I Need Recipes for My Specialized Diet
Photo by Alex Lau, food styling by Chris Morocco, prop styling by Emily Eisen
ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Dinner SOS, test kitchen director and host Chris Morocco and registered dietician and recipe developer Desiree Nielsen answer questions from listeners with diagnosed conditions.
The Dinner SOS team gets a lot of questions from listeners with dietary restrictions, and in many cases they can provide answers just from working with their in-house food experts; however some chronic conditions, such as IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), diabetes, and heart disease, require specialized diets. For example, Maddie wants to make something delicious for her father-in-law’s birthday and needs a recipe suitable for his heart condition. Grace struggles with IBS and is lacking inspiration for what to cook—she’s looking for new ways to revamp her low FODMAP diet.
Chris and Desiree help us understand how to navigate changes in diet, without sacrificing fun or flavor. Chris suggests his Gluten-Free Carrot Cake for Maddie, swapping out coconut oil for olive oil to accommodate her father-in-law’s heart condition. Chris suggests Grace make this Black Vinegar Chicken with Radishes, which is delicious and intentionally low-FODMAP.
Listen now to hear how Chris and Desiree offer recipes that are flavorful and fun, while also prioritizing the callers’ dietary needs.
Chris Morocco: Hey there, listeners, future callers, and cooking enthusiasts. Welcome to Dinner S.O.S, the show where we help you save dinner or whatever you're cooking. I'm Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious. Now we get a lot of questions in our inbox from listeners who have dietary restrictions, and sometimes we can absolutely handle those questions right here in the test kitchen. No dairy, no meat, no nightshades, no problem. But not everyone's diet is that simple. And also, even if you're not dealing with dietary restrictions, healthy can feel like a moving target. I mean, you've probably seen the contradictory headlines. Chocolate is bad for you. No, it's actually great for you, but oats are the real devil.
The simplest questions around what foods are quote-unquote "healthy" can feel hopelessly complex. So today we're bringing in an expert to help us navigate those questions. Desiree Nielsen is a registered dietitian and recipe developer. She's written three cookbooks including the bestseller Eat More Plants, and she's here today to help out some of our listeners who are dealing with restrictions stemming from digestive issues like GERD or IBS to diabetes, and to help us understand how to navigate changes in diet without sacrificing fun or flavor. Desiree, welcome to Dinner SOS.
Desiree Nielsen: Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to help show people that they can still love what they eat, even when there's some sort of restriction involved.
CM: Awesome. Well, yeah, I'm so delighted to have you here. And to start off, I'd love if you could explain to listeners what you do.
DN: Yeah, so I'm a registered dietitian, which a lot of people either don't know at all what a registered dietitian is or immediately they're like, tell me about this TikTok thing I just saw. But for people who don't know what an RD is, we are the sort of legislated, regulated health professional, like a nurse, but for nutrition.
CM: Okay. Has TikTok been a net positive for your profession or would you characterize it as otherwise?
DN: I have this love hate relationship with all of it, Instagram, TikTok, and the like, but I get to do what I do because they exist. The downside of that is that it is chaos on the internet. The fact that we are even asking ourselves whether or not oatmeal is healthy just shows the depth of our despair when it comes to nutrition and food.
CM: That's because it is though, just to confirm, right?
DN: Yeah. The power breakfast of octogenarians everywhere, we have been eating it for so long, there is no convoluted logic that can get you to the place that oats are unhealthy. It can't.
CM: So you're having to debunk quite a lot of myths, I take it.
DN:Yeah. And aside from clinical needs, if you have diabetes or if you have reflux, nutrition really hasn't changed all that much in the last 50 years. But when you're in this complex food system and you hear all these voices saying, don't eat fruit, it has too much sugar or oats are inflammatory or eat nothing but steak and it will cure every illness known to men. People are really like, I have no idea what to put on the dinner table.
CM: But the steak has to be raw, right?
DN: Absolutely. And just drowned in a half a pound of butter too. The people walking the streets of Manhattan eating pats of butter for a snack, it's 100% rage bait. There's no way they could actually believe this is okay.
