Hi friend! I hope you had a wonderful weekend 🙂 My soul sister Hanah is here visiting beautiful Kelowna for a few days and we’re planning on doing as much skiing, cooking, giggling, and yogaing as possible and so far so good!

Today I want to share a recipe for one of my favourite go-to meals: Garlic & Ginger Cauliflower Fried Rice. It takes one pan and like 10 minutes to make; even less time if you do your Sunday Meal Prep.

I love fried rice so much, but when I eat a lot of grains and carbs I tend to get puffy and bloated, so when I stumbled upon this idea of “ricing” cauliflower I knew I had to give it a shot. And like most of my recipes, this one was the result of me looking in my fridge and throwing together a bunch of random ingredients.

One reason I tend to avoid rice as a regular staple to my diet is because of this idea of cross-reactivity between foods. I first learned about this concept from The Paleo Mom when I thought I had an auto-immune condition this summer that turned out to be a mould allergy. Though I luckily don’t suffer from any diagnosed auto-immune issues (because I never went and got tested TBH), whenever I eat gluten I develop a whole host of icky symptoms such as anxiety, breakouts, constipation, bloating, and super achy joints. Not.Fun.

So back to cross-reactivity, when your body starts to create anti-bodies against certain foods due to auto-immunity and/or leaky gut, your immune system begins to recognize specific protein sequences in the offending food that it deems a foreign invader. Unluckily for you, it only looks at snippets of the whole protein sequence and so several different foods can all have very similar sequences and cause similar unhappy reactions in our bodies.

Foods that cross-react with gluten include:

• dairy and it’s various proteins (casein, whey, casomorphin, butyrophilin)
• oats
• brewer’s and baker’s yeast
• instant coffee (not fresh)
• sorghum
• millet
• RICE
• corn
• potato

So if you’ve been diagnosed with celiac or non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and you’ve eliminated wheat, rye, spelt, kamut, and barley, but you’re still feeling icky-pants, I suggest an elimination of the above foods for about a period of 4 weeks.

Once the 4 weeks has passed, slowly reintroduce the foods one-by-one, keeping track of any physical, mental, or emotional symptoms that may reoccur and then eliminating the offending foods. As always, I recommend undertaking a Gut Healing Protocol to soothe, heal, and protect the digestive tract once you’ve removed foods to which you are sensitive.

Anyhoo, this long winded side-bar on gluten cross-reactivity leads us back to today’s recipe: Cauliflower Fried Rice. It’s a great alternative to starchy, potentially troublesome rice and it gives your liver lots of sweet love. Check it!

Low Carb Garlic & Ginger Cauliflower Fried Rice Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 tsp. olive oil
• ¼ red onion, diced
• 1 tsp. ginger, minced
• ½-1 tsp. garlic, minced
• ½ small head of cauliflower, riced*
• 2 free-range eggs
• ½ tsp. sea salt
• 1 green onion, chopped
• 1 stalk cilantro, chopped

Directions

1. Heat a frying pan over medium heat.
2. Add oil.
3. Once warmed add onion and allow to cook 2 minutes until softened.
4. Add garlic and ginger and stir to combine.
5. Add cauliflower rice, stirring to combine.
6. Allow to cook 3 minutes, until cauliflower is softened.
7. Crack eggs into pan and mix thoroughly with cauliflower rice.
8. Sprinkle with sea salt and allow to cook until eggs are cooked through, approximately 4-5 minutes.
9. Add to plate and top with green onion and cilantro.

Option

1. You may want to add another protein source such as roasted chicken, sausage, tempeh, or tofu. Add at step 5.

*To “rice” cauliflower put florets into a food processor and pulse until it achieves a rice-like consistency.

Well that’s the recipe for this week friend. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! Have a wonderful week!

Cait xo