Category Archives: Food

The Unified Theory of Salads

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Food, Salad

≈ 3 Comments

I’m somewhat obsessed with salads at the moment. Some day recently I came home to a close-to-empty refrigerator, or empty by my standards anyway. I think it was after I got home from PA, so I’d been away for a good chunk of the previous two weeks. I had plenty of things that normal people, aka my son, could have eaten — pasta and rice, eggs, even some chips and cookies. But for my needs, it was pretty barren, because there wasn’t much in the way of vegetables or fruit. Some mixed greens still looked edible, though, and I had part of a leftover red onion. I wound up eating greens topped with chopped dates, goat cheese, smoked trout, red onion, and balsamic vinegar. It was crazy delicious.

My previous favorite salad had been arugula, smoked trout, avocado, and strawberries with balsamic. The date salad came close to knocking it out of its place. I’ve also been very big on salads with cucumbers, radishes, and kalamata olives this summer. Also salad with anything as long it also includes a honey salmon from CostCo which is yum, yum, yum. And when I was in PA, I was topping a lot of my salads with blueberries because my brother grows lots of them.

So, yeah, I think I’ve become a salad aficionado over my almost-year with AIP. And I’ve learned a lot, so I’m developing a set of salad rules. A theory of salad, in fact.

First rule, the perfect meal salad — the one that you’re going to eat to sustain you for hours, not a side salad or just a little extra color on a plate — has to include a reasonable amount of protein. Back when I ate grains and legumes, the difference between a meal salad and a side salad was usually whether it contained beans, chickpeas, pasta, quinoa, or some other similar ingredient. But when I’m making mixed green salads my main course, they need to include protein.

My favorites are the fish: smoked trout from Trader Joe’s, flaky smoked salmon from CostCo, leftover sauteed trout or salmon, even canned tuna or salmon. I’ve tried anchovies and sardines, too, but… let’s just say, they aren’t regulars on the meal plan. Leftover chicken from a roast chicken, slices of leftover grilled pork chops, roast beef, all also good options.

Second rule, the ideal salad needs a mix of textures. It wants something creamy. I used to get that from dressing, but now I can’t, so my perfect regular choice for that texture is avocado. Goat cheese is a good runner-up. Salad also wants something with crunch. Radishes are great for crunch. Celery, carrots, nuts (which I can’t use)… all also good for the crunch. Cucumber isn’t either creamy or crunchy, but it’s definitely a texture food. So are artichoke hearts. I’d call them slimy, really, but they add a different texture to the salad.

Third rule, the mix of tastes. A salad where all the ingredients are from the same flavor family is a very boring salad. It’s one of the reasons why I seldom eat a salad with greens, celery & carrots. It’s not like those three things really taste alike, but they fit together. All the bites have a sameness to them. That’s comforting in soup but deadly in salad, in my opinion. And some foods, like avocado, obviously have a flavor, but it’s more bland, less distinctive. I’m happy to eat to avocado for lunch, but generally with added salt or lime juice. I don’t know that I’d call it a flavor as much as a delightful base for different dressings.

So for me, the best mix of flavor options seems to be sweet plus tangy plus … well, I think I want to describe the final flavor as having kick. It can be salty like smoked trout or have the zing of a radish or red onion, maybe even the bitterness of arugula or roasted brussels sprouts, but it’s the surprise flavor, the one that wakes you up when you taste it.

Some options, then. Sweet: dates, pears, mango, strawberries, blueberries, apple, raisins, dried cranberries? Tangy: goat cheese, kalamata olives, pickled anything? Kick (spicy, salty, bitter, umami): radishes, red onion, smoked fish?

And, at last, my theory of salads. The perfect meal salad (based on greens) should include one protein, at least two textures, and at least three distinct flavors. But not necessarily six ingredients, since some foods, like goat cheese, can be both a flavor and a texture. And more has potential too, of course. Our Key West salad had double sweet — both mango and strawberries — which just made it doubly delicious.

Hmm, but maybe the sweetness of the mango made the strawberries seem like the tangy flavor? Because flavors do kind of change in relation to one another. Heavens, I’m finding loopholes in my new theory already. But that’s okay — the only purpose of my theory is to use the base concept to find some new and interesting mixes. Trying to eat ten cups of greens a day means eating an awful lot of salads. That’s fine when the salad is yum, delicious, different, but much less cool when it’s the fourth plate of greens with cucumber, radish, & kalamata olives in two days.

