Today, we’re going to talk about some ideas for gluten free meals, meals for if someone doesn’t eat dairy – maybe a breastfeeding mom – and meals for any kind of dietary restrictions. We’ll look at ideas that you can make either for the whole family, or for that particular person, and how you can make some meals in advance and freeze them. This is just to give you some ideas that you can use if this is the case in your family.
In our family, my husband is wheat-free. We do use spelt, and he finds the spelt doesn’t affect him so much. It seems to be the wheat, perhaps because of the pesticides, or perhaps because it’s been hybridized. It’s not quite as restrictive as gluten free, and he can certainly have some muffins made from spelt flour. We also make birthday cake from spelt flour, and that helps. I’ve also had some experience cooking for people with other dietary restrictions, and I want to give you some ideas.
So, first let’s talk about what I do for my husband. On Friday nights, we have pizza. We usually get takeout, but sometimes we make our own. In this case, if we make our own, we use spelt flour, and then he can eat that. If we’re getting takeout, it’s quite easy to get a gluten free base. Sometimes he and I just have something different – the kids will have pizza and we’ll get some Chinese takeout or something like that. I know you need to be careful with Chinese takeout because their soy sauce can have wheat in it, but in this case, it doesn’t seem to affect him.
Or say we’re having lasagna, which he really enjoys. If it’s homemade lasagna, we can easily get gluten free lasagna sheets, and if it’s a shop-bought lasagna, then it’s easy to find a zucchini lasagna for him. The zucchini is used instead of the pasta. We do this at home sometimes as well. You just cut slices of zucchini or marrow, and then use that in the place of the pasta. A good idea for when you do that is to put a bit of salt on the strips of zucchini, and then leave them on a plate for a little bit to get rid of some of the excess liquid, and use them after that. That way, the lasagna will not be too soggy. But otherwise, everything else in the lasagna is good. We use a bit of ricotta, alongside some mozzarella, the mince or bolognese, the cheese sauce, and whatever we might be using.
Sometimes we do something like mac and cheese with meat. I like to do mac and cheese as a side, not as a main, for the sake of protein. If we had mac and cheese with something, then he would eat the meat, and I would make a baked potato or some rice on the side, with some sauce, so that he has a good meal.
Another good gluten free meal is steak, either on the grill, stove, or oven. We make tenderloin in the oven. With that, we’ll have some stir fry veg, and perhaps some potatoes. Those kinds of things help. Often, we’ll have roast chicken or roast lamb with vegetables and or potatoes. We’ll do chicken breasts or chicken pieces with rice and butternut. All of those are easily gluten free.
The main challenge is when it’s something that we’re all having that he can’t eat. Because there’s always meat with the meal, unless it’s a casserole, it’s pretty easy to just do a different side or a few veggies for him. Maybe this’ll be sweet potato mash, or as I said, a baked potato – something extra that just means he leaves out the wheat part. If we’re having wraps or sandwiches, then he and I will often just have the meat and veggies without the starch.
As I said at the beginning, I like to have some meals with in the freezer so that if I need something for him, like if whatever we eating is completely wheat and hard to switch, then we’ll just grab a small meal from the freezer, and warm that up alongside the other food, either in the oven, the air fryer, or in the pan. Being able to do that helps.
I’ll come back to some more gluten free ideas soon. Next, I want to talk about some meals we cooked for a family where the mom was breastfeeding, and she couldn’t eat certain things because her baby was sensitive to those. She couldn’t eat dairy, cheese, onion, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, or peanuts. Those were all not allowed. There could be butter in small quantities or yogurt, and she wasn’t sure about leeks and cream. There couldn’t be spicy food. We were basically looking at meat and veg, but I’m gonna mention the meals that we made to hopefully give you some ideas.
We made beef meatballs with no onion or garlic in the sauce, with some rice. Then we made corned beef. We could cook a whole corned beef in the instant pot, and put it with a side of mashed potatoes. We had to make sure there was no dairy in the mashed potatoes, except a little bit of butter. We made steamed green beans. We made lamb stew with carrots and potatoes, again, no onion or garlic in there. It was slow cooked. We made cottage pie with sweet potato mash that was dairy, onion, and garlic free. We made a side of butternut. We made roast chicken with roast potatoes and veg. We did some barbecue ribs; beef and pork. We did a chicken stir fry with noodles and mixed vegetables. We did a side of corn on the cob, along with sliced roast lamb, with gravy and oven roasted root vegetables.
There was a friend of ours who had all kinds of autoimmune issues, and was on a special diet. He couldn’t have dairy, he couldn’t have wheat, and he couldn’t have beans. Here are some of the meals we made: butternut soup with bone broth, which is very healing, and coconut cream. There was beef short rib stew with potatoes and carrots, and lamb knuckle stew with butternut puree, again with coconut cream in it. There was cauliflower puree using coconut cream – we would do mince bolognese with cauliflower or butternut puree and stir fry veg. There was a lot of meat with puree. There was beef tenderloin with sweet potato mash, and meatballs with rice, butternut and green beans. This was through our church, so we cooked quite regularly for him.
