Hi! I’ve bee quiet, I know. I should start posting smaller posts as they come to mind, methinks.
Anyhoo, I had a craving for custardy, gooey, amazing profiteroles today and found a gluten-free recipe for them. I need to make them. I need to make them now.
I am tres excited this morning due to two exciting pieces of info:
1) I’ve received a verbal offer for a new job (which explains why I’ve been a bit quiet the last two weeks)
2) I’ve discovered that it is possible to quite easily make my own lactose-free cream cheese
My dream of a completely FODMAP friendly cheesecake can now be achieved!
I’ll have to combine two different recipes. The first one is for making your own yoghurt (I’ll just use lactose free milk), which was posted on The Stone Soup last week. The other was posted by Sarah Wilson this morning, and is basically just some pretty easily instructions on how to make your own cream cheese from yoghurt. Seems pretty logical, yeah?
Will need to source the equipment first (thermometer, esky, starter culture, muslin) and will then give it a go. Shall post results once I have them. If anybody else gets in before me, god speed!
I was having a look at my calendar yesterday and realised Mother’s Day was only 2 months away. Usually I’ll either go back to Newcastle for the weekend and go to a family members place for lunch, or Mum will catch the train to Sydney and we’ll go out somewhere nice. This year, either of those options are going to be near-impossible, unless I want to “just have the salad”.
What better way to make sure I can eat all the tasty things than to cook everything myself? I personally don’t feel comfortable burdening anyone with having to cook things to my strict dietary requirements. Plus, considering how long it took me to get the hang of what I can/can’t eat, what flavours work well, how to use the limitation to my best advantage, etc. I know I can cook amazing, tasty food that the regular person wouldn’t realise is gluten free, lactose free and fructose friendly!
So I started drafting up a menu in my head. A roast chicken is a given, I think. I especially like the idea of the Boneless Roast Chicken featured over at LowFODMAP.com, which is actually a Christmas recipe, but could certainly be used year-round. I’m also really keen to learn how to de-bone a chicken. Bless you, YouTube!
In addition to the chicken, I was thinking something easy to chuck in the Le Creuset and bake. Top of the list would be an oven-baked risotto, with pumpkin, baby spinach and maybe some bacon (ha, certainly no vegetarians in my family).
Sides, easy! A greek salad is simple and fresh, and so easy to make FODMAP free – just leave out the onion! Jane Kennedy has some fantastic ideas for side dishes in both of her books. One is roasted carrots cut long on the diagonal, tossed with parsley and feta (had to omit the garlic, sigh). Another is green beans with butter and toasted almonds.
Dessert, I simply can’t go past cheesecake. A baked lemon cheesecake to be exact (just swap the biscuit base to gluten-free biscuits). This would be the only part that isn’t completely FODMAP free – there is simply no comparison with proper, real cream cheese. (The tofutti stuff can be used for small things, sure, but there’s no way I’d use it for a whole cheesecake.) And if I only limit myself to one small slice with lactose-free ice cream, I should be symptom free. Hopefully.
For snacks pre-meal and post-meal, I’d make a batch of garlic-free basil pesto and serve it with rice crackers. Plus a cheese plate with olives and prosciutto would also go down quite well.
What would you do for a Mother’s Day Low FODMAP lunch?
So seeing as low FODMAP is still quite a new concept, there is of course a whole lot of conflicting info out there. For instance, it seems every Dietician I’ve come across is using a different reference list. As such, now I’ve begun to wonder if some of the foods I’ve been avoiding could possibly be okay. Or vice versa.
For instance, some foods I’ve seen in both ‘no no’ and ‘allowed’ lists include:
Now, tofu and beer I’ve cleared. Some lovely person on the IBS forums confirmed that the fermenting process removes the sugars, therefore removes the FODMAPs. Kate Scarlata also cleared this up too. So, yay.
Broccoli I’ve eaten the last two nights and haven’t noticed any difference. So, double yay.
Coconut milk and cream, I assumed they contained lactose. But from my Googling, it seems the lactose is only found in mammal milk. BUT, coconut flesh does contain fructose, approx 0.5g per 100g. So, bugger all. Not sure what the ratio of fructose:glucose is, but I think this one is gonna go in the ‘test individual tolerance’ list, like the green part of spring onions. Coconut is a pretty big staple in the paleo diet for its natural sweetness, so I’ve found a tonne of coconut related recipes in the last few weeks browsing paleo related blogs. Time to experiment!
