Food Porn For Restricted Diets

It’s that special time of year.

You know the time. When trees are gleaming with fresh rain, tulips are just popping out of the ground, asparagus is appearing at the grocery store, and you have an inflammatory bowel disease. 

It’s that special time of year. It may be spring, or maybe it’s high summer, and the scent of grilled meat is filling your nostrils under the blue sky. And everyone is smiling on the back patio with a beer in their hand, and you cannot drink that beer, so you are holding a water, or maybe an herbal tea, just for some variety, even though it’s too hot to drink tea.

It’s that wonderful season, when the air is crisp and the colorful fall leaves are crunching underfoot, the season of pumpkin pie and hot chocolate, which you also cannot consume, due to the sugar. Or it’s winter, when snow blankets the ground and people curl up by the fire and eat cheesy soups that, if you ate them too, would make you curl up into a fetal position.

What a wonderful time of year! You know the time. When food bloggers write about their favorite seasonal pastries, barbeque sauces, or crunchy salads? And you have an inflammatory bowel disease? Don’t you wish there were food writers who would write a blog post for you? What would that post look like?

The perfect meal for this season, or any season, really, is a nourishing combination of brown rice, red lentils, and kale, with a smattering of soy sauce and sesame for flavor. (Or not, if you can’t do soy or sesame.) We’ve found that, when it’s fall, spring, summer, or winter and you have an inflammatory bowel disease, this recipe really hits the spot.

It may also be substituted with other recipes, such as sweet potatoes, broiled turkey patties, and kale, depending on your preferences and which meal happens to make your gut less likely to send you rushing to the bathroom with embarrassing symptoms.

But for the purposes of this blog, we’ll stick with this particular meal, the meal that we, personally, have found that keeps us from curling up into a fetal position. We mean positions. We are, of course, not just writing in the plural to sound more authoritative!

But whichever meal suits your (and your gut’s) fancy, that is the ideal recipe to cook in this glorious season.

This meal is perfect for a hearty lunch, a delicious dinner, or a satisfying breakfast.

Really, it’s perfect for all three, especially if it is the only meal you’ve found to help stave off those embarrassing trips to the bathroom. It’s so versatile!

For breakfast, we like to get up and make ourselves some nice brown rice and red lentils, topped with a steaming pile of mushy kale.

Then, for lunch, we first open with some brown rice and kale, followed closely by a bite of brown rice and red lentils, and then we close with more kale.

Finally, nothing says dinner better than brown rice, red lentils, and kale!

Here are some sumptuous photos to entice you.

Is there any point in eating anything other than this one meal? Why would a person want to eat more than one meal in a day, a week, or a month, if she’s found the perfect meal? We can’t think of any reason. You should just eat this meal all the time.

The delicious details…

On to the meal itself. How can we say enough about brown rice? It is chewy and satisfying and comes in endless variety, from long grain to short grain to basmati.

Then there are the red lentils. They are sure to entice you with their color, plus their being the easiest legume to digest and an excellent source of protein that won’t irritate your inflamed colon.

For extra variety—and, again, variety is overrated—you can substitute tofu, which adds even more delightful mushiness to the meal, provided you’re not reactive to too much soy, which we personally are.

Topped with kale, your bowl or plate becomes a veritable smorgasbord of color that you can, and will, enjoy gazing upon each breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Then there are the seasonings! They are toasted sesame oil and tamari. That’s pretty much it. We’re going for simplicity here. Make sure it’s tamari, not shoyu, which has gluten. Toasted sesame oil and tamari taste wonderful in combination, and the oil provides you with a gentle source of fat while the tamari offers flavor and salt.

There will be no crunching.

You may be thinking this meal is lacking a bit in texture. Especially since each item, including the kale, will need to be overcooked—we like to call it extremely well cooked—so that its fiber does not irritate the colon.

But, as with variety, who needs texture? Mushiness is the texture of the gods. Your jaw will thank you. It’s much easier to chew your food to a pulp, which maximizes digestibility, if it’s already a pulp to begin with. 

Mushy, soy-and-sesame-flavored mush. This is what you will place before you each morning, noon, and night.

You will find yourself strangely even beginning to crave it, because once your taste buds adjust after a few weeks, your body will think of this meal as the only possible food. All those other people with their crunchy salads and flaky pastries and aromatic beverages? They will look at you with envy, realizing that to be relegated to one single mushy meal, every meal and every day, for weeks or months on end, is the ideal way to eat.

Behold this gorgeous meal! See how inviting it is?

Your favorite recipe. Your only recipe. Your world.

When you go to a restaurant, you will bring this meal with you in a little food thermos and surreptitiously eat it while pretending not to feel weird.

When you go camping, you will stock a cooler full of it and ration it for yourself, guarding it vigilantly against friends and spouses who might want to “taste” it, because you cannot “taste” their food back and there is only so much to last the whole trip, so they are just going to have to get used to your sudden habit of hoarding your food as if it is your life-saving medicine, which it is.

When you go to work, you will pack this meal in a container and heat it up in the microwave and wonder why no one notices that you eat the same thing for lunch every. single. day.

We’ll stop there. Now that we’ve introduced you to this meal, we are sure you’ll fall in love with it like we have, especially because you will have no choice but to eat it and like it and never get sick of it. We’ve found that it also makes a great substitute for Valentine’s Day chocolate, Easter chocolate, Fourth-of-July barbequed ribs, Halloween candy, Thanksgiving dinner, and birthday cake. Who could ask for anything more? 

You’re welcome.