What to eat when you're too sick to eat

I'm having some very weird symptoms lately....weird for me anyway: severe acid reflux, nausea, and food aversion.

Food aversion is actually fairly common for people with Lyme disease, from what I hear. And of course nausea/loss of appetite is a problem that many chronically ill people deal with on a regular basis.

This will be GREAT for weight loss, of course, but the problem is that I have a lot of medication to take and much of it needs to be taken with food. One antibiotic, Mepron, is supposed to be taken after a fatty meal (approximately 20 grams of fat per tsp of Mepron enhances absorption of the medicine)! Fatty food sounds so revolting to me right now!! So what to do?

Several kind people suggested making smoothies and sipping them slowly, and one person actually gave me her recipe, so I will share it with you, in case anyone else besides me is having this problem with food aversion....

Ann Marie's Berry Smoothie

Ingredients:

1/4 C Greek-style yogurt, plain (I use Trader Joe's)
1/4 C almond flour or almond meal (make sure it's certified gluten free!)
frozen/fresh fruit (blueberries, strawberries - nothing too sweet)
a dash of aloe juice to soothe the stomach
a dash of water with lime

Directions:

Whip everything up in your blender or magic bullet, and voila!

According to the nutrition info, there should be exactly 20 grams of fat in this, and I can assure you that it does not seem fatty when it's going down. Yay for almond meal!

I have to stay on a fairly low carb diet now (just found out that I'm pre-diabetic, oh joy!). The nice thing about this smoothie is that the carb content is not bad (< 10 grams?) and if it needs to be sweeter I can add a trace of stevia without adding to the carbs.

Dusting off the Crockpot again

Decided to do a cooking post tonight....I'm sure everyone's had enough of my health issues for a while!

And it's definitely getting to be the right time of year for Crockpot cooking...Autumn is just around the corner and the college football season has already started. Hubby was in the front room this evening as I was putting the finishing touches on dinner in the kitchen; he was almost jumping up and down with joy as the Boise State Broncos managed to win (very narrowly) against Virginia State. Well, I was happy too, let's face it; my daughter Robin just graduated from Boise State last June and we've all adopted that University as our own in this house, at least where football is concerned!! :)

So tonight I made another wonderful Indian curry recipe from the Crockpot Lady's blog; I had tried a couple of curries from her site before, both of which were good, but this one was over the top GREAT! I loved it, and my five year old cleaned his plate! My husband is not a big curry fan but admitted that it was good and that he enjoyed it. Which is good because I made a LOT! LOL!!

Yeah, I know that curry and football don't really go together as far as most people are concerned, but I really wanted some curry tonight! :)

The recipe I used is Crockpot Chicken Makhani, aka Indian Butter Chicken...I made my own slight modifications. Stephanie's recipe is here; she got it from a fellow blogger, Kindra, and modified it to suit herself. Kindra's recipe is here.

Crockpot Chicken Makhani

Ingredients

2 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs (can be frozen)
1 med onion, sliced
6 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 stick butter, cut into chunks
15 cardamom pods (sewn together or tied in cheesecloth)
2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 T garam masala
approx 1 inch grated fresh ginger root
1 can coconut milk (13.5 oz)
1 can (6 oz) tomato paste
2 T lemon or lime juice
1 C plain yogurt
1 tsp salt (more or less to taste)

NOTE: If you don't have cardamom pods, you can use 1/2 tsp ground cardamom, maybe a bit more. You can always add salt, more spices, to taste. Always feel free to modify it to suit your own taste buds!

Directions

Use a 5 quart or larger crockpot. You can either sew together the cardamom pods using a needle and thread or you can tie them in a little cheese cloth bundle instead, if you have cheesecloth in the house. Put some sliced onion in the bottom of the crockpot, then place chicken on top. Scatter rest of onion and garlic over chicken. Combine dry spices, grated ginger, tomato paste, lemon or lime juice, and coconut milk in a medium sized bowl and pour the resulting mixture over the chicken and vegetables in the pot. Drop chunks of butter randomly over the top.


Cover and cook on low for 8 hours, or high for 4 (I doubled the recipe and cooked it on high for 2 and low for 4). The chicken will shred easily when fully cooked.

Stir in the plain yogurt 15 minutes before serving.


Discard cardamom pods. Salt to taste, serve with white or brown basmati rice. Enjoy!!