(Also, I cheated a bit today and had a super tasty Spicy Beef Laksa from Happy Chef in Chinatown. Main ingredient coconut milk! The only difference I’ve noticed since has been a bit of extra gassiness, but quite minor. So I’m adding it to my ‘sometimes’ foods. This particular Laksa was so effing amazing that it is ENTIRELY worth it.)
Pumpkin, I mainly found as a ‘no no’ food on American based lists. I enquired with Kate Scarlata, and she informed me that butternut pumpkin should be limited to half a cup. But our regular pumpkins (kent and jap) are fine. US style big, orange pumpkins are a mannitol source, so should be avoided.
Sweet potato, I’ve heard some whispers on the IBS forums about new research showing that my dear, beloved sweet potato could now be a problem food. I haven’t heard any official word from Monash yet, but FODMAP’ers should be cautious. I’ve personally never had a noticeable reaction from sweet P.
If anyone else has any further info on any of the above stuff I’ve blathered about, feel free to comment! Full disclaimer: I’ve had a few glasses of wine tonight.
Edit: fixed up a few references that I forgot last night! Damn you, wine.
Apologies this has taken me so long to post! I made these over a week ago and I was pretty pleased with the result. I’ve adapted a regular cupcake recipe from a book called 500 Cupcakes; it was actually one of my favourite recipes from the whole book and I made it quite a few times in my pre-IBS days.
Ingredients (made 19 cupcakes):
(Fake) Cream Cheese Frosting:
Preheat oven to 175 degree celsius. Using 2 cupcakes trays, line 19 holes with cupcake liners (protip: Etsy has an amazing and unique array of these!).
Have two decent sized mixing bowls ready and a fine sifter. Combine rice flour, corn flour and potato flour in one of the bowls. To replicate regular baking, you’ll need to make sure these flours are super, super fine. Best way to do this? Sift them! Three freakin’ times! Woo!
Oh, and don’t wear black jeans when you do this.
Combine all of the other cupcake ingredients together. Add in the sifted flours into a mixer bowel and beat on a low speed until all ingredients are combined.
Spoon the mixture into the cases until ⅔ full – don’t over pack them because they will rise considerably! Bake for 20 mins.
Now, making the icing personally kinda killed a little piece of me. I am a HUGE fan of cream cheese frosting. I never use any other kind of frosting on cupcakes. Ever. I’ve made a peanut butter version for Peanut Butter and Chocolate cupcakes ffs (which, coincidentally, will be the next type of cupcake I’m going to try to adapt!). So, you can imagine my trepidation at this hippy shit:
For some reason a quote by an old friend sprang to mind: “You know what tastes better than tofu? The things you’re trying to make it taste like.”
To make icing, combine tofutti and icing sugar, sifting it first. Oh, and if you’re a spaz like me, make sure you break up the icing sugar as much as possible BEFORE attempting to sift it. Otherwise it takes a while.
Beat until smooth and creamy. Fold in the walnuts. Smear onto cooled cupcakes.
If I did it again, I would definitely add more icing sugar to the mix until the consistency is a bit more solid. While they chilled fine, the icing was a bit too liquidy for my taste. I may or may not have described the icing as jizz-like in it’s current state…
I was looking through the #FODMAP hashtag on Twitter last weekend and found someone who has developed a simple Android app which lists foods and their low FODMAP diet suitability. It’s FREE, so if you’ve just started on the low FODMAP diet and need a quick pocket reference guide, this is a handy tool. It has an easy to use UI and a simple search feature. It’s a great base, but it really does have the potential to be an AMAZING app. If only they extended the food list a bit, as the current list is quite Americanised. Plus the list itself is quite jumbled… Some items are ‘meals’ (e.g. french toast) whereas others are individual food items (e.g. eggs). This needs a bit of streamlining imo. Seriously, if the developer dude had an XML file somewhere with the complete food list, I’d be more than happy to maintain it for him…
For those on the iPhone, I found the Food Intolerances app which is actually look pretty nifty. I like the food breakdown information. I haven’t used the app, so no idea what it’s actually like. Any iPhone users out there who have it?
This was a pretty random find! We were walking home from breakfast at Hangry, and my friend spotted a sign in the window of a patisserie that said “Gluten Free Cakes”. To be honest, my eyes usually glaze over these days when I go past a bakery or patisserie, as I know I can’t eat any of the things, and it can be quite heartbreaking, especially if there are almond croissants in the window… So, of course, I had to go check it out.