CM: Yeah.
DN: Back when we were more analog about this, it was all of a sudden health and nutrition were in the headlines where they weren't before, especially the red wine thing. It went back like, it's good for you. It's not good for you. Chocolate's good for you, it's not good for you. And the challenge with media coverage of nutritional science is that science is like a slow moving beast, right? The truth of science doesn't come out after one clinical trial. It comes out after years and years of these things.
And so when we started posting headlines with every new study that came out, it was a real problem because there was this seeming flip-flop, when in reality there isn't that much controversy in the research. And very recently, there was a couple of really interesting surveys that found the poor quality, the information, the more engaging it is, which makes so much sense. What gets your attention more? Did you know your smoothie is bad for you? Or me saying, hey, you're doing great. Maybe let's just do an extra scoop of veggies at dinner, and then you'll be fine. Right? It's that novelty that like, whoa, am I doing something wrong? Am I making mistake? That really resonates with us in a way that just keeps us in this loop.
CM: Okay. I do want to ask with regards to how you work with clients who come to you with different medical diagnoses and dietary restrictions, how do you approach a conversation with them when somebody's just received a new diagnosis?
DN: Yeah, there is an art and a science to nutrition, particularly because we all have different personalities, maybe different fears or beliefs about nutrition, and so it is something that we really work hard on to meet people where they're at and get a real sense of what's your relationship with food right now? How do you eat right now? What are your goals about your health? Are you a big cook? I need to know if someone can really cook before I go say, oh, let's make these brothy beans from scratch when someone can barely boil water. But the biggest thing for me is that there is no diagnosis on the planet that can get in the way of enjoying food and maintaining a good relationship with food. We really focus on what to do more of and getting really clever with flavors, which is something that's so big for me. Lots of spices, really using your fresh herbs and spices and different cooking techniques because healthy food can and should be just as enjoyable as restaurant fare, in my book.
CM: Well said. We're going to get some listener questions going in a sec, but I'm wondering, is there general advice for folks who don't necessarily have a diagnosis but who are kind of navigating perhaps changes to their health?
DN: Yeah. There aren't a ton of absolutes in nutrition, but there are a few. The first is that all of us to whatever our budget ability, whatever our cooking ability, we should be eating more plant foods, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds and whole grains. So that's a big thing for me. I think a lot of the times when we're thinking about health, we start looking for whatever packaged food is gluten-free or low in sugar, but really we need to be putting those actual single ingredient foods on our plate more often. All the other stuff can fit in no problem, but we want to be focusing on that. So learning how to cook vegetables so that you love the flavor, learning how to play with those textures. Sometimes just even treating vegetables like we would meat and searing it off, and braising it, it can implement all of these incredible flavors and textures.
That is fun because it should be fun because if we're not enjoying what we eat, it doesn't matter what plans we have for our nutrition. A week from now, two weeks from now, six months from now, we're going to be like, this sucks. I miss food.
CM: We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, Desiree and I will tackle some listener questions.
Desiree, we are back and we're going to start transitioning to some listener questions. You game to help solve some dinner emergencies here?
DN: Yeah, for sure.
CM: All right, awesome. So our first question is from a listener we're going to call Corey. Let's hear their voice memo.
Corey: I consider myself a passionate and adventurous cook. I make my own broths, syrups, spiced clarified butters, all sorts of things. Anyway, back in March I started suffering horrible pain, nausea, loss of appetite, and I was finally diagnosed with GERD, gastritis, a risk of esophagitis and a peptic ulcer. Treating this has meant cutting out citrus vinegar, nearly all oil, most alliums, any non-lean meat, alcohol, chocolate, coffee, soda, high spice, high fat dairy, and likely a few other things I'm forgetting. All in all, this has been devastating. What was once the source of joy and fulfillment has become one of deep, deep anxiety. The ulcer and gastritis are temporary, but GERD will be with me for the rest of my life. Do you have advice both for cooking through this acute gastro hell and for adapting in general? It feels silly to say, but I mean cooking has been such a big part of my life that I can't help but feel a sense of grief right now.
