'Colitis and Me - a story of recovery' by Raman Prasad

I first came across Raman Prasad when I stumbled into his excellent resource for the Specific Carbohydrate Diet - SCDrecipe.com. I snapped up his delicious looking cookbook soon afterwards and wrote a review of it as fast as my fingers could type (admittedly not that fast). A review that might conservatively be described as glowing. The only complaint I had about the book was that it didn't tell me enough about Raman himself. Who was this warm creative cook? What was his journey?

Of course unbeknown to me, Raman had already written his story in full, in a book titled, 'Colitis and Me'. A week later the postman handed me a suspiciously book-like parcel with American stamps on it and I started to get to know Raman properly, in his own words.

'Colitis and Me' is the story of a young man with Ulcerative Colitis and his painful journey to find a cure for the constant pain he lives with every day. It is such a harrowing story, yet Raman writes with a light touch, treading a fine path between humour and honesty. A few pages in I was hooked. This wasn't my story at all, but it spoke to me instantly of shared bewilderment, living with pain and fatigue, of searching fruitlessly for solutions to a problem the Doctors tell you is unsolvable - and very possibly a figment of your own imagination. The fear that life will never be quite normal for you and the determination to find your own way out.

The book is also beautiful to look at - each page has vintage anatomical drawings and images of fantastical looking Victorian medical equipment that break up the text, adding to the sense that this is a journey against all odds.

Anyone who knows of Raman's work will be aware that this story has a happy ending. Raman finally discovers the SCD and slowly heals his poor damaged gut through diet - going on to help thousands of others do the same. For anyone doubting that Ulcerative Colitis, Crohn's, Diverticulitis and other IBD's can be managed with diet - this affirmation that it can be done, may just change your mind.

This book will speak to anyone who suffers with digestive disorder, anyone who has felt alone and confused by their condition, anyone recently diagnosed who feels condemned to a long sentence of steroids and other medication. It is a triumph of amazing hope and strength where many others would have given up the fight and gone under. Let it inspire you to take control of your own health too.

You can buy 'Colitis and Me' directly from Raman Prasad at SCDrecipe.com

or from Amazon by clicking this link.

How to Eat Green Food When All Around Are Crunching Crisps.

Fin's been having a hard time of it lately. At home he oscillates between boisterous seven year old enthusiasm, petulant three year old stubbornness and astonishingly articulate and thoughtful supper companion of indeterminate age. At school it's any one's guess which of those he will be and I'm guessing that the three year old has been making quite a few appearances.

In the bubble of life with two adults Fin is protected from the unpredictability of other children. At school he can't always have a rational discussion about why he would like to do something a certain way or why he must have this pencil and not that one. School is smash and grab. School is, do it while the teacher's not looking with a smile on your face. School is learning to bend around other people and still manage to be yourself. School can be tough if you're a sensitive and impulsive only child like Fin, who wants to do everything right first time and won't be told.

I want to wrap him in cotton wool and yet I need him to find out how it is out there.

When he is painting up a big dream in the air with his hands and telling me how it will be this way and this friend will do that, and then, and then...... I want to intervene and soften somehow, the inevitable disappointment when he finds that this friend has other ideas and he can't find the crucial bit of Lego either. Without a sibling to box his ears and learn to give and take with, Fin is finding out later than most that you have to compromise nearly all the time to get what you want. You have to take other people into account, or just strike out on your own and carve a lonely, bright path of perfection unhindered.

I was making those bright green pea pikelets for his lunch the other morning, fragrant with fresh pesto and chunks of chorizo - just the way he likes them. As I tucked them into his lunch box with some crisp sweet lettuce and carrot sticks and a luscious dessert of goats yogurt, coconut and pink pomegranate seeds - he let out a long groan of anguish and lay his head down on the breakfast table.

He told me that the other children were making faces at his lunch and asking what it was. When he told him, they mouthed, 'Yuck!' loud enough to humiliate Fin, but not so loud as to draw the attention of the dinner ladies. They moved away a little and made sotto voce comments about the grossness of green food or soup or anything that wasn't white bread sandwiches. Fin felt like a pariah.

