So What Do You Eat?

[dolphin__girl]

Working from home today thanks to the underwhelming (but still class-cancelling) Snowmageddon in Toronto, and taking a break for lunch. I've been discussing the SCD with a few co-workers, especially in light of our staff outing to Winterlicious next week (Cafe California is awesome and has promised they can work around my restrictions), and the question I get most often when I say "no sugars, no flour, no grains of any kind, no starches like potatoes, no processed foods" is "so what's left for you to eat?"

The answer: quite a lot, really. I just have to prepare it myself.

For example, here's today's menu:

Breakfast

• 2 scrambled eggs with butter and a ladle of soup broth (see lunch)
  
• Berry smoothie
  
• Ginger Green tea

Lunch

• chicken soup
  
• Berry smoothie
  
• Ginger Green tea
  
• Cheddar cheese
  
• Pecan butter brownie

Dinner

• Moroccan lamb burgers
  
• Broccoli with lemon butter
  
• Applesauce or pecan butter brownie

Now, of all the items on this list, the only things I haven't made myself are the tea and the cheese. The soup is leftovers from the chicken I roasted last week. The stock is made by boiling the chicken carcass and some meat in a big pot with salt (Kosher salt -- table salt has sugar in it. Seriously. Read the box), pepper, celery, onion, garlic, carrots, and zucchini (peeled and deseeded). After simmering for four hours, I strain the whole thing in a big sieve, skim the fat, add the carrots and zucchini back in (I'm not risking the onion and celery yet, as they're really fibrous and hard to digest), puree it, and add bits of chicken afterward. The smoothie is made from yoghurt I made myself (2 litres of half-and-half and Yogourmet starter in the yoghurt maker for 24 hours), berry puree (again, made myself, boiled with some white grape juice and water and strained through a fine sieve to remove the skin and seeds), a very ripe banana, pearsauce (boiled pears with 1/2 white grape juice and 1/2 water for several hours to reduce the liquid), and Black River corcord grape juice (on the SCD approved list). The brownie is pecans in the food processor until they turn into butter, then baked with an egg, vanilla (pure, from Mexico), spices, baking soda, and honey.

Yes, it's work intensive. But I usually get a few meals out of it (the soup alone usually does me for lunches for a week, and the broth is amazing in eggs). And given that a) I actually know what I'm putting in my body, and b) it's working, I consider it worth it, all things considered.