CM: So before we dig into this, can you tell listeners who might not be familiar with GERD what it is and why Corey might need to be adjusting their diet?
DN: So all of us get reflux from time to time. I mean post Thanksgiving dinner is a classic example of this, but GERD is very different because it's chronic. So this means you're refluxing all the time. And as this person has found, because of that, it's started to erode the esophagus, which is the tube between the mouth and the stomach. So there's a little sphincter, which is a little trap door between the esophagus and the stomach, and the job of that sphincter is to let food through and whatever we eat and drink into the stomach, but then also to snap shut super tight because our stomach is highly acidic. We don't want that stuff splashing back up into our esophagus, but it can get a little bit floppy and start to not work as well, and that's what GERD is. It's that stomach contents going back up.
So if we can avoid applying pressure with having a smaller meal and eating those smaller meals more often, that can be really helpful without even changing how you're eating. But there are some other things. Individual triggers can be so much. It can be coffee for some alcohol, citrus, tomatoes can be a big one.
CM: And that is specific on the individual?
DN: Exactly.
CM: So it varies.
DN: Yeah, someone will notice, well, tomatoes really bother me, and another person would say they don't bother me at all. But in terms of general nutrition, we have that saying cream rises to the top, it does so in the stomach. So when you eat a really high fat meal, it can sort of just apply a little bit more pressure, upward pressure on the sphincter. The other thing that's really, really helpful for GERD that most people don't think about is fiber. Adding fiber to the diet, again separate from potentially even making any other restrictions can be helpful long-term because it helps food move through the body and also the stomach in sort of an appropriate way. psCilium is fantastic, so whether you put that into your oats, whether you use that to make a bread or crackers, adding more chia, ground flax, and psyllium can be really helpful to get symptoms under control.
CM: And so for Corey, ultimately it sounds like at least for the time being, this means cutting out high acid and high fat foods.
DN: If they're in this sort of acute phase, things might feel a little bit more restrictive now than for the long haul, which is when they're simply eating with GERD. But the idea is always when you can to take what you love to cook and simply adapt it. So maybe we are grilling and broiling instead of being a little bit more heavy-handed with the butter basting, for example.
CM: What are some recipes that you think they could benefit from in the acute phase, but in the long term as well?
DN: Yeah, so I mean particularly in the cooler weather, like beans would be such a win any way that you want to consume them. Beans are really high in fiber, including soluble fiber. They're so rich, they're really filling and comforting. The super seedy gluten-free bread, that's fantastic because it has all of those really fiber rich seeds. And so that's a really lovely option for a snack with maybe like a berry chia jam. The blueberry chia jam is fantastic. So all of those things will really help slowly get fiber up, which hopefully will help with symptoms so that you can then adapt to the long term.
CM: Okay, interesting. Yeah, the super seedy gluten-free bread you mentioned, that was based on something that we had done years back, which was inspired by the recipe Sarah Britton published on her website, My New Roots. It's nuts and seeds sort of held together by a psyllium based matrix, and so there's not like an actual crumb to the bread. It functions almost more like a cracker of sorts, but this version kind of uses Teff flour and some yeast to create a little bit more of an open structure and more bread like experience, and it's gluten-free as well.
Okay. Any final thoughts for Corey?
DN: The biggest thing is to just know that wherever you're at right now, it is temporary. Do whatever you need in the moment, but more expansive food experiences will return.
CM: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for that. And Corey, I hope all this helps. Please feel free to hit us up for any clarifying questions. And yeah, we hope all these adjustments go as smoothly as possible. Okay, next up we have a voicemail from Maddie, which we are going to play.
Maddie: Hi Chris and co. I'm Maddie, long-time listener, first-time caller, and I am looking to make something for my father-in-Law for his birthday. Our two limitations are going to be that he's just had some heart complications, so heart healthy is a must, nothing super fatty, but we do want something decadent and awesome for his birthday. And also he's pre-diabetic, so low sugar. All the fun things. We can't really have low sodium and whatnot. But yeah, have a lovely day.
