Category Archives: Food

Quad Cities Paleo

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I finally went back to Iowa to visit the family and was pretty worried about the food situation.   In advance I had ordered some staples on Amazon and had them shipped out – ghee, coconut oil, matcha, coconut milk, … and I figured that the fall-back plan was to drive to Iowa City to visit the Whole Foods there and load up on meats.   Boy was I in for a pleasant surprise.

The local Hy-Vee grocery chain has a huge Health Food section complete with a dietician on staff and a notebook full of their Gluten-Free products.  That section had things like Julian’s Paleo Bread, GT’s Kombucha, local farm-raised eggs, Bubbies kraut & pickles, uncured bacon, good dark chocolate and a host of GF products I’d never go near anyway.   Still, impressive, almost as good as PCC.  A huge organic produce section rounded this out, no problems getting good broccoli, chard, berries, bananas, avocados and sweet potatoes.

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Portland Paleo II

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I just cannot stay away from Portland, it is the only town where I can go out and eat without any worry about my crazy diet.   This last weekend I was down for the SIBO Symposium with my doctor and some SIBO friends and got to check out a new restaurant and a few old favorites from our last visit.

Departure Re-dux

IMG_6985On Friday night three of us walked downtown to go to Departure since it was a beautiful day and sitting out on the terrace just seemed like the thing to do. It was either that or go wait in line at Ox and hope we got in before we starved.    We ordered a LOT of food, tables full of food.  We ate for 2 hours non-stop.  It was great.  I think, if I remember correctly we ended up ordering:

 

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Portland Paleo

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IMG_6817Another great trip to Portland full of incredible Paleo food yet again.  This place amazes me, it is the only city I feel totally comfortable traveling to without worrying about what I can or can’t eat, it beats Seattle hands down for food options.   In February we ate at The Imperial, the restaurant of Top Chef 3rd place finisher Doug Adams, which was one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten and at Cultured Caveman which was good old Paleo comfort food.  This time we added a few other places to our list.

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Nightshades revisited

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Nightshades1After my food allergy test I decide to start adding back in a few new foods to se what happened and in my last post mentioned I was adding in nightshades.  Last week I had some eggplant, that seemed OK.  On Sunday I had Venison Chili which was AWESOME.  I had another bowl of the chili last night to finish it off.  The results – today my weird arm symptoms and general brain fog are back with a vengeance.   My upper arms feel like I just did about 100 push-ups, like they did months ago before I bit the bullet and went AIP.   My head just is not all there and I haven’t experienced this for months on AIP either.    So, I think the answer to the question on the tomatoes is Not to Eat for me.

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Food Allegies

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A few weeks ago I did a huge food allergy test, the Cyrex Panel #10, to see what I was really allergic/reacting to.  Originally I had planned to do Panel #4 for gluten cross-reactivity but didn’t want to have to eat some gluten-free bread to challenge my system first so Dr. Keller recommended this test instead plus it covers way more foods than the cross-reactivity test.  I cared most about a few foods – eggs, coffee, chocolate and rice, all of which are on the cross-reactive test too but also nightshades and some other things that were also covered on the Panel #10.   I had been trying to test some of these foods using the Bulletproof FoodDetective app on my iPhone but results seemed kind of inconclusive using the heart rate change test.

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Fat tea is so freaking good

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Matcha/Ginger Butter Tea

Matcha/Ginger Butter Tea

In an attempt to stop the SIBO caused weight loss I’ve been experiencing I had to add more fat to my diet since I can’t really add in carbs that give me extra calories and one can only eat so much protein per day.   I was adding ghee to all the vegetables I was eating plus cooking with it and coconut oil but it still wasn’t doing the trick.  Enter my new secret weapon that I hope is going to work – the centuries old butter tea.

This is not quite the traditional Tibetan Yak Butter tea but is kind of close.   The recipe started out as Bulletproof Coffee and I was introduced to it by a friend last week.  I’ve been off coffee now for 5 months (I know it is a crime) and wasn’t ready to go back so I decided to just try it with the ginger tea I’ve been doing lately.    A few days ago I added some green tea to the mix and this morning made it with matcha, pretty amazing.  I now don’t think I’ll ever be able to drink plain old tea again, it will just taste like flavored water.  Plus,  I get about 165-200 calories of good quality fat per cup of tea.  I drink about 3 of these a day (minus the actual tea later in the day) which gives me an extra 500-600 calories per day without having to try and eat any more food in.   So far I’ve only had one weigh in but got back above 150 so I’m hoping it is doing the trick for me.

Here’s the recipe:

1/4-1/3 c. ginger concentrate, made by blending ginger & some bit of water into juice
1-1.5 t. matcha tea powder
1 T. coconut oil
1-2 t. ghee or butter (I use Ancient Organics grass fed ghee)
Boiling water

Put the ginger in a measuring cup, add in matcha, coconut oil and ghee.  Pour boiling water over top.  Mix in a blender or with an immersion blender which is what I use.  Strain into a mug to get rid of the ginger fiber and enjoy.

 

 

Eating Locally in the Snoqualmie Valley

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Dog Mountain Farm to Table

Dog Mountain Farm to Table Store sign

One thing I hadn’t expected when moving out to Fall City was how much it would impact my food choices.  After coming down with SIBO and having to drastically switch my diet I felt I was doing pretty well shopping at Whole Foods for most of my food.  After the move Whole Foods became a fairly serious trip into “town” so I started looking closer to home for my food.   PCC in Issaquah is now the real grocery we shop at and they carry way more local produce and meats than Whole Foods did.  I mainly buy my few packaged foods and bulk foods there as well as some local pork until my pig is ready for slaughter this fall.

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Blood on my mala

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YIMG_4434ears ago I took the Buddhist precepts with the Kwan Um School of Zen and the first precept was pretty clear –

I vow to abstain from taking life.

The commentary on this precept states that:

Killing roots out our seeds of love and mercy.  To kill another is to feast on one’s  friends and relatives.  Some day we shall be in one of the three painful realms in payment for our killing, for it is by bestowing life that we receive human life in return.

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Adventures in acupuncture and real food

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NeedlesBellyIt has been two months since I started seeing Dr. Bowen at Bothell Natural Health and got serious about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, SCD.   I was on pretty much a ground meat and baby food diet for over a month but finally in the last few weeks have graduated to somewhere between Phase 2 and 3 of SCD and am eating quite a bit more food and actual real meals.  Is it all SCD or is it also acupuncture?

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The joys of gelatin

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gelatinIt had been probably 35 years since I had eaten Jello until I had to get on SCD Intro and gelatin was one of the few legal foods.   Since that time I’ve eaten a LOT of homemade jello using organic grape juice and grass fed Great Lakes Gelatin.    I usually eat two servings per day of it as a desert or snack.  Initially I just assumed the jello was added to give you a decent snack but I’ve since learned that gelatin is a key part of the healing effect of SCD.   While the GAPS diet uses lots of bone broth, SCD relies on jello for the same basic effect.

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