Taking the Scenic Route

Eating out SUCCESS (for onion allergies + low carb/primal)

12th February 2011

Eating out SUCCESS (for onion allergies + low carb/primal)

If you have weird dietary restrictions, eating out can be really challenging, especially if you don’t want to draw attention to yourself as the weirdo.  Here are some of the places I have found great success.  The Mongolian style grills are great because they can accommodate just about any dietary difference, from vegan to carnivore, from gluten free to any other niche allergy/sensitivity.  Hu Hot is the easiest to go to, even without information about their sauces, because they have more single/pretty plain ingredient sauces alongside the prepared ones.  For both of these places, they clean a place off on the grill and use different utensils for your dish.  They really “get” the concept of cross contamination.  I love them both for it.

Hu Hot is my pick for best chain Mongolian Grill that I have found.  They have an array of simple ingredient add-ins (sesame seed oil, ginger broth, garlic oil, etc) that mean you don’t have to think hard to make something you can eat, even if you avoid all of the prepared sauces.  They also responded promptly to my request for things safe to eat if you are allergic to onions.  And, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could still get most of their menu, a rarity with onion allergies.  Their sauces also seem better balanced “as is” than Ghengis, and they don’t assume you are going to eat mostly starch with a little bit of the regular ingredients.
NO Onions, SAFE TO EAT
carbs per ladle
00; Garlic Chili Sauce
00; Sesame Oil
00; Ginger Broth/Garlic Broth
01; Hot Chili Oil/Garlic Oil
01: Lemon Juice/Lime Juice
01; Soy Sauce
03; Five Village Fire Szechuan
03; Khan’s Favorite
03; Mean Bean Garlic
03; Yellow Belly Curry
04; Black Thai Peanut
04; Sweet Chili Sauce
05; Samurai Teriyaki
07; Burn-Your-Village BBQ
07; Feed the Hordes Hoisin
07; Mongol Mustard
09; Not-So-Sweet and Sour
12; Sherry
Sauces & Dishes WITH ONION
DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON
05; Bekter’s Ginger
05; Kung Pao… Yow!
06; Asian Coconut
Egg Drop Soup
Hot & Sour Soup
garnish on appetizer sauces & rice

Ghengis grill does a better job of letting people know up front what the ingredients are.  They have brocures right up at the hostess stand that list all the ingredients, as well as the macro-nutrient counts.  The sauces are ok, but it seems like everything is a little too sweet and salty if you don’t get the starch.  I suspect they would be better with the starch (noodles, rice, whatever)
NO Onions, SAFE TO EAT
carbs per ladle
00; Asian Chili, hot (listed as 0 carb/.5 oz), sugar
06; Szechuan, hot, HFCS
10; Island Teriyaki, mild, fructose
12; Sweet N Sour, medium, sugar
13; Stir Fry, mild, sugar
15; 3G, mild, fructose
16; Chili Garlic, hot (listed as 8 carb/.5oz), sugar
17; Honey Soy Sauce, mild, fructose

posted in Food | Comments Off

5th February 2010

Zane’s recipe

Zane requested apples with peanut butter and pumpkin seeds.  Weird, but healthy enough for us to happily comply.

posted in Autistic Life, Food, Zane | Comments Off

20th January 2010

Toffee Tales

The saga began the day before Christmas. I made toffee to give as gifts to my family, and another batch to send to family living at a distance with the photos that didn’t come in until right before Christmas. That batch of toffee was sitting there waiting for me to have the funds to mail it, and then Zach lost his job and I realized I had 3 pounds of toffee on my hands and no way to get it to the intended recipients.

I can’t eat it, and I don’t really want it fueling my children, and was debating what to do with it since the local recipients already had a bunch of toffee from my first batch. Some online friends suggest I hold a short auction on it at the parenting forum I participate in (and where the recipe came from), and since the toffee still looked beautiful and Zach confirmed that it still tasted great, I did. I pulled it out to start boxing it up and saw this —->
The chocolate bloomed and had that funky looking white stuff on it. AAACK! So, when the bidding was done and the paypal in my account, I ran to the store to get stuff to make more for the generous winners. So, they will get fresh toffee, but now I have UGLY toffee that I am not sure what to do with again…maybe take it to the University again…there is a new batch of students, and college students might not care as much that is is ugly.

Making the new batch:

mmm…still warm.

And I can not tell you the monumental amount of restraint it took to keep from licking the spoon. (but last time I ate some of this toffee I totally obsessed and craved it MASSIVELY for over a week, and I don’t want to do that again.)

posted in Food | 1 Comment

29th April 2009

“Healthy” Pop

#119 Healthy Pop. (Zach would say “Soda”, but this is my blog) It is a sad, sad thing when the “healthy” pop is the stuff with normal sugar because most pop is made with High Fructose Corn Syrup.

posted in Food, project 365 | Comments Off

25th March 2009

Playing with your food.

#84 Ketchup as finger paint. *sigh*

posted in Art, Food, project 365 | Comments Off

4th March 2009

Blech

#63 Vitamix fail. Kale and Raspberry are, apparently, not a good combination. Hey, if it had been turnip greens the drink could be called “you can get blood out of a turnip”

posted in Food, project 365 | Comments Off

27th February 2009

Cuties Oranges

#57 I think he likes them.

posted in Food, Zane | Comments Off

23rd February 2009

Mandarin Orange Cuties

#54 Today I got fresh Mandarin Oranges for the first time ever. Yummy!

posted in Food, project 365 | Comments Off

13th January 2009

The Happiest Snack Ever

Zora’s most requested snack (usually with mustard or ketchup, but she tries to talk me into grape jelly too)

posted in Food, Zora | Comments Off

29th December 2008

Christmas Eve Anticipation

From the 24th

Zora helping make the cherry pie filling (before the stove got hot, btw). I hope to post a video of this later because it was really cute.

Gingerbread People and Gingerbread Houses for Santa, cooling off from the oven. (the cooling rack is over some of the freshly made fudge…I was running out of counter space for hot things)

Helping make the bread

Happy Anticipation as they get ready for bed, hang their stockings, and put out the cookies and milk.

Neither of them could get to sleep, they were too wound up. It was too short of a night for the parents. (Although I did have a glass of wine, and I determined that is a new Christmas tradition I might have to continue…so much less stress. lol)

posted in Christmas, Food, The Kids | Comments Off

  • Subscribe


 Log in