My “Frenemy” Prednisolone

Like a lot of “Crohnies”, I’m currently on Prednisolone. “Frenemy” is the only way I can describe the stuff. I know it’s a life-saver. But it’s bloody pants.

This isn’t first time I’ve had it. As an asthmatic, I have had a few times (four to be precise) in the past when I’ve needed oral steroids to control serious asthma flare-ups (all of which were related to chest infections or influenza). As someone classified as having “moderate asthma", four rounds with Prednisolone in your lifetime isn’t really bad going at my age in the grand scheme of things. But with asthma, they tend to give you moderate levels (30-40mg a day) for a short blast (5-7 days), it clears your chest, and you’re done. You get some of the side effects, but you’re not on it long enough to get the worst of them.

But in the world of Crohn’s, I’ve discovered that Prednisolone is a whole other ball of wax.

I had one other round of Prednisolone before this one back in September which was given to me by my GP. Two rounds of antibiotic Ciprofloxacin did a partial job at treating what turned out to be Crohn’s symptoms, but as soon as I was off it, I was very ill all over again. And I was losing an alarming amount of weight. The referral to the GI doc happened at this appointment after I brought up the family history of IBD. Knowing it would take 4-6 weeks to get into the GI doc, then another 4-6 weeks to get the tests needed, he decided that a course of Prednisolone wouldn’t hurt. I had 9 days at 30mg. Lots of insomnia and random bruising, but overall, it worked, and I had a month of not being ill. The GI doc was a bit perplexed about a GP doing that, but as far as I’m concerned, the GP bought me time, and I am eternally grateful for that.

This time round, I’ve been given a much bigger course. I was given 40mg a day, with the intention that I “taper” off it by 5mg each week for 8 weeks. As this thing "has teeth" (as a friend put it), the IBD nurse has extended this, so it will probably be 14-16 weeks. Eight vials of blood and two weeks later, I started on Azathioprine, with the intention that this will take over the job of the Prednisolone in getting the inflammation down. So far, (touch wood) I’m getting on okay with the Azathioprine. As for the Prednisolone . . . . bloody hell.

Breakfast of champions?

The first thing you notice about Prednisolone when you get it is how long the patient information leaflet is. The list of potential side effects is incredible. When I’ve had short courses for asthma, I only really had problems with insomnia, random bruising that takes ages to heal (the fact that I’m somewhat dyspraxic and clumsy doesn’t help) and a wicked case of the munchies. All of that is certainly happening this time round, although the “munchies” issue is rather problematic with a bad stomach. I’m very happy that it has brought back my appetite, the fact that I can’t stop thinking about food (hence this blog!) and I keep craving things that I really shouldn’t be eating while trying to get this flare under control, is not good.

There are bucket loads of long term risks as well, the big one being an increased risk of osteoporosis. I'm already at risk for this with post-hysterectomy-perimenopausaul ovaries, but it is a risk that I need to take. Hence the high level calcium tablets at the breakfast table. And everyone who says that I have more weight back on my face now? No dear, that's just the "chipmunk cheeks" from the Prednisolone.

What’s really thrown me though are the mood swings. I found the following meme on the Mind Your Body blog http://opbmed.blogspot.co.uk/ a few days ago, and it rather sums it up.

The patient information leaflet has loads of warnings about the potential effects Prednisolone can have on a patient’s mental health. Having never been on a long course before, I never really had problems with this (other than sometimes feeling a bit hyper with the insomnia), but this time round, I’m getting the picture. One minute I’m fine, the next minute I’m a crazed lunatic, the next minute I’m hyper to the point of confusion, the next minute I’m bursting into tears at Christmas dinner. This stuff seriously messes with your head.

I’m not generally a publicly emotional person and the randomness of the mood swings is driving me crazy. And it’s way worse two to three days after “tapering” the dose down. Two days after going down from 40mg to 35mg, I was called into a meeting at work with a very senior level manager, and I completely bollocked her. I either just set myself up to get sacked or left one hell of an impression. Yes, I can be direct and blunt, but I’m usually a lot more tactful (although I still know I was right!).

 
The fact that the “tapering” for me also seems to bring on absolutely brutal migraines doesn’t help. I so rarely get headaches that I describe them as an “event”. I’m writing this with one now, but really just want to crawl into a dark room and not re-emerge for several days. And when I’m like that, I become apathetic about food, which is not good when you’ve lost so much weight. It’s part of the reason I’ve been doing so much cooking this past week and putting things in the freezer. (The leftover sweet and sour meatballs did re-ignite my appetite tonight though!)




