Coming up: Kitchenpocalypse versus Screwpocalypse. Chills and hiemal hisses from one side, teff propulsions and volcanoes to the other. Will the (W)right kitchen survive this macronutrient melee?? Our hero rushes to the Southlands to rescue the mighty giant, while our heroine learns many lessons the hard, sticky, and explosive way. Tremors in the earth as seismic storage shifts occur. Will anyone ever find anything again? And what new horrors may be found in the off-site freezer? Pill puzzles perk up and overwhelm the perfect culinary planning. Changes abound. In the face of exploding kitchens and cabbalistic dietary complications will our couple ever manage to eat again?? Will a desperate turn to hemp, the devil weed, wreak havoc in the hearts and glasses everywhere?
Pre-order those mesh dehydrator sheets, make a deal with the savory devlish seitan, and pull on an apron to find the answer to these questions and more...
Deep Freeze in the Hot House And other tales of DINK (Self-)-Destruction
I've long fantasized about having a second freezer unit. Given that mine is packed to the point that minor seismic activity could cause a full scale international-flight-blocking eruption, it might be valuable. I even almost bought one before missing my window of sale opportunity.
A few weeks back, my dad inquired about this oft stated interest. He had also been contemplating purchasing one himself.He needs a second freezer once or twice a year. Usually to prepare for the grand Falconer excursion. Maybe some other time he also stumbles on some spectacular sale during his annual trip to Costco. Maybe he's hosting the WWU honor's party or some swim team potluck grown out of hand. So, he could use one sometimes, but not all the time. Anyways, would be useful to have but would be neglected without my involvement.
Ideally, my second freezer would be within walking distance of the current freezer, but I really do need additional freezer space. So, I said SHUR THING! And we agreed to do the freezer (rock and roll) jam session together. Which climaxed yesterday with me waiting restively around his house for untold aeons to receive said freezer on his behalf. Lowe's gives two hour windows on the day of delivery. They really pushed their time allowance. My dad's house is pretty low stimulation on a weekday morning when you don't have the wifi password and forgot your book. I might have gone slightly stir crazy, but at least the house is capacious enough for extensive and deliberate pacing peregrinations. I probably walked the boards for a cumulative several miles, wincing and cat-stancing every time the sounds of a truck echoed through the streets below.
It's a pretty magnificent freezer! Bigger than I'd expected. I haven't nearly enough frozen food, let alone freezer containers to begin to fill it. It stands, for now, as a new challenge. I shall begin over-preparing food in epic proportions! Bring on the spoilable freezable goodies!
Cold must be in the air. It appears every one's all atwitter about standalone second freezers! Mom-boss' boy-toy (a/k/a David, a/k/a Grampa David a/k/a Dave a/k/a Spike the Bounty Hunter) went fishing in Alaska this last week. Apparently when you fish in Alaska, you catch an absurd amount of - wait for it - fish. And "they" take your fish, clean it, vacuum seal it in freezer safe packaging for you, and then hand deliver it to your plane.
So he has about 50 pounds of salmon and not quite that large or an appetite. Which means there's a bit of a need for a standalone freezer at the house. And after much searching, they appear to have found one on super sale at Fred Meyer's. It's exactly the one I have wanted. And it's on - did I mention? - super sale.
So... my brain is delving into the wealth of options here. Enormous freezer at my disposal, but not within walking distance. Small freezer that's exceptionally convenient to the kitchen, but... small. Clearly, I need a medium one that can go in the living room and keep stuff I want to access without planning ahead! Bags of ice! Tons of nuts! Everything in the pantry will now be frozen to prolong life!! Snowballs in the winter!!
I'm actually pretty sure it wouldn't take much time in the winter to fill up that many freezers. I have been eating a lot of fresh produce recently, but this shifts decidedly towards frozen as the season turns. In the summer it's too hot to want warm food, and besides fresh produce is in season and cheap! Frozen vegetables are incredibly convenient, but you do have to heat them. Once the weather turns, I can go through several pounds of frozen veggies quite rapidly. The extra storage space to cycle through those alone would be appreciated. We'll see how it all shakes out. But regardless, I need to get cooking in bulk and buy some more containers STAT.
