Just trying to find out why eating is complicated

Yesterday I had the distinct displeasure of having my back scratched 50-some times. It wasn’t the most fun thing I’ve ever done. The good news is that I only had a histamine reaction to dogs, cats, and dust mites. Now I can say “No!” With full conviction when my kid begs me for a pet.  The bad news is that I am still reacting to something/everything. It’s just not measurable with a scratch test. 
 

Yesterday was also a super itchy day for me. I took my kids out to breakfast and went straight in for my test. The allergist got a front row seat to the “Gina-is-scratching-like-a-tweaker” show. He definitely believes me about how itchy I am all the time.  So, more tests to follow. Lucky me!

Tacos are not complicated

 The other day I made street tacos. 

I just put a beef roast in my Instant Pot for 2 hours. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, get one. I put a frozen roast in mine for 2 hours and it fell off the bone and shredded so easily. 

Once my beef was shredded, I added green salsa. I shredded some cabbage, chopped up cilantro, and crumbled some cotija cheese. The topping is sour cream mixed with lemon juice and sriracha. (I also really like sliced radishes, but forgot to prep those.)

And we ate tacos. 

Theirs

Mine

As a plus, I took the leftover beef, cabbage, and cilantro and plopped them into a container. This morning I took it out of the fridge, added some home made Caesar dressing, and ate it for breakfast. 

A little prep can uncomplicate things.

 I'm going to tell you a secret.  When I made pizza last time I made extra crusts.  I ate the other barbecue chicken for pizza on Friday night.  But, I still had 2 plain crusts in the freezer.  A blog that I have followed for a long time taught me COST; cook once, serve twice. I mean, if you're going to make a mess, make it worth it.

ANYWAY, I topped this one with Rao's pasta sauce,

Vegan cheese and salami

Then some more vegan cheese and precooked bacon.

and baked it at 400* until the "cheese" tried to melt and the rest of the pizza was hot.

Lunch is served. And, it was pretty easy.  Honest.

How to make French fries complicated

I love French fires, and they don't hurt my stomach or joints, and they don't give me headaches.  But, they do have too many carbs.  WAY too many. But, today I was craving fries.  And I still had two turnips in my fridge. So, I did the obvious thing and made turnip fries.

First, I peeled my turnips and cut them into fries. and then I coated them with tapioca starch and salt.

And then  I put them in the rotisserie basket of my air fryer and let them turn for 15 minutes.

The only thing left to do was plate them up.

 

Let me just tell you, they were GROSS.  My favorite thing on the plate was actually the sugar free ketchup.

So, I did what any sane person would do.  I threw them out and had a bowl of cereal with almond milk instead!

I love going out to breakfast, but it's complicated.

 I love to go out to eat.  It's literally the best.  Someone else does all the cooking and cleaning, and I just have a glass of wine and eat yummy food.  (Wine doesn't hate me, by the way.) Or maybe, omelets with a steady stream of  blonde coffee. But, eating out, especially breakfast can be complicated.

I realized that I am to the point in my life that I have one of everything that I need or want. I recently got some little cast iron skillets from The Pampered Chef. They go from stove top to oven, and are the perfect size for making baked eggs.

I started with a dollop of bacon fat into my skillet.  I added diced onion and chopped asparagus and sautéed them a little.

I cracked two eggs into the skillet and let the whites cook on the bottom.  While all this was happening, I turned the oven on to 350*. Then I topped the eggs with vegan cheese and crumbled bacon.

And into the oven it went.  And stayed there until my vegan cheese tried to melt. A note on the vegan cheese; it doesn't taste like much, but it does give the melty texture of cheese when it finally does melt.  I take the eggs out of the oven before the cheese is fully melted, but the heat of the dish continues to melt the cheese. 

OK, so why do I bake the eggs?  Because I only want the whites cooked.  And that's all I get.  Look at those oozy egg yolks pouring over the asparagus and onions!

Now, If only I could get someone to do all the clean up.  I'd leave a big tip for that.

Soup just isn't all that complicated.

 It's probably the least complicated thing on the face of the earth.  

Feeling sick?  Soup.

Cold?  Soup.

Lazy?  Soup.

Running low on ingredients? Soup.

Tonight I had a pound of beef, some turnips, and a butternut squash. So, I did the simple thing and made soup.  I kind of loosely followed this recipe. 

This was the second most satisfying thing I ate today.