However, as awful as the side effects are, I need to remember the most important thing. Prednisolone does exactly what it says on the box. It saves lives.

Adventures in Pasta Making Part 1

At my last appointment with the dietitian, she suggested that if I was getting on alright with turkey mince, that I might want to try making my own ravioli. Normally, stuffed pasta like ravioli is something that I buy pre-packaged from the supermarket, but it almost all contains dairy, which isn’t going down at the moment (*sob*). The only one I found that doesn’t have dairy had pancetta in it, and it made me sick. Sigh.

“Don’t feel you need to go out and buy any new equipment or anything.”, the dietitian says. Do I need an excuse to buy kitchen gadgets?! Instead of spending money, I was good, and put out a call on Facebook to see if anyone had a pasta maker kicking about that I could have a go with. Lo and behold, it turned out that my boyfriend had one in the cupboard that he was given and never used. Rather than any fancy cutters, I just used a glass (one that I use for making perogies) for the job and made crescent moon shaped ones.

That Bailey's glass has cut a lot of perogies in its time!

So yesterday was the first go with it. It was messy, fun, and a lot of work. Not something I would do every day, but now I have a pile of turkey mince ravioli in the freezer.

For the pasta, I went to Beth Hensperger’s site for directions http://www.notyourmotherscookbook.com/all-about-homemade-pasta/

For the filling, I used the filling recipe on this website http://goodpeopleeats.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/turkey-ravioli-with-sage-butter-and.html . I made a few adjustments. Rather than shallots, I used onion granules. I used garlic powder instead of a clove of garlic. As turkey breast mince is so lean, I added some water to the pan to give it some moisture. I possibly over-cooked it a bit though, and it probably would have been better to use turkey thigh as it would have held together better. Rather than the sage and butter sauce on the website, I just made a basic marinara sauce with some passatta to go on top (which I possibly also over-cooked, it was a bit thick for the job). I also had to forgo the Durham Evensong the writer recommended (*pouts*).

Tasty Raviolli

A few things I learnt about pasta making.

#1 You need to run a bit of “dummy dough” through the machine to clean it before you actually start making pasta. The first run came out with a lot of nasty stuff on it. But running that through a few times and pitching it out seemed to do the trick.

#2 This is a two person job.

#3 Doing this when you’re hungry isn’t the best of ideas. It takes too long.

#4 Mix the dough on something with a lip (like a cookie sheet). We had egg EVERYWHERE!

#4 Some mistakes turn out to be good things. “What smells of garlic?” “Not sure.” “Which olive oil did you put in it?” “There’s more than one?” “Yes” *points to bottle used, which is garlic infused*. Oh well, it enhanced the flavour of the pasta!

#5 When realising that your kitchen table doesn’t have enough of a lip to attach the pasta machine, don’t attach it to the counter in front of the drawer with all of your cutlery in it. “Could you pass me a knife, hun?” “Um .. . .”

#6 Use smallish chunks of dough and squish them down to a reasonable thickness before trying to put them in the machine. If you put too much through, you end up with a big mess on the top and it breaks the dough down and you end up with holes in everything. It was easy to make an analogy to how my guts have been behaving.

An analogy for how Crohn's tummies function?

#7 A dough scrapper would have been a good investment (especially for cleaning the table)

It made a rather large batch for two people (or at least for my current appetite), so I froze a bunch. I froze them on a cookie sheet first so they wouldn’t stick together and then put them into individual meal-size bags for storage.

I think I’ll have a few more goes with this and see what else I can create!

Why I Love My Slow Cooker

As soft, tender and lean meat seems to be the way to go with this diet, I figured that getting the slow cooker out is the way to go. I LOVE my slow cooker. I use it all of the time, winter and summer. Soups, stews, sauces, pot roasts, casseroles, puddings, you name it, I’ve cooked in a slow cooker. I’ve worn two out already in the 7 years I’ve lived in England, and I suspect 2014 will see the purchase of a new one when this one wears out. An oval one is best, you can get whole joints of meat in it that way.

