Reblogged from Naturally Gutsy:

Carrabba’s Italian Grill SCD Legal Restaurant

Restaurant: Carrabba’s Italian Grill Website: http://www.carrabbas.com/My Rating: A++

Last Friday, I went out to eat for the first time without my SCD cooler.  I ate real food at a nice restaurant and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  I was nervous about potentially eating something SCD Illegal, but I followed SCD Lifestyle’s guide to eating out…

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My fellow blogger over at Naturally Gutsy has terrific things to say about Carrabba's and their willingness to accommodate SCD. I gotta say... with an advertising tagline like "I want pasta tonight", I would not have even considered going there! I'm glad to see that she had such terrific luck!

Reblogged from Glenn Pendlay:

Why? Well it started in Guatemala last week. I was eating in the weightlifting chow hall with Donny Shankle and thinking about the food. The meal that day included a sort of salad. Tasted like it had some kale in it, had some green beans, some corn, lettuce, and bits of bacon. There were diced up potatoes, cooked with onions. Diced up carrots that most people seemed to be mixing up with the potatoes and onions.

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This blog o' mine mostly talks about SCD. That's all well and good, but there's a larger issue at play. What role does the Standard American Diet play in the tremendous rise of autoimmune disorders in the First World? This article got Freshly Pressed today, and I liked it... It's a rant really, but one I can totally get behind! What are your thoughts? Do you get as frothy at the mouth as I do at our culture's double standards regarding healthy, nutrition, beauty, etc?

Are you an SCD-er? Do you live in a city that has restaurants? (that was a trick question!) Would you consider telling me about your experiences dining out? I’d so love to create a resource here for SCD-ers the world over! Drop me a line, and let’s talk! Just leave a comment here, or on any page of this blog, and I’ll get in touch!

Microscopic image (200-fold magnification) of Candida albicans ATCC 10231, grown on cornmeal agar medium with 1% Tween80. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you’re following SCD, you probably take for granted the idea that gut health, and gut flora, are a powerful key to effective health management…. after all, it makes perfect sense that the healthier your gut is, the less likely you are to suffer symptoms related to gut disease!

But lets zoom out a level here. If healthy and well-balanced gut flora colonies have a relieving and curing effect on IBD, then what effect do they have on other conditions? How important is healthy gut flora to overall system health? What can go wrong when gut flora are not healthy and balanced? Surprisingly (and disappointingly), in the world of allopathic health care, this is a pretty ‘out there’ kind of conversation!

I’m encouraged to see, however, an increased amount of conversation around this topic, and even more pleased to see it happening in ostensibly ‘traditional’ venues (and by traditional, I mean western, modern, allopathic circles). For example, I came across this article today in the IBD and LDN Chat Group on Facebook today:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/05/03/probiotics-impact-brain-performance.aspx

The article discusses possible links between gut flora health and mental health. Now, I recognize that Mercola.com isn’t exactly The Lancet, as far as general acceptance goes, but that isn’t the point. The point is that this conversation is happening. It’s so very important that, as a people, we begin to recognize how important our gut flora are, so that we can take good care of them, and in turn, of ourselves. I, for one, welcome our new bacterial overlords.

I would like to create a page of reader-submitted restaurant reviews, that have a focus on SCD-legality (or lack thereof). I’d love to create a database of some kind so that SCD folks could find places to eat by region, type of cuisine, price point, etc. Is this something to which you might be willing to contribute? If so, I’d LOVE to hear from you!! Even if you’re in the PDX area, I’d still love your contributions, as I *know* there are tons of great places around here I haven’t tried.

No, there’s no money involved here, merely the satisfaction of helping other members of the SCD community.

So waddya say? If you’re thinking about it, but not sure where to get started, check out my SCD Dining Out page. And please don’t think that you need your reviews to read like mine… I’d love to hear YOUR voice, and YOUR experience.

If you’d like to participate (and I surely hope that you do!), leave me a comment on this post, and I’ll get in touch via email (please use a valid email when commenting…. your email is only available to me, the blog owner). If we collaborate on this, it needn’t be anything formal or scheduled… I have enough deadlines at work, and I’m sure you do too!

I’m super excited about this possible collaboration…. are you?

Thanks Sean and Will for all your hard work for the community, and providing IBD folks with a flexible and useful place to gather and exchange information!

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time there, and I can tell you that exciting things are happening. The site is still in private beta, but I have 9 invites remaining. Go check it out here: Crohnology If you’re interested in joining, I’d love to send you an invite. Just follow this blog, and leave a comment. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Like any piece of software at the beta phase, part of the responsibility of using it is recognizing that it’s growing and changing over time and to allow for a certain amount of quirkiness as that process occurs. I have found that Sean and Will have been *incredibly* responsive to bug reports, feature requests, etc. I know that Sean and the rest of the Crohnology community would welcome your voice.