In other news, I continue to slightly injure myself. Mostly, I am still just feeling the bruises of last weeks fun-run thorn-dive challenge. My intercostal is stiff to sore (and rather doesn't like being jostled), and various parts of my torso are attempting to compensate in ache-prone ways.
And maybe, just maybe I had a little stumble down the stairs this morning (I am truly heading towards oafish galoot of a lumbering lummox at this point) to land on a folded over big toe and some already bruised hip bone. Apparently I fall consistently in the same crumbled pattern, given my injury profiles.
That wasn't too bad, but my body didn't like today's run very much. I waffled about whether to even go. Andrew and I were virtually at signing point on our "Naw, we can go tomorrow" pact before I was seduced by a beautiful bay window view of drastically improving weather. It was indeed a beautiful day for a run. Painful, but beautiful.
I didn't actually fall again on the trail, though! That's progress.
To complete the oafish lummox loobiness, I also managed to take my perfectly well labeled "Saturday AM" synthroid pill last night in lieu of my iron+calcium+orange-barracuda-that-is-now-white pills. I realized this briefly after swallowing the thought "hmmm, out of pills already and weren't there more in my evening... AH CRAP". Then I took the rest of them, which purportedly diminished the absorption of the synthroid. Which was probably good. Except then I didn't really know if I should take one this morning again. Decided against it and figure it's a wash. I'm glad I didn't feel any weird effects except a tingly scalp (I'm absolutely sure that the reported hairloss in the first few months will look fabulous on me).
The synthroid (and I'm actually taking generic levawhatchamahoozits, but synthroid is way catchier) is awfully fussy. I can't eat first thing, and have to forestall almost any of my regular breakfast foods. Add that together with the Pre-conception Primer that my endo had provided me, and my lifestyle could theoretically get very complicated at some point. Apparently if I combine recommendations from both my synthroid papers and this primer, I would do best to avoid coffee, abstain from booze (ok that's easy), limit consumption of soy products (oh dear god, I'm screwed), be careful when I take dairy/iron/fiber/most of the food I eat, avoid changing litter boxes at all costs (darn it!), and "while light exercise is encouraged, exercise should be limited to no more than 4 hours of moderate exercise (maximum hr 140 bpm) per week"...
So... that could be... challenging. I've decided that walking on my treadmill all days falls into the light exercise category. I really hope that's true. But the 140 bpm thing would limit me to some pretty mellow "exercise." Maybe walking up a hill or something. I usually stay more in the 160's and most runs, I venture well into the 180s for short jags. Of course bpms vary, so who knows what they're envisioning. I'll be inquiring about that.
The soy will also be interesting. I realize I eat a lot of soy products - soy milk in my hot cereal every morning, tvp with lunch, soy nuts for daily snack, tofu every night, and usually other stuff throughout the day. Thank goodness I'm not a gluten intolerant vegan is all I can say. I'm continuing the theme of "mixing up my regular routine meals" to reach whole new frontiers at this point. Should be fascinating to find out how I settle. Yes, I'm enjoying this. I'm sick with planning fever! There is no cure, but maybe an additional pill or two would help... maybe not.
Happy holidaze to my Labor Day observant buddies.
To the rest of you, hell, it's still Saturday!
The Fruits of our Labor Taste Like Desicated Blueberries But they're so shriveled, I could say for sure
Happy LABOR DAY!! If you celebrate it, anyways. I'm not entirely sure who celebrates Labor Day and how. I do know that being a lawyer, I take all the Court Holidays (in theory, we do often go into work, but with the closed sign up on the door so as to get some real flow-level legal juju flowin').
I'm also not sure how the ol' LD is supposed to be celebrated. Other than maybe moving all one's white pants and boat shoes into storage. Maybe doing a last minute Mad Max Derby through the mall to buy school supplies for the family on major sale? Really, I think I worked last year, and intend to spend today continuing my gambols with cookery. With sides of vacant staring and hopefully a walk or two.
Andrew was hoping to celebrate by (you'll never guess), going on a big bike ride and maybe finishing up his laundry. Turns out that he will truly live up to the timbre of the title and be at work laboring for the old LD. His big Screwpocalypse 2013/14 project is just at the teeter-tip of being ready to ship. Naturally things are now going awry. Just enough to require his presence and a liter or two of Andrew brand elbow-grease. Andrew elbow-grease is highly prized, having a high boiling point and a fantastic ratio of Omega 3: Omega 6 for all your supplemental mechanical needs. Or at least, he's the one the welder called yesterday.
