I gave up gluten nearly two years ago.  This turns out to be no big deal once you get your head around it, except for the french fries, which I really missed.    

(French fries are a no go because they are mostly cooked in oil that has also cooked breaded things) (but I don't have celiac disease, so sometimes I eat them anyway) 

And trying to figure out what to put stuff on - jam, cheese, peanut butter - now that you don't have crackers any more.  I went big on the rice tortillas for a while, but a lot of the GF flours are pretty starchy and I'm not really into replacing a nutritionally meh food with something even less wholesome and so now I am making things like buckwheat pecan loaf, which is so unbelievably good.  I would show you, but I ate the one I made Wednesday already.

So now I'm a person who looks at food and goes - it is whole grain?  Which is hilarious, given my history with processed foods.   I ate a turkey sandwich for lunch every day for at least 5 years and now a turkey sandwich - commercial rye bread, cold cuts, mayo, a sub-par tomato and iceberg, kettle chips on the side - doesn't even look like food to me.  In a way that doesn't feel wretched. 

Unexpected side effect is that I'm now hyper aware of eating in a way divorced from the normal - or "normal" - lady-type food issues. There's so much I can't eat in the world it's completely changed the questions I ask myself and the decisions I make.  I carry protein bars.  Chipotle is the only place I ever get take out.  I cook so much more.  I buy all the vegetables.  I drink green smoothies.  I miss my blender when I travel.  A real lot.   I could give a crap about not being able to eat pastry anymore, I absolutely do not miss it. There are one or two commercial GF bread-things that don;t entirely suck, but I find I'm eating them less and less.

And it keeps evolving.  Like the rice tortillas, which I consider a transitional step to away from bread, and I would still pack if I were on the road, but am not buying at home anymore because rice is pretty starchy and if I eat the tortilla I probably put cheddar on it and then I'm eating a quesadilla for lunch instead of - turkey salad, baked white sweet potato chips with herbed goat cheese, and some of that buckwheat bread.    Which sounds better to you? 

Or protein shakes, I made them dutifully for a year with greens powder and from the same oddly flavored recipe, before it occurred to me to put actual vegetables in them, or herbs or flavor and now 6 months after that I'm making these incredibly green beverages that taste amazing, that are a thing that you would choose for pleasure.  It's like..I started making changes in a mechanical way, for my health and because I had to and gradually it's animating into something else.  It's expensive, for sure, and that's an astonishing thing too.

If you say to someone - you can't eat chicken, or eggs or gluten or dairy or whatever it is - that seems like being sentenced to misery and you can approach it like that for sure.  When I started the anti-inflammatory diet I went on a trip and there was one night when I looked at the menu for the event and just burst into tears.  There was nothing I could eat and it was so hard, and I felt broken, and like I was a drag on joy.   It's such a basic thing, feeding yourself, and there was nothing I could eat.  And that's still hard because in so many places they take away gluten without adding in creativity - this is what it's like for vegetarians a lot of the time, a plate of sadness and defeat.  

And a lot of commercial gluten free foods are desperately bad, because they are trying to replicate unreplicable things.   They make me sad and I've stopped buying them.

But it's getting a little better.  Last month, my favorite brew pub brought me my bunless burger with the fries barricaded behind a pickle so that if cross contamination was a concern they wouldn't touch my burger, and the waitress double checked before she put the plate down.  A year ago this same place brought me breaded fries after a 10 minute conversation about whether they were or not, piled ON the vegetables.  So change happens for them and for me.  

I might tell you you should try gluten free, especially if I you have any trouble with pain or inflammation.  I mean, I think you should but I know it's obnoxious, so I try not to.  But you should.  There's a whole world out there.

 

They're on my mind right now.  

I spent most of last week visiting my mom in the hospital, as a consequence of which I now have bronchitis.  My doc thinks it's viral, but you will never convince me I got that virus anywhere but wing 5E, picking up kleenex off the floor with my (gloved!) hands

Hospitals are disgusting in a really subtle way - it's not the bio hazard disposal units or occationally encountering a person engaging with bodily fluids in a way we usually keep private.  It's not even blood - all that's just life stuff in a more concentrated form.    I think it's a sort of creeping awareness of the pervasiveness of infection that gives you unconscious heebie jeebies.  Did you know you can get a staph infection at the gym?  But running around with anti microbial wipes is not the answer.

For the first time in my life I used the antibacterial soap and gel.  And I do not hold with that nonsense at home.  In a hospital, yes, that is an optimal place to keep bacteria in check.  But at home, nah.  Get the artisanal goat milk soap, your skin will thank you and it won't make your nose itch.  Or the African black soap, I am way into that right now.  

I mean, we all know that overuse of antibiotics is not doing us any favors (we know this right?).

The world seems to be having this conversation this week.  If you can call the New York Times the world, which obviously, is not true, and also grandiose.      