Armed with that knowledge, I found myself browsing the Paleo section at Powell’s Books. After all, there are precious few SCD cookbooks out there on the market, but there are a fairly significant number of Paleo/Primal ones. (Just as an aside, I am using the terms Paleo and Primal interchangeably, but I’m relatively certain that adherents to either would not appreciate my doing so. Lucky for me, it’s not their blog!). It was there I stumbled across the title, Paleo Comfort Foods: Homestyle Cooking For A Gluten-Free Kitchen, by Julie and Charles Mayfield. It should come as no surprise to any follower of SCD that I was instantly flooded with mental images of rich, delectable, starch-based comfort foods that I so dearly missed. Just reading the title made me crave a macaroni and cheese, beef stroganoff sandwich on fresh rye bread! Like Captain Haddock reaching for a bottle of whiskey, I gingerly pulled the book of the shelf, worried that it might turn out to be a figment of my imagination. Pleasantly, it was not. After thumbing through it for a few minutes, my mouth began to water, as I was presented with gorgeous images of fried chicken, pot roast, muffins, and banana pudding. I knew it had to come home with us!

It took Diana and I roughly 17 seconds to decide that the fried chicken would be the first recipe we’d try. Diana has a wonderful/nasty habit of changing every recipe she uses, but at my behest, we followed it precisely the first time, so we could see what the result was, and so that I could properly review it for you, my dear readers. I promised her that, if she so desired, she could change it next time.

I’m pleased to report that, when followed to the letter, the recipe yields a very lovely fried chicken! Mind you, I did not say that it makes a reasonable facsimile of fried chicken. No, indeed. This really is fried chicken. It’s crispy on the outside, it’s juicy and scalding hot on the inside, and it’s delicious!! As one might expect with fried chicken, it uses a fair amount of dishes to prepare, and requires a generous amount of oil in the pan, but this is no different from more traditional preparations. There was nothing terribly tricky about the affair…. Make a breading mix, dip the chicken parts into beaten egg, then dredge with the breading, and then brown in the oil. Once the parts are browned on all side, they go into the oven for 10-15 minutes, et voila! The only thing I would suggest with this recipe is that, if you’re using whole chicken legs (as in, thigh and drumstick together), you should separate them or they may not get fully cooked in the middle. This is not a fault of the recipe… just our faulty technique. A second try using this tip, and all was perfect.

Every week, Diana and I spend part of Sunday making a huge batch of something that will serve as our lunches all week long. This week, we chose the coq au vin recipe found in this book. I gotta tell ya… it’s delicious, and our house smelled amazing!! As with any French dish, there were a fair number of steps involved, but the instructions were clear and concise, and as someone who spent a fair number of years working in commercial kitchens, I appreciated Ms. Mayfield’s cautions about flambeing the brandy (and how not to cause a disaster in the process). The end result was a truly succulent dish. The gravy, of course, lacked the velvety viscosity that one might expect if a flour roux were used, but I really didn’t miss it.

Comfort food in the standard American diet is overwhelmingly carb-dense, and adopting SCD means leaving a lot of our most comforting foods behind. If you’re an SCD-er and looking for ways to fill that comfort food void, I’d really encourage you to stop by your local bookstore and check out Paleo Comfort Foods. I think that one of the things I like most about this book is that it rejects the notion of compromise. Rather than asking, “How can we make something that tricks us into thinking it’s something else?”, the authors seem instead to ask, “With the ingredients we have at our disposal, how can we make delicious, familiar, comforting food that is also healthy?”. This difference is subtle but profound. And in this case, highly successful!

As it turned out, Apple was not the only one of my readers that I met last night. I also met Julie and her beautiful family. Julie has been a frequent commenter here on the blog, and was my primary impetus in finally creating my SCD Legal Dining Out page. I’d been considering something along those lines for a while, but she pushed me out the door.

I met other readers as well… What a neat experience! This was the first time I’d met readers in person t hat I didn’t already know from elsewhere, and it was fantastically encouraging to see that there really are people out there benefiting from my work here, and that folks truly value what I’ve got to say. Thank you so much to all of you. I look forward to meeting many more of you in the future!

I’d like to talk a little more about Julie, or rather, something Julie said. She’s strongly encouraging me to write a more comprehensive guide to eating out while remaining SCD-legal, to publish more, and more comprehensive reviews of restaurants, and to use my writing to encourage more restaurants to be more SCD friendly. Of course, if I were to do this, I’d undoubtedly start with the Portland metro area since that’s where I live, but if it went over well enough I could absolutely find ways to travel and do the same for other cities. Is this something that the rest of you would be interested in? If I published something like this as an e-book would you buy it? How much would you be willing to pay for it? I’d be writing it for you, so what would make it irresistibly compelling for you? Please leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts.

In related news, I’m working on a new feature for the blog, so stay tuned! In preparation, think about the foods for which you’ve had the hardest time doing up with SCD-legal variants, or that you miss the most. Be ready to tell me about them.

Thank you again to Apple, Julie, Emily, and all you other readers out there for making this blogging thing forth the effort! I’m so glad I can share my Crohnie misadventures with you.