Well, at least we had a nice 2/3 Labor Day Weekend, which pans out to about the same thing as a regular weekend. Andrew went roving in search of local teams, possibly finding a few. I made several disastrous experiments on my new birthday dehydrator.
A few lessons learned:
(1) If you own the Presto Dehydro Electric Dehydrator and wish to dry smaller items like berries on it, you should also purchase the "nonstick mesh screens" before attempting to do so. The carnage of all those teeny fruits toppling from several flights of stacked trays into the abyss could chill your blood on a hot summer's day.
(2) Just because the little yellow plums that grow outside your dad's house are perfectly edible and oh so juicy, you may not want to attempt making teeny dried plums out of them. They are mostly juice with a tenacious pit and sloughable skin. Perhaps if you had a better knife, this would not be an issue, but given how teeny they are, the battle and the utter FLOOD of juice pooling up in all available kitchen crevices (and most of your kitchen ensemble) is not worth it. You will be reduced to chopping the firmest ones into an uneven "half" to rescue the side removed from the pit. Digging, squeezing and battling with the other halves to make some impromptu chia jam with the remaining mess. And the half plums will be sticky beyond belief as they drip and plummet through the dehydrator tray slots.
(3) Shreds of mirabelle plums will not be particularly well served by your stacking the second Presto tray upside down, which thus crushes them and causes at least 80% of the first tray to adhere to the "bottom" of the tray above it, which also happens to the actual top and which you'll need to flip somehow at some point, but now you've got drying fruits stuck to both sides as well as your arms and face.
(4) However, a mix of plum skins and a bunch of plum juice will mix pretty well with blueberries and cranberries to make the base of a perfectly satisfying chia jam. Of course the blueberries and cranberries alone would have done that, so probably still not worth the half hour picking them, the hour and change attempting to cut them, and the several washes the kitchen now will require.
(5) Timing matters with the dehydrator a little more than you'd anticipated. Drying times can vary by several hours and over-drying is... interesting. Not that my little charcoal blueberry balls aren't awesome, but they weren't exactly what I'd anticipated.
(6) Miraculously, the hideous mess of dried fruit guts that looked to never come off those Presto trays... comes off with a good spin in the dishwasher. Oh wonderful dishwasher.
Other than dousing our kitchen in sweet nectar, I had a brief flirtation with organization, putting more socks into little categorized storage containers and reviewing my cooler weather wardrobe (autumn wardrobe: in which I switch from all-camisoles-and-yoga-pants-all-the-time into something slightly more varied). It was highly satisfying in that way that throwing things into a garbage bag and saying "I don't need you" can be (oh happy memories of old relationships... where does the time go?)
And best of all - even if Sunday afternoon was more of a Sunday afternoon for Mr. (W)right - we took advantage on it's not-quite-Sunday-dread-before-the-work-week status to join mom-boss and boy-toy at The Expendables 3, which was everything I wanted it to be and seemed like an appropriate end of summer season flick.
Today, I've got some flax-chia-hemp-something-or-other-raw cracker mix gelling. Of course this recipe suggests using a dehydrator if you have the fruit roll sheets which I also don't have yet, so I'll be using their alternative open-oven method. I have to say, the dehydrator has a lot more of a learning curve than some of my other miraculous kitchen devices.
Speaking of which, time to food process some hummus into existence!
Have a lovely Labor Day and/or Regular Monday and/or Last Splurge of Summer Vacation. And regardless of what the day is to you, a fantastic MONKEY MONDAY!!!!
A Tuesday Case of the Mondays Of Kitchen Carnivals and Begrudging Returns to The Office
Oh lordy is it... Tuesday? I have a serious case of visceral anti-work dread down to the marrow of my being. Which is silly, as there's nothing really lurking here. It's just that those long weekends are morale killers in the best of circumstances; they are especially so after a madcap month of rushings and goings and otherwise only half being here and/or being "here" exclusively in triage mode.
