Cooking in the comfort of your own kitchen should be a painless process: you make and eat what you want. Those who suffer from heartburn need not be sidelined by symptoms—so long as they know which foods are safe.
Abiding by a few standard rules limits the chance you will experience heartburn when reaching for a recipe. Since fatty foods linger in the stomach, avoid cooking with oils and butters. Rather than frying or sautéing vegetables, steam them. Meats should be roasted, barbequed, baked, or broiled, and flavor them with dehydrated spices, like garlic powder and Italian seasoning.
Now that you’ve jotted down the basics and tacked them onto the fridge, here are some specific foods that come with heartburn-friendly recipes. They come courtesy of the National Heartburn Alliance and are detailed on the organization’s Web site, www.heartburnalliance.org.
Whole-Wheat Corn Muffins. Muffins are incredibly versatile. They can function as a grab-and-go breakfast, a pre-workout energy fix, or an après dinner dessert. Plus, the recipe makes twelve, half of which can go straight into freezer bags.
Marinated Lamb Loins. Often forgotten by the casual American eater, lamb works for heartburn sufferers because cuts of it (like the loin) are low in fat. Orange juice makes up the marinade’s sweet base (not enough is used to make it dangerous), and rosemary, dried and crumbled, adds extra flavor.
Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Summer Vegetables. This sounds like a trigger meal, until you make a few adjustments. Sweet potatoes—rich in nutrients to begin with—cooked on a grill or in the oven have a fat content of 5 grams per serving, and sweet Vidalia onions are, when roasted, tummy-safe. Zucchini and yellow summer squash round out the veggies.
Apple Snack Cake. Can a tasty dessert contain only 6 grams of fat per serving? Yes. Combining small amounts of flavor-pregnant ingredients like ginger, vanilla, molasses, raisins, and brown sugar make this fun dish go.
Roasted Onion and Shallot Gravy. Perhaps the only almost fat-free gravy in existence, this gravy is perfect for holidays but can be frozen for year-round use. Dropped into 2 cans of reduced-sodium chicken broth, the sweet Vidalia onions add richness and flavor, and the thinly sliced shallots are substituted for troublesome garlic.
Bow-Tie Pasta with Peas and Ham. Typically, pasta is a big-time heartburn offender. But when you use a reduced-sodium broth instead of a tomato-based sauce, you drastically reduce the chance for symptoms. And if you don’t like ham, cooked chicken, turkey, or lean beef work just as well.
