Struggling with what to eat - sensory issues- any tips would be so welcome.

Anoneemoose

Hi everyone.

As the title says, I struggle with food and what to eat. I have chronic illnesses and often suffer from debilitating nausea, as well as bone crushing fatigue. I am highly sensitive to smells and that can make the nausea worse. It also affects my options for freezing batch cooking.

Because of this, I can often not know what I want to eat. I try and loosely meal plan, and have been managing to cook from scratch more often, which works for the most part, but some days it has to go out of the window.

As above, I cannot batch cook and freeze things because I cannot stomach the smells of things defrosting and seeing them when cold. I have just managed to get round this with lasagne. I can only eat it when the bolognaise is slow cooked, but the smell of it cooking all day gives me the boak! I force myself to eat it and do actually enjoy it though.

Because of all of this, our groceries bill is ever increasing and I really wish I could get it down.

Not sure what I’m wanting from this, but if anyone has experienced similar, I’d be grateful for any advice.

Many thanks.

katiepants

You poor thing, that sounds really difficult.

I'm just wondering, if you did manage do do a load of something in the SC, then portioned it up and froze, whether you could bung it straight in microwave to defrost and cook. Then you wouldn't actually have to look at it at all?

Do you have a list of foods/ingredients that don't make you feel sick? Maybe work a menu plan around those?

Also, do you eat in kitchen? Or could you eat somewhere completely different so you aren't surrounded by cooking smells. It's so nice atm, why not sit outside to eat?

tacpot12

It might help if you were to arrange a smell test at home. Get as wide a range of foods together as you can and smell each in turn to see which are particularly problematical and which are more tolerable.

I have abosolutely no experince of your condition, but I think doing the above will inform you and may even desensitise you to the more tolerable smells.

How about defrosting food outside the house? You just need a plastic cover to go over the item and a clean weight to go on top to stop any local wildlife/cats from having a nibble. This would keep the smell out of the kitchen. Leaving the kitchen and closing the door, and taking a timer with you to another room in the house might also help.

I do hope you find some relief from this, it does sound a horrible condition.

Anoneemoose

Thanks so much for the replies. I got rid of my electric slow cooker as I could never eat anything from there. Our oven has a slow cook function, so I do things in there in a hob to oven casserole. No matter what I put in it though (usually bolognaise or chicken something), the lingering cooking smell all day makes me yucky! I can tolerate the chicken more. I know tomato based sauces (I use passata), and in particular the smell of beef stock, really make me baulk! That’s possibly why the bolognaise is a testing time! That’s usually only about once every 10 days or so though. And it’s actually a good meal because we all eat a variation of it. As well as the fact I can cook it in stages. So do the bolognaise prep on a morning, leave it in all day, make the white sauce a bit later and assemble and then bake when we’re ready.

I may try the leftovers thing again and let it defrost where I can’t see it or smell it and then maybe shut my eyes and hold my breath before putting it in the oven!:rotfl:

Unfortunately our rooms are all close together so the smells permeate the house. I do leave windows open and shut the doors where possible.