So anyway my quest is to find other foods that fit the characteristics of things I want in my salad (creamy, crunchy, sweet, tangy, kick) but that it hasn’t yet occurred to me to try in salad. I’m pretty much at the stage where I’ve tried most anything in my fridge on greens (sauerkraut, yes, capers, yes, finely-sliced lemon, yes… although note that none of those ingredients are included in any of my favorite salads, ha!) but the unexpected deliciousness of salad with dates has inspired me to look farther afield.

Alas, all the things immediately occurring to me aren’t AIP-friendly. I can’t eat nuts, seeds, legumes, eggs (or, technically, goat cheese, but it’s so good that I’ve been pretending I don’t notice that I’m more congested than I used to be). Still, I’m going to wander my grocery store with my goal in mind and see what else I can discover!

36 Hours in Key West

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by in Florida, Food, Personal

≈ 6 Comments

I had a perfect vacation in June. Thirty-six hours where everything fell into place, parking spots opened up like magic, meals were delicious, and the stars aligned.

Okay, the stars part might be hyperbole. But the weather was ideal and the tourist gods were definitely on our side.

So it started when my friend S (mentioned previously in blogs of our Belize trip) flew out from CA. We spent a couple days playing tourist in Orlando. We went out for Korean food, wandered around downtown Winter Park, rode the Orlando Eye (a giant Ferris wheel which would have been a lot more interesting if Orlando during the daytime wasn’t just a sea of parking lots), Sea Life (an aquarium in the same complex), the Skeleton Museum (super-cool, with many, many bones) and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. It was a veritable binge of touristing and really quite fun. And it set the tone for our trip within her trip. We were going to tourist and tourist hard.

We knew from the start that our little trip to Key West was going to be super quick — only two nights there, with a drive of about eight hours each way. Because of my food issues, I wanted a place to stay with a kitchen so we were booked for our two nights at Suite Dreams. We got there and it was perfect — small, cozy, tucked away, lush with flowers. But we dumped our stuff and started exploring immediately, discussing (ha, finally!) what we wanted to do on our island vacation.

All the things? Yep. Or at least all the things that could be packed into 36 hours. So we went straight to the Southernmost point of the continental US. Honestly, on the map, it really did not seem to be the farthest south spot and it turns out it’s not! But close enough. Then we wandered by Hemingway’s house before walking around Duval Street talking about dinner. In my preconceived notions, slight as they were, I had pictured Duval Street as being something like Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Maybe it is sometimes, but not, apparently, at 7PM on a Tuesday in June. It was very mellow and peaceful. Because of my food problems, I’d already spent a while looking at restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor and found one that sounded great, except we needed reservations which we didn’t have. But hey, Tuesday in June, worth a try, right? We tried, got three seats at the bar, and ate incredible tapas at Santiagos.

I took pictures of the menu to remind myself later of the best food, but the easy winner was dates stuffed with goat cheese, wrapped in prosciutto, and grilled. We got it on our first round and liked it so much we had it a second time as a dessert. On our way home on Thursday, we stopped and picked up some goat cheese, and at 9PM, before we’d been home twenty minutes, I was stuffing dates. I’ve made them three times so far and still haven’t mastered them, but I intend to. (And yes, I’m allergic to cheese, but I’m willing to pay the price for these–they’re sweet, tangy, salty perfection.)

Back to Key West — stuffed and replete with delicious food, we headed back to Suite Dreams and Suzanne and I got serious about planning out our one complete day in Key West. One day is not a lot of time. All the things is an awful lot of things. Plus transportation between things, plus appropriate meal breaks… and possibly we shouldn’t have left our planning to the day before? But by the time we turned the lights off, we had a detailed schedule planned, including meals.

Our morning started with a kayaking Eco Tour with Lazy Dog Adventures. Perfect weather for kayaking and a lovely place for it. We got to see a surprising number of sea creatures, from sea cucumbers to jellyfish, plus birds galore. The kayaking was my pick — the thing I most wanted to do — and I loved it. If that had been all we did, it still would have been an amazing trip. But we weren’t even close to done!

