If you are someone who has unfortunately been diagnosed with diverticulosis, you are probably well aware that will have to watch what you eat for the rest of your life. Diverticulosis is when pouches, known as diverticula, develop inside the wall of the large instestine or colon. Those who have diverticulosis are told to avoid eating seeds and nuts. The reason to avoid eating seeds or nuts is so that they do not get caught in the pouches and cause irritation and complications, which can lead to diverticulitis.
When my husband was diagnosed with diverticulosis earlier this year, I was very worried about cooking for him. I had to avoid all types of seeds and nuts. This meant no tomatoes, strawberries, sesame seeds, etc. I love to cook and wasn’t sure what I going to do about cooking my husband’s favorites meals. It took awhile to get used to, but I eventually found ways to make him his favorite food without any risk. Here I will tell you how I was able to make pizza, spaghetti, salsa and other tomato based food for my husband to eat. There are other ways he was able to eat his favorite food and I will let you in on those secrets ars well!
Tomato and spaghetti sauces were things that my husband was told to avoid because of the seeds in the sauces. At first we didn’t use them at all and that cut our meal plans drastically. My husband is a very picky eater to begin with, so losing a lot of meals that I could cook was devastating! Then I came up with an idea, what if I strained all the sauces? Perfect! Well, not exactly. It worked at first, but it took a long time and it was almost impossible to remove all the seeds from the colander. Some seeds still managed to escape! This wasn’t going to work, so I decided that I was going to make our own sauces.
Making spaghetti and pizza sauce is incredibly easy. Just buy a big can or tomato sauce in the store, not spaghetti sauce. Tomato sauce is just that, tomato sauce. There are no herbs, seasonings, vegetables or anything added to it. When I first started using tomato sauce to make spaghetti I just used one can and added garlic powder and oregano. It was good and I was so happy that I could still make spaghetti and other meals with tomato sauce, but there was something missing. I then started experimenting and finally came up with a good combination! I now use a can of tomato sauce and a can of crushed tomatoes. The crushed tomatoes make it slightly thicker and a nice consistency. We are now used to making our own sauces and we can add whatever we’d like. Using fresh ingredients like herbs and garlic, along with onions and peppers (more on cooking with peppers below) make the sauce really good!
Pizza was another of my husband’s favorites. There was no way he could continue eating delivered or frozen pizzas because it was impossible to tell whether or not there was seeds in the sauce they used. I started making pizza from scratch! For a quarter of the cost of 1 delivery pizza I can make 5 pizzas free of seeds! For the pizza sauce I just use the same sauce I make for spaghetti!
Other things that my husband is still able to eat that contains seeds are bruschetta and salsa. These I also make from scratch. Fresh bruschetta and salsa taste really great! In order to make anything with fresh tomatoes, you need to make sure to take out all the seeds from the tomatoes. At first this might sound really daunting and time consuming, but you’ll get used to it before you know it. Simply take a tomato and cut it in half, then carefully but firmly squeeze out all the seeds. Make sure to turn the tomato as you go to get all the seeds out. That’s one way to deseed a tomato. Another way is to cut it in quarters and take a spoon and scrape out the seeds.
The same goes for peppers. I use a lot of green peppers, jalapenos and other types of peppers in cooking. It adds flavor and is a cheap filler. Taking the seeds out of peppers aren’t as hard as tomatoes. The seeds aren’t covered in anything pulpy and can easily be washed away. Green peppers and jalapenos can be added to spaghetti sauce, pizza and salsa as well.
Some other things my husband had to avoid eating was yogurt that contained fruit due to seeds. Yogurt is really good for you and my husband does not like plain or vanilla yogurt. We tested out a few types of yogurt and found that he can still have strawberry, blueberry and banana yogurts just as long as there is no traces of real fruit inside the yogurt. Go for yogurt that is fruit flavored and add in real fruit like pineapples and peaches if you like actual fruit in it.
Even though we figured out ways to get around tomatoes and yogurt, there was still popcorn. Popcorn is my husband’s absolute favorite food. He was told to stay away from it due to the hulls on the popcorn. These hulls are hard and can get caught in the pouches, much like being caught in your teeth! There was no way around it that we could think of and it took us months until we finally found a solution! Hull free popcorn! Hull free popcorn actually sounds like an oxy-moron, but there is such a thing. Hull free popcorn is found in gourmet and specialty food stores and online. It is more expensive than regular popcorn, but the concept is that the popcorn is specially grown to be virtually hull free. When the popcorn cooks, the hull disappears or is so thin it is hardly noticeable.
Diverticulosis is a hard thing to get used to, but there are ways around it if you’re determined like we were. My husband can now have his favorite food with a little bit of effort and now you can too!