Trying to contain my outrage so that I could offer Fin some constructive advice, I told him that people react that way to things they don't know and that those kids would most likely grow up unhealthy and unhappy. They were just trying to maintain their view of the world and he should be proud that his lunches were so healthy and varied - not to mention darned tasty to boot! However, I did offer to make some white almond bread so that he could have sandwiches next week and keep the green pikelets for home consumption.

Finley sighed as he hoisted his lunch onto his back and secured his cycling helmet. Anticipation of the lunchtime to come - with the covert jeering, was written in every movement and I felt just awful at having sentenced him to another encounter with the food bigots.

At school, Nick had a word with Fin's new teacher who is still getting the measure of his sensitive nature. Today she plucked just the right note by telling Fin to tease the other kids back if he liked, by pointing out how unhealthy and unimaginative their food was and the possible effects of eating crisps and white bread every day.

It was just what he needed to hear.

When I picked him up in the afternoon he was full of stories and his lunchbox was empty.

'I told them that they would all be fat and have diabetes and I would be slim and healthy' he chirped with a self righteous glint in his clear blue eyes. 'Then I ate all my lunch and they didn't know what to say!'. I could give him all the green food I liked now, he knew just how to handle it.

That night I read to him about dragons and magic while he sucked his thumb and nestled piggy into the crook of his arm. When I came up later to turn off the fairy lights I stopped a while to look at him lying abandoned to sleep, arms thrown up above his head as though falling asleep had caught him unawares. I looked at those long eyelashes lying on those round pink cheeks and listened to the easy way his breath rushed in and out, peacefully, without a care in the world. It dawned on me that I didn't have to wrap him up at all. I just had to keep our little boat a float and provide a bit of steering now and again.

Pesto Pea Pikelets for Ghouls and Goblins to Gobble

These small bright green morsels with their Halloweenish hue are the result of a bed haired kitchen experiment that I conducted before fully awake. As most scientists will tell you, an experiment is a precise and calculated thing, conducted with the dispassionate froideur of the academic. With this in mind, I must retract and say instead, that it was just experimental - not an experiment in the scientific sense - as I was unaware of the passage of time between waking and finding myself at the stove armed with a cast iron pan and a batch of very green gloop in the blender.

There are some things that are possible to cook whilst still semi conscious - porridge, scrambled eggs, smoothies. Anything requiring more than a passing acquaintance with knife, boiling water or delicate timing should be left well alone until the caffeine has kicked in. So these babies, entirely formed by the blender and a gently hot frying pan, are a perfect stroll into wakefulness for me.

My troll-like appearance felt very apt however as I bent over the stove and flipped little green hot cakes onto the cooling rack. I mentioned to Fin that these would be perfect for Halloween and we started imagining a whole meal of garishly coloured foods - pumpkin puree, bleeding beetroot and quails egg eye balls. I imagined for a moment the looks on his friends faces were we to serve up such a supper - pure horror! Yes, their faces would register the horror of those who have seldom confronted a vegetable in its nude and unadulterated state. Those children who come for supper and ask politely, 'what's this?' whilst pointing at green beans, or squash or even broccoli, before pushing said vegetable resolutely aside and asking for some of the pasta I keep in stock for truculent veg avoiders.

Well you can't win em all I guess. But these pikelets are a great solution to the veg hiding conundrum that many parents are faced with. While I don't advocate subterfuge as a solution to bad eating habits - children can struggle with change in any form and vegetables need to become familiar tastes and textures before they are prepared to put them in their mouths and chew.

Of course, the most important thing is to eat lots of vegetables yourself. What child could resist trying a bit of something that you are groaning with pleasure over? I'm not talking, 'When Harry Met Sally' here - but enjoying vegetables yourself can be the key to turning your kids onto them. I rue the day Finley pinched some expensive asparagus from my plate because I was eulogising over it. He had previously rejected every offer of asparagus as one of the things he definitely did not like. One bite of the buttery spear he'd pinched and the rest made their way swiftly onto his plate before I could shout, 'Stop thief!'.

