Roasted Vegetables

Simply roasting vegetables and garlic cloves in olive oil with salt and pepper is one of my favorite foods.  It doesn't matter which vegetables, just as long as they are stuck in the oven for about 30 minutes to an hour (depending on the vegetables). 

This makes me happy.  

I make this a lot - at least once a week.  Sometimes more.  I started getting into cooking as heavily as I have because I have Crohn's disease.  It pretty much makes me stomach life not fun.  A lot of the things that I eat give me cramps so powerfully that I have been known to crawl into the fetal position and lay on the bathroom floor for longer than I want to really admit. 

However, I found a website once about 3 or 4 years ago that was about how she was helped by just really watching what she ate - eating only fresh foods and preparing them herself.  (I don't remember what the site was and I've been unsuccessful in trying to find it again.)  She said that any time she was starting to have a flare up, she would eat some potatoes.  There is a special sort of starch in potatoes that helps settle your stomach.  

I have found that potatoes can help settle a flair up, which is why I've experimented with almost every way you can make a potato (or sweet potato) - mash, fry, roast, bake, grill.  Roasted potatoes are simply my favorite and the easiest to make.  Just chop up, season with some salt and pepper, and bake.  If I have other vegetables around, I'll throw them in.

This is also the reason that I use a lot of gluten-free products.  I don't have Celiac disease and even with limiting my gluten intake, it's hard for me to imagine being 100% gluten-free all the time.   It seems like whenever I have gluten binge - like a huge plate of pasta or when my roommate brings home delicious bread from her restaurant - that I have a horrible flair up.  A little bit doesn't affect me - thankfully.

If you have stomach problems, I definitely recommend trying out different foods.  Cut out this or that for a while and see how you feel - and make sure you eat stuff that is fresh.  So many products out there today aren't really things that should be entering our bodies.  Figuring out ways to make it simple - roasting vegetables - will make you a lot happier than a Twinkie would.

In fact, my dinner - roasted potatoes, garlic, parsnips and zucchini - are probably about done now.