Cooking For People with Infla... Video Transcript

Webcast Transcript

BETTINA GREGORY: Ricky, you have a vegetable option for us. Have you got a vegetable dish today?

RICKY SAFER: I certainly do. This one is called Ricky's RataThai.

BETTINA GREGORY: Well, we have to ask, how did it get that name?

RICKY SAFER: In our family, we have sort of a strange tradition. We spend a lot of time talking about food and eating, unfortunately, and we like to name recipes that we really like and want to keep making again.

So this is sort of Thai style, but we've made it -- the sauce is a bit bland. It doesn't have that spice, so it hopefully will work with people with IBD. It works great with my son. So that's where the name comes from.

So let me pull out the ingredients we have. Basically, you start out by cutting up vegetables, as many different types as you would like. Today we have sliced cucumbers, carrots, snow peas, cilantro -- which I really love. We can do anything. Radishes. If you have a problem, as we talked about, with raw vegetables, you can try steaming some vegetables a bit, broccoli or anything else you want to try. If you want to make it as a main dish, we very often will cook a breast of chicken and chop that up, too, so then it becomes a main dish instead of just a salad. And the sauce is a fairly typical Thai peanut sauce, but since many people with IBD can't eat nuts, it just starts with creamy peanut butter, so you shouldn't have that problem. And it does have some red pepper in it to give it a little spice. You can make it very spicy if you want or very bland.

These are noodles, any type of a thin noodle that you've boiled, and one suggestion I just learned today was to boil them in vegetable broth, so another way of getting some vegetables. So just boil those, cut up the veggies, and then you're all ready to eat. One of the nice things about this, you can make it in the morning, cut everything up, put everything in the refrigerator, and then as soon as you're ready for dinner you come home from work, just throw it on the table.

So, typically what we do, we also have some bean sprouts. This is my dish. I've taken some of these noodles, put them in, thrown in the bean sprouts, the cilantro, and then I would typically take maybe some carrots, cucumbers -- excuse my fingers -- snow peas, pour the sauce on it, mix it all up. And then if I can eat peanuts I will add some crushed peanuts at the end.

BETTINA GREGORY: Looks good.

RICKY SAFER: This is really popular with our family, and one of the things I like about it, that we like, what we're trying to do with all our recipes is to have recipes we can share with the family, and everybody is eating the same thing, including the person with IBD. So sometimes when I make this, if my son is in a position where he can't eat very many vegetables at all, he will just take the bowl of noodles, the chicken and put the sauce on, and he is very happy, and the rest of us are eating the fiber that we're supposed to be eating.

BETTINA GREGORY: And it's a dish with a lot of different options.

RICKY SAFER: There are so many different options. Any type of vegetables, any type of meat. Really, the constant is just the noodles, the peanut sauce, and you can really mix anything in.

BETTINA GREGORY: That's a look at Nutrition and Inflammatory Bowel Disease. Leslie Bonci and Ricky Safer joined me at a recent event sponsored by Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America. For more information about I-B-D, log onto the Foundation's web site at CCFA.org. I'm Bettina Gregory. Thanks for joining us.

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