Cooking/eating limitations

[Mabelline]

My difficulty is so off-kilter to everyone else's that I feel a fool. My blood clots. 18 hospital times in 12 years. My diet, along with Coumadin, or Warfarin, determines what I can consume. I cannot take multi-vitamins, because the iron might kill me. I cannot take a calcium supplement. The only pain reliever I can take is a Benadryl. Don't laugh. It does stop a lot of complaints.

Now. Here is the food part. Everything I love and is good for most folks could be deadly for me. If you want to build your blood UP, ask me. I can name you 50 things that will bring up INR and PT. I hate it. I cheat, but I know what'll happen some day. At this point---don't care---but I know it's not fair, but damn, nobody ever wrote me a guarantee on life.

[lovebenton0]

My difficulty is so off-kilter to everyone else's that I feel a fool. My blood clots. 18 hospital times in 12 years. My diet, along with Coumadin, or Warfarin, determines what I can consume. I cannot take multi-vitamins, because the iron might kill me. I cannot take a calcium supplement. The only pain reliever I can take is a Benadryl. Don't laugh. It does stop a lot of complaints.

Now. Here is the food part. Everything I love and is good for most folks could be deadly for me. If you want to build your blood UP, ask me. I can name you 50 things that will bring up INR and PT. I hate it. I cheat, but I know what'll happen some day. At this point---don't care---but I know it's not fair, but damn, nobody ever wrote me a guarantee on life.

I know the feeling there. No multi-vitamins for me either, and I really have to watch not to pack in too much iron, or salt, or cholesterol, or fat. At he same time I am supposed to get in the calcium without the dairy. Of course, no alcohol, ever, and that is one thing I never cheat on; cooking with it is OK, consuming the alcoholic content is a strict "No-No!" As far as food goes, I cheat sometimes, too, what the heck, even my docs tell me I have such a good auto-defense system against doing what is really bad for me that the occasional cheat won't kill me.

I should be finishing up my course work right now, but this is such a good thread, I can't help sticking my nose in here. Please, assault us with questions and comments during the Q&A.

I have to agree with Marlene about the babies and noise advise for mamster. My son learned to sleep through anything. He was always with me in the kitchen when he was a baby, and grew up enjoying that; still a good cook today, to his wife's delight. Still, it is good to have some time/energy constraint food ideas in your back pocket.

[lovebenton0]

The Cooking with Disabilities course is up -- Part One presents today. Parts Two and Three will present over Thursday and Friday.

You can check out the announcement in eGCI or you can go here to begin the course.

Q&A is already up. As usual, the course will be available through the archives once the initial presentation period is past, and the Q&A will continue.

[callalla]

I've just finished a 4 week liver-cleansing/detox diet. It wasn't totally painful, but sugar, processed foods, alcohol, caffeine and meat were 'banned'. One thing that I discovered is that while brown rice is actually really nice, wholewheat pasta is vile. I think that I'll keep eating brown rice at home in fact .

Stand out dishes that I wouldn't otherwise have tried included a great stir fried tofu/asian salad style dish, and a supposedly North African chickpea stew. Also, instead of using butter, I made a spread out of tahini plus lemon juice, a little water (and if in the mood a little bit of soy or chilli sauce, and/or grated ginger), which was a big hit (with my non-detoxing husband too)

For premium snacking, dried fruit and nuts were the order of the day. I'd forgotten how good they are.

It was really interesting to see how one's palate adjusted to flavours that were often more simple and how foods that I'd previously considered quite plain (bread/rice/vegetables) tasted fab (that might also have been down to eating more organic stuff).

Anyway, my four weeks was up last weekend and although I did have a bit of a bacon and beer fest then, I'll be sticking to a lot of what I did and exploring lots more vegetarian food.

