Migraines, my new cooking resolution, and the new migraine-free cookbook

I have been anxiously awaiting the release of Heidi Gunderson’s Migraine-Free Cooking! cookbook for months now, but it is finally here!  I am so excited.

Now, I own a lot of cookbooks (most of which I never use), so I generally get in trouble with my husband if I buy more of them, but this one is unique so I figured he couldn’t really say anything, he he.  This book uses ONLY ingredients that are listed in Buchholz’s Heal Your Headache book as not causing migraines.  And considering how long the list of banned ingredients is, cooking without any of the banned ones is no small feat.

If I could have asked Santa for only one thing this past Christmas, it would have been the release of this cookbook.  Because this cookbook is a godsend for me as I struggle in my quest to get rid of my migraines. 

I have been trying the Heal Your Headache migraine elimination diet for some time now, but I haven’t been good about following it perfectly and so it’s not surprising that I’m still getting headaches.  Lots of headaches.  But the hardest part of doing it (other than getting myself to cook and not eating out unless I know all the ingredients in the food) is figuring out how to cook tasty, normal recipes without any banned ingredients (if you randomly selected ten American recipes, I’d bet that at least a third to one half of them would include banned ingredients).

You’d be surprised, but it seems that onion or onion powder, lemon, or special vinegars seem to be in everything I want to cook.  One of the most annoying things was that I couldn’t find a single salad dressing recipe that wasn’t “bad” in some way.

Enter this cookbook.

Now it just remains to be seen how tasty the recipes will be, but I have faith.  (Tonight I’m supposed to make the turkey meatloaf.  We’ll see if that happens, lol.)  Although there are basically no pictures and from the cover it doesn’t look like a normal cookbook at all (I’m not picky, but don’t cookbooks normally have a food stylist?  at least for the front cover?), it has recipes for all sorts of things, which is all I really care about.

There is a hummus recipe (no lemon!), chili recipe (no beans!), a lasagna recipe, a shepherd's pie recipe (no cheese!), a meatloaf recipe, salad dressings recipes, and a bbq sauce recipe… and that’s only the beginning. 

Did I mention that I was a little bit excited? lol. :-)

Some of the recipes require more work than I would like, but the fault there lies with the diet itself and not with the cookbook.  I don’t like the idea of always making my own salad dressing, for example, but if I’m going to stick with this diet until my headaches go away then that is just something I’m going to have to deal with.

If any of you are on this migraine elimination diet or thinking about going on it, you should definitely check out this book.  Unfortunately, it is $19.00 on Amazon, even though it is a paperback, and there are no used copies available, but I thought it was worth it.  (I even paid for one day shipping so it would come before I left the US!)

If you are interested in “migraine-free recipes,” here is the link to Heidi’s website, which contains some of her recipes.

Happy cooking!  And for those of you suffering from migraines, cheers to the hope of a migraine-free future in 2010. 

I’m not giving up, migraines.  Your days are numbered.

P.S. Going along with my New Year’s Resolution to cook five times a week in 2010, I made dinner last night – and get this, I made garlic french fries from scratch.  HEALTHY garlic french fries.  From scratch.  It took, well, at least an hour or so including the cooking time and making the hamburgers, but I was very pleased with myself.  (I’ve only been planning to make these for, I don’t know, a long time, lol.)  And yes, they were delicious. :-)