Cooking has always been about experimenting for me. Going by the recipe is fine for somethings, like candy making or if I know I enjoy this person's particular formulation of the dish, but by and large I like to tweak recipes. Non-baking recipes I'll usually just make up as I go along. Baking recipes are more chemistry dependant and therefore harder to do on the fly.
Lately though, I feel like I am having to reinvent the wheel, knowing what a wheel looks like but having to make it with very limited and somewhat unsuitable materials. It's exhausting trying to do that for every dinner.
Lately I've been having PCOS flare ups, partly just because and partly because there has been some stress in my life, so I've had to switch back to a stricter low-carb/low-GI diet. This would be annoying but par for the course, if we hadn't started a gluten-free diet for DH. He's had 'stomach problems' all his life, which I have been trying to solve for the 3 years we've been married and I've been in charge of procuring his food. Gluten-free was the last on a long list of things we've tried, and so far seems to be the most successful. We'll look into having proper testing done at some point, but since he just took a new job in a new city, the timing is not right for finding a specialist in our current area.
So in short, I am facing the challenge of cooking both low-carb/low-GI (LCLGI) and gluten-free. Lots of LCLGI food is gluten-free because if you aren't using any grain-flours you aren't going to be including gluten. It's also rarely recognizable as analogous to its carb-loaded counterparts, and to a certain extent just requires recognizing that there is no substitute for pasta or bread. Gluten-free foods, of which there are TONS on the market right now all nicely labeled, are rarely LCLGI because they are made with rice starch, tapioca starch, potato starch, etc. Pretty much everything I can't eat. Thus I am faced with the choice to make two different dinners, or to try and find food that lies in the overlap that we both find palatable.
Of course, some things don't really change. Meat is gluten-free and low-carb. Vegetables, pace potatoes, ditto. But there is something so fundamental to having some kind of starchy thing, and that's mostly where the problem lies. DH can have rice, but I can't. There are both low-GI and gluten-free pastas on the market, but of course they occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. I can have rye or spelt bread in small amounts, but he can't. I can make risotto with rice for him and risotto with barley for me, but that seems absurd. The best LCLGI and gluten-free recipes feature coconut flour, which has a noticeable taste for me that I don't always want. Most of the recipes I've come up with use almond flour which is unavoidably gritty, or oat flour which is gritty and whole-wheat tasting unless you really work to hide it.
Cookbooks are typically one or the other, and if they are both they are typically one of the crazier diet fads, like paleo. While that is the closest to what we are eating, I just can't say we are going paleo. The whole diet is based on bad or non-existent science, cheese is something I rely on, and I can't get over the absurdity whenever I see a paleo recipe call for things bananas or brussel sprouts. Those yellow bananas you get in the grocery store have existed for less than 200 years, and look nothing like a paleolithic banana. Brussel sprouts only popped into existence in the 1300s. Coconut flour also did not exist in paleolithic times.
In short, food posts are probably going to be a little less "here's a recipe I made up last week" and more musing on what works and doesn't work as I try to reformulate, replace and otherwise revamp my repertoire of foods in the coming months. A journaling of success and failures so I hopefully don't have to repeat the latter too often. Also most likely they will be shorter interludes as I work on my Basic Physics series. And if you happen to follow me on Twitter (@PhysicsGal1701), now you know what all the food posting is about.
Cheers!
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