My favourite slow cooker book is this one by http://bethhensperger.com/home.htm

What I really like about this one is that it’s for small quantities. One of the challenges with slow cooker recipes is that they assume that you have one of the big 4.5L ones and are cooking for a family of six. I have a 3L one and am cooking for me, sometimes the boyfriend and sometimes friends. I don’t need quantities to feed an army, and I don’t have the freezer space to contend with the leftovers. That’s one of the reasons I love this book. That, and most of the recipes in it are really good.

As yesterday marked my 7th anniversary of moving to the UK, I wanted to make something tasty to celebrate, so I used one of the above fore mentioned turkey drumsticks to it. The thing about turkey drumsticks is that they are still pretty lean for dark meat and are cheap as chips (£2 for a 2 pound drumstick) because no one wants them. There’s nothing wrong with them, people don't know how to cook them! Roasting doesn’t work. They have a lot of tendons and are very sinewy and are best braised or slow cooked. But cooked right, the meat falls off the bone, and there is loads of it! So I decided to make turkey pot roast from the above book, with a few minor alternations. Credit for this recipe completely lies with the author of the above book, Beth Hensperger.

1 turkey drumstick
Salt and freshly ground pepper
A few tablespoons of flour
2 tbsp of olive oil
½ onion
2 cloves of garlic
½ tsp of basil
1/4 tsp of thyme
1 cup of chicken broth
1 large carrot cut into small pieces
2 medium potatoes cut into small pieces

Cook on low for 7-9 hours.

As I’m not supposed to be eating onion and garlic (I could cry!), I peeled them and put them in the pot whole, then took them out at the end, so I got the flavour, but without the tummy upset.

With the chicken broth, I had some in the freezer, but there wasn’t quite a whole cup in the pack I defrosted, so I topped it up with a stock cube and boiling water.

I removed the skin from the turkey leg. I’m not one to eat the skin on poultry anyway, but seriously, ALWAYS skin poultry before you put it in the slow cooker. If you don’t, all of the fat from the skin goes to the bottom leaving a greasy, sticky, rather disgusting slime all over everything. After skinning it, I dusted it in with the salt, flour and pepper, and browned it on both sides in a frying pan. Meanwhile, I prepared the potatoes and carrots and put them in the bottom of the slow cooker. Once the turkey leg was browned, I popped that on top of the veg, deglazed the frying pan with the chicken stock, and put the rest of the ingredients into the crock and left it on low all day. The house smelled great!

Alas, a slight disaster struck at tea time. The boyfriend and I were planning to go to the cinema that evening and although it had been in the slow cooker for over 7 hours, the potatoes weren’t yet cooked and when I checked the internal temperature of the turkey leg, it was a few degrees short. It was really needing 9 hours, not 7! So everything got dumped into a pot on the stove and heat was turned up until it cooked, but that cooked off most of the liquid. Oh well! I took the meat out first and carved that on a cutting board, then dug out the (now stuck to the bottom of the pot) veg.  It was still tasty once it was cooked! And it didn’t hurt going down!

One other thing about cooking turkey drumsticks. They are a pain to carve, so once we had enough meat for dinner, I wrapped it up and popped it in the fridge overnight. This morning I had a good pick at it, as there was still loads of meat between all of the tendons, and managed to salvage almost of a cup of shredded turkey off of it to use in soup, pasta, sandwiches, whatever. And now the bone is boiling in a pot for stock and my house smells amazing! Not bad for all of £2!

Why it Pays to Go to a Good Butcher

I have an awesome butcher. Not many women can say that, but I can! I moved away from the town next to the village where he is located at the beginning of this year and still make the 15 mile drive there once a month to stock my freezer. He sources most of his food from local farmers, he keeps me well supplied in the venison he gets from the game warden at the local estate, the quality of everything is top notch, and his staff are hilarious! After my near meltdown when picking up my Christmas turkey (which I still haven’t cooked), I figured that I needed to go back and rope them into helping me figure out what I can eat.

And I’m glad I did. Turns out the butcher’s best mate is also a Crohnie, so he totally knew what I was on about. He was able to lay it out for me.“Mostly poultry, I’m afraid! But you might want to try out some pork tenderloin as well.” Sounds like a plan. “Any chance there are cuts of beef I could get away with?”, I ask hopefully. “Not what we source,” he says. “You’d really be better off with venison as it’s so lean”. Sounds good to me! I LOVE venison. Half my freezer is full of it from the last deer they got in (I do mean that, by the way!). He gladly did turkey mince for me from Christmas leftovers, along with a couple of turkey drumsticks for the slow cooker and some pork tenderloin. I will be back!

