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If you are cooking a family meal, and you want to bring the flavours of home, nothing says family dinner like a whole roasted chicken. It’s simple but it really does speak to the home cooked meal. To this day I refuse to order chicken in a restaurant, (even if it is low FODMAP) only because it’s a home meal, not a going out meal. This is a compliment to chicken.

To add a little twist I suggest flattening your chicken. For extra laughs they call this spatchcocking a chicken. It’s now my favourite way to cook chicken. It makes for a simple yet pretty hard to screw up method to cook/eat chicken. This will bring the family dinner to your plate, and bring that wonderful smell of cooking meat to your home.

Add in a couple smashed potatoes and some roasted veg and you have a home cooked family dinner that will feed your soul. All simple to do and all with low FODMAPs.

And nothing is better to feed your soul but chicken soup for the soul…. which you can now make! With the bones of the chicken dinner you just ate! Low FODMAP chicken stock. This gives me immense happiness to fully use the chicken and make stock from the bones. This makes stock plentiful in my house and one of the major reasons I enjoy cooking whole chickens.

Ok I have had the carbon steel pan for about 6 months now. Here’s my take on it:

I’m still super happy to move away from the Teflon non stick. Carbon steel from that perspective keeps my family safe.

My pan is finally seasoned. It took a while as it was my first time doing it, but finally I can cook eggs without being concerned they’ll stick. I’m sure other can season a pan faster but I finally have mine well seasoned.

It can totally “burn a steak”. This is my test for most BBQs. Can you sear the outside while keeping the inside pink. Can you push out concentrated heat? Carbon steal pans can get Extremely hot and keep their heat. This is a big difference compared to my old non stick pans. They could maybe sear one side then loose they’re heat. Carbon steel doesn’t. You can sear both sides without an issue. This is actually the part that makes me the happiest.

Clean up is a breeze. I thought I’d really dislike the hand cleaning. I actually don’t mind it at all. I use a clean cloth or paper towel while it out and we are good to go.

My over all opinion is they are worth it. Find someone that knows how to season and you will really like this pan.

Like many out there Covid 19 has taken effect on my life. I ordered all my Christmas gifts this year off of Amazon. After making some amazing meatballs I was getting low on gluten free bread crumbs. I have also started to look to Amazon for other things like getting gluten free panko/bread crumbs. This time when I went shopping for the gluten free bread crumbs I also so I could purchase gluten free Gnocchi. (Pronounced No-key) I have had them before but never made them myself. For some reason this Gnocchi was extremely cheap. ($2 CDN for 500 grams of Gnocchi.) It was also Extremely FODMAP friendly. Well with a match like this, appealing to my cooking side, my frugal side, and ordering from Amazon I was destined to make some Gnocchi. I had never made it before so I searched out for an recipe I could adapt. I found something that really spoke to me. I made some minor adjustment to make it low FODMAP and now I’m super happy with how this turned out.

Please checkout this Tuscan Gnocchi. It’s got huge flavour, and it’s vegetarian without making a big deal about it. If you have a carnivore, just serve the gnocchi with a side of steak. That always makes carnivore feel better.

October is here, so it seems super relevant that we talk pumpkin and squash. Winter to me has always had these flavours, so it’s a natural one to discuss. Normally, I’d do the research myself but someone has already done a great job of digging up the info. Please give a quick read here: https://www.evilonions.com/home/a-pumpkin-primer

It is a good article that jump starts you knowledge on what you can eat and what might be more risky to eat.

I also found a posting on reddit which may also be a good place to ask questions if you have any questions on the topic of squash/pumpkins and FODMAPs.

I have been working on a pumpkin spice pudding dessert but haven’t gotten off the ground with it yet so I’ll update about that once I have made some progress.

I’ve been watching a lot of video’s on youtube recently. Here is a cultivated list of videos for you to help understand what it is and how to make gluten free bread.

• Gluten: What is gluten?
• The science behind excellent pizza dough, that happens to be gluten free.
  • FYI the exact recipe isn’t given but it’s alluded to and we will try and ‘make it’ stay tuned. (Or subscribe to Cooks Illustrated)
• Sourdough bread with Babish
• How to make a yeast starter for sourdough.
• How to make yeast, if you can’t buy any. It’s stupid easy.

Here are some pizza recipes to help inspire you:

• If you can’t wait and you’re looking for some pizza today here are some ideas
  • Here’s a Gluten Free Calzone, but it still needs some substitutes to make it gluten free. (I’d remove onion/garlic powder and just use 1/2 tsp of garlic unfused oil)
  • Here’s a great base recipe that still needs some low FODMAP tweaks. (again replacing garlic powder with garlic infused oil) This is likely what I’ll base my recipe off of to start experimenting. As the Test Kitchen video says, use both the yeast and the baking powder.