[ingridsf]

I've just finished a 4 week liver-cleansing/detox diet. It wasn't totally painful, but sugar, processed foods, alcohol, caffeine and meat were 'banned'. One thing that I discovered is that while brown rice is actually really nice, wholewheat pasta is vile. I think that I'll keep eating brown rice at home in fact .

Stand out dishes that I wouldn't otherwise have tried included a great stir fried tofu/asian salad style dish, and a supposedly North African chickpea stew. Also, instead of using butter, I made a spread out of tahini plus lemon juice, a little water (and if in the mood a little bit of soy or chilli sauce, and/or grated ginger), which was a big hit (with my non-detoxing husband too)

For premium snacking, dried fruit and nuts were the order of the day. I'd forgotten how good they are.

It was really interesting to see how one's palate adjusted to flavours that were often more simple and how foods that I'd previously considered quite plain (bread/rice/vegetables) tasted fab (that might also have been down to eating more organic stuff).

Anyway, my four weeks was up last weekend and although I did have a bit of a bacon and beer fest then, I'll be sticking to a lot of what I did and exploring lots more vegetarian food.

It really is interesting, how a food I think of as fairly dull can suddenly become utterly fascinating. I had a Potato Epiphany in a bar called The Apache that served food in Hamburg. I was there with my dad back in 1988. We were drinking beer and eating steaks (damn good ones, too) and baked potatoes. This potato was somehow more than a potato, and no, it had nothing to do with the higher alcohol content of the beer. The potato had plenty of butter and a little parsley, very nice but it didn't explain the subtle floral flavor or just that, unlike previous potatoes, it had any noticable flavor at all.

It remained a mystery until 1997 when, over dinner at home here in San Francisco with my partner, I tasted the potatoes we had just bought at the farmers' market, and WHOOSH back to The Apache. Organic potatoes, you see. The Apache was slinging organic spuds, that was what it was.

Sacred simplicity, I think they call it.

And everybody, do check out the EGCI course in progress, Cooking with Disabilities. It's great!

Ingrid

[cansel]

Well, I am amazing myself with the kind of creativity I can dredge out to liven up those skinless, boneless chickie breasts and egg whites! So much so that my co-workers actually envy me my Spartan food, and lean over my desk at Feeding Time to ask what I'm eating "that smells so good."

I would like to have some of those recipes! My nutritionist has me eating lean protien, lots of it, lots of veggies, and beans. The only limitations I really have food wise is no type of sweetener, fruit or fruit juice.

Time and money are my main limits. I like things like prime rib, and T-bone steak, shrimp, scallops, but I stick with lean hamburger meat and chicken breasts mainly.

[Toliver]

My difficulty is so off-kilter to everyone else's that I feel a fool. My blood clots. 18 hospital times in 12 years. My diet, along with Coumadin, or Warfarin, determines what I can consume. I cannot take multi-vitamins, because the iron might kill me. I cannot take a calcium supplement. The only pain reliever I can take is a Benadryl. Don't laugh. It does stop a lot of complaints.

My mom has a similar clotting problem. She has to be told by the Coumadin clinic at her hospital when she can eat dark green veggies or when to stay away from them based upon her blood work. Vitamin K, I believe, is one of the culprits.

She really misses her spinach salads!

My difficulty is time & self-worth. As it's been previously posted, during the week I just don't have the time to whip up something. And then I also think, "Well, it's just me...why bother." I do try to make a lot of something on the weekend that will carry over into the week. But there are still days where I have to force myself make something that's good and good for me instead of just nuking something that's not.

[NulloModo]

An eating restriction is actually what made me decide to learn how to cook, and what brought me to e-gullet.

Up until last september I couldn't cook a thing, I would nuke frozen dinners, order in, eat out, or maybe just maybe toss something prepared but frozen into a skillet and heat it up to eat. This resulted in me growing from an already fairly large size to nearly 400 lbs, clearly, something had to be done.