If you're in the Worcestershire area, Pete the Meat is your man! http://petethemeat.co.uk/

Look What I Got Today!

Despite the website saying that it would be a 28 day turnaround, my new MedicAlert bracelet arrived today.

Do I have enough written on here?

This whole Crohn's thing is feeling very official now that it is enblazed on my wrist. 

I've worn a MedicAlert bracelet since my teens, and have always been able to get away with a small disc on the bracelet for my dinky little wrists. "Sorry love," the lovely woman at MedicAlert UK says, "there is no way THAT much information is going to fit on a small one". Sigh.

Breakfast . . . Or Rather My Difficult Relationship with Eggs

Eggs and I, have, um, a mutual disrespect for one another.

I remember my mother feeding me scrambled eggs when I was really young. I don’t really remember what age I was when I started turning my nose up at them, but I do remember that I was never very fond of the taste, and they kind of hurt my tummy, so I really didn’t like eating them. They don’t like me and I don’t like them. Nowadays we call it having a food intolerance.

I often refer to the egg intolerance as being a “threshold” intolerance. You will see recipes on here that involve eggs (like the gingerbread cake posted a few days ago), which may seem a bit odd when I talk about having an intolerance to eggs. 3 eggs in a cake? I don’t eat the whole cake (or at least, not in one sitting!). 6 eggs in a cake (I make a wicked gluten-free/leaven-free chocolate cake suitable for Passover), I start paying a price. My boyfriend’s aunt’s Yorkshire puddings where she substitutes more eggs to use less milk for his lactose intolerance? I suffer “Yorkie regret”. You get the picture.

Either way, at the moment, I need to minimise things that upset my system. As much as I’m not really fond of the taste of eggs anyway, it’s a bit of a pain that they are generally something I can’t eat, because they are down-right encouraged on a low-residue/low-fibre diet because they are easy to digest (for most people, just not me) and high in protein.

My foodie friend, who was ever so kind to me about my pre-Christmas meltdown, bought me some maple syrup for Christmas. I LOVE maple syrup. The real stuff. In large quantities. I could drink it straight from the bottle (and will admit that I have done that more than once!). One of the only things I miss about living in Canada is going out to tree farms in March when the sap starts to run and eating very freshly made maple toffee which is rolled out on the snow. Heaven!

So, I’ve been on the search for dairy and egg free options to pour this lovely gift on. One of yesterday’s experiments was vegan French toast. I don’t remember the last time I had proper French toast, I find it just too eggy for my tummy and haven’t had it in years.

I tried out this recipe, which uses banana. http://vegetarian.about.com/od/morerecipes/r/FrenchToast.htm I made some adjustments though. As I was only cooking for me, I cut the quantities in half. I used -

1 ripe banana
Just under ½ cup of rice milk
½ tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp of nutmeg
Dash of cloves
½ tsp of vanilla

I used a hand blender to puree the whole thing and poured into a shallow dish. I used some chunky slices of  white bread, and soaked them for a bit, turning halfway through. I heated a frying pan and a small amount of sunflower oil and cooked them until they browned. It made about four slices, which meant two for lunch and two for the freezer.

It was actually quite good! And nice to be reminded how tasty French toast actually is (and to actually eat a fruit! It was pulverised puree, but it was fruit!!) But I will say that the combination of banana puree and maple syrup was a bit sweetness overkill. 

Tonight’s experiment was applesauce pancakes, using this recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/cinnamon-applesauce-pancakes-129670.

Again, I made a couple of adjustments. As it was just me, I cut the quantities in half. I make my own applesauce, and had just enough leftover from the gingerbread cake earlier this week for this. I hadn’t put much cinnamon in the applesauce when I made it, so I added more to the recipe. The quantities I used were-

1 cup of flour (I ended up adding about another 2 tbsp of flour as I found the batter runny)
2 tsp of baking powder
1/4 tsp of salt
1 tbsp of sugar
1 cup of water
1/4 cup of applesauce
1/8 tsp of vanilla extract

I cooked them on a hot frying pan with a little bit of sunflower oil.

I found the batter very runny and it made very thin pancakes (I should add that I was making these as “North American pancakes”, not “English pancakes”, which tend to be much thinner and more like crepes). When I got to the bottom of the batter, I then discovered a big pile of flour that I had clearly missed mixing in. Doh! So the last two pancakes pictured came out nice and fluffy!! I ended up with about 12 pancakes from this recipe, but I suspect it would have been about 8 had I mixed it properly. Either way, more for the freezer for meals that I can just reheat. And more excuses to eat maple syrup!!