We also would make roast lamb flavoured with thyme, with potatoes, carrots, and gravy that had bone broth. There was chicken curry and rice, with coconut cream in it, and gem squash on the side. There was beef shin with sweet potato mash, and cottage pie that used sweet potato mash made with coconut cream. We’d do chicken drumsticks with roasted butternut and roast potatoes, grilled hake with corn chowder, using coconut cream instead of dairy, trout with stir fry vegetables, or sometimes salmon. Both of those were grilled. We used olive oil instead of butter.
There was grilled barbecue chicken with baby potatoes and green beans. Once he was okay with eating butter, we made a hake with a Hollandaise sauce. Hollandaise has egg yolks, butter, lemon juice, and salt, and that added a lot of interest to the food. Generally, we tried to do a bone broth style gravy to go with most of the meat. to make sure it wasn’t too plain or dry.
For a while, we were cooking for a lady who didn’t want to eat any starch. She mostly just wanted green veg and protein. She was fine with beans, but preferred meat, and didn’t want rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, or even butternut or anything like that. She just wanted greens and protein. I’ll tell you about some meals we made for her. There was chicken curry with stir fried veg, mainly green veg like zucchini. We would put cheddar cheese on top of beef bolognese, and maybe add some steamed long stem broccoli.
We did roast lamb with gravy and green beans on the side. We made cauliflower and cheese soup with cream, grilled chicken with Brussels sprouts, honey mustard chicken kebabs with halloumi cheese. and barbecue chicken kebabs with brussels sprouts. There was shredded chicken salad, and we did bolognese in the style of nachos, with a layer of yogurt or sour cream, some guacamole, some salsa on the side, and a bit of cheddar cheese.
We would make broccoli and cheese soup, lemon and herb trout with steamed broccoli, basil pesto chicken with brussels sprouts, and meatballs in a tomato and kidney bean sauce. There were chicken wings, and a beef curry. We did beef burger patties with sliced cheddar on top, and sometimes a vegetarian bean stew as a change. There was chicken and vegetable stir fry with no noodles, corned beef in broth, beef stroganoff with mushroom in it, and sometimes tenderloin steak with mushroom cream sauce.
These meals were all meant to be healing, to not have anything too allergenic, and to have high nutrition. There were also grilled beef sausages with some kind of veg on the side. We made quiches with vegetables and either sausage or bacon in – these would be crust free quiches. She did eat dairy, so the quiches would have eggs with milk, and we’d add the meat and veg.
Here are some other ideas for easy wheat-free or gluten-free meals: there’s baked potatoes with shredded chicken or beef bolognese on top with a sauce, perhaps a cheese sauce if you eat dairy, or a sour cream. You could do any kind of beef or lamb stew, any kind of roast; beef or chicken. Corn nachos or tacos are helpful because they’re not wheat, and then you can stuff them with the usual shredded meat and salad, or vegetables and cheese. Corn tortillas are also very helpful. We sometimes make flatbread using spelt flour and yogurt, and we cook them on the grill. If you eat spelt, that’s always very nice.
One of the best snacks for if you eat dairy is yogurt with a little maple syrup, and you can add granola into that. For another snack, we do a mix and match. We’ll have a little bit of sliced cheese, some crackers – you can get gluten free crackers, some dried meat – jerky or biltong, some raisins, olives, nuts, and any other kind of snack foods.
Here are my last few ideas: stuffed bell peppers are great. You can stuff them with beans, quinoa, beef bolognese, or corn and cheese, and then bake them. Those are great. Then, as I’ve mentioned, any kind of oven baked or grilled fish is delicious with simple lemon butter and some stir fried vegetables. You can have burger patties without the rolls, and add sliced cucumber, sliced tomato, some guacamole, some cheese, and some mushrooms. Those can be delicious. In the same way, instead of a hot dog with a hot dog bun, you can add some salsa or tomato relish to your sausages, and you can have them with potato mash or something. You can have corn grits with it, and some vegetables, and then the usual sauces on the sausage; mustard, mayonnaise, or tomato sauce.
Another fun idea is a meat fondue, where you warm the meat or cook it in broth. It’s like a cheese fondue where you have melted cheese, but in this case you’d have broth in the fondue pot. Then you cook your pieces of chicken or beef, very thin pieces in that broth. It can take a while – sometimes I pre-cook the meat, and then we just warm it in the broth, but the idea with this is to have some interesting sauces for each person to dip their meat and their vegetables into. Maybe you have some thinly sliced chicken and beef that you dip into a cheese sauce, or a sun dried tomato pecorino sauce, or any kind of sauce that you like. You can also dip your vegetables, perhaps some baby potatoes, brussels sprouts, and baby carrots; those are great dipped in cheese or mushroom cream sauce. This makes it a lot more fun without having to have gluten in your meal.
Lastly, for a good lunch, if our kids are having bread, even sourdough bread with some kind of meat like grilled chicken, then my hubby and I can have grilled chicken with a little bit of mayonnaise or guacamole on the side, or just some sliced avocado, some sliced tomatoes, or a bit of feta or mozzarella. Maybe we’ll have some blueberries or some cheddar cheese. All of those things make the meal more interesting without it having to include gluten.
My favorite gluten-free desserts are ones where you don’t have to worry about using gluten-free ingredients, which are often a bit strange or expensive. This includes things like chocolate mouse, crème brûlée, flourless chocolate cake, and macarons – all of those are naturally gluten free and are wonderful as a dessert. And, of course, there’s ice cream – that’s the best of all. I hope you got a couple of good ideas from this!