Next we headed to Half Shell Raw Bar. R’s thing was oysters so I asked the tour guide on our kayak trip which of the two places we’d found she’d recommend. Half Shell sold local oysters, so we went there. The menu didn’t have a lot to offer a gluten-free eater, but we got 2 dozen oysters on the half shell, shared between us, and then I ate a side of veggies and a side of coleslaw while R and S ate po’boys that looked delicious. The restaurant was right on the water, with a picnic tables & fish nets ambiance, so also a fun environment.

After lunch, we went grocery-shopping. Weird, right? But we’d decided to have dinner in, both because no restaurant was going to top our Santiago’s experience and because our evening plans meant we’d be looking for dinner around 9. At the recommendation of our morning tour guide, we stopped at the Eaton Street Seafood Market. Great people there, plus a gluten-free single serving cheesecake! We wound up buying porgy (a fish I’d never heard of, much less eaten), a bottle of sauvignon blanc, the cheesecake for me and the cutest little tray of cupcakes for the gluten-eaters.

We needed to get our fish back to the hotel fridge, which then gave us a short window of time before heading out for our evening adventure. R thought about trying to find the beach, but we didn’t really have enough time, so he hung out in the room and S and I relaxed in the small hotel pool.

Next up, we strolled across the island to Sebago Water Sports for a sunset sail and snorkel trip. I still couldn’t tell you whether the kayaking or the sailing was the highlight of my trip. Partly it was because it was such perfect weather. I love sailing, but you know, sometimes the sun beats down and you get a headache. Sometimes it’s windy and you spend the whole time eating your hair and wishing you’d remembered your sunglasses. Sometimes it’s just that hint of chilly where you’re not cold enough to complain but you’re not comfortable either. And sometimes, you’re out on the ocean, surrounded by blue and beauty and the expanse of sea and sky, and you remember that the world holds magic. This trip was the latter. At least for me. Poor S gets seasick with incredible discretion — she doesn’t even turn green, just leans over the side, pukes, turns back around and resumes the conversation. And the snorkeling and sunset were seriously so good that it could have been an ad for the experience — big fish, colorful fish, warm water, gorgeous sky, green flash. It was magic, really.

After the sun set and we returned to shore, we wandered back to the hotel. I cooked the fish — sauteed in butter rescued from our lunchtime bread plates and sprinkled with take-out salt & pepper that our lunch waitress had kindly found for me — while Suzanne made the salad. I think I’ll find the picture, because it was ridiculously gorgeous and beyond delicious.

salad

The salad includes mixed greens, mango, strawberries, radishes, and avocado.

The next day, we wandered around a little bit more, then hopped in the car and drove home, stopping at the Key Deer Nature Preserve and taking a short hike (although the only deer we saw was by the side of the road, not in the preserve), checking out one of the sandal outlets that were everywhere, and eating lunch in Key Largo, the highlight of which was grilled shrimp wrapped in basil and prosciutto. We got home around 9, so really it was a 60-hour vacation if you include the drive. But the 36 hours actually in Key West were wonderful. Really just the kind of magic that you always want a vacation to be and that it never, ever, ever is.

Once home, stuff happened, life got a wee bit exciting, and two days later, I hopped on a plane to Pennsylvania, but that’s another story.

Smoked trout, arugula, strawberry, avocado salad

03 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Food

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This salad is basically the perfect salad. I’ve been addicted to it for weeks. Today I experimented with spinach instead of arugula and nope, it just didn’t work as well.

So, to a base of arugula, add four sliced strawberries, chunks of half an avocado, approximately 2/3 of a Trader Joe’s smoked trout, and drizzle with balsamic vinegar. So good. The strawberries taste best with some arugula — bitter and tangy in the same mouthful. And the trout and avocado also taste best together — salty and creamy, plus the different textures.

I appear to have never taken a picture of it, which is okay, since my photos are pretty terrible, and I find it tough to believe that I will ever forget this recipe… but here it is, saved for posterity anyway.

Pan Sauce and Chicken Thoughts

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Chicken, Food, Randomness

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Pan Sauce Thoughts image

I make roast chicken fairly often these days, because it’s a solid protein that I can use in a bunch of different ways. Leftovers are basically the only way I can imagine surviving the AIP regimen — otherwise, I’d be cooking serious food at every single meal and sometimes one just wants a bowl of granola level effort when it comes to breakfast or lunch. Or dinner, for that matter, although I suppose we’d call it take-out at dinner!

