Using the advanced search engine on the Meals for You website, it’s easy to search for recipes which are likely to be migraine-friendly with these steps:
1. Open up the Meals for You advanced search page.
2. On the web page’s section “1″, type or copy-and-paste this into the box marked “exclude”:
onion parmesan cheddar avocado bacon wine beer banana raisins raspberries
3. Under the “Special dietary needs”, tick the boxes to exclude these:
- peanut products
- tree nuts
- citrus
- caffeine
- chocolate
Also tick any other boxes which apply to you – I’ve ticked these things which don’t agree with me:
- soy products
- tomato
- eggs
4. Add any other one-word foods you can think of to the “Exclude” box you filled in step 2. Note that two word foods such as “tasty cheese” won’t work – it will exclude anything with the word “tasty” AND anything with the word “cheese” – probably not what you want.
I haven’t found any way to deal with foods with more than one word, unless one of those words only happens with that specific food – such as using “parmesan” to exclude “parmesan cheese”.
5. In the next step, choose any desired nutrition levels. You may like to tick the “low” button for sugar or salt, for example, or the “high” button for fibre.
6. Choose any preparation time limits you want.
7. Click on the “Search” button near the bottom of the page but beware – you’re not finished yet!
8. When the results page has loaded, it will have used your “exclude” words from step 2 to only exclude those words in the titles of recipes. We need to exclude them in the ingredients – click on the “search ingredients” button to do the search you really want.
It happily surprised me that even with all the exclusions I’d put in, the site still had 302 recipes for me. I was thinking there wouldn’t be many left after I took out all those ingredients!
9. If you want to now narrow your search further, put words you want to search for in the “Include” box or extra things to exclude in the “Exclude box” and press “Search ingredients” again. The search will remember your other preferences as long as you use the same search page.
Caveat: Be careful with the results – they are not guaranteed to be migraine friendly recipes.
Some of the things that the migraine exclusion diet excludes are hard to put in a list like this – “MSG” for example is never on a recipe ingredients list but may or may not be included in the chicken stock you purchased to use the recipe with. Use your common sense and check each recipe and any purchased ingredients as you would any other time.
So why bother using a search like this? It gives you recipes which are more likely to be migraine-friendly, or easy to adapt to make them migraine-friendly. It also may give you ideas for new ingredients, or new ways to use old ingredients – I’ve never cooked artichokes before, but one of the recipes uses artichokes. Perhaps I’ll like them!
- Ricky
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