CM: Okay, so a festive birthday dessert that's not super fatty or super sugary. I'm sure you hear this all the time. Certainly from my perspective when I first heard this, there's a moment of, honestly, to be frank, panic, this might be a bit of a tall order, but what are your thoughts?
DN: I feel like this is my zone of excellence creating things, particularly because I'm 100% plant-based. So I think a lot of the typical tricks like butter are just not in my wheelhouse anymore. So a couple of things to note with heart health. I mean heart health and blood sugar health are really intertwined. So it's not necessarily the amount of fat, particularly for a festive dessert. This is not something we're putting on the plate like three meals a day. This is a treat, a celebration, dessert, but type of fat becomes more important. Immediately. I thought of an olive oil cake for this. Olive oil is the best researched, most heart healthy fat on the planet. But then we have the question of the blood sugars themselves, and this again is super individual because people will have different blood sugar responses and individual tolerances. Some people do fine with lower sugar, but they're consuming maybe more all-purpose flour, whereas others, they really need to get sort of the carbs down lower in order to keep their blood sugar stable.
So an almond flour product could be amazing. Almond flour has such a tender crumb, and it's naturally got that sweetness. And then you also have to talk about sugar. And one of my biggest pet peeves as a dietician, you see it all the time on the internet, people will say, here are my healthy such and such cookies with a cup and a half of coconut sugar. And the health thing that they're stressing is the fact that they don't have "refined sugar" but sugar is sugar.
CM: What about dates or dates syrup, honey, maple syrup or just still sugar?
DN: It's all still sugar. And I love dates. I love maple syrup, but they are still sugar when it comes to blood sugars. So yes, I mean dates have fiber. Dates also have prebiotics in them, so they're really good for your gut microbiome. But the average Medjool date is like four teaspoons of sugar. So they're not a freebie when we're trying to manage our blood sugars, but absolutely they're flavorful, so we can often use less, and they do come with a little bit of their own nutrition.
CM: What about sugar from banana?
DN: So the way that our blood sugar responds to a food takes into account the entire context of that food. So if we eat a ripe banana that has one impact on our blood sugar, if we put that banana in a banana bread with whole grain flours or oats or ground flax with fats, so the fat, the fiber, the protein inherent in all of those other foods then changes our blood sugar response. So absolutely getting your sweetness from applesauce, from banana, baking with a lot of fruit, that's a great way to add sweetness without adding a lot of extra sugar. You still want to think about the context of the food because all-purpose flour is going to have different blood sugar effect than whole grain flour and vice versa.
CM: So what if I said I could get you an almond flour based cake? This one would have olive oil, but still some refined sugar. And what if I just shout out the ingredient quantities and you can tell me if it's a go or no go.
DN: Okay.
CM: Okay, great. So this is my gluten-free carrot cake. Half a cup of what would go from being coconut oil to olive oil, if that helps our case here, three cups of almond flour, whole eggs, five. I have carrots, unsweetened coconut, and I have one and a quarter cups dark brown sugar.
DN: If that were to serve maybe eight to 10 people, I feel like we can just take the sugar down by a little bit.
CM: Okay.
DN: Just a little bit and that would be fantastic. The eggs are going to be higher in saturated fat, but if we take the coconut oil, which is also high in saturated fat and swap it for olive oil, that's going to get more of those heart healthy fats. And the actual coconut itself is quite high fiber.
CM: So clearly my head was going to kind of cake as being this kind of her example of celebratory dessert, but I feel like you've got other thoughts as well.
DN: I do. I have a chocolate mousse, which for a little bit of context, I'm a plant-based dietician in a house that would love to eat fast food every single day, and they are not vegan. So I have the world's toughest critics at home.
CM: You have your work cut out for you. That's wild.
