Have I mentioned before how much I love eating delicious, yummy food? I amuse Stephen by the inordinate amount of time I spend thinking about food, searching for recipes, and planning our meals.  For those of you who know me, I’ve gone through a number of dietary restrictions in the past two years due to an ulcerative colitis diagnosis.  As I am weaning off one medication and decreasing my dosage of another, I’ve now jumped on the “AIP” diet, also known as the “Auto-Immune Protocol” diet, to heal my gut.  If you want to learn more about it, you can read about it at Sarah Ballantyne’s blog The Paleo Mom.  It’s an elimination diet (no grains, no gluten, no dairy, no legumes, no processed vegetable oils, no processed food chemicals and ingredients, no added sugars or nonnutritive sweeteners, no seeds or seed oils, no nightshades, no spices derived from seeds, no eggs, alcohol, or coffee).  But the upside is that I’m eating beef, pork, and lamb again in abundance with lots of vegetables.  And so far I think it’s helping me.

And in the process of looking for AIP-friendly recipes, I’ve discovered coconut manna and plantains–my two new favorite foods.  I’m just going to link to the recipes in today’s post, so if any of these sound appealing to you and you’re reading this in your email, you’ll need to open this post in your browser in order to open the links.  First up–coconut manna.  I no longer can eat oatmeal (or at least for the time being until I start to reintroduce foods into my diet), and so I found this “fake oatmeal” recipe, bananas and cream oatmeal, that has coconut manna.  I tend to eat it as my dessert instead of breakfast.

Next up are plantain tortillas.  I can no longer eat corn tortillas and of course flour tortillas are out.  I’ve had my fair share of meats wrapped up in cabbage leaves, which I’m really enjoying, but today I made plantain tortillas, and boy are they satisfying for someone who can’t eat bread. I haven’t quite perfected the recipe yet, but they were still really good.  Zoey ate two of them with her dinner.  You’ll find it here at the fresh tart blog.

And the final recipe is a simple one-pot chicken dinner–roasted chicken thighs with capers and olives.  I used bone-in chicken thighs but didn’t need to change the cooking time.  The recipe calls for squash, but I added carrots so I could puree them and give them to Zane. On a side note, I gave him the pureed carrots with applesauce I canned from our ranch apples last year along with a bit of coconut oil–he smiled and seemed to like it.

I am gently reminding Stephen that we need a house update.  So if we’re lucky, some photos of our house will appear in the next few weeks.