How to make YOUR recipes compatible with the Candida diet

You’ve been collecting recipes for years and now you find out you have a yeast overgrowth and have to eliminate yeast from your diet. A cursory search of her recipe file and all those good cookbooks she’s had for years makes her realize just how many foods contain yeast. Not just yeast, but foods that quickly turn to sugar in the stomach and feed the yeast that’s already there what they love.

This makes carbohydrate-rich foods a problem. So, there goes your favorite beef stew recipe with all that corn, potatoes, and carrots! Not to mention all that pasta made with refined white flour.

The first step in rewriting your recipes to help your candida diet is to become familiar with the foods you should eat to rid your system of excess yeast and the foods you should avoid.

Here is the short list of what to avoid:

• bread products
• Alcohol
• Sugar, high fructose corn syrup
• Vinegar and products containing vinegar
• Fermented foods – sauerkraut and cider
• “Moldy” foods, such as cheese and dried or smoked meat
• Cured meat – bologna, bacon, bologna
• Fungus
• Misery
• soy sauce
• canned tomatoes

Here is a short list of good foods:

• Vegetables, especially green leafy vegetables
• Beans
• Fresh uncured meat, poultry and pork
• fish and shellfish
• eggs
• seeds and nuts

Once you have the above two lists in mind, start reviewing your recipes. I started with my favorites so I wouldn’t feel deprived. I revamped my beef stew recipe by swapping the beef for chicken, dropping the corn, using just 1/2 potato and 1/2 carrot, and adding green beans, zucchini, and cauliflower. To thicken the sauce, I used a bit of arrowroot instead of flour. It was great!

Another big favorite of mine is the crab cakes. When I lived in Delaware, I lived right on the beach with a quagmire behind me. I would go to the dock in the quagmire and throw my crab pot in during the season and pick it up when I got home from work. Usually it would be full of crabs and crab cakes became an obsession.

The problem was that my favorite recipe used breadcrumbs to hold the crab together. So what did I use instead? I crush almonds. Yes, that’s right, almonds. Not only are they good for you, they didn’t really change the flavor and I’ve even started coating the crab cakes in almond flour before baking or frying. Hmm!

If you do this, one recipe at a time, as well as adding more healthy foods to your diet, you may find, as I did, that when my yeast overgrowth wears off and you can start adding yeasty foods back into my diet (slowly, noting how I felt afterwards) I found that I liked my new way of eating and that the higher carbohydrate foods I had before didn’t appeal to me as much anymore.

It is very easy to do this one by one. On my website you will find more recipes and a mini-course, “10 secrets to living without yeast” that will help you address this problem. Take a look at the links below.