One of the first blogs I found when I started SCD was Beth’s blog. She did SCD for her daughter Amy who suffered from Crohn’s disease. Beth always had the best recipes! Every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas I make her stuffing and pumpkin pie. I’ve never felt deprived at the holidays and even people who didn’t eat SCD loved the food.

She wrote a cookbook that is now available in print – The Turtle Soup SCD Cookbook. While it would make a great Christmas present, I would suggest buying it beforehand to enjoy the stuffing and pumpkin pie.

For anyone wondering what I eat for holiday dinners, here’s my go-to list:

• Beth’s stuffing recipe
• Roasted turkey (in a covered pan, stuffed, no extra prep)
• Sweet potato and apple casserole (sub butternut squash if you’re on SCD)
• Steamed carrots smothered in butter
• Steamed green beans smothered in butter
• Homemade cranberry sauce (cranberries, honey)
• Homemade gravy (pan drippings + broth + onions, mushrooms, thyme)
• Beth’s pumpkin pie
• Whipped cream (can be made SCD)

Beth’s recipe book is great for everyday food and meals. It’s not a holiday recipe book, she just happens to have the best stuffing and pumpkin pie!

So after liking the Beef Korma, I didn’t expect this Tandoori Chicken to be so amazing!!! That’s the first two recipes I’ve tried from Raman Prasad’s “Adventures in the Family Kitchen” and loved. Wow. Also a very easy dish to make. Make a marinade (yogurt + spices), pour it over some chicken and leave it in the fridge. Then bake it as you would normally bake chicken. I simply served it with some steamed asparagus and it was delicious.

I used to love Indian food, but found I usually had stomach problems after eating at Indian Restaurants (much like many people actually) and I never figured out why. Making these recipes at home gives me the chance to only use ingredients that I know I can handle. One example would be using my SCD yogurt in place of commercial yogurt. The tandoori chicken recipe tasted even better than any restaurant tandoori chicken I’ve ever had. It was simply fabulous!

So while I was making it, I noticed the sauce turned a sort of pinkish brown. I wondered why it wasn’t super red like it is in restaurants. If you were trying to make this dish super red using natural spices, it would probably take so much red chilli powder to do so, that it would simply be inedible. So I looked up recipes online for tandoori chicken to compare ingredients. Well, the only thing I could find that worked to make the dish super red, was RED FOOD COLORING. Yep that’s right, tandoori chicken served in restaurants is red because they ADD food coloring to it. How silly is that? Someone figured out that people said it tasted better when it was more of a red color. So to encourage people to order it, they started adding food coloring. What a strange society we live in..

Oooohhh baby this was good. I hope this is what it’s supposed to look like. I might add less water next time. I got Raman Prasad’s SCD cookbook “Adventures in the Family Kitchen” a few weeks ago and wanted to try this Indian recipe called Beef Korma. It called for yogurt so I decided to wait until I was comfortably eating the SCD yogurt each day to make sure I didn’t have any problems with it. I’m now up to 3/4 cup per day of yogurt so I went ahead and made this recipe. It was really tasty, I highly recommend it! Also pretty easy to make. Marinate some beef in yogurt with spices (I buy stew meat so you don’t have to cut it up, and I marinate the night before in fridge). Cook some onions and spices in a large pan, add the meat, add water and simmer. Add some tomatoes and simmer a little more. Then it’s ready to eat! I hope all his recipes are as delicious and easy as this one.

I also ordered a few other cookbooks along with this one from my library. I can’t afford to buy them all, so this way I borrow them, copy out recipes, and send the books back. I figure if I lose any recipes I’ll just borrow the books again. The Breaking the Vicious Cycle had a few good recipes but seem more advanced for what I want to try right now (lots of cheddar cheese used in them). I also got Dr. Mercola’s “Total Health Program”, Kendall Conrad’s “Eat Well Feel Well”, and Jodi Bager and Jenny Lass’ “Grain-free Gourmet”. They all look like they have a few recipes in them that I’ll make. Some of them are a little extravagant for my liking. I’m more of a one-pot dinner kinda gal. I’ll make sure to post about which ones I try and which pass the taste test.

So I’ve been waiting to post about these because I was trying to take a really nice picture that fully shows how tasty and neat these snacks are. Well, here’s the first picture I ever took, because honestly, none of the other pictures looked any better. I guess I’ll have just describe them

When trying to gain weight on the SCD diet, avocados and coconut oil play an important role. Sure red meat and eggs can help you gain weight, and don’t forget all those almond butter brownies, but avocados and coconut oil are cheaper and easier if you ask me. So I set about figuring out how to have avocados and coconut oil with just about everything. I use coconut oil in all my cooking. Avocados I like enough to eat just on their own, but I also really like these chicken avocado tots I found on www.scdrecipe.com.

Basically it’s just cooked chicken breast and avocado put in a blender and blended up. I tend to vary between using more avocado than chicken and vise-versa. Then place about a spoonful onto a pan full of coconut oil and fry em’ till they’re nice and browned on both sides. I make mine sorta like a flattened meatball, but you could also make them completely round. They end up pretty tasty and even better if you have them with some ketchup to dip it in. Nice snack to just grab from the fridge now and then.