Steve’s SCD Diet Healing Journal: Week 22 – SCD Legal Raspberry Duck on Cauliflower

Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle Steve Wright has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing.  After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, these series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet.  Check back and follow his progress:

Week 22 Summary

Man I really hope these journals don’t get boring but honestly my digestion has been very stable lately.  I am still not quite where I want to be, but usually I’m averaging a 3 or a 4 on the Bristol Stool chart.  The reason I say I’m not quite there yet, is I’m still getting the occasional 2 and honestly I would rather be bouncing between a 4 and a 5 on the chart.  In case anyone is wondering I do average about 1.5 BM’s a day (some days 1 others 2 hence 1.5).  But overall it has been steady and relatively boring which is a good thing!

As I’ve noticed this trend it has sort of renewed my focus to push into more SCD legal foods.  I really want to concentrate on adding foods and progressing through the remaining phases.  Last week I started to make a concentrated effort to try new vegetables.  As you know I’m sort of giving up on broccoli for now but I figured I would give its cousin cauliflower a shot.

I actually don’t know if I’ve ever eaten just cauliflower, as far as I can remember its only been as part of mixed vegetables, but I really enjoyed the taste and it didn’t give me any digestion problems.  I bought organic cauliflower heads and cut up the florets and steamed them.  The first time I ate it I grated the florets down using a cheese grater to make it easier to digest and to simulate eating rice.  The next couple times as I finished off my leftovers I skipped the grating idea cause it just takes to dang long!

The second item of the week that I gave a go with was green peas.  For the peas I ended up buying organic frozen peas from Meijer.  I bought two bags and put them both into a glass bowl and then put some about a cup of water in the bottom.  I then put them in the microwave for 20 minutes on high.  The came out what I would say is about medium cooked, soft but not mush.  I put some sea salt on them and have been enjoying them for a couple days now without any problems.  I would like to caution people to really pay attention to chewing your food and especially peas as they have a outer shell that really needs to be ground up as much as possible before swallowing.

Looking ahead next week I have my follow up appointment with the doc so I will have a full report of my Genova Stool test and my blood work.  In the meantime I’m going to add the goats milk yogurt back in (its going on about 7 weeks since I last made some) to see if I can get rid of my random 2’s and get my average BM score up to the 4 – 5 range.

SPICE OF LIFE RAMBLINGS

I’m thinking as this blog evolves we need to start having some more food porn and recipes for people on the SCD diet.  Now I know there are a ton of recipe sites out there but I want this section to focus on showing a newer cook that it is possible to make some amazing dishes even if you don’t know jack about being a real chef.

This week I got some frozen duck breasts from an avid hunter friend of mine and I wanted to make something special with it.  In the past whenever I cooked duck breasts it was on a grill smothered in BBQ sauce.   Now that I’m doing the SCD diet I can’t just go buy a bottle of HFCS BBQ sauce from the store and slather it on.  So I did some searching and decided to make my own recipe.

Below was my gourmet meal of the week, it was good, but not Emril POW! good.  I think this is because I messed up a few key areas.  First I cooked the duck breasts too long, they should only be cooked to medium, but some of mine ended up being well done and real tuff.  Second I boiled my sauce too long and overflowed it as well so I don’t think I used enough raspberries.  Below is my adjusted work in progress attempt at raspberry duck.

Duck Breasts

8 duck breasts

2 tablespoons of sea salt

Red Pepper flakes to taste (1 Tbl is a good start)

1 tablespoon coconut oil

Heat a large pan to medium heat while washing and drying the duck breasts.  Coat the duck breasts with sea salt and red pepper flakes.  Let the duck breasts stand for 15 min before cooking in the mean time put the coconut oil in the pan.  After the oil is melted put the breasts in and cook on each side for 3 to 4 minutes each depending on thickness of breast.  The goal here is to get them medium or medium rare.

Raspberry Sauce

1/2 cup dry red wine

1/4 cup honey

8 oz raspberry

2 teaspoon of Cinnamon

In a small pot combine the wine, honey, cinnamon and raspberries.  Bring the mixture to a rolling boil for about a minute or two.  Then reduce heat and simmer for another 10 minutes (if berries haven’t broken down you may need to mash them to break them up).  Then pour the sauce through a metal mesh strainer into a food container (use glass if possible).

If you want to get all fancy, steam and grate some cauliflower as a base, slice your duck breast and then drizzle with sauce!

Official warning: this is a work in progress, like I said, it was good but didn’t quite POP like I wanted it to….Any real chiefs out there want to weigh in on my mistakes?