I like pizza...but it's complicated

I long for the days when I could pull a frozen pizza out of the oven, cook it, and eat it.

It's a lot more complicated than that anymore.

Today I was craving barbecue chicken pizza.  So I had some barbecue chicken pizza.  It only took me forever to make it.  Almost a week, in fact. 

Last week I found chicken drums on sale for $.99/lb, and then $1.00 off the package.  I bought 3 packages.  Two days ago I knew I had to do something with them, or I would be throwing that great deal away, thus nullifying the great deal. I put all of the drums into my giant Instant Pot and cooked them up.  When they were done, I drained them and put them into my fridge to wait for inspiration to whack me upside the head. Yesterday I picked all the meat off the bones and separated out all the cartilage and skin.  I put the chicken bits into quart sized bags and froze all but one of the bags.

Today I made pizza. 

When I say I made pizza, I don't mean that I tossed a frozen pizza in the oven and ate it when it was hot.

First I made the crust.

Last week I found a package of Bob's Red Mill Paleo Flour at the grocery store.  I thought I would give it a try.  It was great.  And, it was gone pretty quickly.  I have no idea what I paid for it. Going to the grocery store is a social outing for me, so I was just too busy talking to everybody to pay attention to what it cost.  I'm sure it was expensive.  I figured I could replicate the flour on a larger scale and for less than whatever I paid, so I went in search for a recipe.  This is what I found. I measured out my almond flour and found I could make the recipe 11 times.  Yeah.  I made the recipe x11. I saved the package with the recipes and taped it to my flour bin.

This is what I used to make the pizza crusts.

Once I had the crusts made I slathered them with some good-for-me barbecue sauce that I found at my local grocery store.

I topped my pizzas with onions I caramelized in bacon grease, chicken, and bacon I found pre-cooked in the fridge, then dolloped more bbq sauce over the pizzas.  At this point, I put one of the pizzas into the chest freezer on the pizza stone.  A couple of hours later I transferred it to a ziplock baggie and left it in the freezer for later.

I topped the second pizza with vegan cheese. A word about vegan cheese... Or paleo flour... or anything else that you are going to substitute, really.  It's not the real thing.  Don't expect it to taste like the real thing because you will be sorely disappointed, and probably throw your food out.  And this was too much work for that nonsense.  Embrace the fact that it will taste good- but different.

Finally, I baked this bad boy and ate the whole thing!

I told you it was complicated.

It's complicated

 Hello, and welcome to my complicated journey with food.  It's probably not complicated the way yours is, it's just complicated.

I am not an expert at anything.  I'm not a nutritionist, or a doctor, or even a professional foodie.  I'm just a girl. Trying to eat.  And not be sorry later.  To that point, everything I say on this blog is my own opinion  based on my own experiences, and never to be construed as advice on how you should eat.  

My complicated journey started when I was small.  Real small.  My mom was super careful about what she fed me.  Sugars, such as fructose (corn syrup), preservatives in packaged foods, and food dyes sent me into manic episodes.  My mom tells me that I started talking half an hour before I woke up, and stopped talking a half an hour after I went to sleep.  I thought maybe my middle name was Maintain, since my mom was always hollering. "Gina! Maintain!"  These days, I'm sure that I would be on a high dose of ADHD meds.  I was hyperactive, but not attention deficient.  As I grew, I learned how to actually maintain myself and my actions so that I wasn't constantly on someone's nerves.

When I was about 16, I spent the summer as a camp counselor.  One day I was out in a field playing a tag game with my cabin.  I was running and stumbled.  In order to stay on my feet, I put my head down and ran in the direction I was falling.  Unfortunately, with my head down, I ran right into the stomach of one of my campers.  And we both ended up on the ground anyway.  When I hit her, I heard and felt everything between my ears and my shoulders crunch.  Within a couple of minutes I had a migraine, and my co-counselor and my campers were tucking me into bed and turning out all the lights, whispering and tiptoeing through the cabin.  

When I didn't feel better the next morning, I arranged to get to the chiropractor.  This involved a ride from my sister who was on staff at the camp, and a ferry ride, and pretty much took all day.  By the time we got back to the camp, I felt like a million bucks!  I mean, it was a 180 degree change from the morning.  We got back just as the campers were going to dinner, so I joined all of my campers in the dining hall. 