I'm interested in this idea of cultivating the second genome though - in  basic terms that's what I'm doing by eating live culture yogurt or taking probiotics,  so now I'm wondering if it's possible to do it in a conscious and targeted way.   As one of those recent autoimmune diagnosees Pollan refers to, this is relevent to my interests.  (That's  a NYTimes link, sorry, but it's an interesting (long) article if you haven't used up your free reads this month.  Also the cover pic is adorable, if you like kids and animals and cuteness).

Seed me with your beneficial microbes, baby.   That's true love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been using Facebook a lot recently and realized it's essentially microblogging, but all the comments come from people I know.  Which is fun.

It's Thanksgiving weekend and I am making stock and watching Ewan McGregor motorcycle across Mongolia.

It was a nice Thanksgiving, with the two women who run my LYS and their family letting me hang out.  Many experiments with gluten free Thanksgiving foods - I think it's funny how we blame the turkey for the post meal coma when we've just eaten ALL THE STARCH - my stuffing is coming along, but I haven't found a good GF bread for that yet.  

My dissatisfaction with my stuffing made me go look up my great grandma's recipe, so I think I'll be able to improve.  Though it may take me til next Thankgiving to digest what I've eaten over the past 3 days.

And now I'm making stock.  I stuffed in the turkey breast carcass (I cooked my own for "leftovers") (my first roast Turkey; today I am a woman) and some bonus chicken wings and legs, and all the leftover herbs, garlic and veg from the crisper and cooked it for 9 hours and now I've stipped out the bones and put them in more water to see if I can get a jelly stock from the marrow.  It's mostly curiosity.

Of all the magics that you can perform with time, soup making is the most magical to me.  Put a bunch of kitchen trash in water and take out.....food.  Delicious, delicious food.

Half the stock I made last night is in the freezer and half is in the dutch oven because it's time for Bowl of the Wife of Kit Carson Soup.  Even when I was a little girl it bothered me that it was Wife of Kit Carson.  So I looked it up - her name was Josefa and she married Kit Carson when she was 14 and he was 34, and had a jillion children and this soup - turkey stock, adobo chiles, chickpeas, rice, jack cheese and avocado - is not her original recipe but is characteristic of the American west and is also DELICIOUS.

Here's a link: http://www.food.com/recipe/bowl-of-the-wife-of-kit-carson-turkey-leg-soup-with-chickpeas-483078

Though since I started with a carcass I'm using this mostly as a guideline.  You can make it with chicken too, but for me the whole point is the adobo-spiced turkey stock.

Ewan McGregor is in Alaska now and I'm going back to my knitting.  Happy Thanksgiving.

 

 

I had to take the car to the car dealer today - no biggie, they just have to redo properly something they halfassed - and I took the day off because the car dealer is almost an hour away, near the shore.   They gave me a comp car and I took it up to Red Bank and did something I never do.  

I wandered aimlessly.  

The thing about life in these parts is I always feel that I only go places to buy things.  There's not enough THERE there or something, no central non commercial anything, which is part true and part me.   But today I wandered through the fun kind of antique shop - not the ones where they frown at you, but the ones with a dozen different vendor booths and a high/low mix of semi antique furniture and mid century costume jewelry and lamps and old toys.  

I saw a glass and decanter set I would have gotten for someone as a wedding gift if the grammar had been better (each piece was engraved: "me" "you" "ours" and it should OBVIOUSLY have been "yours" "mine" & "ours"  OR "you" "me" & "us") and a pair of amazing tall iron beds that I would have liked to put in a guest room at a beach house somewhere.  This must be the good bit about being an interior decorator, the thrill of the hunt without the burden of acquisition, plus someone else pays.  

My mother's an indefatigable junk hunter and collector and I haven't voluntarily been in such a place in a long time, from lifetime junktique fatigue.  But it was fun to have no plan and just look and imagine and then discover right around the corner an upgraded pizza place with a decent gluten free crust and no lunch rush to speak of so they were happy to let me read in my booth for an hour.  

Did I mention it was the most glorious of late summer days,  with a perfect blue sky with one artistic fluffy cloud painted on the horizon and the kind of breeze that just keeps brushing the heat off your skin?  I drove around after, until google maps showed me a green patch and I found a park - my second park, in fact.  The first one was right on the river but had no trees to speak of and it was a shady kind of afternoon.  The second park had children playing some kind of sport and a little corner with two maple trees and a pond just far enough away  from the fields that the sound of shouts and whistles melded with the cicadas into a sort of background hum of summer.  Oh, and there was a pond, with ornamental grass for the breeze to rustle.

I sat down to read but it was so perfect and I was so full of pizza that I used my handbag as a pillow and stretched out with my book and pretended to read while I drifted in and out of sleep for an hour with all the noise of the park lapping around my brain.  I can't even tell you how deliciously transgressive it felt to sleep in public or how humane was the pleasure of having my bare feet in dirt and grass.  Even the three ant bites I am sporting now have a charm to them.

 

So this will shock you:  I'm going to talk about yarn.

I have these 3 skeins of cashmere lace-weight singles from Colourmart in tartan green that I bought in like, 2007. I've always been ambivalent about them - a very fine dark green single just never spoke to me for lace and I have SO MUCH of it (2300 yards x 3 cones).  What was I thinking?  I have no idea.  Which is unusual.  Usually I remember the emotional state that went along with the acquisition.  IN DETAIL.  It's part of the yarn romance.  

