Blessed Are the Pessimists for They Have Made Backups

  So said a plaque in my Mom's office at the Fire Department. She worked in IT there for more than 30 years before she retired last year. One of the main things she learned? At the Fire Department, everything is an emergency! 

 For many years (maybe decades?) I've been a big proponent of having a meal plan. This informs my grocery shopping and keeps me from overspending and wasting food. It also solves the age-old question of "What's for dinner?" One of my favorite tools? I use a meal planning service called Plan to Eat*. On it I store my recipes (I have nearly 2,000 saved at the moment). Then, using the planning tool, I schedule my meals by dragging and dropping them onto a calendar. Plan to Eat then generates a shopping list based on the ingredients from my recipes. It learns over time which stores I prefer to buy things at and what category (like produce or dairy) things will be found in. It takes just a few minutes for me to delete any items I already have on hand, like spices, add anything we've run out of, and change anything up, like which store I want to buy something at this week. I have the Plan to Eat app on my phone and so my grocery list is always with me, I can't leave it on the fridge! 

 The biggest saboteur of the best laid meal plans is my health. No matter how carefully I plan, if a crash or "flare" comes or I get hit with a major migraine, I may just not be up for making my carefully planned dinner. At times like these I have a few options: I push through and make the meal anyways (not the best option for my health), I send a loved one out to pick up take-out or order Uber Eats (very expensive and not great for my health either), or I use one of my backup meals.

 Backup meals are ones I've purchase at a store that are quick and easy (think something like a frozen lasagna that you just have to throw in the oven) or a pre-prepped meal that I've stored in the freezer. I have been blessed for about 20 years by having a large, upright freezer to store extra food in. Even if you only have an over-the-fridge freezer, you should still have enough room to keep one or two things on hand. You can even consider canned food. For a long time our family enjoyed a large canned variety of beef stew and that was a great backup meal. Unfortunately some of the easiest things, like a frozen lasagna or canned beef stew, have had to fall by the wayside as I've transitioned to gluten free eating. 

 When my babies were babies, they all had food allergies. My first two boys had significant dairy allergies and my third had a soy allergy, which was what we had used to replace much of the dairy items in our household. Because I nursed my babies, anything I ate they ate, so I had to be dairy and soy free accordingly as well. Thankfully, they all grew out of their food allergies for the most part by the time they were 5 years old. They still experience some sensitivities, especially to dairy, and especially if their bodies are inundated with other allergens, like hay fever. 

 Having carefully watched and investigated this for my kids for years, I started to form a "bucket theory" for allergies. I've since learned that this is a fairly common way of looking at things. The way I see it, our bodies have a pretty healthy way of dealing with allergens that we come across. For much of them we barely notice them, if at all. But when they start piling up, when we have pollen and dairy and dog hair and dust mites infiltrating our systems, then our body's natural ability to handle them is overrun and we start to experience symptoms. These could be respiratory symptoms, like sneezing, runny nose, or cough, or digestive symptoms, or other things like pain and sleep issues.

 As I got older, I started to notice more and more of these symptoms in myself as well. Starting in 2016, I began working with a Functional Medicine Practitioner to identify and remove the culprits from my diet. I went on all sorts of gut healing and restrictive reset diets. At one point I did the SIBO diet that combines the Low-Fodmap and SCD (Simple Carbohydrate Diet) diets and started me out by going back to plain chicken breast, cooked over a grate to remove the fat and without ANY seasoning, plain ground beef, cooked the same way, and boiled/pureed carrots. That was it. That was all I could eat to start with. Once I'd had about a week on that, we began adding things in one at a time, typically one per week. Each thing that was added in had to be peeled, deseeded, boiled and pureed. Yep, that goes for lettuce, cucumbers, you name it. Some things weren't too bad, cucumber sauce is awfully similar to applesauce for example. Some things were just gross. Not fond of boiled and pureed lettuce, just sayin'. After a great deal of time (more than 6 months) I had barely added anything back to my diet because I kept reacting. We tried blood testing for food allergies, and that showed I was reacting to just about everything too. What this boiled down to was years of trying one special diet after another with very little benefit to show for it. 

 In hindsight, this makes sense. It turns out that one of the most common comorbidities (I'll never be able to use that term without a little shiver) of EDS is MCAS or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. What is MCAS? I'll let Dr. Rubin Explain:

 Because I have MCAS in my Chronic Constellation (the group of conditions that I deal with on a regular basis) I avoid most trigger foods (like gluten and milk) and I have to constantly watch for what I might be reacting to TODAY. So frozen lasagna, pizza or canned soup is pretty much out for me.

 What do I keep as backup meals? Costco has been carrying some gluten free chicken strips that I like to keep on hand. They're pretty dry by themselves, but I've learned a hack from Buffalo Wild Wings that goes a little like this:

Print Recipe

Buffalo Wild Wings Parmesan Garlic Wing Sauce Recipe

Make our Buffalo Wild Wings Parmesan Garlic Wing Sauce Recipe at home and your Parmesan Garlic Wings will taste just like they came from Buffalo Wild Wings.

Source: secretcopycatrestaurantrecipes.com

Course: Main Course

Prep Time: 10 min

Total Time: 10 min

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• ¹⁄₂ cup Butter melted
• 1 teaspoon Garlic Powder
• ¹⁄₂ teaspoon Onion Salt
• ¹⁄₄ teaspoon freshly ground Black Pepper
• ¹⁄₂ cup grated Parmesan Cheese

Directions

1. Place all ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Mix well. Throw cooked wings into the bowl. Toss to coat. Enjoy.

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 In addition to the gluten free chicken strips, I often keep a few frozen pizzas on hand; regular for the rest of my family and gluten free for me. I do pretty well with Costco's frozen Yakitori bowls so they are a quick and easy one person meal when needed.

 I also do my best to keep some homemade options on hand as well. Whenever I cook soups or stews, I always store leftovers in the freezer. I do this by ladling a serving into a quart size Ziploc freezer bag, 

sealing it, then freezing it on a cookie sheet. Once solid, it gets added to a shoe box sized plastic container in the freezer that is my "file drawer" of soup options. Be sure to label the bag because you'd be surprised how similar some of these things look once frozen! When you're ready to use them, just run the bag under warm water for a few seconds and rub it to release the bag from the contents. Then I break it in half both ways over the divider in my sink, making 4 pieces in the bag. I open it and dump it into a bowl for the microwave or a pan for the stove, depending on my preferences in the moment. Easy!

Here's the Thing: You never know what the future will hold. I don't know if the headache I woke up with will last through the day, or the next two months. It's really nice to have a few things on hand for those days when you really need to take care of yourself and NOT cook dinner. Backup meals can be your best friend!

*This is my personal referral link for Plan to Eat. If you use this link to subscribe, you will receive 20% off your first annual subscription payment and I will receive a small commission.