Tandoori Chicken with Yogurt Sauce (and Jaime's new outlook on food)

Greetings Dinner Clubbers! I'm sorry I've been quiet lately, but I have a reason. A little over a month ago I came to a big decision in regards to my health and it relates to food in a big way.

As dinner club members all know, I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease at age 19. I then spent my 20s trying to pretend that everything was just fine, eating everything I wanted and choosing to believe that diet had nothing to do with my digestive health. More than anything, I just wanted to be normal.

Then I paid for that negligence with a series of surgeries and complications in my early 30s. I am now 37 and have post-surgical short bowel, chronic anemia, and food allergies in addition to active Crohn's Disease. Right after Christmas I finally decided that I wasn't willing to put up with that as status quo any longer and that I was ready to try some dietary changes, even if that meant radically changing my relationship with food.

On January 21, I started the day with a bagel and cream cheese, granola bars for a snack, a stuffed baked potato for lunch, for dinner a cold cut and cheese combo on a big sourdough baguette and then followed it with a huge bowl of homemade ice cream with hot fudge and caramel sauce.

On January 22, I started following the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). No grains of any kind, no starchy vegetables, no sugar, and no lactose. I won't lie... the transition was really, really, really hard but I decided to give it a month and then reassess.

I'm happy to report that the results are already positive. My digestion is vastly improved and I had a colonoscopy last week that showed major improvement in all areas. YAY!

And now that I'm 5 weeks into this new way of eating, I barely remember what it was like to eat the old way. Just writing about that day of eating makes my stomach hurt.

So what is left for me to eat? Lots of great thing like fruits, meat, nuts, most vegetables, homemade yogurt, and most cheeses. For example, tonight I made this tandoori chicken with yogurt sauce from Martha Stewart's Everyday Food. It was so delicious, I forgot to take a picture and so am using the one from the website. Richie had rice with his; I enjoyed a side of steamed green beans with mine.

Now that I've decided the diet really does work and am committing to it for the long haul, I'm looking forward to sharing more of my delicious meals!