It's Going to Be OK... And That's Dinner

Catching up and getting into making dinner on a new diet.

Hello again! I’m trying to come back to sitting down to write to you more often. It felt too hard to do before. But now that it’s Spring I’m feeling more open and alive and ready to write to you again. For many reasons, it was a difficult Winter. One of those reasons is that back in the Fall I was diagnosed with a post-Covid autoimmune disease that finally explained too many months of roving inflammation, joint pain, and fatigue. Don’t worry—I’m going to be OK, and I’ve been working really hard on healing myself since then, but I spent a lot of this winter sick and sore and resting because of it.

For Christmas I gave Jack a framed print of an X-ray of my hands giving the OK symbol. It’s from the rheumatologist appointment that confirmed I don’t in fact have rheumatoid arthritis, as I had feared. I wrote “it’s going to be OK!” on the back for him, but really I think it was for myself. It hangs in our dressing/laundry room now, a daily reminder that all my fears do not come true.

I even snuck my OK hand X-ray into the music video we made for Jack’s debut single which came out this winter, for a song that recounts another one of my worst fears not coming true. About a year ago Jack almost died of an overdose. Thanks to lucky timing, Narcan, a helpful 911 operator on the other end of my phone, and perhaps a few guardian angels watching over us both, he did not die. My OK skeleton hands on our wall help remind me how lucky we were that day, and how thankful I am to have the man I love (and will soon marry!) alive and well in my life today. (I have so much more I want to articulate about living through this experience and maybe one day I’ll write about it... but for now, you can read more about Jack and his music here and here.)

Meanwhile, I’m still learning how to manage my symptoms and heal myself with my new (hopefully not forever) autoimmune disease. I’ve got a great team of doctors on my side, am on some helpful medications, and have been working on following an anti-inflammatory diet. I’ve been gluten-free (I have Celiac disease) for almost 20 years so I’m no stranger to dietary restrictions, but when all the sudden I was advised to follow an AIP diet and cut out all grains, dairy, eggs, beans, nuts, nightshades, and sugar… things got rough. I started spiraling with anxiety and guilt about food for the first time in my life. I started feeling scared to eat the wrong thing and make my aching body hurt more, which lead to losing my desires to cook and to eat. It was depressing and weird and all very new and confusing. Luckily I quickly realized it wasn’t a sustainable or healthy practice for me. So my doctors and I took a step back, ran some labs, and determined that the most important things to focus on eliminating from my diet to help reduce my inflammation were dairy and eggs (and gluten, which I’d already been doing).

My Steelhead Trout Spring Dinner

For six months now, I’ve been homing in on my own best version of an anti-inflammatory diet. It’s still a work in progress, and sometimes I’m better at it than other times. I’ve found I can only really pull it off when I’m cooking and eating at home—when I’m out, staying gluten-free is enough to worry about! So I give myself meals away from home “off” and the rest of the time I cook and eat AIP-ish. Which means I avoid eggs, keep dairy limited to butter and occasional goat cheese, lean low-carb, low-sugar, low-alcohol, and low-nightshade, and focus on enjoying high quality proteins and vegetables. Unfortunately for my deep love of any dessert full off eggs and dairy I truly do notice a difference in my joint pain when I stray too far off this path. Which in a way is good news because it means the path is working. When that depresses me, it helps to remind myself: this is just for now. Someday this might not be the way that works best to feed my body. But for now, it is. And for now, I’m thankful for any pain relief and healing I can get.

My Anchovy-Lemon Chicken Dinner

One way that I’ve made cooking and eating in this new way more fun is by sharing videos of the kinds of weeknight dinners I’ve been cooking for Jack and myself on Instagram (and TikTok too!) Back in November I kicked it off with a favorite anchovy chicken thigh dinner and have been sharing a couple new dinner recipes a month ever since. All the recipes are complete dinners, take 30 minutes or less, serve two, and adhere to my anti-inflammatory diet. Making these videos has helped me get excited about recipe development again, and I truly love hearing from followers who make and enjoy my recipes after I post them. And now I want to share these recipes here with you as well!

Going forward, I’m going to be moving my recipes here to Substack rather than giving them away with my videos. I’ll still post videos on Instagram and TikTok of course, but the written recipes will live here. Making this kind of recipe content costs me time and money, and I hope I can ask for the support of you, dear readers, to help fund the continuation of this content I love to make for you. If you want to keep seeing my recipes, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you thank you thank you.

Here’s to focusing less on our fears—we’re going to be OK!

xoxo, A