This isn’t necessarily a low FODMAP post as much as a new to cooking post. If you have an old non-stick frying pan you should consider throwing it out. The teflon that is used contains a chemical that basically can cause various cancers. Any quick google of “why is non stick cookware dangerous” will help you understand why I am suggesting it’s time to throw them out.

So if you are throwing them out what should you replace it with? Well ceramic non-stick are good, they don’t have a long life of non-stick and slowly get worse over time. A more attractive alternative might be to use either a Cast Iron or a Carbon Steel Pan. Both have great thermal properties(They evenly distribute heat), but Carbon Steel is a little more nimble with temperature adjustments. It heats up faster and will respond faster to changes from your range/oven than traditional cast iron. And an added bonus is both of these pans can be thrown in the oven if a recipe calls for it. Something you definitely can’t do with a “non-stick” pan.

I recently purchased two and threw out my non stick. I have to say that there is some work to be done to season them properly. But once you have done that they cook beautifully. I definitely would suggest them as a part of your kitchen tooling.

Summer essentials:

• Fody’s BBQ sauce (see our review on it). It definitely is worth the trouble if you want to have something ready to go on hand.
• Fody’s Ketchup
• If you have time you can make your own Smoked Hickory sauce.
• Buys some bamboo skewers.
  • You can do “make your own Kabob” (LOW FODMAP ingredient suggestions here) this is a fun way to have none FODMAP people integrate with FODMAP people. You pick what you can eat and let them pick what they can /want to eat. It’s a ton of fun and choose your own adventure is always fun.
    • Pork Kabob suggestion for the meet
  • They are great to make desert (Fruit on a stick)
• Curve Ball recipe for the BBQ: Pat in the Hat Thai Turkey Burgers.

If you saw our last post on breaking down a pork tenderloin you might say to yourself, now that I have all this pork what should I do with it. Well it’s summertime and their are some great marinades you can use. I do suggest all of these marinades taste better with at least 2 hours of time to soak into the meat. Their is nothing wrong with adding the marinade to the meat as you freeze it. This just make it super easy when grabbing it out so that it’s ready to go for you. With that said here are some super easy and delicious marinade recipes.

• BBQ sauce. You got go wrong with the simplest of strategies. I think that it’s hard the flavour of BBQ sauce. And it’s just so simple to make and flavourful. It’s a crowd winner and you don’t have to really stretch yourself to make the sauce.
• Citrus (Carnitas) Marinade. If you are looking for fresh flavours this is a great choice. It’s has the pizzaz that you are looking for and can be made from regular ingredients in your fridge. This can be a life saver recipe that can be wiped up in a hurry to make your feel the flavours of summer. I do suggest that you don’t freeze this recipe with the pork. The acidity will dry out the meat, so stick to a more strict 2 hour marinade. I do freeze the marinade separately from the meat and mix them together when thawed.
• Savory Soy Marinade. Saving the best for last this is my goto pork marinade. I love this, it has the salty savoriness that speaks to my sole. I love how the flavours come together. Totally worth the 2 hour wait to eat this. I have also been known to chop up the pork chops so even more of they soy mixture penetrates the pork. Then I take the meat, stab it with a bamboo skewer and have a little pork shish kabob.

Saving money is a really good strategy. If you are new to cooking, (and a lot of people that become low FODMAP are new to it), maybe you haven’t broken down a pork loin before. We like to shop costco and we thought maybe a video of how to do it might be helpful. So here’s our video documentary of how to break down a pork loin.

You will get 3 pork products from breaking down a loin.

• Boneless”Pork Chops”
• Pork Loin Roast
• Pork Kabob

See our video’s below on how to do it:

Kabob’s tasting amazing when they are marinaded. Check out out recipe for them.

When we tie a roast, we are looking to make it uniform in size. The below video doesn’t mention that but that’s why we tie up a roast, is to make it as uniform as possible so it cooks as evenly as possible.

This is actually just a blog post to tell you to go over to FODMAPeveryday.com. They have a great article on How to Read Food Labels so you do not get bitten by hidden FODMAPS that are hidden in prepared food. I won’t go into it as I would like you to go over and read it yourselves. FODMAPeveryday.com helps explain the different USDA laws and their actual meaning when it comes to FODMAPS, and when in your FODMAP journey you can/cannot have “spices” or “natural Flavours.”

P.S. Oh, yeah I should mention that they make one of my favourite rib rubs. … Totally worth a shot!

Ok enough teasing on the article. Go check out FODMAPeveryday.com and their article on How to Read Food Labels.