DN: Oh, I do. So I make a chocolate mousse that is actually low sugar and tastes just as delicious as any other chocolate dessert that you could imagine, like it is craveably good, especially with a little bit of a cherry compote on top, but it's made from tofu. The texture is light, it's not too heavy, it's rich, but it's still a little bit light. And so something like that could be great. And then you can also put that chocolate mousse on a little bit of a cracker crumb crust and make a little bit of a mousse pie out of it. So that can be another option that is actually lower in sugar, really healthy fat profile as well.
CM: Listen, I truly believe like silken tofu is incredibly neutral, and it has this ability to be very airy and kind of provide that sort of lift. Obviously it's not a one-to-one for beaten egg, but it's going to give you that amplifying the volume of a mousse. I think that's a really, really smart idea.
Okay, Maddie, really hope that that is helpful. Let us know what you ended up deciding on. Okay? And happy birthday to your father-in-Law. We're going to take another break, but stick around for more answers to your questions. All right, next question is from Stefanie.
Stefanie: My dinner emergency happens nearly every night. We are a family of four, me, my husband, my 13-year-old daughter, and my 16-year-old son, an athlete who eats a lot. Every night I'm cooking around the following limitations. Lactose intolerance, sheep and goat okay. Pescatarian, no shellfish, kosher, diabetes-friendly soy-free. I cook a lot of vegetarian food, salmon, and Beyond Meat. I feel like my rotation is getting old.
CM: So it seems like Stefanie's restrictions are a little bit milder compared to what we've discussed so far, but I'm really curious how can we train ourselves to see the possibility against the restrictions that we're all faced with whatever our circumstances are. And do you have anything in mind in this specific case?
DN: Yeah, what's that old adage? Constraint breeds creativity.
CM: Sometimes.
DN: Sometimes, and particularly when it's at home. As someone who also makes dinner every night for a family of mixed eaters, the five o'clock question is the hardest one. I think the diabetes friendly is really just about returning to those whole foods. So the whole grains, the vegetables, the legumes, the fish, there's some egg in there, hopefully for some protein Beyond Meat. I got to admit, I love Beyond Meat. That's very delicious.
CM: You do?
DN: I do. I think it just offers variety. Again, it comes back to this idea of variety, being able to have different textures, different flavors so that you don't feel so constrained. I do a Beyond ground sort of stuffed acorn squash on my website, which is a really nice sort of Sunday or holiday veggie main. Frittata is always a really lovely weekly thing, particularly if you have extra roasted veggies around, that's another staple in this house. I always say when in doubt, roast it. So whatever is looking really good at the store or at the market, just doing a beautiful sheet pan of all these roasted veggies.
CM: In terms of being diabetes friendly, would a brown rice, flour based, gluten-free pasta count? Or would you be thinking, oh, whole wheat pasta would count. Or is any frankly type of noodle or pasta just not going to be super diabetes friendly?
DN: The fiber helps. So whole wheat is going to offer more fiber and more protein than brown rice, which I think would surprise a lot of people. So I might lean towards a whole wheat spaghetti. I find a lot of the shapes of whole wheat, they're a bit mealy, whereas in a spaghetti or spaghettini, you don't get that. But the other thing that's really fantastic if you like them, I do, are the chickpea-based pastas. They're just such a huge win in terms of protein and fiber. But if you're like, I just really love white pasta cooked al dente, that actually has a much lower impact on blood sugar than most people might expect.
CM: You mean if you went past al dente, you would put yourself at a disadvantage?
DN: Yes. And the reason for... Yeah.
CM: Al dente is not just better, smarter, and frankly the only way to cook your pasta. It's actually better for you.
DN: So our measure of how a single food, and again, it's in context of all the other foods on your plate, but if you were to just eat plain pasta, our measure of how it affects your blood sugar is called glycemic index. And white pasta cooked al dente has a lower glycemic index than almost any bread you can produce.
CM: What?
DN: So it's actually a pretty blood sugar friendly food. And then what we want to do is we want to think about the context. So are you going to serve yourself a sprawling plate of pasta? Maybe a little bit more of a modest portion, and then where do we pull extra fiber in from some vegetables or some legumes, like a little pasta e ceci action like that would be fantastic. And then how do we keep it diabetes friendly? So maybe it's not a lot of heavy cream, but we do a little bit of a cashew Alfredo instead and then add extra protein because we have the slow burn carbs with the extra fiber with that protein that's going to make it even more blood sugar friendly than just that al dente pasta.
