Life in Motala

I tried this recipe over Christmas. I liked it, I got the chomping-on-chips feeling. I tested it on a bunch of kids and it got a rating from OK to super. The trick to making these chips is making sure the kale is dry and then watching it so it doesn’t go brown,  it tastes burnt then.

KALE (GRÖNKÅL) CHIPS

Cut away the stems and tear into smaller pieces. If you wash the kale, make sure it is dry before using it. Pour a little olive oil over the kale and use your hands to make sure all the leaves get coated. Sprinkle with salt (and maybe some vinegar or spices). Spread on an oven tray and toast in the oven 150-175 C until crisp (about 10 minutes).

I have only made this with green kale, the purple kind is supposed to taste best.

This last Tuesday was Tjugondag Knut - Twentieth Day after Christmas and Knut’s namesday. This is the day to traditionally remove all the Christmas decorations and eat up any candy left on the tree. We have both stopped with the SCD diet and started with some more starchy foods like rice. It took me a long time to understand the SCD diet. I had questions like It’s supposed to be a starch free diet, but there is starch in a lot of vegetables we eat??? Some starch is straight while some starch makes complicated formations that look like snowflakes. The snowflake stuff is in foods like grains, virtually impossible to completely break down and it seems to cause havoc in sensitive people.

Yummy chicken:

Fill a large pot half full with water. Add 2 bay leaves, 5 peppercorns, some thyme and rosemary (a twig or two of each). Bring to a boil and let boil for 5 minutes. Take a whole, cleaned chicken, and drop it into the pot together with a lemon cut in half and half an onion. Lower the heat and let simmer for 50-60 minutes. Fill the kitchen sink with cold water and place the pot in the cold water. Let stand for 1 hour. The chicken is now still warm but easy to handle. It literally falls apart in your hands and makes perfect chicken for sallads or just a snack.

Ingrid wanted to eat the traditional Swedish Christmas food and I wanted to keep on going with the sugar and starch free diet. We ended up compromising. We ate smoked salmon, mackerel, salmon roe and crayfish with sallad as the fish starter and then had waldorf sallad, cooked ham and two kinds of spare ribs (American style and Asian spicy) as the main plate - all SCD "legal". Ingrid also ate Janssons, a potato casserole with anchovies, and home-made inlagd sill, pickled herring (sugar, vinegar and spices). The foods we completely skipped this year were the Swedish meatballs, the short little Christmas sausages and gravad lax, raw salmon marinated in sugar and salt.

We also have a tradition of making a plate of cookies and candies to eat when opening the presents. I was pleased with the plate I made this year, though I did cheat a little, I used some cocoa powder in one of the treats (cocoa is not allowed on SCD).

On the plate: ginger cookies made with almond flour, peanut butter squares with hazelnut toffee, julknäck Christmas toffee made with honey, nut brittle and cocoa and butter balls. The photo does not do justice to the amount of work put into this… LOL. All in all, it was a good Christmas.

This SCD diet is keeping me busy: nuts soaking for making nut flour with later, cream yoghurt hanging in a towel to make super yummy farmer’s cheese and milk cooling for a new pot of yoghurt. It is fun making all this food from scratch! It gives me the same kind of satisfaction I had when Ingrid was little and we lived in the country and had loads of chores, like chopping wood.

It is fun when things take time. That reminds me of the story in Laura Ingall’s book Farmer Boy. The boy and his father went out to the barn to thresh the wheat during winter. The father told his son about a new machine that could thresh your wheat for you. They both agreed that was a dumb idea, because it was so nice to get out of the house at winter and do something that made you hungry.

We started the SCD diet a few days ago. We have both been really tired, but things feel better today. Ingrid went off to school with a lunch box of home-made applesauce and fried ground chicken. So far making our own yogurt has been the hardest part. In the end I bought an electric blanket to keep the yogurt warm (it has to ferment for over 24 hours) but the temperature still dips below 38 C (100F) during the coldest part of the night.

Why this diet? Well, if followed it is said to cure IBS and wheat intolerance. One thing I found really interesting in the book was the history of celiac disease. Before gluten was named the bad guy there was a theory that partial starch breakdown was the culprit. Gluten is a protein surrounded by a complicated pattern of carbohydrates. Incomplete breakdown of the carbohydrates leaves the protein still stuck to some carbs and it is this bit that hurts the intestines. So is it the gluten that is the problem, or the long carbohydrate chain stuck to it? A lot of people never get better on a gluten-free diet until they give up wheat completely. We are like that. Anyway I found that this book was the first to really explain why starchy foods are so difficult for us and also what we can do about it.

The offical SCD-website or  A power point show about the diet (press the square box below the screen to see fullscreen).