How to find easy recipes: gluten free, lactose free, migraine-safe?

April 21, 2023 3:49 PM

I am dating someone who can’t eat gluten, lactose, or many other foods including dietary migraine triggers. I am also useless in the kitchen, very easily overwhelmed by cooking and meal planning, and can only cook from clear written recipes (I can’t improvise or imagine what would work well together). How can I find things to cook for my new person without completely stressing out about it?

Some foods to avoid include: onions, processed garlic, olive oil, black pepper, chocolate, heavily processed meat. Caffiene is out. Tyramine is out (as much as possible).

A few notes:
I imagine people will want to reply suggesting I communicate with my partner and learn what foods and meals they like. This is already happening. I want to expand and take the initiative so that it doesn’t feel like my new partner is carrying/mothering me so much in the kitchen.

I also imagine people will want to suggest taking a cooking class. I have already done this several times and can’t afford to do this any more right now. It also hasn’t helped prepare me for dealing with a limited diet.

My dependence on clear written recipes is in part due to my neurodivergence and not easily worked around. I know some people can cook from a pantry of ingredients and knowledge about flavour combinations and such. My brain doesn’t seem to work like this. Unless I have clear directions I freeze up or get overwhelmed.

posted by d288478 to Food & Drink (10 answers total)

Maybe look at one of Mark Bittman's Minimalist cookbooks? While they will list lots of potential substitutes, in the end they're very basic and use few ingredients.

(Also, I hope it's not very annoying to suggest that perhaps cooking for this person is not your natural path for expressing your affection. I think it's admirable you don't want to be "carried" by your new person, but sometimes couples have complementary skills and it's better to leverage that than to try to split everything down-the-middle equally.)
posted by praemunire at 3:54 PM on April 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

These restrictions sound like they would fit well with the low-histamine diet, so you might have luck googling with that as a search term. Here’s one website that has a bunch of recipes and here’s another.

I might also recommend, if you haven’t already, to let go of any expectations for yourself or for your partner around this. It sucks to be newly dating and to not be able to safely connect around food, for both of you! So try not to take it too hard or too personally if they prefer to prepare things themselves, if they react to something you make that “should” be safe, if you get frustrated with the restrictions you’re now working with, if either of you have days where you just wish food could be easier.
posted by stellaluna at 4:29 PM on April 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Have one like this at home. Vietnamese summer rolls are good with tolerable foods and wheat-free rice noodles in (as it should be), omelettes are also a pretty good bet and simple homemade sushi rolls. I don’t have specific examples of these but any online recipe should be clear enough.
Check if cheese is ok (much of the lactose is worked out in the process), if so a plain cheese omelette and a fresh side salad can be a delight.
posted by Iteki at 4:34 PM on April 21, 2023

I think maybe a good way to approach this challenge is to give yourself some more limitations. Instead of aiming to make entire meals and meal plans for them, look at how you spend time together and determine what type of food sharing event you have with them the most, and aim to just make those things. For example, if you usually watch movies with them at night and want to have things to snack on, focus on just finding and/or making yummy snacks and finger foods. If you regularly meet up for lunch, focus on figuring out some solid go-to lunch ideas that travel well. Once you have a few things that work well, you’ll probably be able to transpose them to other meals or food sharing events with some small changes, like, if you determine a great lunch wrap, you can make one and cut it into coins to serve on a snack tray at night, or if you learn their favorite fruits for a fruit and veggie dip arrangement, you can use those fruits to make flavored breakfast dishes. Basically, by giving yourself a limitation to start, you’ll be narrowing down the possibilities to something you can grapple with mentally.

Do they have celiac, or are they just gluten sensitive? Because I have a family member who has celiac and he needs to like, use his own cutting boards and maintains a very particular kitchen and absolutely never expects anyone to provide food for him because his gluten allergy makes things unreasonable for anyone who hasn’t lived their whole life to expect. If your partner has given you the go-ahead to embark on this food making quest for them, then trust them, but if you aren’t entirely sure what you need to do to maintain a gluten-free cooking environment for them, start there.

The most detailed, fully explained, tested, and replicable recipes I’ve ever used all come from two places: America’s Test Kitchen, and King Arthur Flour. You will need to either subscribe to ATK or buy Cook’s Illustrated magazines with the recipes you’re interested in (just pay for the website subscription), and King Arthur Flour has many recipes on their website that you can search through and filter by diet. They also publish cookbooks, though I’m not sure if they have a gluten free baking one yet. Their GF flours and mixes are some of the best, though.

