Thanksgiving food Ideas when you can't eat anything

The very first Thanksgiving I had after my allergies decided to go insane was pretty awful. I was down to less than ten foods, trying to figure out what to eat, and really came up with nothing all that palatable.

Although admittedly, the next Thanksgiving was more emotionally upsetting, what with being exposed to one of my allergens by my ex (just a whiff), to help prove to me that it was all psychosomatic. Yeah, that one didn't work too well, just made me sick the entire holiday, sigh.

But, anyway, back to foods. There are some AMAZING recipes for Thanksgiving foods you can make with substitutions. Awesome ones. If they help you, awesome. And I mean that - I'm all about the food porn here. I love seeing other people enjoy food, even if it's not something I'm likely to try myself (see the similarity here? Food porn - it truly is).

But if you are like I was, you may have so few foods that you just don't even know where to start. It's overwhelming. So, for those like me, here's some things that might help a little bit for Thanksgiving foods when you have very little you can have. I don't know if these will help anyone, but I hope that they may be of use for some.

Why what we say matters.

I constantly share information about Celiac Disease.

I know this annoys some people. My friends are likely nodding their heads and saying, 'yes, Shauna, please do shut up about this sometime soon, eh?' I can appreciate that. I know have a bit of an obsessive personality at times. It comes out with anything new in my life, like the three tiny goldfish that turned into a 10 gallon tank, a 20 gallon tank, a 60 gallon tank, and explorations into fish breeding, live plants, and attempts at mimicking a complete ecological environment.

Like I said, just a teensy bit obsessive. Although my fish tanks were awesome, if I do say so myself.

But with Celiac Disease, it's not always obsession driving me to talk about it. Deep down, this is grief and anger. I talk about cooking and the food industry because I have to think about it all the time. But Celiac Disease is more than that.

Cooking without Tasting

If you come to visit my house, something you will hear almost daily is "Here, taste this. How is it? What does it need?"

More chiles? Of course it needs more chiles!

Now, this could be seen as some attempt at creating child chef prodigies, but in reality, it's because I can't eat many of the foods that my family can. If the meal has meats from the regular store, beans if I'm close to my sulfite load, veggies and fruits from the store, eggs, garlic - there is a whole host of foods I can't eat that one or both of my kids can. There's even more that my hubby can, not having gluten issues like the rest of us.

Days of Real Food

I just found a blog called 100 days of real food. It was a lovely idea - a family was going to try to eat only whole foods, nothing processed, for 100 days. Then they tried it again on a budget.

It was a really neat idea, but I wasn't sure how much it would relate to us, mostly because our own diet has become so extreme. Their criteria for what made up unprocessed food was broader than I'm allowed in my own diet, so the question was, would they have foods I could eat, on their diet?

Reality TV: what is cooking really like, these days?

I'm still learning to cook with the  foods I have available, and I'm not a natural, which means I don't instinctively understand how to cook something or what flavors will blend well. So when I am trying to create a recipe, or trying to tweak an existing one? The end is not always a pretty sight. I'd say it works out about as often as it fails spectacularly.

But right now, with my extreme food limitations, ruining my food isn't a minor, if frustrating, experience. It hurts to screw up on a recipe these days, because the loss has a lot more of an impact.