I’ve been open about my food intolerances in the past – how difficult it is to enjoy a meal when your stomach hurts every time you eat or when the thought of essentially being poisoned and throwing up for a day when a little gluten slips through the kitchen cracks scares you out of going to a restaurant or friend’s house for dinner.
I write a lot about the things I can’t eat. But I don’t always get you up to speed when there’s something I can eat again. Those are the happy moments, and I should share them too.
They’re easy to overlook. Since my last update a year or so ago when I couldn’t eat fructose or chicken, eggs, meat, mushrooms, corn, soy and gluten, I’ve started being able to eat chicken again. There was no doctor, homeopath or naturopath-based test involved, just my body not feeling awful immediately, a day, or a few days after eating it. Sugar of any kind still gives me problems, but I think we’re getting along better – I don’t get anxious and irritable to the same extent. Where a few sips of wine (red or white) or anything boozy would immediately give me a headache (and some still do) I’ve moved from no wine at all to the occasional full glass with dinner (up from a month spent at a few sips). I’m still not eating spelt or rye (buckwheat, quinoa, and millet don’t go down very well either – I mostly feel dizzy and light-headed or as though I haven’t eaten anything because I’m still starving even after several servings, which intensifies the dizziness), but I can live without those fairly easily. I think corn is even alright in very small doses. And sometimes I’ll have mushrooms.
And for these things I’m very thankful. But I’m still scared that a little contamination from my roommate’s baguette on my kitchen counter will wake me up at 1am with a stomach ache, or a headache or a racing pulse. Or a buttery purée that a server swears is dairy-free at a restaurant will have me in stomach spasms or a lesser form of discomfort for a day. And while the anxiety all this fear causes isn’t good for my digestion, I’m sure, I feel it’s better to be worried and vigilant than lax and sick. I’ve been there. It’s no fun. I wanted to die. I remember. And I never want to forget.
But lately I’ve been doing okay. I’ve been pumping as many billion probiotics of different strains into my gut as I can and eating warming, soupy foods to coax my stomach into trusting me again. “It’s okay, stomach. See? I’ll take care of you,” I say. Not to my stomach directly. I guess I more so think it, because talking to your stomach (unless you’re pregnant) is maybe a bit strange.
And my stomach believes me sometimes. There are times I feel it tell me that it can handle half a glass of wine. And I so enjoy that wine. And I stop after half a glass because my head says that’s enough. And once or twice my nose smelled antibiotic-free and hormone-free pork ribs or braised beef, and I wanted it more than I have in years. And I thought that if I had a bad reaction and needed to take a nap to sleep it off, that would be okay that day. But I didn’t need a nap that afternoon. And sometimes my stomach wants a 30th Tunisian date because it doesn’t kick in that I just ate 29 (which is far too many), and I spend the next day thinking about why my stomach didn’t tell me to stop. I asked it after every 5 dates if it really needed more and it didn’t say no. I asked it after 15…We’re still working on this one, my stomach and I. We’re also still working on not eating within 3 hours of sleeping. That one never used t be a problem but I actually blame the probiotics for this one – digesting away, making me not feel full.
I remember when I was 10 or 11 years old and I went to Quebec City with my mom and a sports team I was on at the time. I was having not the greatest time, but one day my mom and I got a break from the team and went to this big mall with so many stores, and more elevators than I’d every seen. Coming from St. John’s, NL where there is only one mall (called, appropriately, “The Mall”) this was a big deal. It was my Disney Land. I’d never been to Disney Land (and still haven’t), but it filled me with what I expect would be a similar feeling of awe. Yes, it was a mall, but to an 11 year old girl who’d never been in any building so big, it was a testament to human ingenuity, building something so big and shiny.
So we shopped, which was a luxury, since shopping with my mom was a rare treat even at home, mostly reserved for back-to-school and Christmas. And I remember two things about that day: That I loved my mom so much for knowing that I needed to get away from the team for an afternoon, and the ice cream.
