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recipe help post :3

a few friends have offered to help with suggestions for new meals/recipes I can eat, given that i have a relatively bonkers medically restricted diet and also very little ability to physically do the prep/cooking part, and because of the physical disability part NOT a lot of excess anything for recipe dev. I've always said no thank you because the limitations are really quite intense, but I've got people offering to help and I really appreciate it, so here's a post with what we're working with, BUT fair enough if you read it and can't come up with anything bc same :P There's multiple medical things contributing to this, i don't think it's worth separating them into conditions because whatever the cause i can't eat them right now. BEWARE this is a post about medical food limitations so if dietary restrictions are tough for you that's what this whole thing is, there's a read more so you can scroll past.

OKAY (: Things I can eat - cooked apples, bananas, peaches. very likely some other fruits once cooked (plums bc they're also stonefruit, pears, berries maybe), unlikely to tolerate citrus or anything acidic BUT maybe i can try in small quantities - cooked bell peppers, carrots, courgette, aubergine, sweet potato, regular potato (including wheat free gnocci), celery, spinach, butternut squash (so maybe other types of squash too), small amounts of tomato - cooked basil (pesto), 'herbs de provence', paprika, small amounts of garlic, salt, ginger - wheat free flour/bread, etc - chicken, pork (not ham, unlikely bacon), turkey - special vegetable stock that doesn't have onions in - eggs but only when they're secret :P (that's a texture/taste one. RIP because they look SO GOOD and i even learned to poach eggs due to they look so delicious but i cannot stomach them)(so no poached/boiled/scrambled/omelette, but i include them in e.g. cake, pancake, etc) - small amounts of lactose free cheese (cheddar, edam, parmesan) (i don't like strong cheeses also, separate from the lactose stuff) - OATS and oat milk (might also be able to eat yoghurt made with oat milk if that exists?? but haven't tried it and idk if it contains other stuff i can't eat for that reason) - rice - hazelnuts, pistachios - dairy free spread (i use an olive based one) - cocoa - sugars Things I can't eat - any plants that are not thoroughly cooked. including fruits, vegetables, and dried fruits, olives, literally plants. I can eat them once they are thoroughly cooked, *IF* they are not in another category that I can't have. Except I don't like olives, or asparagus. I miss salad so so so so so so extremely much. and smoothies. rip. - the skins of vegetables. they all need peeling right now including potatoes. - regular dairy - peanuts - haven't tried other nuts that aren't hazelnuts since my allergy stuff started - wheat - acidic things (citrus, vinegar, etc) - tomatoes are a recently reintroduced exception if i eat them cooked and in very small amounts - onions including salad onions/leeks etc. some people can tolerate veryyyyyy caramelised onions but given my energy restrictions i haven't made them yet to try - spices, including chillies and black and white pepper, mustard - beef, processed meats unless the 'process' is just minced raw, lamb - shellfish, fishy fish (that one's a flavour thing) - brassicas (broc, cauliflower, kale, etc) - legumes (beans, lentils, chickpeas) - avocado - mayo - mushrooms (that's a flavour/texture thing too) - because of my acid/onion/spices thing, i haven't found a pre-made sauce that i can eat e.g. ketchup, worcestershire, etc. bare in mind sauces also have to be wheat free. #nosaucewoe - a lot of plant based proteins are made of the stuff that doesn't work for me. if it's something with a few ingredients, there's potential for re-introduction, but the more ingredients there are, the harder it is to isolate which one(s) are causing the issue - alcohol Things I can possibly reintroduce, but i need to have a moment in life when i can accomodate the potential to get extra sick from food so probably better not to be the focus of a recipe because i'm extremely not there rn - small amounts of coconut milk, maybe. would love to eat this one actually.... again though, probably not good as a base, but potential as an addition - white fish - cooked sweetcorn in small amounts - cooked peas in very small amounts - mighttttt be able to tolerate some kind of legumes very well prepared (something about soaking for one trillion years? canned vs dried? but bc they trigger my symptoms, like with the caramelised onions i haven't invested the time/research into long recipe that might make me ill) - haven't really investigated beetroot and radishes so probably not a good base but potentially as an additional ingredient if they're used that way

