Salicylate free pasta sauce

If somebody else is cooking the main meal, get them to cook the pasta and mince and then leave some mince out for you.

Slice a circle of red cabbage and a couple of slices of leek. Chop all this as finely as possible, including the white core of the cabbage. You can also use celery chopped finely too.

Then in a separate frying pan, using rapeseed oil, fry all the vegetables lightly. Add the mince and some soy sauce, say a quarter bottle. Simmer for a while, especially if you are having to cook the pasta.

When ready to serve add some more soy sauce, maybe another quarter bottle, and allow half a minute to warm it. The cabbage and the soy will give the sauce moisture, compensating for not having tomato.

My favourite meal!

By gum!

Thankfully I was too busy to book an appointment with the dentist last week.

The toothache caused by the garlic meal recurred nightly and I was taking paracetamol to relieve the agony. I was almost convinced there was something wrong with the back tooth - except that every morning when I woke up the pain had gone. Also it was not confined to the one spot - but cropped up in other parts of the jaw. So by the end of the week I concluded that my gums had gone hypersensitive.

My big fear is that I'll get an unbearably painful flare-up on the gums and end up with the dentist - who will assume an infection and pull a tooth or some such. I lost one tooth last year before all this was diagnosed.

But, as I write, the teeth are right as rain. Even though I went away for the weekend I managed to be tough on food without starving. I had a lettuce sandwich for one meal while others tucked into cooked food - but I survived!

I did come back with a swollen forehead. It may have been an insect nip. There's a red patch on the scalp. I took two antihistamines and slept soundly for two nights and it's gone.

Coming up, I promise: The recipe for a perfect salicylate free bolognese sauce.

Garlic and beef

Oddly, garlic appeared on my latest diet sheet as having negligible salicylate. I'm sure it was never there before.

So we used it to season the Sunday lunch - beef. The beef came out quite tough and difficult to chew and bits started getting stuck in my teeth, in the top left jaw.

That caused unpleasant irritation but as I ate it seemed as though some got stuck in the bottom right teeth too. Within minutes I was in excruciating pain and we ran off to get paracetamol. Eventually the pain died down and I survived yesterday with the merest feeling of soreness around the jaw. And a good scrub got rid of the bits from the upper teeth.

This morning the irritation was back in the bottom right jaw - and seemed to come from the wisdom tooth at the back . Now for the last 12 months any tooth problems I've had have been caused by allergic reactions and have gone away. But by this time I was thinking maybe it was time to see the dentist. After all trapped food can also cause abcesses and infection. Then the irritation started spreading to my tongue and throat. A sign of allergic reaction?

I had things to do so left it - although for the first time in months I took my Epipen with me. In time all the pain disappeared. Maybe no need for the dentist and no stuck food. Just a reaction to the garlic, I suppose.

Tonight I agreed to finish off the beef and tried to soften it by cooking it in left over gravy. Stupid thing to do. A piece got stuck in the same place in the upper jaw and this time I can't get it out. And now the pain (or inflammation) has spread to the lower left jaw, not the right side this time. So now I've taken a couple of anti-histamines in the hope of reducing the inflammation and freeing the food.

Last time I try garlic.