I do think that you might have a better time if you were to do some baking, rather than cooking. Baking is usually much more focused on following the recipe and having clear directions. Basically, you are the opposite of me - I chafe at recipes and need to deviate from them, find baking stressful because I have to follow too many directions, and I’m constantly craving variety. Baking, even gluten free baking, is the inverse of this.
posted by Mizu at 4:35 PM on April 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

To add, since others have, if you aren’t much of a cooker, it’s as much an act of love to not complain when you have a lot of plain dinners or when it’s a pain in the butt choosing restaurants, and it’s an act of love to ring ahead to restaurants and discuss what various dishes come with, and to be the asshole who, when they say the risotto has no onions says, “is it made with water or stock? Cos the stock has onions like…” and “by no onions I mean spring onions, leeks, the whole lot” when your partner doesn’t want to be rude or is tired.
posted by Iteki at 4:39 PM on April 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Also, sorry to multi post, but look for FODMAP foodstuffs, I bought super expensive onion etc free stock cubes from Australia where FODMAP is big, and then we could do nice soups and things.
posted by Iteki at 4:43 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd start by asking your person to approve the first couple of recipes before you start cooking. Chances are they will be able to tell you a bit more and then you can go look for a suitable cookbook.For example, likely they eat salad safely, as long as there is no onions in it. So then you head for the library, get out a half dozen books on making salads, and then you wave a recipe or two under they nose - "How about I make this?"

Listen to their answer.... "But there's no starch in it, I'll be hungry. At home I usually open a can of chick peas..." or whatever they object to, and make a note "salad with chickpeas". Then look for those recipes on line. Or if they say sure, it sounds good, you just go ahead and make it.

It's a good bet that they eat salads, and fish. So look for cookbooks that are gluten free, and check the salad and fish section of those books.

Another thing you can do is go shopping for groceries with them and snag their grocery store receipt. That will give you an idea of what they buy, so then you can look for a cookbook or for recipes on line that start with things from that they picked up. Maybe they bought two packages of chicken - look for a gluten free chicken cookbook, or gluten-free chicken recipes on line. Maybe they bought rice noodles. "Chicken with rice noodles..."

You could also start by looking for Asian recipes, as they are often made with rice flour, which is gluten free, and without any dairy products, which helps you avoid the lactose.

The difficulty is that you want a very particular type of cookbook, one with a limited set of recipes. It's possible such a cookbook doesn't exist. But the other option is to check if you new person has any cookbooks they rely on. If they have a couple of books on macrobiotic cooking, that could be the type of cookbook you want to look for.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:54 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Serious Eats is a very dependable recipe site, where you can sort for xx-free recipes in their search engine.

Woks of Life is another very dependable site, where you can sort for xx-free recipes in their search engine.

At both sites, most of the recipes are tested and written to a standard you would mostly expect from larger, paywalled sites. (With Serious Eats, the oldest recipes can be a bit less perfect, but are still good).

With those recommendations, I also want to add to the choir of voices saying you shouldn't worry too much about this. Until I was in my late 20s, I suffered from multiple food allergies and intolerances as well as pollen allergy. I had to teach myself to cook. My then partner really tried to contribute to cooking, but TBH, it was just irritating for me, a constant reminder that my diet was difficult and complicated -- and bland. Also, while I did find the daily cooking a bit of a tough chore to begin with, I became quite the foodie, and now I love cooking and mostly prefer my own food, even though they eventually found the root cause of the allergies and I can now eat almost everything.
posted by mumimor at 11:27 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have a friend with a bunch of restrictions (wheat, dairy, sugars). She appreciates that I go to the effort of making stuff she can eat - but also pointed out that variations on meat and vegetables are all perfectly fine eg roast chicken with roast vegetables, steak and salad (she also noted that people often forget that proper mayonnaise is dairy-free so creaminess without dairy is possible).
posted by AnnaRat at 3:33 AM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Echoing the other comment mentioning low-FODMAP recipes might be the way to discover dishes that check most (if not all) of those boxes.

Here are some low-FODMAP recipes from Taste of Home with photos

This is a recipe for Chili-lime salmon tacos. I make just the salmon part very often and keep the spice blend on hand. (Just leave out the black pepper.) It comes together fast and is delicious.
posted by pdxhiker at 1:33 PM on April 22, 2023