NOW THE PHYSICAL LIMITS the real kicker. I can't really stand up a lot, or do a lot of activities at once. 10 minutes solid is a VERY long time for me to do something continuously. making cheese sauce takes about 10 minutes and is a marathon meal that i sometimes can't even manage because it needs active attention for all that time. I can't sit down while actively cooking or supervising something on the hob because of my joint stuff/kitchen layout, yes even with a swivel stool and I know this advice is well intended. Most meals are made very simply, with ingredients that I chop and freeze days in advance, and the cooking step is mostly heating. to illustrate, MEAL EXAMPLES - bell peppers and pork steak with a tiny bit of garlic cooked in the airfryer, with rice. no sauce or anything, just salted and the garlic (I chop and freeze the peppers and pork days in advance, so the cooking is just putting in airfryer and making rice) - bell peppers, carrots, sweet potato, regular potato, and chicken cooked in the airfryer. again no sauce, just salted (again, bell peppers and chicken chopped and frozen in advance, this is a higher effort meal bc i parboil the potatoes and carrots before airfrying to make sure they're thoroughly cooked for my allergies) - i make a bell pepper and tomato pasta sauce (p much just those ingredients, and salt), with gf pasta and grated cheddar. making the sauce is something i have to do across days usually, one to do the washing and chopping peppers (with breaks to lay down in between), one to roast the peppers and then cook with passata because the going backwards and forwards monitoring the cooking is very energetically taxing) - gf pasta with cooked pesto (SHOUTOUT TO PREMADE SAUCE), and diced bell peppers cooked in vegetable stock then drained (again, bell peppers chopped and cooked in stock in advance, reheated to eat with the pesto) - the one single frozen gf pizza I like and can eat (SHOUTOUT TO PREMADE MEAL I CAN JUST PUT IN THE OVEN) - gf pasta with cheese sauce (made gf, with oat milk, and dairy free spread and lactose free cheddar) - chicken casserole (chicken, celery, carrots, special vegetable stock, herbs de province, paprika, salt) (this is another multiple day marathon with washing/peeling/chopping done on one day with laying down breaks in between, then the cooking and assembling the next day. i bulk make this so that a couple of meals per week i just have to heat this from frozen and eat with rice and grated cheese (or it would go on potatoes, but they're more labour intensive to make) - turkey mince 'bolognaise' which is literally turkey mince + passata + a tiny bit of garlic, with gf pasta and lactose free cheddar - i think that's literally 7 days worth of meals that i eat on repeat every week until i get sick of them. luckily i have a lot of tolerance for this. - IT'S ROUGH OUT HERE

#food cw #edit: added mustard explicitly to the list as i had classed it by inference under spices before 😭 sorry mustard i miss u and your bff honey

Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake

A fun but often unpalatable collection of recipes by authors including Robert Graves, Norman Mailer and Beryl Bainbridge should come with a trigger warning. Anyone for Instant Mince or Dutch Onion Crisps?

In most instances, the words “I can’t cook” are a lie: the person saying them is perfectly able in the kitchen, and just being needy, excessively modest or anxious (maybe their sauce split before you arrived). But sometimes, alas, the phrase is just a simple statement of fact. At the tail end of the 1970s, for instance, the editor of a book called Writers’ Favourite Recipes asked the novelist Beryl Bainbridge what she liked to make for supper after a long day at the typewriter. Bainbridge carefully prefaced what she had to tell him with the phrase (used by her children) “I am a very bad cooker”, but the editor was not – woe! – to be put off. Her recipe for Instant Mince was indeed included in the collection, for all that it was quite obviously a crime not only against mince, but also against potatoes, tinned tomatoes, vinegar, and any human beings who might end up having to eat it (in case you’re wondering, the four ingredients are combined and boiled vigorously until the pan is “almost dry”).

For a while, of course, Beryl’s Instant Mince was pretty much lost to posterity; cook books go out of print, and with them the culinary outrages of the past (“spoon the instant mince on to [buttered, white] bread and cover with HP sauce, also raw onion rings”). But now, like some horrible alien in a movie, it’s back, for another editor has seen fit to gather it into a new collection of author’s recipes titled Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake, where it lurks next to several other equally unappetising confections: Robert Graves’s Mock Anchovy Pate, Norman Mailer’s Stuffed Mushrooms, Rebecca West’s Dutch Onion Crisps. As you may tell, this is not a book for the easily-made-queasy, and though I am usually implacably opposed to trigger warnings, I think it should have come with one: This Book Includes Scenes Featuring Large Quantities of Margarine and Fillet of Beef Served With Bananas. Some Readers May Find It Distressing.

The beef and bananas – how the stomach resists even the typing of this combination! – is the creation of Noel Streatfeild, the author of Ballet Shoes and another of those who baldly admits to being “a very bad cook”. Streatfeild insists that she has practised her “Filets de Boeuf aux Bananas” (NB the French here is a clever but ultimately ineffective smokescreen) and that she got the recipe from an acquaintance in whose house she was staying. But if I tell you that it comprises steak served with bananas that have been fried in breadcrumbs and an egg sauce that is seasoned with horseradish, you’ll understand immediately that Malcolm Gladwell’s principles of success do not apply here. You could spend 10,000 hours perfecting this dish, and it would still be fit only for the dustbin – though I would still be marginally more inclined to eat it than Graves’s Pate, which is made from minced fish, egg and steamed jellyfish. I believe him when he notes that “nobody at the table will know what they are eating”.

It’s not all bad. The book does include the odd recipe from the famously sybaritic and greedy, and even from a couple of writers noted for their abilities as cooks. You probably can’t go wrong with Ian Fleming’s scrambled eggs (whips to the ready), or Rosamond Lehmann’s extravagant variation on shepherd’s pie (the secret ingredient is orange peel). Kingsley Amis offers us his fromage à la crème, a perfect combination of egg whites, cream cheese, cream and sugar, though one knows perfectly well that he probably never actually made it for himself – and sure enough, a mere few pages later, up pops his longsuffering ex-wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose devils on horseback come from the cookbook she wrote with the restaurant critic Fay Maschler (a brilliant volume that I own and use often).