But I daren't complain. I got to have my Labor Day off. Unlike Mr. (W)right, who flew in to the rescue at work yesterday to free up some thingamajiggers to help the welder fix something found in X-Ray inspection that can now be re-inspected so something else can be quibbled over so that... ship date for this gigantic thing is looming at the end of the week. It's all very exciting and/or stressful. Especially since the bike-and-chain is supposed to fly out to "commission" the whole machine at the clients' home, and this is edging ever closer to our Honeymoon in Prague. He's not giving that up, but he really wants to be the commissioner (I don't know if he realizes that doesn't mean wearing a neat hat and using the bat signal when trouble looms). Needless to say, he was off like a bullet yesterday morning, while I stayed at home and said "have a nice day at the office dear" in my best housewife timbre.
Maybe it was actually seeing my husband off to work and staying home, but the domesticity flew yesterday.
Even before the man was out the door, I started myself some flax-chia-hemp raw crackers. Because I could. Because I own a dehydrator and this recipe explicitly calls for one, but since I don't have the right sheets, I used the oven with the door propped open. Because... because wow they're actually amazingly tasty. First dalliance in crackers was snap-crackle-cracker-jack.
And then the floodgates burst with a flurry of proteiney volcanoes on par with Bardabunga (though perhaps a higher ash level at this point and not quite as pretty).
Yes, I've given myself a new food challenge (too much Top Chef at too young and impressionable an age). Needless to say, messes and detailed plan logs/schedules/calendars shall be involved.
Taking the endo's recommendation to limit soy intake (i.e. "the entirety of Adella's diet"), I've been getting a little more "creative" in my quest fold in a healthy balance of protein for my rabbitey diet. Soy is a convenient cheat for getting sufficient protein. It's easy. There's not a lot of fat or carbs to throw your macrobiotic profile totally off kilter. It's versatile. And holy crap, I am so glad I'm not actually allergic to the damned stuff. It is in EVERYTHING. Out of curiosity, I started browsing products at the store a few days ago. Everything more or less contains soy in some bizarre extracted fashion or other.
Now, I know I don't need to go nuts avoiding every last trace, but since it is in everything, I figure I don't then need to enhance with little shots of phytoestrogen serum by mainlining the pure soy explosion that is a major component of most of my meals somewhere along the way. At (second) breakfast I have soy milk in my barley. At lunch I have a huge bowl of tvp. In the afternoon, soy nuts. For dinner, invariably tofu.
To get vegetarian protein without leaning on soy definitely pushes one back to either a heavy heaping of dairy and eggs, or some highly calculated combinations of starchy proteins (beans and legume) and fatty proteins (seeds and nuts). Now, I'm definitely ovo-lacto, but until I started trying to gain weight, I was actually pretty sparing in my animal proteins generally. There's a certain tang in much of it that tastes just slightly off or meaty to my palate. Has taken some conscious effort to cultivate that taste for it again over the course of three or four years. It's been a gradually adjustment to more and more milks, yogurts, cheeses, and eggy things.
I'm also supposed to space my dairy ingestion away from my new pill, so that limits things. I do already have a glass or two of milk a day and some yogurt in the evening. I've just started liking cottage cheese again after a post-illness period where the idea of it made my tummy churl and roil.
Actually, I'm a little obsessed with it, so the timing is good. I've discovered cottage cheese as a sauce supplement but also as a sandwich spread, which is stupidly simple but appeases me. I suspect if I added a bit of dijon and some onions, I'd have a sterling substitute for egg salad. Not that I don't also like eggs alright, but we already go through a pack of eggs every two days. I get weirdly conservationist about going through too much more than that.
So, beans and nuts and grains (oh my!).
This leads to my first experiment turned learning lesson. My typical tvp lunch is 1/3 cup tvp, 1 tablespoon chia seeds, 2 teaspoons kelp powder, minced garlic, cayenne, several different spices, maybe a diced apple or yam, and whatever other veggies I feel like adding plus a lot of water. Microwave for 3-5 minutes and tada!
I love this meal. But the tvp is admittedly portable filler. Since this week's little revelation, I've decided just to throw a cup of some small round grain or other into the rice cooker (similar texture), and use the resulting grain over the course of the next four days. Canihua was first on the plate and it does a fabulous stew type of showing.