So chicken — can be eaten plain, hot or cold, put on a salad, mixed with various ingredients to be sort of a chicken salad (no mayo, so it never feels like real chicken salad to me), used in soup, mixed with cooked veggies as stir-fry, loads of options. And yet… chicken is kind of boring, especially when you’re not breading it, adding barbecue sauce, or frying it. Even my stir fries seem bland since I can’t use soy sauce. (Fish sauce — while similar and a useful discovery — adds too much saltiness to be equivalent.)

Anyway, last time I made roast chicken, I decided to try chicken gravy. It was … interesting. I understand why people don’t make chicken gravy very often. It’s fattier than turkey gravy or beef gravy. I suppose southerners are actually notorious for chicken gravy on biscuits, but I’m not a real southerner, so I’ve never even tried that.

This time, I decided to make sort of a combo — part pan sauce, part gravy. A pan sauce would usually be made with chicken broth, not the chicken drippings from the roast chicken, so with this pan sauce/gravy, I used chicken drippings, added white wine vinegar and capers, cooked it down a ton and then added arrowroot powder to thicken it up.

It requires more experimentation. But the general concept — pan sauce over roast chicken slices, is excellent. Next time the right approach might be to try a couple tablespoons of the drippings for the flavor, water, and balsamic, cooked down a ton.

Meanwhile the roast chicken strategy that I tried last night was the chicken rubbed with olive oil, sprinkled with garlic salt, in a 400 degree oven, cook for 30 minutes, then turn, then cook for another 45 minutes. The turning wasn’t worth the effort — the bottom skin still wound up soggy. Someday I’m going to figure out how to make a perfect roast chicken without a lot of effort (my favorite answer used to be pick up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store, but that no longer works for me, alas) but my roast chicken also still requires experimentation.

Why post experiments? Because the last five times I’ve made roast chicken I’ve tried something different and now I can’t remember anymore what I’ve tried or not. ARGH! So writing down the experiments is how I’m going to find the answers. It’s the scientific method of cooking.

Soup

23 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Food, Randomness, Soup, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

I have done many good and useful things this week. Few of them involve writing books, unfortunately, but in my (weak) defense, my kitchen is under construction and it’s vastly distracting. It turns out that for me, it’s easier to do my taxes while people are smashing things in another room than it is to write. Live and learn, right? But hey, at least my taxes are basically done. I’m still waiting on forms, but the hard part is over.

What does that have to do with soup? Not much. Except the aforesaid kitchen issues means that at the moment, I have no kitchen sink, no stove, no oven, no dishwasher. And a very restrictive diet that does not permit simply settling in for delicious take-out for the next couple weeks. I thought feeding myself on this diet was already taking too much time — little did I know how much more challenging it might get.

However, I think I’m also just maybe being a little crazy about it? Yesterday, I decided to throw a chicken in the crockpot. I chopped up an onion and a lemon and threw those in, too, and then sprinkled the whole thing with Italian seasonings and garlic salt. Then I ignored it for eight hours or so.

When I finally went back to it, the meat was falling off the bones so I spent a pleasant fifteen minutes pulling all the meat out, ignoring the plaintive eyes of the three dogs clustered at my feet. When I was finished, I looked at all the bits left in the crockpot — bones and skin and onion and bits of meat too small to get — and thought, ugh, how am I going to clean this without a sink or a garbage disposal? Much to the dogs’ sorrow, I did not think it would be safe for them to do the job. But I also realized, hmm, this might make a nice broth.

So instead of tossing the whole mess into a garbage can, I covered it with water, plugged it back in, and left it alone all night. This morning, I spent another pleasant quarter hour carefully filtering the liquid from the rest. When I was done, I had two Mason jars full of chicken/onion/lemon broth.

Well, broth means soup, right? But this was weird broth, plus no kitchen. I do have a barbecue, though. Unfortunately, it looked like it might rain. So of course I did what any sensible person would do — I went rummaging around in the refrigerator/pantry to see what I had that could be turned into soup, without violating the rules of my crazy grain-free diet. No rice, no noodles, no orzo… but I had artichoke hearts. And parsnips. And spinach…

I chopped up some onion, put it in a saucepan on the grill, sauteed it for a while, added some chopped-up parsnips, kept sauteing, added some chopped-up artichoke hearts, kept sauteing, added the broth, threw in some chicken, brought the whole thing to a nice simmering boil, tossed in the spinach, and took it off the fire when the spinach was still bright green but wilted. It needed salt, but otherwise… yum.