Experiments with Turkey Mince

One of yesterday’s experiment’s with food involved making a big batch of meatballs out of turkey thigh mince. After the experience with mince turkey breast in tourtiere earlier in the week, I figured that it would be too lean to hold together as meatballs, so opted for thigh mince instead.

For the meatballs, I used -

500g of turkey thigh mince
1 egg
1/4 cup of homemade bread crumbs
A big dash of garlic granules
A big dash of onion granules

I made a big batch, frying half (in a very small amount of olive oil) to put in the freezer for future use in pasta sauce or whatever, and cooked the other half using this recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/always-perfect-sweet-and-sour-meatballs-123240, which was linked through this website http://www.food.com/cookbook/low-residue-diet-cookbook-31173 which has suggestions for low residue diets.

It was bloody gorgeous!!!! And it went down really easily! *happy dance*

I adapted it slightly. The recipe calls for chilli sauce, which is obviously out of the question at the moment. (Ironically, sweet chilli sauce is something that I kept going through phases of really craving when I had rare good days before starting treatment.) So I substituted tomato juice. Following the recipe’s directions, I then added an equal amount of water, and then quickly realised that it wasn’t necessary and was far too watery. So I turned up the heat for about ten minutes to boil off some of the liquid. I used the brown sugar and lemon juice as directed, and added a generous dash of garlic granules. Upon taste testing, it needed a bit of salt and a bit of something else, so I added a bit of soy sauce (probably about a teaspoon and a half), which did the trick. So the quantities I used were -

12 oz of tomato juice
½ cup of brown sugar
1/4 cup of lemon juice
1 ½ tsp of soy sauce
A generous dash of garlic granules
About 1 tbsp of cornflour mixed with equal amount of water to thicken

I cooked the meatballs right in the liquid, bringing to a boil, then simmered with the lid on for 20 minutes. I made a big pot of plain basmatti rice to go with it. As I said, bloody gorgeous! Between me and my boyfriend, we polished most of them off, and I have just enough left over for one serving in the freezer. A definite success and definitely on the “Yes!!” list.

Seriously tasty!

Turned out better than our attempt at dairy-free custard made with rice milk we made for pudding . . . Tasted good, but um, definitely not custard. It was like water. May need some adjustments, that one!

Better luck next time?

How I Did (and Didn’t) Deal with Christmas Part 2

Although I tried my hardest to make the best of the Christmas season this year (for some reason, listening to copious amounts of Christmas music of Classic FM was helping the Prednisolone induced mood swings), Christmas Day was less of a success food-wise.

My second appointment with the dietitian started with the question “What the hell am I going to do about Christmas?” “You’re the fifth patient to ask me that today”, she said. I explained that I was going to my boyfriend’s parents, so I wasn’t doing the cooking. She gave me lots of advice about what I could eat and what was on the “no-go” list. Turkey is fine, but cut it up into very small pieces before eating so you don’t risk undigested meat going into your sore guts. Eat only the insides of roast potatoes, as the outsides will be too tough and fatty and potentially still have skin, which is “no-go”. Only have one other serving of veg, and make sure that it’s well cooked and not sprouts/broccoli/cauliflower/cabbage (yuck, yuck, yuck and yuck). No sausage stuffing or bacon wrap. You can use gravy to soften the meat, but only if it’s the cheap bisto stuff as the real thing has too much fat. Traditional Christmas pudding is “no-go” because of the dried fruit and nuts (and is anyway, because I’m allergic to grapes, and it’s full of raisins and brandy). The big thing is not to load your plate, not to eat too much and just eat a small meal. Right, all armed and prepared. Sort of.

I realized getting to the table that there wasn’t really anything I could eat other than the turkey. It was awful, and I felt really guilty sitting there in front of the cook of the feast, slowly picking my food apart into little pieces and taking ages longer than everyone else to eat half as much. I tried to follow the dietitian’s advice, but realized halfway through that what I had put on my plate wasn’t going to work for my sore guts. Needing some kind of carbohydrate in the meal other than just the guts of roasted potatoes, I grabbed a Yorkshire pudding and remembered halfway through eating it that it was probably made with soya milk because the cook is lactose intolerant. A fatal error when you have a long standing soya intolerance. I paid the price, and by 4:00 was experiencing an angry tum and a Prednisolone induced mood crash, which resulted in me pretty much bursting into tears and going home early where I spent the rest of the night curled up in bed with a book and a heat pack. Happy fucking Christmas. Oh well, I tried.

