Today signals the 5th week of my epic elimination diet. For the past 36 days I have avoided 19 different food items, including: citrus fruits, beans, vinegar, tofu, tomatoes, eggs and mushrooms. Suffice to say, this is not easy. In fact, I don’t wish this upon anyone. It’s one thing to be gluten-free 0r dairy-free or nut-free, let alone all three at once. But it’s a whole other beast to ignore a dozen or so common random food items. In both cases there are plenty of options; but in the latter lifestyle there is much more difficulty when interacting with the outside culinary world. If anything, the elimination diet makes you feel like a weirdo, alientaed from the “normal world.” A world I once proudly inhabited.

Drama aside, the weekly menu writing has faced gaining difficulty. At the moment I am most tortured by the absence of eggs and tomatoes in my diet. The egg-free issue totally affects breakfast options. Forget eating out. At the same time, I have to temporarily say good-bye to custard, quiche and other souffles. The casserole scene deflates when the egg is gone.

Tomatoes on the other hand, have absolutely killed my beef ideas. While planning this week I considered what I could make with ground beef. It seems like all ground beef recipes call for tomatoes; and if I want to braise some tough cuts, there again, are tomatoes.

There are lots of options out there. The problem is, I don’t know all of them. (If you’re reading this and have ideas, please comment and share them with me!) Considering this limited view of culinary possibility, here is the menu I wrote for the coming week:

• Hamburgers, sweet potato fries and pickles (no pickles for me though)
• Curried rice noodles with vegetables and ground beef
• Three vegetables sides: braised greens, spicy roasted cauliflower and carrot/parsnip puree
• Double Dutch mac ‘n’ cheese with chard and steamed broccoli
• Coconut curry with beef and vegetables over rice
• Sweet potato and sage soup

While flipping through Bittman’s How to Cook Everything I found a great recipe that uses beef and does not require tomatoes but curried noodles instead. As a fan of rice noodles, this meal shall be especially delicious. Having white rice noodles (as opposed to brown rice) is a nice change of pace. The Asian brands are cheaper and larger than the GF brown rice variety. Interesting though, this recipe only calls for 1/2 a pound of ground beef. With the remaining half I want to make the hamburgers. Normally I try to stick with 2 meat dishes in a week, but since this calls for two 1/2 pound portions, look’s like we’ll have three.

I also found a package of beef stew meat in the basement freezer. I’m thinking of throwing this into a green coconut curry with some vegetables. Yes, I know I make a curry dish regularly, but there’s something about the meat addition that adds excitement to the weekly rice meal.

Overall, it looks to be another fabulous week of food. Maybe later this week I’ll finally get around to posting a recipe for one of these dinners…

Related posts:

1. Asian Madness (weekly menu 9)
2. A Fresh Perspective (weekly menu 20)
3. The New Year (weekly menu 15)
4. Sorry for the Delay (weekly menu 17)
5. Winding Down Winter (weekly menu 26)

Tags: diet, Mark Bittman, tomato