Monday, March 20, 2017

Homemade common-allergen-free bibimbap!

Not gonna lie: having this many food allergies and sensitivities sucks. Since Kara was born, my body has lost the ability to process chicken eggs, soy, and bananas. Add that to all of the other things my body hates and the only common food allergen that I can still eat without consequence is wheat (which is good, 'cause my only meat-like substitute these days is seitan — and I'm trying to eat that sparingly, lest I develop a sensitivity.

But yeah, I missed the simple, quick and easy meals I had next-to-no-time to throw together when Kara was a baby, like egg sandwiches or — in my predominately Korean neighbourhood, with grocery stores to match — bibimbap.

So it was a revelation to discover, just before Christmas of last year (i.e., about 3 months ago) that people with chicken egg allergies can sometimes eat duck eggs without difficulty. That was around the time that I picked up a 6-pack from the local Chinese grocery and tried it in my baking, thinking that having trace amounts of a single egg across a batch of shared baked goods would be a good litmus test for sensitivity on my part. I'm happy to report that not only did it work out, but that I've since been able to branch out into making duck egg-intensive foods like tamago-yaki without ill effect.

When you factor in the fact that I've recently been mainlining episodes from Maangchi's YouTube cooking channel, it's not hard to see how I might've arrived at the conclusion that I ought to try my hand at making bibimbap. And so it was that I had a common-allergen-free bibimbap as my early lunch today. This one features short-grain brown rice, blanched spinach with chives, and "sweated" and stir-fried carrots, zucchini, cucumber, and red bell pepper. It was topped with an over-easy duck egg. Everything was seasoned with salt, sunflower seed oil, and garlic.

I began the vegetable prep work last night to minimize the amount of time that'd take today. It was fairly time-intensive, but I think the results were well worth it. I had an unbelievably delicious, nutritious, and quick-to-assemble meal option today and still have plenty of the vegetables left over for later in the week.

No comments:

Post a Comment