I bit the bullet and jumped onto the Atkins plan, and now, 8 months later and 170 lbs gone so far, I have gone back to talk to my parents to have them teach me recipes they knew and that I had always loved, bought and started to work my way through 'How To Cook EVerything', started to work my way through the green leafy produce section at the grocery store, realized that the produce at my grocery store was utter shit, and started to work my way through the produce at the local farmer's market. I have been reading every recipe I can find, and cooking something brand new virtually every night. I am learning what various spices taste like, that I can actually make something that tastes better than what I can get at Friday's, and that cooking is fun!

I don't see the severe carb restriction as a roadblock, but instead as a starting point. When composing anything, whether it be a meal, a piece of music, a photograph, whatever, it is 100x easier to get things started if you have some guidelines. Since I will eventually be able to add whole grains and even sugar and flour back into my diet in moderation, I know that I will eventually tackle the joys and challenges of traditional baking. For the time being I have having tons of fun with savory dishes, and also learning how to make some pretty decent low-carb baked goods by balancing soy flours, protein isolates, whey proteins and extracts, nut flours, seeds, and other such random ingredients. I also think it is fun that I am learning about all of this pretty much as it is drafted, low-carb baking being such as new practice and all.

So for me, if it wasn't for a restriction (albeit self-imposed) I would have most likely never discovered the joy of cooking in general.

[JPW]

170! Wow! That's great! Congratulations.

Some moderate hypertension caused me to rethink my junk food habit. As a result I gave up all fast food. With adding only a little more cardio to my weightlifting and being more careful in what I eat in general, I have gone from 210 to 193 since mid-January.

A few weeks ago, I caved and had an order of McDonald's fries. It was like starchy crack. It felt so good going down. But after about 30 minutes I thought I was going to retch.

[cansel]

I bit the bullet and jumped onto the Atkins plan, and now, 8 months later and 170 lbs gone so far, ...

...I am learning what various spices taste like, that I can actually make something that tastes better than what I can get at Friday's, and that cooking is fun!

I don't see the severe carb restriction as a roadblock, but instead as a starting point. 

So for me, if it wasn't for a restriction (albeit self-imposed) I would have most likely never discovered the joy of cooking in general.

Impressive! Thank you for sharing your story!

[foodie52]

I never used to cook with brown rice: I've been using it now pretty much exclusively (except, of course if I'm doing anything ethnic that required white rice). I've found that as I've gotten older, TEXTURE has become more important to me, in fact, just as important as flavor in my foods. I've developed a love of chewy foods! Brown rice satisfies that requirement more than white. I've also substituted whole wheat pasta only when I plan on eating it plainly, say, simply sauteed in a little olive oil and garlic. I use either the shapes or the flat noodles because they don't clump as much as the spaghetti.

[chromedome]

Fascinating thread. So many topics touched on, I'm in severe auto-distraction mode just reading it.

Personally, I have no real limitations on my eating except the financial. I'd love to play around with a ton of different things that I just can't afford. Oh well, we'll see what a few more months of slaving at two jobs does for the ol' budget.

However, having said that...

My wife has numerous non-life-threatening-but-damn-they're-irritating health issues. She's relatively healthy since surgery a few years ago, but for a stretch of five or six years my major cooking constraint was meeting her needs for caloric intake.

Here's the way the scenario stacked up...

Her metabolism (I won't get into the whys and wherefores) was in overdrive. She needed to eat six real meals every day just to maintain a minimal healthy body weight. If she missed even one meal, there was a strong likelihood that she would suddenly turn white as a sheet and need to sit down *NOW!* The obvious solution, feeding her high-fat high-calory foods, was out because her gall bladder would have a fit. She couldn't take supplements, because her gimpy kidneys would have a fit. Cool, huh?

Now add in a few spousal food allergies (spinach, for example) and the usual kaleidoscope of kid likes and dislikes, and it's an interesting scenario to work with. Oh, and this took place during the years when our financial situation was going to hell, so I had to do it all on a very minimal budget.

It taught me to be very creative.