Nora Ephron is here, and Laurie Colwin: two fabulous American novelist-cooks, neither one of whom, so far as I know, was inclined to make a cake using canned soup as Sylvia Plath did (she got the recipe from her mother, Aurelia). But in the end, we’re forced to conclude two things on closing this (OK, I’ll admit it) very fun little book. First, that famous writers are no better than the rest of us when it comes to cooking, and often a good deal worse; at present, I’m finding Rebecca West’s onion-crisp-things to be more indelible even than her journalism. Second, that distracted as they are by plot and character, they may be a danger both to themselves and to other people in the kitchen. Margery Allingham wrote some very fine detective stories, but her insistence that her salad cream will last for a year is suspicious-making to put it lightly.

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#just for books #Sylvia Plath #Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake #book review

HEADCANON : FOODS .

HEAR ME OUT i have a lot of thoughts on her food habits and things she likes / doesnt like so here we go!

SWEET AND SALTY ; we all know she loves junk food, and if youve followed me for a while i’ve talked about it in the past. she was fed a very bland diet in hawkins and wasn’t allowed sweets and salt. this was not only to maintain utmost health, but also because her body doesn’t absorb vitamins and nutrients as well as a normal child’s body should. things like sugar and salt is fairly addictive, so when she tastes a very sugary very processed waffle, she developed a sweet tooth that transferred over into other items. she loves saturated things, sugary things, syrupy things, salty things, so on and so forth .

SOUR AND SPICY ; foods with strong or overwhelming flavors are more difficult for her tastebuds to manage. she is used to a bland and flavorless, and while she now prefers sugary / salty over that, she has a strong dislike for things that are overtly sour or acidic like some candies, lemons, vinegar chips, pickles, etc. she also dislikes spicy foods and avoids eating them.

CHEESES ; i really wasnt sure where to put this one but i felt it was necessary to add. she really loves processed cheese like kraft singles and string cheese. she will eat shredded cheese straight from the bag. she will squirt easy cheese directly into her mouth. she loves pizza with lots of melted cheese on it, and will gladly and happily eat cold cheese pizza. what she doesnt like are fancier cheeses with strong flavors, like blue cheese, sharp cheddar cheese, feta cheese, and cottage cheese. she likes cream cheese just fine and honestly would eat it with a spoon.

TEXTURES ; some textures that she’s not used to in foods make her gag / are hard for her to swallow down. she hates the texture of oatmeal, and in general dislikes oatmeal. she doesnt like when the cereal gets soggy and will eat around the soggy parts. she doesnt like mushy peas or vegetables that are too soft like carrots that have been cooked down in a stew. she also doesnt like eggs for the texture and usually wont eat yogurt. sometimes when she chews bananas too long the texture gets bad and she has to spit it out. she thinks pears taste sandy. she hates jello.

BEVERAGES ; as for drinks she dislikes soda for its carbonation as it makes her hiccup and her eyes water. she likes apple juice and orange juice that isnt too sour. she really likes chocolate milk and strawberry milk but doesnt care for regular milk. she doesnt like tea and if she tried coffee she would hate it as well. grape juice is also on her good list. she hates sunny d but thats just me projecting ( and also cause its sour and gross ). water is okay but she’d pick a juice or flavored milk first.

MEATS ; jams gonna like this but her favorite meat is chicken. she thinks hopper makes chicken extremely well even tho he usually just heats that microwave shit. she likes chicken nuggets and he buys her the dinosaur shape ones even tho she’d eat them either way. its hard for him to get her to eat other meat because she doesnt care for things like meatloaf and eats around the meatballs in spaghetti. she hates fish, will not touch it, will not try anything she knows is fish, because she tried a fish filet once and absolutely hated it so now she thinks all fish is horrible

FRUITS AND VEGETABLES ; while she would rather eat something processed she still needs to eat fruits and vegetables and does have favorites / least favorites. while it doesnt really count as a vegetable, she really likes corn and potatoes. she also likes carrots and can tolerate peas and green beans. she likes asparagus and zucchini, and really likes water chestnuts for the crunch. she hates tomatoes, broccoli, and lettuce. she also doesnt care for onions but if theyre cooked into the food she usually wont even notice they’re in there. as for fruits she likes blackberries, oranges, apples, and sometimes bananas. she doesnt care for strawberries, pineapple, or pear ( pear mainly because of the texture ). she loves watermelon thats probably her favorite.

she picks the onion out of onion rings and just eats the bread

she can eat mayo and cream cheese straight from the container

she likes dipping her chips with cream cheese

she dunks her chocolate chip cookies in orange juice

she doesnt peel string cheese she just bites it (YES BECCA AND BILL SORRY)

she likes orange juice with her cereal

she eats sausage links with syrup on them

she loves apples and peanut butter

she likes salt on her watermelon

she hates pineapple on pizza sorry she will pick them all off

#› * HEADCANONS .#i dont kno why #dont question it #just #appreciate it #/ food