CM: This is really interesting. I think what I would've said to Stephanie is I think you need to just broaden your horizons when it comes to what is in your pantry and where you are sourcing your flavors from. We have a recipe for vegan cacio e pepe by Chrissy Tracey, and I think the thought of adding chickpeas to that, like a crispy chickpea kind of tossed through there, something could be absolutely dynamite. Any final thoughts for Stefanie?
DN: I think the key for her is really embracing that sense of exploration. When was the last time I brought a beluga lentil on the plate? What can I do with these? Can I make it a beautiful salad? Can I crisp them up to add some texture to a pasta dish, for example? And really playing, yeah, have fun with the sauces. Really think about because the same basic ingredients, fish, for example, or chickpeas with vegetables, can taste dramatically different when you play with those sauces and get three or four back pocket sauces that you can really leverage to bring in that extra flavor so that similar foods can taste different.
CM: Yeah. Nice. All right, Stefanie, hope that helps. Our last question is from listener, Grace. I absolutely love listening to your podcast and wanted to reach out with a challenge I'm currently facing. I've struggled with severe IBS, a gastrointestinal disorder for most of my life. I'm currently working with a dietician to follow a low FODMAP diet and slowly reintroduce various foods. I'm really grateful to be doing this to see if I have specific trigger foods, but could use some help in coming up with some creative low FODMAP meals that are quick to make. My creativity is running low, and I'm getting tired of my own cooking. And one other thing, my partner is most of the time vegetarian. So vegetarian options would be great. Can you explain for listeners what a low FODMAP diet means and why this might come up?
DN: Yeah. So low FODMAP, the reason we call it FODMAP is the long version is fructo-oligo di and monosaccharides and polyols. So it's a bit of a mouthful, but the take home is that they are only in carbohydrate containing foods that resist digestion, which means they stay in the gut. And for many of us, this is a super good thing because they feed your gut microbiome. But when we have IBS, there can be this aspect of FODMAP intolerance. Lactose intolerance is actually the classic one that most people know. They don't tolerate lactose super well and when they consume it, because that sugar draws water to it, it sort of loosens everything up and it's very ferment-y. So people are kind of miserable when they consume too much ice cream.
But there are other things like those fructans which are found in wheat, in garlic and onions that are very ferment-y so they can cause a lot of pain and symptoms. And so we go low FODMAP, not forever, but we call it a learning diet. I love that she's working with a dietician because you slowly and systematically reintroduce because maybe lactose isn't a thing for you, but it's the fructans or maybe fructans are okay but goss which are found in beans is your real trigger. So it allows you to customize a way of eating moving forward to help you minimize your symptoms.
CM: So some examples of things that she could unequivocally eat, what comes to mind for you?
DN: So a great example is a lot of gluten-free foods are also low FODMAP. So when we choose, for example, the brown rice, gluten-free pasta, that's not going to have any FODMAP. Another great example, quinoa and millet, and this is the big annoyance and this is my zone. I am a gut health dietician first and foremost. So the challenge with eating like this is that it's very picky. For example, you are not going to be eating bananas unless they are under ripe, like really under ripe. A ripe banana has too many FODMAPs. You can consume strawberries but not apples. So in every category there are things that are no-go, and there are things that are totally fine. Green leafy vegetables almost across the board. So the chards, the kale, the spinach, the arugulas, they're all great. Cucumbers are great. Tofu is fantastic, whereas beans, so this is where we are eating nothing more than like a tablespoon sprinkle of lentils or chickpeas. So those sort of come off particularly in the vegetarian options, it's a little bit more difficult losing meaningful amounts of legumes. Almost all spices and herbs are low FODMAP.
CM: Okay.