Of course, my dish problem has not gone away at all — in fact, I made it even worse. But it still looks like it’s going to rain, so I’m thinking I’ll line up the dishes in the grass for a first rinse. (Kidding. Sort of. The bathtub is probably a lot more efficient.)

But it made me think about soup. I want to say that it’s hard to ruin soup, but I have, in fact, ruined soup more than once. It’s very easy to ruin soup if you add too much of something — too much salt, too much hot sauce, too much of an overpowering flavor. It’s also easy to ruin soup if you start with a bad base. I’ve made bone broth before that for whatever reason turned out disgusting. Disgusting broth makes disgusting soup. (I think it was because I forgot about it and let it boil. Also garlic in broth can be very overpowering.) But if you start with a broth that tastes good and you add ingredients that taste good and whose flavors complement one another, then even if its weird — and let’s face it, parsnip artichoke spinach chicken soup isn’t showing up on any gourmet restaurant menus anytime soon — it works out okay.

And all of that is a really good metaphor for writing. I’ve lost track of how many unfinished projects I have going on. I need to start trusting that my broth is okay and my ingredients are at least interesting, so my soup is going to be fine, and stop second-guessing myself all the time.

I’ve been reading a lot this week, too — telling myself that as a writer, reading is practically part of the job description, while playing WoW is not. (Every time I play a little WoW, a part of my brain does a rebellious, back-of-the-brain, lecture about how WoW is story-telling and I could be learning from it and how it’s actually stretching my creativity, but the rest of me knows that’s BS.) Anyway, if I get ambitious tomorrow, and/or stuck on the current story again, I may write about the things I’ve learned from watching successful writers break the rules, because I have been thinking about writing, even while not doing it. Meanwhile, though, I think I’ll go eat some more soup. And contemplate the dirty dishes.

Making home-made soup, entirely from scratch, with no sink or stove or oven — I think that ought to be a metaphor for something, too. I’m just not sure what. Or maybe it’s not a metaphor, just a symbol.

Not-so-awful Offal

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by in Food

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So the diet continues. I haven’t really started re-introducing foods yet, because I don’t feel well. On the other hand, the few times I’ve goofed, I’ve felt even worse than usual the next day. On Wednesday, I went out to dinner with the wonderful Orlando Independent Authors group and while I ordered off the gluten-free menu, there was something in my food that I probably shouldn’t have eaten. I needed a nap by 10:30 Thursday morning and spent most of the day feeling desperately in need of caffeine. Since it’s actually not a natural state to need caffeine–our bodies ought to be able to function without stimulants and I’ve been off it for over a month–it was a reaction to something.

C’est la vie. The reaction was inspiration to decide that it was time to take this stupid diet to the next level. While I’ve done great on the restriction phase, omitting a purely crazy number of foods from my diet, I haven’t done nearly as well on the nutrient-dense part of the plan. Ideally, I am supposed to eat ten cups of greens a day. Now, even that measurement annoys me. How do you measure ten cups of greens? Are they tightly-packed or loosely-packed? Cooked or raw? Is a cup as much as you can stuff into the cup? I have no idea, but I’ve resigned myself to the principle of eating a lot of greens. That one’s not hard to manage, since I do anyway. Ten cups worth? Eh, probably not. But five, easily, so I can up that.

Next up, at least a tablespoon of fermented food daily. I’ve been managing that two or three times a week, but frankly, it’s gross. I choke it down, occasionally gagging, but reminding myself that it’s medicinal, not food, and no worse than cough medicine. I still haven’t done it every day, because, well, because knowing something is good for me doesn’t make it more bearable and some days I just don’t feel like it, but I am resolved now to start. Every day, a fermented food. For… two weeks? I should probably make it thirty days, but I think I’ll start with two weeks. I suspect that’ll be enough to prove to myself that it’s worth doing, because I have definitely started to wonder whether my road map of good days and bad days might be tracking pretty clearly with the day after I’ve choked down some sauerkraut being a good day. But two weeks ought to be enough to see whether that tracks, as long as I stay good about everything else.

But the last items on the list — last because they’re the only other things I’m not doing, not last because there are no other rules for AIP — the last items are to eat bone broth every day and organ meat four to five times a week. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck some more. I honestly don’t know if I can manage these two. They say to just heat the broth and drink it like coffee or tea as a morning beverage. It revolts me. And organ meat — just no. But I want to feel healthy again. So last night I made my first attempt at organ meat.