It generally won't be the first time you present a vegetable either - no matter how appetisingly prepared. Children need to see something quite a few times before it becomes acceptable. If you don't have aubergine once a week it will be regarded with suspicion until it becomes familiar. If they only ever get a small portion on the side of their plate, a bowl of salad is a scary proposition. Crank it up gently until they are eating exactly what you do and you'll slip past the guards before they have a chance to slam the breaks on.

I don't need to sneak vegetables past Fin anymore, but I do like to include them in breads and pancakes as a lightener, balancing out the dense protein of eggs and nuts with a little healthy fibre and nutrients, sweetness and flavour. These pikelets are a lunchbox staple. I vary them with whatever I have handy; coconut, peanut butter, squash, carrot, beetroot, banana, pesto, parmesan....... Each time with a little experimental wonder on my face as I observe the changing textures and tastes wrought by the different addition. They mostly benefit from being kept simple flavour wise and making sure you add enough ground nuts to get a soft dropping consistency. Beyond that, it's just a case of bunging it in the blender and dropping it in the pan - scary bed hair is an optional extra.

Pea Pikelets

This is a method for you to fly with, not an exact recipe.

About 1 cup of veg or fruit that is mashable (cooked peas, squash, carrots, beets, banana)
1 large free range egg
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp cider vinegar or lemon juice
ground nuts (almonds, cashews, hazels..) - enough to make a soft dropping consistency
pinch sea salt

Put the veg or fruit in the blender with egg, vinegar, salt and bicarb and whiz until smooth.

If you want to add grated parmesan, pesto etc add it now.

Add spoonfuls of ground nuts and blitz between each addition until the soft dropping consistency is reached.

Heat a heavy frying pan (skillet) and pour in a small amount of oil. Don't have it too hot, or the sugars in the veg or fruit will burn before the pikelet is cooked. Drop spoonfuls into the pan, leaving room for turning.

Cook for about a minute until golden brown on the bottom but not set on top - lift one gently up with a pallet knife to see.

Flip with the pallet knife - some skill is required here and cook for a minute or so on the other side, until that is golden brown too. Cool on a rack, or eat them hot from the pan with creme fraiche and crunchy salad leaves or pumpkin puree, or bright green pesto!

Hey, Slow Down There a Minute! Go Ahead Honey it's Gluten Free! Slow Food Round Up.

This week has been anything but slow! Boy do I need reminding to step off the treadmill, take a deep breath and let life flow through me. How easy it is to become caught up on the bank in a nest of flotsam, when all that's needed is a little kick of the feet and we're off again, borne up by the endless movement of where we've been and where we're headed.



September was the month for slow food at Go Ahead Honey it's Gluten Free HQ. Joining me this month in the steamy kitchen were a select bunch of hardcore braisers and pot roasters, ready with their wooden spoons and Kilner jars to gently meld the flavours of the season over cups of tea and a nice piece of gossip. When it came to it, I couldn't choose between these delicious meals and say which was slower or more local, was it Rachel's apples, plucked from the grass of her own garden? Was it Nooshin's koresh, the limes for which have been dried for weeks in the Iranian sun? Was it the tender pieces of meat, braised until the cartiledge melted into the vegetables to create that velvety texture we crave from a good stew? Of course it was all of these and singling on out just seemed, well, beside the point.

So here is what everyone made:

Courtney (aka Glamah) of coco cooks made this mouth watering take on the tart tatin - ain't no pastry and sugar soaked apple tooth rotter this though - she slow cooked some tasty beef with mushrooms and celeriac to make a savoury celeriac tart tatin. Delish!



Gabi at The Feast Within used a pork cut that I am completely fascinated by, named a 'spoon roast' - supposedly because when slow roasted, the meat is tender enough to eat with a spoon! No need for fancy cutlery here folks, just dig in.



