Iron.

I have iron deficiency anemia.  Most of the time it doesn't bother me, but if my hemoglobin drops down to a certain level, I start to feel symptoms including headache, irritability, fatigue and heart palpitations.  It's not fun for me or anyone in my general vicinity.  :-)  I don't tolerate my prescription iron pills well.  My nurse practitioner and I have tried to find iron that I can tolerate, but so far, we've really not been successful.  The pills won't dissolve in my stomach or something.  I won't tell you all the details, but it is not pretty.  So this week, I've been very symptomatic and I have been trying to come up with something to do.  I bought some chewable children's vitamins with iron and I bought a bag of spinach.  The first 3 iron rich foods on the list I read were, canned clams, liver and spinach.  I'm not a fan of any kind of seafood, canned or otherwise, so I can't imagine that I'd be able to stand canned clams.  I don't mind liver if it's breaded and fried, but since I am gluten free, I can't just go to KFC and order some.  Theirs would be breaded with wheat.  So, I'd have to bread and fry that liver myself.   That's kind of icky to me, but I may have to end up doing it.  Anyway, I focused on the spinach.  I tried a green smoothie which was pretty much disgusting.  I was pondering this last night while talking to my youngest son and driving past Chili's.  He said that it was a shame that I couldn't make the spinach taste like Chili's Texas Cheese Fries.  This got me to thinking and voila, I came up with a solution.  I was very pleased to discover that it worked.  I put the spinach in the blender with some milk and then added that into my baked potato soup.  It's yummy.  It looks like broccoli soup instead of potato soup but it tastes pretty much the same. 

The only problem is that I read last night that iron that comes from plant sources like spinach is more difficult to absorb than iron that comes from animal sources, like say, for instance, clams or liver.  So, this may not help my symptoms.  Still, I'm going to try putting ground up spinach in a lot of different recipes before I take the plunge and try frying liver.  Eeek.

Watch out family!