Recipe help.. low/no fat just had gallbladder surgery

I'd say to start off with, try to stick with foods that don't have added fat, plus avoiding fatty meats. So lean meats, and then don't add in oils, shortening, butter, and such to your recipes. See if you can tolerate a little bit of nuts or seeds, maybe. If not, you can drop those too.

I can't have oils much for other reasons, so here's things that have helped me:
1. Bake things more - if you can, get a silicon baking sheet. It's flexible, so you put it ON a metal baking sheet, but you can simply peel it off of foods, so they don't need oil added in order to get them OFF of the sheet if you bake it.

You can do things like cut potatoes into wedges, pre-heat an oven, then rub them quickly with water and sprinkle with salt (it'll stick because of the water) and bake them for baked french fries.

Get some corn masa (like corn flour, but better tasting and you get more nutrients. Often found in Mexican grocery stores if not in regular one). Mix it with enough water and salt to make a dough, then pat it out into a corn tortillas and dry-fry it in a pan (this is how it's usually done, without any fat, so it works well). You can get a tortilla press to make them flatter, if you want to dry-fry them and then cut them into wedges and bake them in the oven for baked corn chips.

Bake your own falafel rather than fry them. Bake squash, bake apples, sweet potato fries, all sorts of things.

2. Add fruits. A lot of cultures have fruit sauces with tons of things. Mango salsa, orange and mango sauce for pork or chicken, cranberry sauce for pork, apple or pear sauce for pork or poultry. It adds a lot of flavor with no fat.

3. Avocado - see if you can tolerate the fat in avocado. If you can, it's a good substitute for a lot of creamy things. There are recipes for making avocado based fudgesicles, avocado chocolate pudding, and so on.

4. Cashews - if you can tolerate the fat from cashews, look up recipes using cashew cream (cashews blended up with just enough water to cover, to make your own version of it). There is cashew cream cheesecake, or cream of mushroom soup, or faux cheese, even. It's a good dairy sub, again, if you can tolerate the fat from it.

5. I would highly HIGHLY recommend starting an herb garden. Best thing I ever did when I started having a limited diet. You can grow a lot of herbs for very little money, in the ground or just little pots in your kitchen, and the flavor they add can help SO much. You can also buy fresh herbs, but there's a larger variety of herbs you can grow than that you can usually find in the store.

A super easy sauce with these is simply blended up veggies and fresh herbs - cook it or use it raw, pour over salads or other veggies or meats. Add some fruit for sweetness or color, if needed.



Hope that might help a little. And just hugs - I had a very sudden drop in my diet choice just a few years ago, and I remember how much I desperately wanted just some flavor in my food, you know? Much sympathy!