It was from La Cremière – a Quebec chain. With the team we weren’t allowed to have any fast foods or fatty desserts. So when I’d seen a La Cremière earlier that week, I’d had some frozen yogurt with frozen fruits that you choose and they blend up for you. That was allowed. But my mom and I loved soft serve. On special occasions we’d share a banana split at Dairy Queen in Newfoundland (I’d eat the butterscotch side, she’d eat the hot fudge side, and we’d share the hump of strawberry in the middle). And here at La Cremière they had soft serve with a delicious twist impossible to resist – a caramel swirl.
Wow! I thought. And because everyone knows soft serve is lighter than hard ice cream (right? I could be totally wrong, but that’s what I believed at the time, that iced milk was better. Lets not think about the oils, preservatives and saturated badness please), I was allowed a caramel swirl spiral cone.
It was about the best thing I’d ever eaten. So smooth and creamy and with these hits of caramel running through it. It was better than a Dairy Queen butterscotch sundae or my half of the banana split – denser, richer. Blizzards and McFlurries didn’t exist yet but it was better than those too.
It was so good that when I moved to Quebec 13 odd years later (yes that is an ambiguous use of the word “odd”) I went in search of this ice cream place and my favourite caramel swirl cone.
And when I had one I felt ill. My stomach mutinied and I learned my lesson. After that I didn’t miss La Cremière or crave it at all anymore because I knew how badly it would make me feel. Besides, I since inherited two ice cream makers and can make my own almond milk ice cream whenever I want.
But it’s not as good. It’s not nearly as creamy and smooth, and I never go to the trouble of making a dairy-free caramel sauce to wind through it. Soft serve can be substituted with other grittier iced creams, milks, frozen yogurts and custards, but these are merely iced distractions. The only dairy-free version that has ever come close was my macademia nut gelato in a pacojet in the Modernist cuisine lab in Bellevue, Washington. That’s why you can’t even buy a decently priced home version of the machine you see in ice cream shops. Trust me, I looked for one to test drive. There’s a monopoly on them and they’re really only available in commercial, extra large versions.
But yesterday I was overtired and frustrated because my plans got messed up and I found myself in the Quartier des Spectacles with some time on my hands. And I was craving something – something gluten- and dairy-free, something sweet, something calming, something satisfying. And lo and behold, a La Cremière. It was not dairy-free. I believe it was gluten-free. But for the first time in a long time I craved it with my whole being. I thought carefully about what could happen if I ate it. And I told myself I was feeling good today, and I’d had a very sips of wine at a wine tasting (which often seems to help with dairy for some reason) and I promised myself I’d go right home and take a probiotic pill. Biking home would probably also help get my heart beating and my digestion going.
So I went for it. I bought a caramel swirl ice cream, sat at a table in the Complexe Desjardins food court and took a hesitant first mouthful of ice cream off the top of my swirl. And I closed my eyes and let my heart rate slow. It took me 10 minutes to eat that ice cream and I savoured every bite. When I got to the cone I broke it open and licked and sucked the melting creamy soft serve from its cracks. I threw out the gluten-heavy cone, but it was still the most gluten I’d touched to my mouth in over 6 months.
And I wasn’t sick. I had some stomach flips but no pain. I won’t be pushing my luck again any time soon. But I, risking a build-up of anything bad in my system. But I have to say thanks to my body for letting me have that pleasure. And thanks for healing, because life isn’t worth living for me without little moments of joy. There are millions of ways to make them, many of which don’t involve food, but I know that with the ability to eat more foods again, I’ll have more happy moments. There’s nothing like not having something for a long time to make you appreciate having it again.
And for goodness sake, it’s a soft serve ice cream cone. It’s not the second coming. It wasn’t life changing. It’s not as though the caramel swirl soft serve at La Cremière is the best, most delicious, most amazing thing in the entire world. But yesterday it was.
So, to health and to happiness, two interrelated states of being. To being able to enjoy something as simple as ice cream. And to anyone else on their food journey who doesn’t think they’ll ever enjoy a specific food they love again, I just want to say that there’s hope.
À votre santé.
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