Pineapple tacos: a great recipe to help with taste changes during chemo
Chef Ryan Riley shows you how to make pineapple tacos: a quick and easy recipe that’s especially good if you’re struggling with taste changes as a side effect of cancer treatment.
Losing your sense of taste and enjoyment of food can be one of the hardest side effects to deal with when you go through cancer treatment.
This inspired Ryan to set up Life Kitchen, who provide free cookery classes and recipes for people living with cancer, to help them rediscover their love of food.
He held this fab cookery demo at our Find Your Sense of Tumour event in 2019, and kindly shared the recipe with us from the Life Kitchen cookbook. Thanks Ryan!
Watch below or keep reading for Ryan’s pineapple tacos recipe.
Ingredients
Makes about 20 tacos
- 100g shelled cooked prawns OR goat’s cheese OR non-dairy alternative
- 1 red or green chilli, finely chopped, plus extra to serve (optional)
- 1 lime or lemon, zest and juice, plus extra wedges for squeezing (optional)
- 1 spring onion, sliced into rough matchsticks
- 1 pineapple, peeled and sliced into wafer-thin circles
- A small handful of coriander leaves
Method
In a bowl, mix the cooked prawns/goat’s cheese with the chilli, the lime/lemon zest and juice and the spring onion.
Fold each pineapple round in half to resemble a taco shell. Fill each shell with an equal amount of the prawn/goat’s cheese mixture, sprinkle over a few coriander leaves and squeeze over some extra lime, if you like. Serve immediately with optional extra chilli on the side.
Taste & flavour fact
Ryan: “Fresh pineapple contains the enzyme bromelain (lost when the fruit is tinned), which breaks down proteins into amino acids and tenderises meat. In Life Kitchen classes, the most significant feature of fresh pineapples is their power, for some people, to eliminate a metallic taste that can occur as a side effect of their treatments.”