oh, nuts!

The plan for today was to post a comfort food kind of recipe in honor of Paleo Comfort Foods, recently released and on its way to anxious cooks and diners around the world, including me. I will do just that in a day or two, but today my mind and my body are fixated on what seems to be my newest food intolerance. I am not at all sure that this love affair I've had with food for most of my conscious life is not completely one-sided. In fact, I'm getting less sure all the time as one food after another joins the ever-growing category of "don't touch, don't even think about it."

Being newly re-energized by all I've been reading about primal and Paleo eating, I again stocked up on a variety of nuts. I soaked, then dried some in the dehydrator, others I tasted raw. I used an approximation of a recent recipe of Elana Amsterdam's for another batch. Some were good; some were okay. I was not totally excited by any of them, though. Recipes I can tweak, that's no problem. Pain, on the other hand, is a serious problem. I no longer mess around with pain at all. Problem is I did not expect the pain from the nuts. Maybe I should have, since I've had issues from time to time. Since I didn't expect a problem, I didn't approach it cautiously. I ate several kinds of nuts, prepared in multiple fashions all at roughly the same time. I don't know if the pain, which at this point has not fully subsided though it's been two days, was from one type of nut or a specific preparation or if each and every one was an equally guilty culprit. I don't know and I'm not willing to do what's necessary to find out: eat the nuts again. That is not happening.

For the time being, I will turn my attention and recipe selection away from nuts, at least walnuts, pecans, and almonds, since those were the ones I used this week. There's still lots and lots of good food out there. Right now I really need some serious comfort food.