The purpose of this website is to help people who follow the low FODMAP diet. In particular the goal is to help those with certain challenges feed themselves more easily. The analogy that I’ve based my website on, Spoon Theory, represents a unit of effort needed to complete a task as a ‘spoon’. Most people dealing with chronic illness or disability tend to have a limited supply of ‘spoons’ and various tasks take different amounts of ‘spoons’. Additionally everyone rates tasks differently due to their own abilities. And our abilities may change over time. That means there is no way to standardize the difficulty of a recipe or task.
For that reason, I have included a wide variety of cooking techniques. There are recipes that minimize active standing time, recipes that focus on speedy results, and recipes that don’t require much prep work, as well as other low-spoon accommodations. Look for the recipes that suit your current abilities for the best results. An easy way to do this is to visit the Recipe Index and look through the search terms tag cloud.
Tags to pay attention to include:
- Stovetop – for meals prepared on a cooking range. These are often faster-cooking meals but they require standing at the stove.
- Oven – for meals baked or broiled in an oven. These meals can be left for a while to cook without much attention.
- Under30Min – reasonably quick meals that can be prepared start to finish in 30 minutes.
- Speedy – very fast recipes that can be made in under 10 minutes.
- Marinated – meals that require marination for flavor. Usually they are quick to prep for marination, but require waiting several hours or even overnight. The upside is that usually the cooking itself happens very quickly.
- LowSpoons – the absolute lowest effort recipes with little prep work and little active cooking.
Naturally you can also use the tag cloud to search by primary ingredient, country or region of origin, vegetarian/vegan, and certain types of allergen-free recipes. There are lots of other useful tags as well.
My recipes are based not just on Western cuisine, but also on cuisines from around the world. A great deal of North American food in particular is based on onions, garlic and wheat – all of which are off limits for low FODMAPers. For that reason I’ve tried to search for flavor in different ways, using authentic recipes from cultures that don’t call for those ingredients and adapting them. I am a lover of herbs and spices and use them liberally. Feel free to adapt the amounts used to your own tastes.
The majority of these recipes are from scratch, meaning they contain as few processed ingredients as possible. When they do call for processed ingredients (ketchup, mayonnaise, chicken stock, etc), be sure to select low FODMAP versions that don’t contain things like corn syrup, garlic or onion. Some recipes call for ingredients that are not low FODMAP, but can be tolerated in small quantities. Therefore it is important to stick to the recommended portion size for those meals. If you don’t already have it, I highly recommend Monash University’s app FODMAP. It has an excellent guide to recommended portion sizes of most common foods.
Typically my recipes are written with fresh veggies in mind, however you can certainly substitute frozen or canned low FODMAP vegetables. This can greatly reduce the amount of effort that goes into a recipe. The idea is to enable home cooks to use recipes in ways that suit them. Fed is best, so use whatever works for you.
When using ingredients that are available in different stages of preparation such as frozen shrimp, use what works best for you. The best tasting seafood will always be fresh caught, however unless purchased from a reputable fishmonger, most seafood has likely been previously frozen. That means the best option for most of us is the bagged frozen kind. In the case of shrimp, I prefer to use raw shell-on deveined frozen shrimp, but if shrimp without shells or pre-cooked shrimp is easier for you to use, feel free to use it.
For the most part I have tried to avoid ingredients that are highly specialized or difficult to find such as specific branded low FODMAP foods (such as FODY). There a few exceptions that may be tough to find locally – low FODMAP broth, sweet rice flour and garlic-infused olive oil. All are available online. To cook Asian recipes, you will likely need access to a well stocked grocery store or an Asian market.
Last but not least, these recipes assume access to the following kitchen appliances: stovetop, oven or toaster oven, microwave, simple rice cooker, refrigerator and freezer.
Forks, Lives and Spoons 