Thanksgiving on a very restricted diet

[melannen]

A friend of mine is in the middle of a long process of being diagnosed with Something (is it pcos? is it mcas? is it eds? is it pots? is it me/cfs? is it neurological? is it gastrointestinal? is it all of the above? will they ever stop doing tests and start suggesting treatments? you know the kind of thing) and as a result has been put on a very restricted diet, by which I mean separate specialists have put her on:

-low fodmap
-low histamine
-low fat
-low acid
-dairy-free

We are trying to throw together something resembling an American Thanksgiving meal for her that we can all eat together. Does anyone have suggestions?

-I found a roast chicken with popcorn stuffing recipe that will work if we leave out the onion and celery and go easy on the oils
-We'll do a fruit-she-is-allowed-to-eat salad
-We can do cooked carrots
-I'm going to try to do a simple savory raspberry sauce for the chicken

Anybody have any other ideas or suggestions? (I'd especially love ideas for something like a traditional American holiday dessert that has no dairy, nuts, grains, or sweeteners...)

Comments

[harpers_child]

Claire Saffitz did a flourless chocolate cake on her youtube a few months ago. Would that work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fCZN27e9Bo

[stultiloquentia]

A sweet potato pie with coconut milk might fit the bill.

[melannen]

Chocolate fails on low-acid and low-histamine (so does carob) and between fodmap and histamine she basically can't have any sweeteners at all other than fruit that is on the okay-fruit list, and hand-pressed juice from them.

She can do eggs though! I wonder if something souffle-ish with fruit could work...

[melannen]

Sweet potato might work! Not sure how to do a crust, though, or a pie with no sweeteners. (I'm going to be very annoying about shooting things down, but in my defense, this diet is very annoying.)

Coconut isn't on the definitely-low-histamine list she was given, and also she's supposed to avoid anything canned for histamine reasons; I'm not sure where to get in not-canned around here. (It is a *very* annoying diet.)

[stultiloquentia]

Yeah, I figured it would be crustless, a pudding. This sort of thing. I think sweet potato is sweet enough on its own that it would be worth attempting without the sugar, even if it winds up teetering between a side dish and a dessert.

Aw, coconut wasn't on the list I googled, sorry. Can she have any of the usual non-dairy milk options?

[melannen]

I don't really understand the low-histamine list she got, tbh! It does not make logical sense (she can have popcorn but no other corn products?) so we are just following it to the letter - it seems a lot stricter than some of what's online.

I don't think she can have any of the commercial milk substitutes; most of them include things on the no list and avoiding highly-processed things in general is part of it too. (in some ways this diet converges on strict paleo too.) Also she can't have pretty much any sweeteners at all, the natural ones aren't on the fodmap list and the artificial ones aren't on the histamine list. And she can't have most spices because histamine.

I am thinking maybe an unsweetened fruit ice for dessert though! She can have raspberries and blueberries. And she just got a delivery of farm-fresh eggs from her parents' free-range birds, which she can eat and are reasonably safe raw, so we could live dangerously and even do a frozen egg white fluff with berries.

[lannamichaels]

What's on the safe fruit list?

[melannen]

Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, cantaloupe. That's basically it.

[lilacsigil]

Would any of these work: https://www.tastingpage.com/cooking?category=Dessert

They're all grain and sweetener free, and some are nut free and dairy free.

[melannen]

Ooh, some of those look really good, but I think they all rely on at least one thing she can't eat.

(Most of them aren't sweetener-free, either - I've found a lot of health-food "sugar free" recipes have natural sweeteners like honey or agave nectar or stevia. Most of them aren't histamine-friendly, and a lot of "low-carb" natural sweeteners and "non-processed" sugars are even higher FODMAP than refined sucrose, because making it easier to digest is part of why we refine it.)

[vass]

Those fruits are are all ones that would taste good frozen whole, too.

Edit: well, balled rather than whole in the case of the cantaloupe.

[harpers_child]

I asked the SU who does desserts. He wasn't sure if it was okay for all the restrictions.

I wonder if you could do something like a snowball (shaved ice) with fruit juice as the sweetener?

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, I've cooked for dairy, egg, gluten, FODMAP, mushroom and nightshade-free (three different people with overlaps but the same meal), but that still leaves me a few options! I salute you for trying to find things for your friend to eat with you!

[melannen]

Thanks everyone who had suggestions! They helped a lot.

Here's the final menu:
Braised Turkey with Popcorn Stuffing - the popcorn stuffing (and gravy thickened with pureed carrot, also in the recipe) were actually really good! The popcorn stuffing was amazingly close to the kind that comes in the box, the carrot gravy wasn't much like gravy-gravy but was still good. If you know someone on a low-histamine diet, this works, and she was delighted at being able to have stuffing after living on basically meat and vegetables for a long time. The chicken was also good! We left out some of the spices and all of the fresh vegetables other than carrots, and it was excellent.

Herb-Roasted Carrots - she could have most green herbs but very few dry spices, so I went for this for hopefully a different flavor even if the same vegetable. Went light on the oil, but we also accidentally bough half shredded carrots so it ended up with the shredded carrots packed around the larger ones, which was a really good texture? I've had texture issues with roast carrots before, so would definitely accidentally do that again.

raspberry sauce - this was improvised from other recipes, but I basically added a cup of chicken broth and some salt to 6 oz raspberries, and then just boiled them down until they were a sauce-like texture. It made a perfectly acceptable sauce for the meat, and good color for the table!

baked sweet potatoes - these weren't on the list of things she'd been eating but some internet research implied they might be okay and she wanted to add something new, so we did. using the old family recipe of "just bake them till they're done". They were huge and took forever to cook so we didn't get them until after the rest of the food was gone, but we're pretending that was on purpose, so that the new food was separate from the known-okay ones. (If I did this again I would quarter them first.)

Then I attempted raspberry ice by pureeing frozen raspberries and ice, but I think none of the devices we had were strong enough to manage the puree, so that was the one thing that failed. Nobody really needed dessert at that point, though. I guess if one thing had to fail that was the best one.



fruit salad - of all the fruits she could eat