{Book-Based Basket} Special Diet Gift Basket (AIP)

This year I’m working on something a little different. Each month (at least that’s the plan) I’ll be highlighting a gift basket that’s “built” around a book — starting with this autoimmune paleo basket that revolves around Nourish. (You can read my review here, if you missed it.)

Special Diets Can Be a Challenge

Special diets can be a challenge — they typically involve significant (sometimes scary) change, and they often involve “weird” foods, unfamiliar ingredients, and not-so-tried-and-true recipes. That makes this a particular opportunity to minister to friends or family who find themselves in this situation!

Whatever the diet, you can give a cookbook or how-to guide, together with either some compliant snacks or some of the more unconventional ingredients. (For instance, a bottle of coconut aminos could be a good “ingredient” gift for the autoimmune protocol.)

A few examples/ideas:

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Vegetarian

Tools are probably a better option here than foods, many of which would be perishable. You could include something unusual like a spiralizer, or just general-purpose vegetable prep tools like peelers, graters, and/or a Norwex veggie scrub cloth. A small bottle of a gourmet vegetarian sauce could be a fun addition.

The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook

Gluten-Free

There are a number of gluten-free cookbooks “out there.” Some are, in my opinion, virtually useless. Some are excellent. Others are in between. This is one of the good ones. A bag of almond flour would be an obvious choice to accompany this book. Xanthan gum might be a logical addition to some GF baskets. Tinkyada pasta is one of the few decent gluten-free pastas on the market, so a box of that might be a welcome inclusion.

The Nourished Kitchen: Farm-to-Table Recipes for the Traditional Foods Lifestyle Featuring Bone Broths, Fermented Vegetables, Grass-Fed Meats, Wholesome Fats, Raw Dairy, and Kombuchas

Traditional Foods

Starters (yogurt, kefir, kombucha, etc.) would be great additions to a basket like this! If you happen to already be cooking this way, you could include small jars of your own starters from home. If not, starters can be purchased. Mason jars, cheesecloth (for straining, and for keeping bugs out of ferment jars), vegetable pounders (for packing veggies under culturing liquid), etc. are good tools. Things like butter, meat, and eggs probably aren’t good additions to most gift baskets, since they don’t keep well!

Obviously, these are just ideas! Your basket contents will depend on what special diet your recipient is on, as well as on variables like your budget. Let’s take a closer look at the autoimmune paleo basket I created. This one is based not on ingredients for cooking, but on snacks — a tricky area for this diet.

Basket Contents

All of these snacks are AIP-friendly. Everything but the black olives (as I understand it) are officially Paleo Approach-approved. Black olives themselves should be AIP-compliant; the processing/packaging is another question. These are probably not the best olives available, but I wanted to include them to show some easy supermarket-accessible options. I like that this particular packaging comes without all the liquid, because that makes them a lot easier to eat on the go.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the Tiger Nuts. (Don’t let the name confuse you; they aren’t actually nuts.) Bare makes other fruit chips — most notably banana — and other brands make compliant fruit chips, as well. The Epic bar requires special explanation. It uses a little brown sugar in the processing, but it’s a negligible enough amount that this is still considered acceptable for AIP. AIP-compliant meat snacks are hard enough to find that that’s a really good thing. In fact, this is, to my knowledge, the only one of the Epic bars that’s okay, so be sure you’re getting this flavor.

Bundle it up and off you go! If you want to purchase the items I included in my basket, you can find them below. (Although some are obviously probably just as easy to find locally. Some of these bulk buys are probably overkill.) I wanted it to be easy to anyone who wanted to just replicate what I assembled.

Have fun with it!

Nourish: The Paleo Healing Cookbook: Easy Yet Flavorful Recipes that Fight Autoimmune Illnesses