On another front, I didn’t undertake my usual Christmas baking frenzy this year as I simply lacked the energy, but thought I would make a cake for the occasion, as I hoped it would at least be one thing I could eat. My lovely boyfriend’s mother made jelly as an alternative to the Christmas pudding (as the grandkids like it), but seriously, I’ve eaten so much jelly over the past few months that if I never see it again, I will be very happy. Unfortunately, she put fresh fruit in it, which made it “no-go”. She didn’t know. And that’s ultimately the problem at the moment. *I* don’t know what I can eat, so what the hell am I supposed to tell someone else who is trying to feed me?!!! Again, I just felt really awful, because I know that she was just trying to be accommodating.

Either way, I made gingerbread cake after consulting with the dietitian about the ingredients in this recipe. I actually originally found this recipe on the Splenda Canada website https://www.splenda.ca/recipes/gingerbread-cake/?search=gingerbread%20cake when cooking for a Type 1 diabetic used to be a regular part of my cooking life. Even though it is meant to be a more “healthy” cake because applesauce replaces most of the fat, it seriously is the nicest gingerbread cake I’ve ever had! It’s bloody moist thanks to the applesauce.

As I wasn’t cooking specifically for anyone diabetic this time, I adapted it and used sugar instead. I made the applesauce out of Bramley apples, and pulverised the hell out of it with the hand blender so it was pretty much puree. It was gorgeous. And it went down a treat, despite angry belly. Of course, my boyfriend and his family devoured the whole thing at tea time after I left, so I never got a second piece.

Gingerbread Cake

• 2 cups (500 ml) Unsweetened Applesauce
• 3/4 cup (175 ml) Treacle
• 1 1/3 cup (325 mk) Granulated Sugar
• 1/3 cup (75 ml) Sunflower Oil
• 3 Eggs
• 3 cups (750 ml) All-Purpose Flour
• 2 tsp (10 ml) Baking Soda
• 1 tsp (5 ml) Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp (3 ml) Salt
• 2 tsp (10 ml) Ground Ginger
• 1 1/2 tsp (8 ml) Cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp (3 ml) Ground Cloves

Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and flour a bundt pan.

Pour applesauce, treacle, sugar and vegetable oil into a large
mixing bowl. Add eggs. Stir well.

Blend remaining dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Mix well.

Add dry ingredients to the applesauce mixture. Stir well.

Pour cake batter into prepared pan. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes,  or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from oven. Cool cake in pan on a wire rack approximately 20 minutes. Invert cake onto serving plate.

I decided to put a bit of a glaze on this one. For that, I used -

•    ½ cup of Icing Sugar
•    ½ tsp of Vanilla Extract
•    About 1tbsp of Rice Milk

I mixed that together and drizzled it over the cake.

My Prednisolone munchies think I should make another one . . . .

How I Did (and Didn't) Deal with Christmas Part 1

Although the Crohn’s diagnosis came as a relief more than anything else, the timing wasn’t brilliant. The day after I got the diagnosis, I was on a train to Paris for badly needed and overdue holiday. We had a lovely time despite the state of my health (and did surprisingly more than I thought we would) and the weather was brilliant the whole time. We rented a claustrophobic little studio self-catering flat in the Bastille neighbourhood, which was a God-sent, because I don’t know what I would have done if we had to eat out the whole time. The street we were on was filled with lively restaurants, bars and creperies. There were two bakeries at the end of the road which kept us in baguettes all week. The supermarket was also at the end of the road, where the smell of Camembert hit you every time you walked in.

In short, I learned a new definition of hell that week - Not being able to eat in Paris.


Of course, the next problem with this happening in December is Christmas, that time of year full of merriment and most importantly, food. And I’m on a restricted diet that even I don’t really understand. Bloody hell.

I had already ordered a turkey joint from my butcher (I never bother with a whole bird anymore, I’m not feeding enough people to make it worth it), so I went to pick it up on the 23rd. I was having one of those nasty Predisolone induced emotional days and after waiting ages in the queue looking at all kinds of things that I either know or don’t know if I can eat, nearly cried when my friendly butcher asked me if I was getting anything else to go with the turkey. I told him that I would need to come back after the Christmas rush to have a conversation about food (which I’m going to do). I then went to a friend’s to drop off her kids’ Christmas gifts, and promptly burst into tears. Happy fucking Christmas. Fortunately, as a fellow cook and foodie who is also living with chronic health issues, she totally understood this extensional holiday crisis. I decided freeze that turkey joint until I’m up to dealing with it.

