My stint with a low-iodine diet, in preparation for the radiated iodine therapy, was fine, though I really missed two things: ice cream and hot sauce. (Not at the same time….)
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I don’t actually eat much ice cream (unlike a friend of mine who reviews and grades ice cream on his Instagram page — check him out!). I’ll drizzle Hershey’s chocolate sauce over a couple scoops of vanilla bean maybe once or twice a week, at most.
But for some reason (possibly because ice cream was verboten), watching the Younger scoop his chocolate chocolate fudge each night gave me serious and surprisingly strong cravings.
Further, I’m not a hot sauce maniac, by any stretch of the imagination; a few shakes of Tapatío or Cholula make me very happy. Yes, they’re wimpy, as hot sauces go. You definitely won’t find me on Hot Ones (not least because why would they ask me?). But I find them flavorful, and I use them reasonably often — though not as often as my kids: when the Elder uses hot sauce, he slathers it on, and the Younger puts four hot sauces on his rice and a couple additional drops on each individual bite.
My go-to low-iodine meal was chicken, black beans, and rice, which is the perfect dish for hot sauces. It drove me crazy to leave them off. Sure, I used lots of cayenne, or red pepper flakes, or dark chili pepper, so the food wasn’t bland. It was probably spicier than when I just use hot sauce!
But dry spices just aren’t the same.
I’m not complaining, really. The diet wasn’t bad — it certainly wasn’t as bad as I expected. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had to avoid foods that had been prepared with salt (thus the ban on hot sauces). Most salt is iodized, and sea salt contains iodine naturally (as does anything from the sea, I guess). But most kosher salts — I used Morton’s kosher salt — are allowed, so I didn’t lose that important flavor. And unlike diets I’ve tried for weight loss, I was allowed most meats, pasta, and rice. I was allowed potatoes, too (minus the skin) — though I wasn’t allowed milk or butter, so I had to improvise with mashed potatoes or hash browns.
But I really missed my hot sauce!
If I’d had to stay on the diet much longer — I only had to follow it for a little under two weeks — I’d have learned how to make a hot sauce with acceptable ingredients. I’m sure it’s possible.
And there are acceptable ice cream substitutes, too. I didn’t bother with that because I figured, incorrectly, that two weeks would be no big deal. And by the time I realized that I really wanted ice cream, I was radioactive and had to stay home.
But yeah: for my first meal off the low-iodine diet, I dropped leftover chicken, rice, and black beans onto a couple corn tortillas and smothered the whole thing with Cholula. (I also ordered a couple of the milder sauces from the Hot Ones store.)
I’m sure you can guess what I had for dessert.
Now I just need the weird metallic taste to clear up, a process that can take up to eight weeks. Apparently irradiated saliva irritates the taste buds. Yum!
Photo is a mashup of a mug for sale by Tapatío and a photo by Food Photographer | Jennifer Pallian on Unsplash