Zest Patisserie features a pretty extensive cake menu, and a very decent selection of them are gluten free. If we’re going to delve even deeper and look for items that are completely low FODMAP friendly, the list gets a lil bit smaller as all the cheesecakes and uber chocolatey cakes get crossed off. Sad face! However, if you planned it well and only limited yourself to one very small slice, you could easily get away with a bit of lactose if you know your gut can handle it.
The cakes that are low FODMAP friendly include:
* double check the lactose content
The prices for medium size cakes is $37.50 and large cakes are $48. I know where I’ll be getting my birthday cake from!
Zest also have a nice range of mini desserts and muffins. The gluten free range included banana muffins, mint choc dessert and a pina colada dessert. I opted for a caramel and nut muffin and it was DIVINE.
Note: I spied two pistacios within the nut topping, so watch out!
This morning I very unexpectedly had the best low FODMAP breakfast I’ve eaten so far at a little cafe in Balmain/Rozelle called Hangry.
Their menu has a bit of a Middle Eastern slant – breakfast tagines, dukkah crusted items, falafel, etc. I was actually expecting to just order some kind of regular breakfast fare, and ask for it without bread. Lo and behold I see the Vegetarian Breakfast on their specials menu. Instead of bread, it was on some baked olive polenta – win! It included poached eggs with dukkah, sautéed spinach, roasted tomatoes, mushrooms, feta and pesto oil. I opted to swap out the mushrooms for some bacon.
Look at it! I can eat all of it! (Sorry for the crap Android quality photo – I wasn’t expecting to be doing a cafe review this morning!)
I was quite impressed with the fact they changed up the presentation to stack the bacon with the rest of the meal, rather than just chucking it on the side like a lot of places would do. The only thing you can’t see is the polenta at the bottom of the stack. I was actually in two minds about that – when I have baked polenta, I much prefer it crispy/crunchy, sort of like a giant beer-battered chip. Because this was on the bottom of the stack, it was more on the soggy side.
Other than that small criticism though, it was perfect. The eggs with the dukkah were a fantastic combo (note: dukkah is made using pistacios which are a no-no food, so it should be eaten in moderation – I’ve actually made my own version of dukkah before using almonds, sesame seeds, peanuts and cashews – really great as a crust on a lamb fillet – I should make it again and do a post about it – ANYHOO). I’m a massive sucker for tomatoes, feta and pesto together. The bacon was cooked perfectly – I’m a fan of crispy bacon, and the strips were all crispy.
I wish I had taken a photo of the menu, as their website is currently under construction, and I can’t remember if any of the other items were completely low FODMAP friendly. I’m pretty sure most items were served with ‘crusty bread’, so perhaps you could make a special request to swap it with the baked polenta. Although considering the polenta was part of the ‘specials’ menu, this may not be possible. Hey, Hangry, if you read this, make the Vegetarian Breakfast Special a permanent menu item!
Will definitely return if I’m in the area again. From the other reviews on Urbanspoon, it seems they cater to lots of different diets – gluten free, vegan, vego, etc.
I got glutoned and/or lactosed! 
And it wasn’t even accidental. It was completely self-inflicted and I GREATLY underestimated the effect it would have on me.
I’d heard that once you go off the food that you’re intolerant to your reaction is much more severe if you do eat it again. Absolutely 100% correct.
It was Valentines Day. I was hanging out with a friend. I decided to treat myself and have a cheat night, which I’ve done before, but hadn’t indulged in no-no food to this degree. For dinner, pizza. The proper Italian kind, from Rosso Pomodoro in Balmain. Plus Reece’s Pieces for dessert.
The reaction? Being woken up at 2am with stomach cramps to rival your worst period. Running half asleep to the loo and staying there for a while. Followed by bloating and clogged up guts for the next 2 days (and counting).
Was it worth it?
No.
This is an AMAZING article about why gluten intolerances (and food intolerances in general imo) have been on the rise, by Sarah Wilson.
It was in response to Mia Freedman’s sceptical article questioning why everyone is suddenly intolerant to everything. Luckily she’s pointed out that she isn’t targeting the people who are genuinely intolerance/allergic to certain foods (after seeing an actual Doctor/Dietician), but it’s a double-edged sword when these types of articles are given attention in the media. The Today Tonight watching Mother’s then assume anyone who says they are intolerant is just being a big cry baby.
Both decent articles and worth a read.