Yesterday, I tried teff. In the rice cooker. A whole cup plus three cups of water.
The rice cooker has an allergy, I believe.
Or so I can surmise from the full chunks it spewed right out of its blowhole, thoroughly inundating the kitchen with little brown teflets. Some survived, so at least I had enough for a few days. Quite the spectacle, though. I will never get all the teff out of that little bugger.
For equal measure, I also made chickpeas, black beans, and split peas today. Those did not explode, although the chickpeas were intransigently sluggish, and the split peas started to boil over just as I was attempting to mop up the teff from upper edges of the rice cooker.
And then there was Seitan. That's right, the demon gluten wheat-meat. I am so relieved I'm not celiac as well (knock on wood). I used to just keep a container of vital wheat gluten around and scoop a bit into sauces. It mixes really well with egg whites and veggies, actually, for a fluffy quiche type thing. But occasionally I go ahead and make full on wheat meat. Yesterday was my day.
In between all these little proteiney innovations, I reassessed my entire pantry, parceled out bulk grains into gallon freezer bags, and offloaded a heaping cooler full of extras to my dad's off-site freezer. This took some good hours, and I required a good long walk around the lake in between.
Needless to say, I also scoured the kitchen about twenty times yesterday. And reogranized everything. My little kitchen freezer is now virtually a prep freezer. It includes all the ingredients I use almost daily, but which need to be frozen. All the leftovers, the still sealed or extra bulk that I won't need for a few days to several months... shuffled off and on ice in various other cooling compartments. And since many of the things in the pantry were things I would have frozen if I'd had the space, the pantry now fits my ever expanding menagerie of kitchen devices.
I'm guessing this domestic explosion was the end product of several weekends of latent energy while the August anomie interrupted my little schedule. But part of me also is just thrilled at how much I could get done if not for that pesky work thing. I mean all that morning energy needs an outlet, and once I get momentum I just keep going... straight until Andrew gets home from work and I'm spackled in gluten fluff and teff balls (possibly some left over blueberry charcoal balls in my hair). A few more days of this, and I might have started in on gardening or something crazy. And the plants outside quake in terror.
But ah well, it is now Tuesday/Monday and it's time to offload some of that energy into that ever distasteful occupation known as work. Some clients are about to be serviced doggamit! And they'll like it, until they get the bill anyways.
Happy weekday however you slice it. Thirteen days until the hubahuba and I blow this joint!
Princess and the Pea Powder's Hemping and HawingThe Ongoing Nutritional Adventures of Rabbit-Girl and her Trusty Koala Socks
Ok, ok, having been squeezed through the eye of a camel to get myself back into the office doors (took a decent amount of honeyed coaxing and industrial lubricant to push my flailing and screaming form through those post-vacation doors), I'm resigned to this work week thing. For now. I have work to do, so... I'll get to it. But first, more post-soy vegetarian obsessiveness.
Recap: specialist^specialist put me on fancy new medication that is fussy beyond belief about what sort of pills and nutrients with which it will deign to hobnob. Calcium and iron are ok, but only in the afternoon. Fiber is tolerable, though a crashing bore, and only after a few hours. Other pills steal the light and ought to be consigned to other parts of the day. Oh and soy and coffee? Those prima donnas are outta here.
I exaggerate. It's been recommended - both due to the new thyroid pills and future endo-excitements yet to come - that I lay off the ebony euphoria and keep my soy intake leerily low.
So the coffee hasn't been a huge deal. If I can randomly eschew my ten pack a day gum habit based on eco-guilt pangs, then coffee is nothin' honey. Especially since I'm already sensitive to caffeine and therefore drink mostly decaf and heavily diluted caff with more milk than caff. Ok, it's not nothin' exactly. I miss the ritual. And drinking several cups of decaf over the course of the day does deliver a nice low dosage that my body seems to miss. Maybe. Who can tell. My nose is also runny, so maybe I'm just fighting allergies or a minor cold. But I did have a headache that might have been withdrawal related and I have been awfully sleepy by afternoon (when the little synthroid cyclone mellows out a bit).