I clearly remember that dinner was spaghetti, salad and garlic bread. I also clearly remember how glad everyone was to see that I was ok.  And... Then I remember breaking out in hives abut 20 minutes after dinner.  And I remember wanting to crawl out of my skin. I did not, however connect the dinner and the hives.  I was young.  And I ate spaghetti all the time.

My symptoms continued throughout the summer, and it wasn't until the fall that I began to notice the pattern of eat/hives.  Also, it was at this point that I began having migraines on a regular basis.  Crippling migraines.  Dark, silence, barf, feel better migraines.  I was missing school one or two days a month just from migraines. My mom and I began to look at all the ingredients of everything I was putting in my mouth, and noting when I was breaking out in hives.  We narrowed the culprit down to wheat. So, we cut the wheat out.  This was 1991.  Before everyone was gluten free.  Before every store shelf was loaded with wheat free options.  I was the weirdo with sandwiches on rice cakes. And I wasn't even trying to lose weight like all the other rice cake weirdos.

And the migraines persisted.

For years.

I got married in 1997 and my babies began to make their appearances. Jesse was born in 1997.  Caleb was born in 1999, Elizabeth graced us in 2001, followed closely by Abigail in 2002. Jonah closed up the clan in 2004.  If you're counting, I was pregnant or nursing a baby for nearly a decade. At some point in all of that, I stopped getting hives, and I started eating wheat. But I was never without headaches. By the way, we also adopted a small human that we named Levi in 2012.  He is 10 now.

And my kids were never without belly aches.  Caleb has been diagnosed with leaky gut syndrome.  That means that he doesn't fully digest his food before it passes through the intestinal walls.  His body sees these food particles as invaders and he has histamine reactions to just about everything he eats.  He's a grown man now, and finally listening to my advice on how he should be eating, but that's a different story for a different blog.  Abigail has been diagnosed with the inability to digest animal products.  The only exception to this is eggs and fats.  She is 98% vegan out of medical necessity. 

Sometime in the 20teens, I realized that I just didn't feel good most of the time.  You know, even without being tied to a human parasite.  My joints hurt, my skin crawled, and I was FAT! So, once again I began eliminating things from my diet.  At first, being gluten free again was enough.  I was even headache free for the first time in a couple of decades.  That worked for me for a few years. Sorta.

And then I developed asthma.  It wasn't so bad for the first few years. I had an inhaler tucked away in my first aid kit for emergencies.  I used it about once a year and just concentrated on slowing my breathing and calming myself down about 90% of the times that I had an attack.  

In the midst of this, I have gone grain free and have done a couple of diets where you order the shiny packets of "food" and eat one real meal a day.  They work.  I lose weight...while I'm on the diet.  And I gain weight like it's my job when I'm not on the diet. Being grain free really helps with the joint pain and the itching I have been experiencing, and it really cuts down on my gas and bloating.

In the last two years my asthma has gotten bad enough that I am under strict orders from my doctor to have an inhaler on me at all times.  It is pretty scary to my family to watch an attack from the outside.  It's less scary for me because I can feel that I still have the situation under control, and I can feel when the symptoms start to subside.  Fall of 2020, though, was pretty horrendous for my symptoms.  I was using my inhaler almost daily, and sometimes more than once a day.  December 2020 found me in 2 different ER's because I was not able to control my symptoms.  ER visits are followed up by another visit to my regular doctor. 

I felt like I was on a carousel, and I couldn't get off.  I wanted off so badly, so I made the decision to go see a naturopathic doctor instead of an allopathic doctor. The difference is that one treats the problem as an issue in a closed system, where one portion of the body could be affecting any other portion of the body, and the other treats symptoms as separate issues. While I am still waiting for a full allergy panel (pandemics, you know) to be done, I have stopped using dairy at my naturopath's suggestion, in addition to all of my other food modifications.  With just that little change, I am down to using my inhaler once or twice a week.  So I know that even though dairy is not "it", it has definitely been a contributing factor.  No more shiny packets of  "food" for me, since they are loaded with whey protein.

I really like food. But it seems to hate me.  I am on a journey here.  It's my journey.  While I definitely have not arrived, I wanted to document my trip.

Since I definitely do not have Celiac Disease, you are going to see pictures like this:

That's my slice next to the kids' pizza. Don't send me emails.  I know.

Have fun reading about my crazy journey. Because I like food, but it's complicated.