Elizabeth Yarnell, Author, Innovator, Naturopath, Speaker
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Dairy-Free New England Fish Chowder Recipe

I love the taste of creamy New England fish chowder, but that dairy base does not love me back. So, when I was faced with a few pounds of rapidly thawing fish fillets of various sorts after our recent freezer thaw, I created my own dairy-free version of that creamy chowder that may even surpass the classic.

Creamy and delicious, this dairy-free New England Fish Chowder was a big hit.
Creamy and delicious, this dairy-free New England Fish Chowder was a big hit.

I made something like 10 quarts of this soup to freeze for the winter, so I’m just going to tell you what I did and what I used but you’ll have to figure out your own amounts.

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Non-Dairy New England Fish Chowder

Ingredients

  • Garlic
  • Onions
  • Fresh green chiles (I used Anaheim and Jalepeño)
  • Potatoes, scrubbed and diced
  • Corn kernels (frozen are fine)
  • Kale or chard, washed and chopped
  • Fillets of fish

Instructions

First, I minced a bunch of garlic and onions and sautéed them in coconut oil in a large stock pot. Ok, I actually blended them up in my Mini Bullet blender because if my son can spot a shred of onion chances are he will reject the entire bowl. He’s ok if he doesn’t see it, so I blend them. In your own soup, you can, of course, do whatever you’d like.

I seeded and deveined a fresh Anaheim green chile and a fresh jalepeño pepper, then chopped them up and added them to the sauté.

After just a few minutes, I poured pure coconut milk and water into the pot. I’m trying to avoid canned coconut milk these days because the cans are lined with BPA, so I used an ingenious product that is organic dried and condensed coconut milk. It comes in a small brick. Chisel some off and add water and voilá! Instant coconut milk. I’ve also used this dried coconut milk in place of dried dairy milk in an instant hot cocoa mix.

When I had a good bit of coconut milk/water in the pot, I added a dozen diced potatoes (with the skin on), the kernels from six ears of fresh organic corn, a bunch of kale, washed and chopped roughly, and about 6 lbs. of fish fillets. I think we had orange roughy, tilapia, and halibut, but it didn’t matter. Any fish would have been just fine.

The chowder simmered until the potatoes were tender and the fish flaked apart. After seasoning with sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper, the soup was ready to serve!

 

Nausea, Vertigo Symptoms of Food Sensitivities

My son awoke on Monday morning complaining of vertigo and nausea. It was a clear food sensitivity reaction.

These symptoms have happened before and I’m learning that, if I do a little detective work, I can directly correlate the episode with something he ate. I’ve also learned from past experience that if I insist he goes to school during these episodes, I should expect a call from the school nurse after he eventually vomits. He stayed home and on the couch for most of the day. By dinnertime, he was feeling much recovered.

If you are not living in a constantly inflamed state, then your reaction to an inflammatory trigger will be noticeable. If you are following a customized anti-inflammatory diet, or LEAP, then you can recover from any inadvertent reactions

This time the culprit was a pineapple popsicle he had enjoyed for dessert the night before. We have known he was sensitive to pineapple since he submitted his blood for the Mediator Release Test (MRT), but it had been more than four years since he had eaten pineapple and he begged to have it. At this point in our food sensitivities journey, the best way to tell if his oral tolerance has risen for a food is to challenge it on a day when it is the only new variable.

He wanted to try it. Sometimes you have to suffer through a hypersensitivity reaction to convince yourself that you are truly better off without that food in your life.

Of course, its best to avoid the hypersensitivity reaction in the first place. That’s the goal of the customized anti-inflammatory diet that I design for my clients in my naturopathic food sensitivities clinic. I work with clients nationwide; feel free to contact me for a free initial consultation if you suspect food sensitivities may play a role in your ailments.

Cooking Glorious One-Pot Meals for One

Reader question: Thank you for this way of cooking!  I cook for one only.  Should I get the LC 1 qt dutch oven and cut your ingredient amounts  in half? Will that work?  No where in book or website, have I seen cooking for one only mentioned.  Is there any drawback if I got the 1 qt pot and halved the amounts?  Would cooking time be the same?  Thank You!  Love the taste of food cooked this way!  But too much leftovers.  ~ Patricia D., Hot Springs, Arkansas

Hi Patricia! Thanks for writing. You have a point: I haven’t written much about making Glorious One-Pot Meals for one even though the topic often comes up during my appearances and classes. In fact, many single GOPM fans habitually make a 2-person GOPM and refrigerate half of it in a covered Pyrex dish for enjoying the next lunch or dinnertime.