Chicken heart pate in a christmas tree mold

Offal pate

Behold. Chicken heart pate . Yes, it’s molded with a Christmas tree on top. That’s because the only container I could find (I’ve been using my containers prolifically what with making soups and stews and freezing portions) was an old Jello mold of my mom’s. I could have made it a heart-shaped pattern or a couple of other options, but the Christmas tree amused me the most. Doesn’t it look disgusting? Grey mystery meat.

If you’d seen it cooking, it would have looked even grosser. Chicken hearts sometimes have blood in them and when you try to trim the fat off, the blood comes out in clumps. It’s revolting. Even the thought of it is forcing my cheeks to pull back in a disgusted expression. Ick.

Taste-wise, though–eh. It’s not so bad. It has pear, onion, garlic and applesauce in it and I’ve eaten it on slices of pear and slices of apple. While I wouldn’t choose to eat it regularly, it won’t kill me to treat it like the fermented food and try to manage a serving every other day while it lasts. I’m counting a serving as two tablespoons, so it’ll last a while. Three-quarters of it is already bagged and in the freezer, giving me three or four weeks worth, I hope.

But the real picture I need is one of the three dogs. For the entire hour I cooked it, they were pains. Every time I turned around, the three of them were lined up behind me, eyes intent, tails flapping on the ground, quivering with hopeful anticipation. If I decide I can’t eat it, they will happily take it off my hands. And the next time I need to get Zelda to take a pill, I know exactly what I will go for.

In a related diet note, I now weigh a number that I fully expected never to see on a scale again and … I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s definitely bringing up lots of past stuff for me, enough so that I wish I could afford to go back into therapy for a while. Not because I’m worried about my current weight, but just because I can see how I’ve got some unresolved emotional issues about the meaning of weight and what it says about how we present in the world. It might be good for me to get some clarity around my subconscious crap.

Thinking it out, I was content being ten pounds overweight. My self-image was/is that I was/am a comfortably plump, middle-aged mom type, safe and non-threatening. Safe and non-threatening. Interesting choices of words. But I’m back into the normal weight range and my collarbones are noticeable again and … it’s less comfortable for me. I feel like I’m starting to look fragile again and I don’t like it. I don’t know why it matters–I’d have to lose 45 pounds to hit my (extremely unhealthy) 23-year-old weight and that is definitely not going to happen. But… hmm. Being that thin was one way of being invisible. Being mildly overweight is another way of being invisible. Yeah, this is why I need therapy. Oh, well, maybe my nutrient-dense offal is also high calorie and I’ll drift back up to my comfortably plump zone.

And now I should go write some book words. Or maybe go for a swim. The season is almost, almost over, but I swam yesterday and it was lovely.

Gluten Reactions

21 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Food, Randomness

≈ 6 Comments

I ate a little gluten yesterday. R and I escaped from the noisy house (the gigantic fans are still running 24 hours a day, trying to dry the place out) and went out to breakfast. My order came with an unexpected English muffin and I took a few bites of it.

I’m not sure why I did it. Was it curiosity? Did I want to see what would happen? I’ve been feeling horrible lately–depressed, exhausted, congested. I’m pretty sure I’ve got another sinus infection and my allergies have been attacking nonstop. Maybe I thought I might as well eat gluten because it couldn’t make me feel worse.

I was wrong.

Wow, was I wrong.

All of the pain in my joints that I’ve attributed to early-onset arthritis (diagnosed seven years ago) is back today. My knees ache. My fingers and toes hurt. And my stomach is upset. *sigh*

I suppose that’s good to know, especially as we head into the vacation that I am still determined to have. Chances were that I would have eaten gluten at some point during the trip, simply because it’s so hard to avoid. Now I’ll be reminded of the cost. But I am definitely feeling sorry for myself today. I wish it had at least been a chocolate cupcake or some really good French toast.

In nicer news, the insurance guy is coming this afternoon, so at least I can get that out of the way. I’ve never dealt with an insurance claim before so I’m not sure what to expect. I’d love to ask him author-type questions because it seems like it could be a really cool job for a character in a story–but maybe I’m basing that idea on the characters in Leverage rather than reality!

