Cooking for Varying Diets...

My wife and I are gamers and host a weekly game with friends who bring their kids. We adults take it in turns to do the food prep for the week, and therein begins the trouble.

Normally, picking foods for fussy kids ranging in ages from 5 to 11 would be bad enough. Little gremlins simply don't know enough about the good foods in life. Maybe it's because they still have most of their taste buds and all the "acquired" tastes of adulthood have more to do with us not being quite so sensitive. I don't know. But picking foods gets really tough when having to work around serious diet restrictions.

First off, one of the gamers is allergic to dairy. She still eats some amount of dairy and the allergy isn't horribly severe, but enough dairy and she'll pay for it. Now add her pork allergy. And now her symptoms that are stunningly like those for gallstones (get too much fat and be really sick) but which aren't supported by diagnostic ultrasound nor lab tests.

Then there's her husband. Large and heavy-set guy and, quite naturally, having trouble keeping his blood sugar levels in control. A very common issue in America today (and soon the rest of the industrialized world).

Player #3 has also had trouble with his blood sugars.

And then there's my wife who definitely had a brush with gallstones severe enough to drive her into a diet so low in fat that the pounds melted off her fast (screw Atkins, super low fat WORKS).

Now, try to pick a meal that won't set off anybody's ailments. It ain't easy. I predict lots of chicken will be on order for the weekly game. No one's allergic. It's relatively low in fat and it's easy to flavor. Sometimes we also turn to multiple dishes for different groups of eaters.

And that's what we had this week. It was our turn so we started working through recipes to find the right one to trot out. It being our weekly D&D game, we don't like to spend too much time during the game to do food prep. It's kind of a drag to pull away from the table and the action to cook all the time. So we were thinking CROCK POT.

We have this crock pot cook book by Dawn Hall called Busy People's Slow Cooker Cookbook. The recipes are very simple without many ingredients or preparation steps. They're also, unfortunately, fairly bland for the most part, but they're definitely a good starting place. They're also generally oriented to reduce the amount of fat per serving. Tons of recipes have under 4g of fat. For a dinner, that's not doing badly at all.

Tonight we picked a Chicken Chili recipe and doubled it so we'd have enough. It was made up of chicken and was based around a lot of Great Northern beans - I added some red beans for more contrast as well. And it turned out pretty tasty and filling. All of the adults (and 1 child) were satisfied with how it turned out (although a couple of us did think it stood well with a little punching up from some Tabasco sauce too).

For the kids, we made homemade mac and cheese, a tried and true recipe from a Campbell Soup cookbook. The kids ate well, the adults ate well. And it all worked out in the end. But it sure was a challenge to get there.