus, tomatoes, chocolate, caffeine or alcohol)
  • Dairy free
  • Gluten free & Wheat free
  • Soy free
  • Egg free
  • Nut free

That winter after her first cardiac surgery, with the threat of feeding tube constantly dangling above us, this soup was the savior. I could melt two tablespoons of extra virgin coconut oil into her bowl, adding more than two hundred calories per serving. Sometimes, she ate only this soup and blueberries for days and days on end. I made several batches per week.

This soup made me feel powerful. It was a weapon I could use to fight the ribs I saw sticking out of her back and the shape of her skull so prominent under her thin downy hair. This soup let me do something about what was wrong. I fed it to her spoonful by spoonful until she could hold a spoon herself.

“Swallow, sunshine,” I told her. “It’s your soup!”

This soup is my hero.

Sammi’s Chickpea Soup

adapted from this recipe by Vegetarian Times

1 Tbs. extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 (15-oz.) cans chickpeas, rinsed and drained
2 cups water
2 cups vegetable broth
1 bay leaf
½ cup roughly chopped greens — any greens will do (spinach, chard, parsley, kale)
1 ½ tsp. salt
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice (optional)

Saute the onions and garlic until the onions are translucent. Add all the other ingredients except the lemon juice. Cook uncovered over a medium-high flame for roughly fifteen minutes — until the chickpeas can be mashed against the side of the pot with a fork. Turn off the heat, remove the bay leaf and, using an immersion blender, puree the soup to the consistency you like best. If your diet and palette allows, add the lemon juice and serve.

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