I love seafood but sadly, I can’t eat a lot of it anymore. The phosphorus and potassium content of most fish and shellfish wipes out my daily allowances for these macronutrients real fast! And the sodium is off the charts for all seafood, but they do live in salt water before we catch and eat them, so I get it.

I’m trying very hard now to adhere to the Chronic Kidney Disease diet limitations. It’s sure not easy! This dish I created tonight does just barely come in under my total daily limits. It is also low-carb (so many of my recipes now are not low-carb), so I thought I’d share this one with my subscribers. It was so good I know you’re going to like this one! It was inspired by a dish I ate years ago in Lafayette, Louisiana at Chef Paul Prudhomme’s sister’s restaurant, known as Prejean’s. Mine was not exactly as I remember hers, but it was very similar in taste and appearance, so I’m pleased nonetheless.

This recipe a lot of cream, but it Atkins Induction limitations, because each serving only contains 1/3 of the 1/2 cup of cream i the entire recipe. Paleo followers will have to sub in coconut milk for the cream; Primal Blueprint folks may want to reduce the cream, but will be able to enjoy this tasty dish once in awhile.

INGREDIENTS:

3 4-oz. filets of flounder or sole (or other mild white-flesh fish)

8 oz. fresh or frozen crawfish tail meat

1/2 c. heavy cream

1/2 c. water

1 tsp. my salt-free Seafood Spice Blend (more if you like it real spicy)

Light dusting of Xanthan gum to thicken to your preference

Chopped green onions

DIRECTIONS: Place fish on non-stick pan. Brush or spray with a bit of oil. Broil for 3-5 minutes (depending thickness. Remove from oven. While they are broiling, place 1 T. butter in a non-stick skillet and melt. Add crawfish, water, cream, spice blend and sauté until crawfish turn opaque and curl. Lightly dust the surface of the mixture with xanthan gum and simmer, stirring constantly, allowing it to thicken. Dust again if necessary. Plate the fish on platter. Spoon 1/3 of the mixture over each filet. Top with chopped green onions and serve at once. Seafood has enough sodium in it you should not have to add any salt to this dish. Enjoy! This is both tasty and quite filling! I could only fit in a salad with a delicious Asian Carrot Salad Dressing (not my creation, but click for the author’s tasty recipe) without going over my daily nutrient limits. This would be also delicious served with a seasoned cauliflower mash, yellow summer squash or your favorite eggplant side dish.

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION: Makes 3 servings, each containing 3 oz. cooked fish and 2.7 oz. of cooked crawfish. Each serving contains 379 cals, 1.87 carbs, 30g fat, 27g protein, 506mg phosphorus, 441mg potassium and 598mg sodium

I got told last month I have Chronic Kidney Disease, Stage 3. For those that understand, my Estimated Glomerular Filtration rate is 50, or a kidney function test of 50%. Now having said that, I have brought it up to 52% watching a very strict Kidney Diet (not pleasant) the last two weeks (and lost 13# as well). Hope both improvements are a trend! But the Stage 3 CKD diagnosis will stay on my record for the foreseeable future since kidney function naturally declines in everyone as they get older. I turn 77 on New Year’s Eve. “And There You Are” as the Brits say so often. That’s the condensed version.

Now for the expanded version……..On a Kidney Diet, I not only have to track the usual suspects: Calories, Carbs (net only), Fat, Protein and Sodium………..but I must also track Phosphorus and Potassium like a hawk! And man, after 1 weeks search effort on-line, I only found ONE food tracker that would give me those 2 minerals. It’s called Happy Forks. You might want to check it out sometime. Sadly, this website only displays the food you type in to search and has no capability to list my item searches in a Daily Totals or anything like that. Really not happy about all this. I created a spreadsheet that I do this on daily, but what a pain in the patookus!! But I’m finding shortcuts that are helpful.

Talk about going back to square one. It’s like the last 16 years of my low-carb life just got erased and I get to start all over again. All my old and new recipes I will have to slowly calculate again including the Phos and Pot for every ingredient in them. I wonder if I will live long enough to do that, quite honestly. But it is what it is and I will have to resign myself to coping with all this.

If that’s not bad enough, I can no longer have many nuts, can’t bake with almond flour, can’t use coconut products, Can’t use most of the low-carb flour substitutes I have been baking with these past 16 years (and I just stocked up on several of them)!!! All those specialized ingredients right out the window (all but wheat protein isolate and whey protein in very small amounts). I’m supposed to use regular wheat flour, Einkorn flour, oat flour, barley flour or rice flour.

Another slap in the face is this diet doesn’t allow me to have more than 3-4 oz. of protein in a serving, but I’m finding in order to keep my Phos and Pot under the daily limits of Phos <800mg and Pot <2000mg, I usually can only have 2-3 oz. maximum meat at my evening meal! And can’t fit in much bacon or sausage (only homemade, salt free, lower fat sausage). 😦

Another gripe for me: I’m a big veggie eater and so many of my fave green veggies like spinach, kale and other greens, broccoli and a bunch of other veggies are at the top of my ‘difficult to fit into my daily limits’ list. Pumpkin and squashes are high in Phos and Pot as well. 😦 Practically ALL foods have those two minerals in them, and some are over 250 mg per serving!!

Seafoods are THE WORST!!!! Even as few as 5 boiled shrimp, or 5 oysters on the half-shell, and almost NO backbone fish, except salmon, which is pretty low in Phos & Pot. They want my sodium under 2000mg per day. Seafood is about the only thing that sends my sodium above 1500-1700mg/day. Beef and Pork are just as bad in the Phos & Pot department!! So I am having to eat mostly Chicken, turkey and the occasional small amounts of shellfish.

I have to really watch the veggie intake as well, eliminating the ones like spinach & tomatoes (horrible Phos & Pot numbers), which heretofore I cooked with a lot. Many of my red-sauced Italian foods and Mexican foods are ‘verboten’ unless I use almost no sauce on my portion.

I invested in a divided casserole dish so I can sort of limit or eliminate problem ingredients on my side, and fix the dish regularly for my husband on the other side of that baking dish. That is helping a lot during preparation.

So I’m still in the bemoaning my plight phase of this, but I’ll get over it. But still trying to figure out just exactly what’s a girl CAN eat and stick to the limits sthey want to see you consuming to avoid further decline. Rarely so the kidneys snap back once the damage is done.

Needless to say, I haven’t been able to post many new recipes of late because logging my food is a full-time job!! Clearly I won’t be posting new baked goods my low-carbers could have, since I have to use more conventional flours now. I am toying with the idea of setting up an additional blog (with just Kidney Diet Recipes), but not sure I can handle that just yet. Will let my followers know if I set a new kidney diet recipe blog. For now I’m taking the easy/lazy way out and just visiting sites that have some ‘allowable’ recipes already designed and calculated.

I have calculated what I am preparing for Thanksgiving Dinner and can have my 3-4 oz. turkey and a cup of dressing, no problem. I I’ve even found an acceptable apple and cherry pie recipe to try on the DaVita website.

Takes me most of the day to search foods, calculate and load the data to my spreadsheet, so all I can say is it’s a darned good thing I’m retired. If I were still working………what a nightmare that would be.

Let me also take this opportunity to wish all my loyal low-carb followers a very Happy Thanksgiving!