How to make any restrictive diet much easier - improve the quality of the food

DISCLAIMER:  I am not a doctor or medical professional of any kind, and nothing here is medical advice.

I made a long post about the vegan diet that solved my problem, and the topic of improving the quality of food to compensate for restrictions is in there, but I think this topic deserves a separate post. Virtually any restrictive diet, unless it is just raw vegetables/fruit, can be made dramatically more enjoyable by improving the quality of the food, to compensate for the restrictions.

The examples I give will be from the vegan diet I followed, but the basic concept applies to virtually any restrictive diet you are following. The quickest and easiest way is to simply buy more high end versions of products, but what you really want is to make things from scratch. For example, a soup you make from scratch, with a long cooking time, and fresh ingredients, will be far better than some campbells soup you grab off a shelf at a store. A (from scratch) vegan soup, that skips spices and sulfur filled things like onions, will in fact be far better than a cheese & meat filled soup you get off a shelf at a convenience store.

If I get some pizza dough from a store, and then take the time to thaw it to room temperature and then stretch it out, and I add some high quality canned tomatoes to it, it is superior to a diggorno or red baron pizza that is covered in cheese. If I take the time to make the dough from scratch, I get an even better result.

Any bread or dough based items that are made from scratch will be far superior to anything store bought. Making yeast based bread/dough from scratch is nothing to be scared of. You basically get some dried yeast, and add it to water that is warm, but not hot enough to kill the yeast.

The most important thing is to take the time to cook things from scratch, but you want to have at least decent quality ingredients as well. Canned italian tomatoes will usually be far superior to USA grown ones, for example. All butter is not the same, and fresh vegetables are usually superior tasting to frozen ones. Fresh herbs are usually far superior to dried. For example fresh basil is far superior to dried basil leaves. Canned tomatoes are much better than fresh tomatoes, if fresh tomatoes are out of season.

When I did my initial, all vegan phase of my diet about 20 years ago, I had enough sense to buy higher quality foods than I normally would to compensate for the restrictions in the diet. It was not until much later that I actually learned to cook things from scratch (this was just for fun). If I had done this initially, my diet would have been much easier.

Cooking things from scratch is not usually much more expensive (its often cheaper) than buying premade foods, and often the time between steps does not need you to be in the kitchen watching the food. For example, when making breads/doughs, there will be a long time between steps, but you don't have to watch it, since nothing is actually cooking over heat.

There is a truly vast amount of cooking channels/videos on youtube. Sometimes recipes can't be modified to follow dietary restrictions. For example, If you try to bake brownies without the eggs, it won't work. A large percentage of the time though, you can simply leave things out of recipes to accommodate your diet, and it will work fine. For example, a tomato sauce recipe that calls for chopping up a whole onion and adding it in, can be done without the onion, to avoid the sulfur.

The most important part of making food from scratch is usually the long cooking times, to create flavors that otherwise could not be created. So be wary of any really quick recipes. I suggest looking for youtube channels by real chefs, so you have some confidence in the quality of the recipes. It is also a good idea to get some well respected cookbooks, for the same reason of having confidence in the recipes. These are usually cheap to get used.

 

Here are some things that I have enjoyed making from scratch, that fit a vegan diet:

tomato sauce (I use it on pasta)

vegan soup

bread

pizza dough & vegan pizza

smoothies (with frozen fruit and water, or almond milk)

candied orange peel/slices

oven baked french fries

 

The main health advantage of making food from scratch, for this condition, is that you have total control over what goes in the food. If you are extremely sensitive to sulfur levels for example, than this approach gives you total control over that.

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