And, you have the right idea: just as Glorious One-Pot Meals can be easily doubled or tripled to feed four or six people, so can they be halved to feed just one person. I have a couple brands of 1-quart to 1.5-quart size cast iron Dutch ovens that I often utilize to make a single GOPM (I have a Le Creuset and a 1-quart seasoned cast iron Dutch oven from Cajun Cast Iron. One is deeper and the other is wider). I love using the 1-quart pots because they contain just enough for one person, they cook very quickly (typically 25-25 minutes), and fit easily inside a toaster oven.

Does it work? Absolutely.

Be sure to follow the core tenets of making Glorious One-Pot Meals: use a cast iron Dutch oven and fully preheat the oven to 450 degrees F before putting the full pot inside. You’ll be able to tell when your meal is ready, as always, three minutes after the aroma of a fully cooked meal escapes the oven.

Happy cooking!

Chemotherapy Recovery Diet Recommendations

Undergoing chemotherapy treatments to fight cancer may be effective in eradicating the dangerous cells but it can also leave the rest of your body in bad shape. What should you eat or take to recover?

By definition, chemotherapy is chemical therapy, or pouring toxic chemicals into your body in the hopes of killing bad cells so that good cells can survive.

That’s all great when the chemotherapy works and the cancerous cells are eradicated, but how do you help the body recover from the assault?

Dr. Ben Kim advocates following a round of chemotherapy with a diet focused on fresh juices from leafy greens, vegetables, and fruits. If you don’t have access to fresh juices, then consider taking a large daily dose of a super green concentrate powder supplement made from whole foods to get the antioxidants.

He also recommends practicing a mostly vegetarian diet for the month following. A vegetarian diet is easier to digest than one with animal proteins.

To these ideas, I would add a round of intensive probiotic therapy (here’s one I like) to help replace the beneficial flora and fauna in your intestines that were unintended casualties of the chemicals.

A good plant-based digestive enzyme will help break everything down in your stomach enough so that your intestines can actually absorb the available nutrition from the food. Malnutrition can bring on lingering side effects from other therapies and delay recovery.

If you find that the chemotherapy has left you with nausea, bloating, acid reflux, diarrhea, constipation, or other digestive symptoms, you are likely experiencing a loss of oral tolerance due to cellular damage from the chemotherapy. When this happens, your best course is to identify food sensitivities through the Mediator Release Test and work with a Certified LEAP Therapist (CLT) to design a customized anti-inflammatory diet.

Homemade Natural Carpet Shampoo/Cleaner for Carpet Cleaning Machines

This is the Rug Doctor carpet cleaning machine we rented to clean our carpet and we got great results using our homemade non-toxic carpet cleaning solution.

We had to clean the carpet in our finished basement this week, but I couldn’t stand the thought of living with all the chemical fumes and residue from commercial carpet cleaning solutions. So I made my own natural carpet cleaning solution and we rented a carpet cleaning machine from the grocery store.

It worked beautifully! Our light beige carpet looks and smells fresh and clean. Cleaner than it has been since we moved in eight years ago, I’d have to say.

On the tails of the freezer thaw we experienced a week of so ago, our basement flooded during what is being called a 500-year event. Our house isn’t near a river, or even on low ground, but the window well filled up with water from the rain and poured through the sill to flood the basement.

We were luckier than many out here who found their houses swimming in raw sewage during the flood, but we still faced a clean-up  job to avoid mold and before the basement could be used again.

After we sucked all the water out and dried out the carpet and pad, we rolled the carpeting back and could see visible water stains left from the dirty flood water. I knew we had to clean it but we needed to a) do it ourselves (no flood insurance!) and b) avoid the toxic fumes and residue left by commercial carpet cleaning solutions and their undesirable toxins. The basement houses our family room, so the kids especially spend a lot of time down there and I didn’t want them exposed to those nasty chemicals.

I searched online and found a great recipe for natural carpet shampoo from Rachel at Surviving the Stores blog. Not only does it work, but it dried cleanly without any residue and left a clean, mild scent of orange from the pure essential oil I added to the mix. I increased her original recipe to work with the large carpet cleaning machine we rented.

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Homemade Natural Carpet Shampoo/Cleaner for Carpet Cleaning Machines

Ingredients

  • 3 quarts of hot but not boiling water
  • 1/2 cup 3% Hydrogen Peroxide (the one you can get at any drug store)
  • 4 Tablespoons White vinegar
  • 3 Tablespoons Dish soap (I used Seventh Generation, like Rachel did)
  • 1/4 teaspoon essential oil of your choice (I used Sweet Orange)

Instructions

Heat the water in a large saucepan until hot, then remove from heat. Add the hydrogen peroxide, white vinegar, dish soap, and essential oil and stir gently. Do not agitate enough to cause the dish soap to froth.

Pour mixture into carpet cleaning machine and follow the directions on the unit to clean your carpet.

While some commenters below advise against using vinegar with hydrogen peroxide, I’ve used this recipe a number of times without any problems for either the carpet or the machine.

 

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