One thing that I have been experimenting with over the past two weeks is minced turkey. I figured that it’s super lean and already kind of half ground up, so should be a safe enough bet to get some protein into me. I’ve already established that it goes well in bolognese and makes a decent meatloaf. I had a better day on Christmas Eve, and decided to see if I could use it for some kind of a modified tourtiere for Christmas Eve dinner.

Tourtiere is a French Canadian tradition for Christmas Eve, usually made with ground pork, but also sometimes a mix of pork and venison, or other game such as rabbit or pheasant. In some ways it was a risky gamble, as it is traditionally done in shortcrust pastry, which has loads of fat, which I’m having trouble absorbing. I had a small amount of shortcrust pastry in the freezer leftover from Thanksgiving (I’ve imported a few Canadian traditions to England with me), but not enough for a whole pie, so I figured that only having pastry on the top would cut the fat and make it “safer”.

Usually it’s made with loads of onions and other veg, but I left them out (you have no idea how much it pains me not to use onions!)

Adapting my ex's mother’s tourtiere recipe, this is what I did -

400g of mince turkey breast
About a 1tsp of onion granules
1\2 tsp of salt
1\4 tsp pepper
1\4 tsp cloves
1\2 cup water
1\3 -1\4 cup of breadcrumbs

I used a bit of olive oil and cooked everything in a skillet but the breadcrumbs until the meat was no longer red, then mixed in the breadcrumbs. I dumped it into a casserole dish and covered it with the pastry. My boyfriend decided it needed festive decorations, so broke out my cookie cutters. I cooked it at 180C for about 40 minutes.

I steamed the hell out of some carrots to go with it.

Verdict - It tasted okay, but it was really really dry. I forget just how lean turkey breast actually is, there's just no fat in it. Usually the breadcrumbs are used to soak up the juice in the pan and kind of hold things together. There was nothing to hold together. Next time round, I’ll probably use about 3/4 - 1 cup of water to give it more liquid. And definitely more onion granules, at least 2 tsp if not a whole tbsp (I really could cry about not being allowed onions!).

More importantly though, it generally went down okay and didn’t upset my stomach, so I’ll put this receipe on the “yes” list with the above adjustments.

One Christmas meal down, one to go!

Did I Just Buy That?!

Anyone with IBD, and several of those of you who don’t, have been subjected to the *ahem* unpleasantries associated with diagnosis.

I had a lovely nurse, who it turned out lived in my hometown for 15 years, walk me through everything I needed to know for the dreaded “prep”. “3 days before,” she says, “you eat naughty food”, writing with word “Naughty” next to the list of acceptable food. White bread, white rice, white pasta, startch starch starch. The “low-residue diet” infamous to anyone who has been subjected to this.

As certain foods had been making me more ill over the summer, things started dropping away from my diet. Alcohol went first. Then anything heavy and creamy. Then fresh fruit. At one point, I eliminated wheat for a week. It didn’t make any difference, so I went back to it. My one really bad habit of a daily fizzy drink went. Previous experience with ciprofloxacian taught me it doesn’t go well with dairy, so that went. Attempts to eat re-introduce yoghurt after two lots of antibiotics were a disaster. Fresh veg started to disappear. Cold meat and peanut butter were making me sick. Jelly, Lucozade and Dioralyte were becoming my constant companions.

As my weight was dropping at an alarming rate and my health was declining, I had been googling food options for Crohn’s before the “tests”. At one point, I ran across someone who fully admitted that were currently subsisting on Spaghetti Hoops and Alphabetti because they didn’t have the energy to cook. And you know what, I had hit that point.

So here I was in Sainsburys, with a shopping trolley of stuff for “the prep” - Lucozade, lime jelly, various cordials to cover up the taste of the dreaded stuff, Dioralyte, Sudocream, baby wipes - and several tins of Alphabetti and screw it, it’s on the “Naughty” list, so I bought Frosted Flakes.

The shame.

I was completely and utterly embarrassed.