Gluten-free

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Food

≈ 7 Comments

A friend of mine who shares many of my health issues recently started this completely insane autoimmune-paleo diet, one of those restricted eating things that eliminates basically everything except meat and green vegetables from her life. (<–exaggeration, but only slight). She sent me info on it, suggesting it might help me, too.

Um, no, thank you. I like food, I like eating, I like cooking. I also like occasional sugar, plenty of pasta, eggs and dairy, caffeine in the mornings, wine in the evenings, and don’t even get me started on soy sauce. The idea of cooking without it? Yeah, no, not going to happen.

But somewhat randomly, for three days in a row, I didn’t eat any gluten. It was a little bit intentional–I paused before having granola or toast for breakfast and chose not to, and when dinner rolled around the third day, I decided to make something that I knew was gluten-free. But it was also happenstance, days when salad and veggies and pure proteins came my way easier than sandwiches and pasta. On the fourth day, C and I were on our way to yoga, and I told her that I thought I might be entering a hypomanic phase again.

That afternoon, I made pasta for lunch, ate the same pasta for dinner because I was in a hurry, and ate the leftover pasta for breakfast the next morning. And then crashed. That day, I got nothing done. After thinking I was getting hypomanic–lots of energy, lots of drive to get stuff done, super-efficiency mode–I was abruptly back in total sluggish depressed mode, finding it hard to get out of bed, not really interested in doing anything, too exhausted to continue the spree of cleaning chores I’d started the previous day.

The next day I decided to give gluten-free a try. Not the whole autoimmune-paleo thing–that looks way too hard! But just gluten-free. To see. Five days in and my energy level was back up. I was updating all my blogs, tracking my sales numbers, reading boards, organizing my closet, making plans, going out to lunch, inviting people over for dinner. Every last bit of laundry was done and put away. Even minor stuff — I changed the light bulb in the garage that burnt out months ago that I kept ignoring despite the inconvenience. It took five minutes to set up the ladder and I couldn’t think why I hadn’t done it ages ago.

And then last night I inadvertently ate some pasta that I thought was gluten-free but wasn’t.

Today, I’m normal again. I don’t feel bad, I feel normal. Not manic, but also not energetic. One job and then I want to take a break for a while. Yoga and afterwards I’m totally ready for a nap. The grocery store is exhausting. That’s normal. My normal. The way my normal has been for as long as I can remember.

And it is both dazzling and sort of terrifying to realize that my normal is a gluten-created normal and that I can have a new normal if I’m willing to eliminate gluten from my life.

That auto-immune diet, though, still looks just too hard.

Grilled tilapia with lime & cilantro marinade

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Seafood

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No picture, but C might have one later.

Sprinkle fillets of tilapia with salt & pepper & Old Bay seasoning. Let sit while preparing a marinade of:

Olive oil
2 garlic cloves, pressed
The zest of half a lime, the juice of a whole lime
Some chopped up cilantro
A tablespoon of drained capers

Pour some of the marinade over the fish and leave it for a while. (A longer while than the ten minutes or so that I gave it would have been good.)

Oil the fish… basket? grate? the thing we bought at Big Lots for $5 last week that holds fish on the grill so you don’t lose them into the flames… and do a better, more thorough job of it than I did.

On a pre-heated grill, cook the fish, three minutes per side.

Serve with the extra marinade and add extra marinade to tilapia.

Say yum.

The smokey flavor from the fire was so good on the fish, and the lime, garlic, cilantro, and capers added much flavor without over-powering the lightness of the fish. It was excellent.

Idea for another time: the same marinade with grapefruit and mint. It sounds weird but I bet it would be delicious on tilapia.

Spicy Grilled Chicken

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Chicken, Spicy

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No photo, bad me, but last night I grilled chicken tenders.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them when I started out. I’ve found that marinating chicken in a dairy-based product (yogurt, sour cream, mayonnaise) keeps it moist when you cook it, but I was sort of in the mood for spicy. Or tangy? I didn’t know, so I decided to go with everything. I made a marinade with the zest and juice of a lime, a couple tablespoons of mayo, and a tablespoon or so of siracha, and marinated the chicken in it all afternoon, before grilling it on a hot grill, a couple minutes per side.

Yum. Both spicy and slightly limey and as low-calorie as a marinade gets. Eaten with grilled asparagus and small potatoes. I burned the potatoes, but they were still delicious.