Food is one of my absolute favorite things about being alive in this meat husk. Things such as the crisp bite of a Honeycrisp apple freshly plucked off a stately tree, the aroma of brick-oven fired pizza in the company of adored friends, the earthy bite of a carrot after prying it from the fragrant soil, all of them excite my soul.
I beyond adore food.
So, my sentencing to food prison due to autoimmune dysfunction has been a bit hard to bear. I tend to be a bit of an optimistic soul, but to have something that I truly cherish removed from my existence has been a bit of a mental trial.
That said, the abstaining from all things gluten, dairy, and sugar has helped me immensely. Over the last eight weeks my health has improved a ton, and because of the improvement it has become a bit harder to not partake in the bounty that is food.
Earlier this week I decided to do a test and have something that I very much love, curry. There are plenty of vegan curries out there, and many of them I love, but chicken tikka masala is one of my favorite dishes of all time, and Utara Brewing Company and Curry House in Sandpoint, Idaho makes some of the best I have ever eaten.
Tikka though, has dairy in it, in the form of yogurt. I figured my first experimentation with ingesting a bit of dairy should be in fermented form, and the cool thing about Utara is that they also have the most amazing gluten-free cauliflower naan on the menu that tastes excellent, which meant that I was able to only try the one trigger.
So before you could say, proceed with the potential inflammation experimentation, I had a fragrant clay bowl full of steaming jasmine rice, chewy, garlicy naan, and a large portion of senses-assaulting tikka masala.
I was a very happy camper.
Utara is one of my favorite places to eat locally anyway, because it used to be an old service station and now it is a brewery. It's pretty fun to sit at a pub table stuffing one's face where cars used to have their oil changed.
Plus, your view is watching the master brewer crafting all manner of fermented bliss. They are even introducing a hard tea soon and I must say I am most intrigued to give it a try!
Whenever I eat gluten, sugar, or dairy I wake up the next day feeling like I have the flu. And what I mean by that is the bone burning, muscle-aching aspect of the flu. The following morning I noticed a bit of achiness which tells me that immune system still doesn't like dairy at all, but at the same time there was absolutely no thyroid-swelling assault, so I count this as a win in the I get to eat foods I love once in a while department.
But that said, I am still going to have to be all vigilant and militant about what I consume. For the last several years I have spent most of October-March in a complete immune system flare state of doom, and one of my goals is to avoid that completely this coming Fall-Winter.
So, gluten gets to stay gone, and dairy will only be enjoyed once a week and on very limited special occasions. Sugar, well, I'm so used to not eating it that most dessert foods are repulsive to me now so that's not really a problem, I just mostly missed pizza and cheeseburgers on occasions with real cheese, but since there are so many GF options in bun and flour form now, I am not having an issue there at all.
My next plan is to secure some raw, A2A2 cheese from a local dairy and run an experiment on that type of dairy to see what my immune system thinks of that food. I really do think it's our American food products and production additives that are causing most of my harm, and you wouldn't believe the amount of similar stories I hear from others on the same topic.
So, another goal is to keep up with producing as much of my own food as possible. I have plenty of eggs, I grow a large volume of my own produce, and once I get the plastic on the new large hoop house I plan to have a nice little secession harvest of greens to eat weekly so I don't have to buy them. Not that I don't love buying things from my local farming and homesteading friends, I will still do that when it comes to food items I don't wish to grow and don't eat a lot of, but overall I want to produce as much of what we ingest as possible.
It should be a fun challenge, and who doesn't love a good experiment?
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's was perilously close to being immersed in the curry iPhone.