by Answers to today’s questions at thefridayfive@DW https://thefridayfive.dreamwidth.org/132130.html
1. What is your favourite food?
I really have two:
For cooking at home: home made mashed potatoes and fried herring.
For eating in a restaurant: French fries and “lehtipihvi”. Lehtipihvi is a steak that is only 2-3 millimeters thick but very wide and tall. I’ve never been able to get a steak like this for frying at home, only get them at restaurants. This is what I always have the very rare times I eat in a restaurant.
2. What is your favourite food preparation method?
Don’t really have one. Whatever fits my needs and desires the best at the time is my favorite.
3. What is your favourite cuisine or style of cooking?
I’ve really come to love basic Finnish home cooking, the kind of food that was everywhere when I was a kid in the 1980s. So no pizzas or hamburgers or ethnic foods but just your basic cooked potatoes and sauce with some kind of meat slices, mashed potatoes with meatballs or fried herring, cooked potatoes and fishsticks, pan-fried potatoes and fried sausage. Rice and chicken casserole. Macaroni and pan-fried minced meat casserole.
Yeah, a lot of potato foods. Potatoes were a staple of cooking back then, we had them in some form or another on practically every dinner.
4. Do you have any dietary restrictions and if so what are they
I used to have clear restrictions until about 20 years of age because of food allergies. I still do have some restrictions, but because of a different reason and a lot less clear.
I used to have food allergies: chocolate, citrus fruits and some other things. Now it’s less clear, but I still have rash although about 99% less. But I’m not sure whether it’s because of some foods because I also atopic skin so I probably would have rashes just because of that no matter what.
Now I have some restrictions due to Crohn’s Disease: a few specific foods and drinks are forbidden most of the time: sima (mead) which is only enjoyed around May Day in May, mämmi (rye pudding) which is available only for Easter, and this one specific rye bread which is available year around. I can have little portions of these nowadays IF my Crohn’s disease symptoms are good and stable at the time and have been for a while. Because they very easily cause worsening of diarrhea. Which is sad because I LOVE all three and not being able to eat/drink them as I used to makes me sad and feel like I’m missing out.
Otherwise, there are foods that are good to avoid when you have Crohn’s, but I don’t pay much attention to a lot of them because they’re foods I’ve never eaten before either such as peas or legumes. Otherwise it’s also possible that frying can make symptoms worse as well as using lots of butter or other fats so low fat is recced generally. But all food styles and ingredients are very indidual how they affect a patient or not, doctors can’t really help with that or even dieticians, you have to trial and error what works for your Crohn’s. And then that too changes on how inflamed your bowels are, where the inflammation is located etc. I eat pretty normally, but when I’m having very bad symptoms, I’ve noticed I like very plain foods – porridge, banana, rice, chicken, viili, plain yoghurt with little bit of honey – that sort of thing. And then if the symptoms are very, very bad…. usually my appetite is gone completely then as well, and then it’s actually easier to drink nutritional supplements such as Nutridrink in addition to whatever food I manage to get down just to recude stress about am I getting enough nutrients. And Nutridrinks are easier, less offensive and faster to get down too than some porridge or something and that’s a big thing when I’m not feeling like eating at all.
So I go very much by how my bowels are feeling – calm and stable: eat almost whatever I want to. Queasy, restless, flatulence, more diarrhea: avoid fried, fatty foods and favor more bland fare.
5. If you could introduce the whole world to one ingredient to improve their culinary experience, what would that be and why?
Don’t have such thing.
But pizza should always have Aura blue cheese on it – and plenty of it!