Normally, I’m someone who cooks virtually everything, even soup stock, from scratch. I drive 15 miles to a country village to buy meat from a top-notch butcher once a month. I love trundling around farmers markets looking at produce. I LOVE to bake. I can cook one hell of a meal on a one-burner stove when camping. Lakeland is known as the “kitchen porn shop” in my house. Cooking is how I unwind.

Although I’ve never been a big vegetable eater, I have gotten into the habit of making myself eat them. I was that single woman who felt smug about her mostly healthy food choices standing behind the haired working mother in the supermarket queue whose trolley was full of ready meals and crisps. And now I was buying tinned pasta.

And you know what? I ate it. And it didn’t hurt. So after all the nasty tests, I carried on eating like that.

I received the diagnosis the following week, and was promptly sent in to see the dietitian. I told her how much I normally like to cook and how I make virtually everything myself. I could see that she thought I was going to be an easy patient because she wouldn’t have to drag me out of the chip shop. Then I confessed to what I had been eating for the past two weeks. And you know what she said? “Great! Eat more of that! What about canned soup?”

WTF!! Did a dietitian honestly just tell me to eat Alphabetti??!!! Yes, she did. And she agreed that this was the only time that I would hear those words out of a dietitian’s mouth. Plain, white, soft, bland and boring with lots of calories. Rice, pasta, white bread. Virtually no fibre. I’m allowed one to two very well cooked (i.e., pureed) vegetable a day. Only one serving of fruit, and it has to be either a very ripe banana or applesauce. Only very lean, tender meat.That’s what I’m meant to eat for the next several months. She assures me this is only temporary (bloody hell, I hope so!!).

So now the search for food that I can eat begins. Searching for “low-residue recipes” online doesn’t bring up a whole lot, mostly just people commenting how unhealthy it is and how it is only meant to be temporary, but not actually telling you what you CAN cook. One of the only truly useful threads I’ve found was this post on Jeantte's Healthy Living where the comments kind of ran away with a discussion by people with IBD and there frustrations at trying to find things they could eat which were at least mildly interesting, and the writer of the blog making a pretty decent attempt at thinking of ways to adapt things. (Thank you, Jeanette!)

But there isn’t much out there, so I will be experimenting a lot and posting my experiments here.

First Post

When I had a hysterectomy in March 2009, a friend encouraged me to keep a blog about the experience. I gave that serious consideration, set up an account, even wrote a few things, but never posted them. Now I kind of regret that. I’ve mentored several other women who were facing that decision or just had a hyst, and I can’t say “Oh, go read my blog!” when directing them to information.

I enjoyed more or less four years of reasonable health and being reasonably pain-free for the first time since hitting puberty after my hyst and it was the best, although also the most-agonizing difficult decision I ever made. For that, I am eternally grateful and I made the best of it.

Alas, like many things in life, that was not to continue. In July 2013 I started having a lot of GI symptoms. Like a lot. I’ve always had a dodgy tummy. I have lots of food intolerances and a few full-on allergies and I could belch the Royal Navy under the table, but this was something different. Having moved six months previous, I was dealing with a new GP surgery who didn’t know me. In and out to the GP with it, being told it was probably just viral over and over again. Thankfully my gyane history taught me to be a bitch self-advocating patient, and after two lots of antibiotics didn’t do the job, I was referred to a GI specialist.

After lots of tests, I was diagnosed with Diffuse Small Bowel Crohn’s Disease on 6 December 2013.

This didn’t come as a total surprise. By this point, I had unintentionally lost well over 2 stone (about 30lbs to you non-Brits), and all of my own research was pointing to Crohn’s. On top of that, IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) runs quite strongly in my family (thanks for those genes, Dad!).

For the most part, I can live with the diagnosis. It’s an answer. Although there is no cure, there is treatment. I’m no stranger to chronic illness. Just adds to the list of other autoimmune issues I deal with anyway. I’ll deal.

I used internet forums extensively when I had my hyst (http://forums.hysterectomy-association.org.uk/; http://www.hystersisters.com/) and sought similar when roads were leading to this, but discovered that ‘Crohnie’s’ seem to be more in the world of the blogisphere rather than closed discussion groups, so I thought I would dive in! Maybe one day my witterings may be useful to others. In the meantime, it will give me a chance to vent rant share my experience. Truthfully, I suspect this blog will end up mostly being about food.

Food. That’s what’s really been doing my head in. A foodie who loves to cook with a massive IBD flare. Good thing I like a culinary challenge!