The soy, though, is a full on Adella-sized challenge. So, obviously I'm obsessing over this largely because (as previously stated) human beings like the illusion of control, and in the absence of anything clear-cut with my current body issues, any means of asserting control is soothing. That out of the way, it is interesting to read about the "soy controversy." Is it good? Is it bad? Would it be ok if we stopped applying SCIENCE to everything that's remotely healthy and extracting the shit out of it then ubiquitously adding it to random things in fractured and fragmented (potentially unhealthy forms)? How much soy do Asians really eat and does it matter if they seem to process various somethingorothers differently than us? Anyways, bottom line of my little dalliance with the internet is I got to take what I want to hear right now and go with it: soy can interfere with thyroid meds as well as other hormone meds, 1-2 servings of unprocessed or fermented soy products is probably good and more may or may not have impacts on thyroid and/or fertility, and super processed soy (like anything) is dodgy.
So reasonable enough, except I've defaulted to a much higher amount of soy products in my diet, and that didn't even count all the semi-convenient bars and whatnot that include soy isolates and oils and other weird extractions. In sum: it would, again, suck to be allergic to soy. It is more ubiquitous than gluten even (speaking of which, making seitan with two cups of vital wheat gluten and a 1/4 cup of chickpea flour is awesome!) and up there with tree nuts.
Fortunately, I'm not. But I'm trying to be aware. And I'm taking the opportunity to experiment. So the whole grains and lentils, and legumes, and nuts (oh my!) and seitan are great. But, other than the nuts, they all take time to prepare and still can leave me with little protein shortages through the day. At least from what I'm used to.
So I'm dallying with alternatives. There's whey protein. My dad gave me a torso-sized jug of the stuff last Christmas and it tastes pretty good. As super processed powders go, it limits the weird ingredients and doesn't have too much random crap in it. It does have soy lecithin, but what on god's green and well-paved earth doesn't? It definitely benefits from a hand blender when mixing with milk, but gets nice and frothy from there. I'm thinking when we're travelling there will be many little packets of this to go with my huge bags of nuts, dried fruits and dried whatever else I can dream up on the dehydrator.
Yesterday, for kicks, I tried hemp protein powder. We are in a pro-hemp town in a pro-hemp state, these days. And I do rather enjoy hemp seeds. More importantly, it came in a single serving packet so I could sample without committing. I think it's mostly just ground up hemp seeds. Certainly what it tasted like. It looked like hemp silt and intransigently resisted any attempt at blending with my water. Not a bad taste, though distinctive. Kind of like drinking a swamp. If I were more of a smoothy person, I think I'd totally dig this, although part of me wonders why I wouldn't just add the seeds themselves.
I have not tried the next frontier of weird vegan protein alternatives. I hear pea protein and rice protein in a half-half blend is the shiznet... from some vigilant vegan body builder on the internet. So it must be true.
In the meantime, I feel myself falling further and further down the DINKo rabbit hole of raw sprouted organic homemade dehydrator energy bars and (cringe from the eternally miserly student self who thinks I can live off of Snickers from the discount shelf just fine and all this time and money is profligate) Co-op memberships. I've just started reaching the point where I can say "you know, the organic version isn't that much more expensive when you think it's just forty cents extra" instead of "but it's twice as much money!"
Speaking of which, I got a yogurt maker for my birthday. I know technically making yogurt in the oven is really easy, but it kind of wasn't for me. First there was the case of the onioney parsley yogurt. Then it just kind of didn't set right... And really, the major appeal is that this yogurt maker comes with perfectly sized 5 ounce glasses. Oh and the yogurt turned out perfectly. Just about time to make another batch, in fact.
So yes, I have a dehydrator, a yogurt maker, a rice maker, a slow cooker, a food processor, an immersion blender, a microwave, a toaster, a coffee/spice grinder, and an extra freezer. Younger me is befuddled, as she lived mostly off of freebie hummus from work and bags of frozen veggies. I also received a multi-purpose mandoline/slicer thing yesterday, and finally bought a bread knife. There are still some major holes in my kitchen-cadre. I don't really have a mixer (I use the immersion blender in a pinch); I don't have much of any oven ware and have been using a casserole dish we got at our wedding plus a tiny oven tray; and I pretty much have one knife other than the bread knife. But I'm getting there.
Have a humdinger of a humdpay all y'all! May your hemp powders be frothy and delicious, and may flights of koalas sing you to your weekend.
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