Cooking for Diet Impossible

One of my only 'challenges' in the last few weeks has been cooking for my mom on her new maybe-nonsense, maybe-not diet - no dairy (mk), or gluten, yeast, or soy (ow). It's almost enough for an epic cooking blog... especially with my new camera magically able to make even steaming broccoli look cool. But, she's a bit inconsistent - sometimes allowing a topping of Parmesan or a bit of soy sauce, other times scrutinizing labels and outing anything that contains a drop of vinegar or the tracest amount of soy lecithin.

Still, in a bizarre way, it's kind of fun. I really don't think I'd mind, for example, spending a summer cooking for a vegetarian. I'm even finding that I might be able to spend a summer cooking for a vegan. I could avoid gluten. I could avoid soy. I've learned enough about different cuisines, and about making some things myself, that I'm not even needing to raid the supermarkets tiny gluten-free shelf for pizza crust, going to the health food store for tomato sauce that really is just crushed up tomatoes a few spices, and buying special vegan soy-cheese for a topping that doesn't really melt right. No, I'm just giving up on pizza. :P

Dairy and gluten pretty much rule out western food. Yeast luckily overlaps with gluten a lot, so it's not much of a new restriction. The toughest thing there is vinegar, which I can replace with lemon juice as long as it's not prepackaged into something. Oh, prepackaged food... I thought I sympathized with hatred towards them and their trace amounts of 'beef extract' or 'peanut oil' before... but now I abhor them. I mean, you just want to buy tomato sauce, and it has to have four unpronounceable ingredients in it? How different would the product really be without those?

Soy is a killer. I could happily enough move to eastern food with few restrictions if it wasn't for soy being out.... Dairy unfortunately does snipe most northern Indian dishes, but there's still then Southern Indian, Thai, Chinese, American Chinese, and Japanese food (of those I know something, however small, about preparing.) Oh, but wait. Take out soy, and you take out most Japanese dishes, and many of the Chinese ones as well. Southern Indian food is a bitch to make, especially without any specialized devices like pressure cookers or food processors. So... you guessed it... I've been making a LOT of Thai.

I'm an old hand at red curry, but let's face it - you can only eat so much coconut milk, and I don't want my family to get sick of one of my specialties anyway, so I've tried to mix things up.

I made pad thai one day, which turned out well except at the grocery store, where I finally found rice noodles by ripping up instant soup packets, and because the store didn't carry almost /any/ of the sauce ingredients, I sheepishly bought some pre-made sauce and modified it as I could.

I also made larb, but it didn't go over all that well, despite my using Ju's recipe and thinking it was just as good. Dad said he liked it and I don't think he disliked it, but he didn't eat the leftovers. Mom apologized and said she was sure that it was good, she even thought she liked the flavor, but the whole concept of ground pork was just freaking her out. Shame, really, because she's supposed to OD on lemon juice, and here larb is the healthiest Thai dish I know how to make, doesn't include any of her no-no foods, doesn't require any specialty ingredients*, and has a ton of lemon juice. Grrr...

* - Okay, so technically it doesn't. And I didn't use any. But there is one specialty ingredient it would be quite nice to have, and that's toasted rice powder. You only need a tablespoon, so a bag would last forever, but making it by hand isn't so nice. It took me half an hour, using muscles I've rarely used before, to grind up that tablespoon.

Yeah. I'm starting to feel like I'm on iron chef.

Here's an example of a nice meal I made the other day - mom relented and allowed teriyaki sauce even though it has soy in it:

Grilled salmon with teriyaki glaze
Jasmine rice
Baby carrots with sesame-honey-teriyaki
Steamed broccoli with lemon