It looks like this, kinda.  But darker.   It has some weird photogenic issues with color saturation.  Or I do, as a photographer.

I tried to sell it during the stash sale.  I've offered it as a gift.  I took it to a yarn swap.  I listed it on my trade page on Rav.  

After the yarn swap I took a bunch of stuff to donate but I couldn't add this.  It's CASHMERE.  How can I give that away?  I love cashmere.

Earlier this summer I had a thought, sat down and spent two days watching dumb movies and plying it into a three ply.  It's a very fine lace-weight, so I knew I would get a fingering weight maybe.  It was boring, but at least then I might be able to get someone to take it off my hands.  

Result:

Still with the color saturation.  But you know, slightly improved, if still uninspiring.  About 2300 yards of green cashmere sock yarn basically.  It kicked around the house waiting for me to take a picture.  Well, waiting for it to stop raining AND be under 100 degrees so I COULD take a picture.  It's been approximately similar to a sweaty gym sock out there.

This is how much it has rained in the last few weeks.  And also that probably explains the 7 mosquito bites I got in 3 minutes yesterday - excuse me while I go dump that out.

(Oh how delightful, there were mosquito larvae SWIMMING in it.  West Nile on the hoof.  )

Last night I was tidying and I started to put it away finally and on a whim - the faint thought "industrial oil/yarn finishing" drifting out of the recesses of my brain - stuffed it in a lingerie bag and washed it on hot in the washer.   Nothing to lose when you don't really like it in the first place, right?  

 

Oh.  *exudes smugness*  Look at my beautiful new yarn.

 

I have a large smear of dirt on my knee and an icebag on the other one.  While jumping on a shovel last weekend I did...something and am limping around right now.   I only mention it because I am enjoying the symmetry of ice and dirt.

There comes a time in life when you become SO BORED with your own broken bits you could scream.  I think that this moment is when progress occurs?  At least in therapy and I think with physical adaptation too.  I've been reading Kate Davies for several years - long before she had her stroke, though I like her writing more now.  And although what she is working with is very different than what I am, there have beens days when her simple courage at keeping going have definitely sturdied me up.

I blew off freinds last night - it looks on facebook as though they had a nice time but I just couldn't bear it - the press of people in a bar, the noise, and the inevitable one cocktail too many and losing half the weekend to getting myself back together again.  I have an inflammatory disease.   It's very hard to acknowledge that to myself, to admit that it's a factor.  But alcohol...and sugar and potatoes and chicken and and and ...are all inflammatory and when I indulge I pay and pay and pay.   Sometimes it's worth it but I'm learning to pick my moments a little. 

So I listened to the rain and watched something foolish  and practiced flicky eyeliner like a teenager and this morning I got up and fed the roses and the cat and the houseplants and deadheaded the dianthus and geraniums and am making a grocery list.  I'm going to make a salad and a buckwheat/almond/chocolate cake to take to a dinner tonight and I'm happy I think.    Who you turn out to be in so different from what you think you'll be, you know?  

A year ago I would have moaned that I was old and boring and been upset, but what I HAVE learned is that I am neither of those things.  It's just that when you have to ration your resources a little you have to really really know what you actually want.  

But I like deadheading.  I think it's a fine way to spend a morning. 

I've been displacing anxiety with cleaning recently.   Or at least that's what it looks like, but I think it's more like taking a sauna when you're hung over.  Purging the toxic.

It's been SUCH a weird year with huge changes in my physical, emotional and mental lives and now suddenly I'm looking at my stuff and seeing how and if it fits in a totally new way.

I've been at this a while - over the last few years I've taken bags and bags of mental illness to Goodwill - but there's layers. Epochs. Levels.   The day I took down the portrait of my great grandfather was a big one (I didn't send him to Goodwill, though I am not sure what I will do with him.  Attic maybe).  

The last few weeks I've been in the office/computer/craft area.  Purging files, organizing.  Cleaning out the antique desk I am DYING to get rid of so instead of lurking in the corner sucking the energy out of the room now it's empty, free floating and ready to be sold.  There was a trip to IKEA.  I turned my old TV armoire into a fabric cabinet and now its full of all the yards of merino jersey and printed linen I've been collecting over the past few years, folded and sorted and in piles of silk or wool or knit or woven.  I like opening the doors and looking at it.  It reminds me that I used to love potential.  Maybe I still do.

Today I ran into something that didn't fit properly and I started to set it aside and then I started to hand sew it and then I remembered I have a place for that now and I put my sewing machine on my  new sewing table and 10 minutes later my crochet hooks don't fall out of my notions bag every time I open it.

It was just a really great feeling, even though my house is pulled apart and half sorted and I need to put some things on Craig's list and take stuff to Goodwill and even once it IS sorted and cleaned I can already see that there's going to be another complete round of purging and using up, but it's going to be (at least partly) the purging and using up that comes from living and creating in a space that reflects my actual tastes and life and needs.  Which is pretty awesome.