Rachel at The Crispy Cook made a batch of sweet and spicy chutney from apples grown in her own garden - a tree she had the foresight to plant fifteen years ago. Now that's what I call slow - and local!



Nooshin of Bye Bye Gluten made a sumptuous looking Persian Split Pea Stew - or the rather more romantic sounding, khoresh-e-ghaymey-lapeh. I love Persian food, which is all about the alchemy of slow cooking. Nooshin uses dried limes to give the stew depth and piqancy.



Vittoria of Deliciously Gluten Free bought us her version of her mother's time honoured turkey soup - the stock for which took two days to make! Respect Mama Vittoria! As we don't all have AGAs in which to make two day stock, vittoria brings the recipe up to date with a slightly less time consuming stock recipe. It looks wonderfully restorative Vittoria.



My contribution to the event was the unconventional breakfast dish, Pumpkin Pie Porridge. A dish which contains neither oats, nor milk and came about kind-of by accident, but is sweet, satisfying and reminiscent of pumpkin pie filling - and counts as one of your vegetable portions for the day!



Next month's event will be announced shortly, keep your eyes peeled!

Homemade Fresh Chorizo Sausages

Ten fat sausages sizzling in a pan!
Ten fat sausages sizzling in a pan!
Then one went pop and another went bang....
There were eight fat sausages sizzling in a pan.

Hmm. When I was a child, I didn't really stop to ponder the reasons why two sausages might suddenly disappear into thin air. Were they really vaporised or did they (to use the JK Rowling approved) disapparate, only to re-appear on some unsuspecting breakfast plate with a fat 'plop!'?

I hadn't really tasted a sausage at that age anyway, due to our family being staunchly vegetarian. My idea of a good fry up was a couple of sos-mix patties and a pile of scrambled eggs with some Heinz baked beanz providing the much needed sauce for my fatty, textured soya protein approximation of I knew not what.

Now I am truly carnivorous I do know what a good sausage tastes like. I know that feeling of all being well that it can bring to a weekend breakfast. Is there really anything like stepping out of the steamy bathroom all ready for the day, to be greeted by that bisto curl of slow cooked sausage caressing the nostrils? Only muffins come close.

Most sausages have a rusk component of breadcrumb, flour or grain, which is not allowed on the SCD, yet a 100% meat sausage tends to be rather on the lean and solid side - not that succulent mouthful we hope for with our morning eggs. I have been investigating bespoke sausages, but will have to commit to ten kilos of the things - and the freezer is already groaning with Mark and Jean's lamb and beef! My  solution is to make my own, with almond meal instead of rusk - rolling them into sausage like shapes for the pan. They don't quite have the same succulence as a sausage with a skin, because the fat drains out of the sausage instead of bathing the meat as it cooks - but keep them small and cook them fast and they will be a welcome addition to your table. You can be in charge of the flavouring and batch size - even serving up a smorgasbord of different tastes in one meal if the fancy takes you.

I give you my take on chorizo sausage - not the cured kind. A small homage to San Sebastian, the home of the SCD legal, Alejandro chorizo that I am eking out in ever decreasing portions since we returned from holiday. If you don't like chorizo, take out the paprika and add some thyme, or sage - maybe a smidgin of grated apple?

Fresh Chorizo Sausages (makes 10-12)

300g (10 oz) Pork mince
2 heaped tablespoons ground almonds
1 clove of garlic
1 tsp unsmoked sweet paprika (pimenton dulce)
1 tsp smoked sweet paprika (pimenton dulce ahumado)
1/2 tsp sea salt flakes
2 heaped tsp honey

Put the pork mince in a bowl and add the ground almonds.

Chop the garlic finely and add to the bowl with all the other ingredients.

Smoosh together with your clean hands until everything is smooth and combined.

Break off chunks and roll then into small sausages.

Store in the fridge in a sealed container for up to a week. When you want to eat them, fry in a small amount of oil for 10-15 minutes, turning occasionally until golden on the outside and no trace of pink inside.