Nightshade-Free Chicken Taco Recipe (corn-free, gluten-free, dairy-free)

I've got an easy, nourishing main dish recipe for you today! These Nightshade-Free Chicken Tacos are super easy to prepare and perfect if you are following our Elimination Diet or another special diet such as an autoimmune diet or a diet specific for arthritis. My children also love this recipe! The chicken taco filling is cooked in a Crockpot making the prep time less than 10 minutes. I like to serve the taco filling with my Plantain Tortillas (pictured here) or my gluten-free brown rice flour tortillas. The filling is also wonderful served inside of a baked half of a kabocha or delicata squash, topped with greens and sprouts of course!

Need a little more assistance in the kitchen creating this meal? Then check out the elimination diet video cooking series I created on how to make plantain tortillas and this chicken taco filling, plus a few more easy and delicious elimination diet recipes. You can sign up here to watch the videos.

Use this recipe for Phase 2 of our Elimination Diet program. Not quite sure what an elimination diet is? An elimination diet is a powerful tool to get to the root of most diseases and disorders. Why? Because most disease begins in the gut. The gut has the highest concentration of immune cells, and the most common thing that the immune cells will react to is food.

When you are constantly in pain, moody, and fatigued, your body is inflamed. In other words, your immune cells are being irritated by something in your environment. What is the most likely suspect that is irritating you? Surprisingly, it’s your food.

Odds are that foods you are eating every day are leaving you sick and tired. How do you find out which ones? The Elimination Diet. This foundational tool of Functional Medicine has been used for centuries to discover which foods are making you ill and which ones can make you feel incredible.

The Elimination Diet is a simple process of removing all potentially problematic foods from your diet until your symptoms subside—usually a few weeks. Then you slowly reintroduce foods back into your diet, one by one, to see which ones bring your symptoms back. By finding the foods that are behind your suffering, you can completely turn your health around and elevate your quality of life. 

If you are curious about trying an elimination diet and not sure where to begin then check out our online Elimination Diet Support Program and Elimination Diet book, both of which provide excellent tools that walk you through each step of the elimination diet.

What if these new tools helped you to become a better you? A lighter, more energetic, happier you! That's what doing an elimination diet is all about.

While on an elimination diet, you'll find that many of the foods you are accustomed to eating every day are off limits. You'll get to experience new flavors and new foods that promote healing at the cellular level. And you can start right now with these nightshade-free chicken tacos.

Slow Cooked Beef Stew

I don't think I've shared a beef recipe yet on this blog. It might be because we rarely eat it. To eat meat or to not eat meat is an interesting subject and heated debate among many. Beef is a concentrated source of protein, minerals, fats, and vitamins. For the deficient person, beef can be extremely beneficial. For someone dealing with diseases of excess, beef may lead to more health issues. Eating beef raised on corn, which is most likely GMO-corn, leads to the need for medications for the cattle, different types of fat deposited in the meat, and a reliance on a type of agriculture that is not sustainable for our planet. Plus, most feedlot cattle these days are pumped full of hormones to grow and plump up quicker, making the business of raising cattle more profitable. If this isn't enough, it has now been found that a quarter of all ground beef is now tainted with drug-resistent bacteria, such as staph aureus.

When cooking with beef, look for a source of locally raised organic grass-fed beef. Grass-fed beef is lower in saturated fat and higher in Omega-3 fatty acids, CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), and vitamin E. In fact raising cows on grass is what nature intended. It has only been in the last 70 years that farmers began feeding grain (corn) to cattle. Eating beef with green leafy vegetables, especially cultured vegetables, helps digest the meat, making the meal even more beneficial.

I feel best revolving my diet around plants and eating beef on occasion, only when I feel I really need it. The end of pregnancy creates an extra demand on a woman's body. I found that eating red meat about twice a week in the second and third trimester of my pregnancies was very beneficial. Now breastfeeding a busy, scooting, almost-crawling five-month-old, I feel good having beef in my diet a few times a month. Of course you'll need to decide how often, or if at all, eating beef is right for you.

Adzuki Bean and Sea Vegetable Soup

Seaweed? Yep, that's right, those beautiful vegetables that grow in the ocean. They're really quite tasty! I realized recently that I had not yet highlighted this wonderful, mineral-rich plant. Did you know that sea vegetables offer a concentrated source of trace minerals, particularly iodine? Iodine is needed to make thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone is incredibly important for normal function of the human body. So important that every single cell has a receptor for this amazing "master switch" of metabolism. Want to have perfectly regulated body weight and body temperature? Then shoot for optimal thyroid hormone function. How do you do that? Eat a gluten-free diet that keeps your autoimmune thyroid antibodies down, and add in some seaweed on a regular basis.

Seaweed is one of nature's richest sources of iodine. Iodine is THE key ingredient in thyroid hormones. We have all heard of T4, tetraiodothyronine, the pre-hormone, and T3, triiodothyronine, the active form of thyroid hormone, but what does that mean? It means four iodines attached to a tyrosine amino acid or three iodines attached to a tyrosine amino acid. One of these iodines is removed with the help of selenium as a cofactor when turning the inactive T4 into the active T3 thyroid hormone. So in essence, if you do not have adequate iodine and selenium, your body may not be able to produce enough thyroid hormone. Are you eating a diet high in phytates, oxalates, and raw cruciferous vegetables? You may have an increased need for iodine, as these foods tend to bind to iodine.

Seaweed can be found at your local health food store. Look for kombu (kelp), wakame, hijiki, arame, or dulse. I keep kelp granules in a small container on our table to sprinkle on food. I like to add wakame to soups like this one.

Mung Beans and Rice with Indian Spices and Caramelized Onions

I have had a number of requests for slow cooker recipes. Thank you! You have inspired me to use my slow cooker more often in the last few weeks! It is so nice to simply add all of the ingredients to the pot, walk away, and come back hours later with a warm, hearty meal in front of you. I have a few new slow cooker recipes to share with you in the coming weeks (both meat and vegetarian). The following nightshade-free recipe is designed for the Elimination Diet and is perfect for Phase 2 and Phase 3.

Aside from being one of the quickest legumes to prepare and the easiest of all beans to digest, mung beans have numerous positive health benefits. They are a good source of essential fatty acids, antioxidants, minerals, and protein. They show good antioxidant activity in the scientific literature. Mung beans don't have a very strong flavor so they tend to take on whatever you add to them during cooking. Indian spices pair particularly well with mung beans as do dried herbs. Last week I made a tasty mung bean, leek, and potato soup with dried tarragon, thyme, and dill. You can really play with spices and herbs to create some delicious combinations.