There are a lot of foods that I have had to say goodbye to, or severely limit, over the course of my chronic illness journey. Between GERD and my IC, tomato sauce is something that will consistently make me feel dreadful. I’ve tried popping a Prelief beforehand, but it doesn’t offer enough protection against the effects of eating highly acidic foods to make it worth playing with fire. Being doubled over in pain every time I eat certain food has solidified some food aversions for me. I don’t often try to dissuade myself from breaking those aversions, because it makes it easier to go without something, like chocolate, if I wrinkle up my nose when I see a dessert that is chocolate-on-chocolate-on-chocolate. I really miss a simple plate of spaghetti and meat sauce, or a gooey slice of pizza, though. Not only are they classic staples, they’re fairly cheap, and easy to prepare. I’ve tried a variety of homemade pasta sauces like pesto, alfredo and a terrible pumpkin sauce that I tried to convince myself I liked because I was craving variety. I have also been on the hunt for a “nomato” pasta sauce to use in place of a tomato sauce in pasta recipes and on pizza.
I have hated beets since I was a baby and spit them back at my Great Grandma. (Poor Grandma. She was just trying to feed me.) Nothing has swayed that opinion since. Still, out of desperation, I attempted a recipe I found online that used beets as its base. At the time, I thought it was just so novel to be able to make a pizza for myself and eat pasta with a meat sauce, that I think I convinced myself it tasted better than it did. My family didn’t really care for it, so I made it again for myself and didn’t torture them further. However, it really tasted like beets, no matter how much I tried to convince myself otherwise. Disappointed, I went back to the hunt. There aren’t a lot of options, though. The recipe that used peppers as a base intrigued me, but I never got to make it before I discovered that peppers needed to be added to the list of foods that consistently make me feel awful.
That left one more option, that I have seen in my search anyway, and that sauce is largely composed of cherries. It sounded weird to me, but I was willing to give it a shot. The first time I made it, I made it as close to the recipe as possible, but since it called for a lot of vinegar, I cut some of that and used cooking wine in its place. It probably makes the sauce even sweeter than intended, but if I am dumping a bunch of vinegar into my sauce I might as well be using tomatoes… I’ve made multiple batches using the cherry-based recipe, making little changes each time, to better suit my needs. I make sure the onions are really cooked, because raw or partially cooked onions are bad news. I might try grape juice in place of wine next time too, because alcohol can also be triggering and it’s not being cooked off. (I have used grape juice in tomato sauce before and it works for me.) I will continue to play around with the ingredients until I perfect it to my liking, but for now it works. Nothing has quite filled the void left by my inability to eat tomatoes without suffering, but I am grateful to have found something that can help scratch that itch when I have a hankering for pizza or spaghetti with meat sauce.
Nomato Sauce Recipe from Foodcourage.com.
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