DN: So it's great to get the flavor in. The other thing to know if you're trying to boost flavors, and particularly if you really miss alliums, dark green onion tops are perfect. So they're the one allium that you can use constantly as long as you're using the dark green top of the scallion or the green onion only. So you can use those as you would garlic and onions. The other thing to know with garlic, you can get low FODMAP garlic flavored olive oils, but you can also infuse your oil at the beginning of cooking. So if you smash a couple of cloves of garlic and you pop them in some oil and warm that on the stove for five minutes, just nice and low, you can then remove the garlic and you have this garlic scented oil that you can continue your cooking with, but you haven't actually added any FODMAPs to the dish.
CM: That's a great tip. That makes me excited as someone who loves garlic, and not that I'm on a low FODMAP diet, it's just good to know that there's a way
DN: I am pathologically committed to alliums, so I really have to stretch myself and put on that low FODMAP hat when I'm cooking.
CM: And you had called out this 30 minute green pasta with kale from your website. Talk a little bit more about that recipe.
DN: Yeah, I love this recipe because it's very weeknight friendly, so it's great if you're 5:00 PM not a lot of energy to cook. All you're going to do is as you set that water to boil for the pasta, take a big bunch of kale, blanch it in the boiling water for a minute or two, and then toss that kale directly into your high speed blender. And exactly, we add salt, we add nutritional yeast to give us that umami because we can't use any garlic or anything like that. We use the hemp hearts, which give you a little bit of creaminess that cashews would. They're stronger in flavor, but the kale hides it and what you come out with, just very few ingredients as a little bit of a protein boost in the sauce, and you get this sort of green Alfredo that's got a huge bunch of kale. It's one of the only ways my kids enjoy eating a huge bunch of kale, and it's really, really simple and satisfying.
CM: Nice. As far as low FODMAP recipes go, I also wanted to mention my colleague Kate Cassin has a great recipe for black vinegar chicken with radishes. Kate developed this recipe as part of September's Feel Good food plan. It's a chicken stir-fry using black vinegar, soy sauce, a little bit of sesame oil, but it's made without any alliums. It's intentionally low FODMAP. And Kate's Whole Feel Good food plan is worth checking out for you, Grace. She curated a whole bunch of recipes that work for her, and hopefully they will work for you as well. Anything else that we haven't asked but that you want to mention?
DN: I think that the biggest thing to remember is that any change takes time, and working with new ingredients and working with new restrictions can feel challenging at first. But once you get to know your ingredients, once you find some back pocket recipes that just work for you every single time, you absolutely can learn to love whatever new path you're on. The more you have fun, the more you will love what you eat, the easier it will be to stay on this path.
CM: All right. Well thank you so much. If listeners want to hear more from you, where can they find you online?
DN: So you can find me on my website, which is DesireeRD.com. I also host an evidence-based nutrition podcast called The All Sorts Podcast. And then of course, on all the socials, I'm on Instagram DesireeNielsenRD.
CM: If you have a dinner emergency on your hands, write to us at dinnersos@bonappetit.com or leave us a voice message at 212-286-SOS1. That's 212 286-7071. We'd love to feature your question on the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice, and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. You can find the Bon Appetit recipes mentioned today on the Epicurious app, brought to you by Condé Nast. Just search Epicurious in the app store and download today. And check out Desiree's website, DesireeRD.com for the plant-based recipes she mentioned today. Also, we know that we've barely brushed the surface of all the dietary restrictions listeners are dealing with, so we're linking to some older episodes that may help with guidance on dairy-free cooking, and gluten-free baking. Check those out in the show notes.
Thanks for listening to Dinner SOS. I'm your host, Chris Morocco. My co-host this week is Desiree Nielsen. Our senior producer is Michelle O'Brien. Peyton Hayes is our associate producer. Cameron Foos is our assistant producer. Jake Lummus and Pran Bandi are studio engineers. This episode was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's, head of Global Audio. Next week, Jen is a great home cook and can tackle basically any ingredient that comes her way except for her husband's favorite protein.
Jen: I cannot manage pork in any fashion.
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
