Remabulous

Cooking with the Clan

32 has been a year of cooking, it turns out. Six full items on my list are food related. Not surprising as I love little more than to cook and eat in a group, as I am doing here...

But six items? That's a big chunk. We have:

• #1: learn to make souffle
• #3: learn to make cheese
• #17: build a vegetable bed in the garden
• #20: order organic produce delivery and cook everything that shows up
• #26: Take a knife skills class- chop like a ninja
• #31: make homemade pasta

So far, I think I'm doing pretty well on this. My stepmother cooked a carrot souffle for Christmas that was amazing. I need to get on her about the recipe. Yum.

I have not yet made cheese. I was a bit worried about dairy for a bit when I made my sad gluten discovery. Now that I am pretty much certain that dairy and I are cool, it's going to get back into the priority list...

I've got the delivery box showing up and I have discovered a new love affair with collard greens. My god. Go buy some and saute them with olive oil and salt until they get a bit crispy. Even better- add some crushed garlic. Yumtastic. I have been making them to go with chicken and apple sausages for dinner once in a while.

I have been failing knife skills class. Two lessons:

1. Don't try to cut a full chicken neck off a chicken with a knife- use scissors. I sliced open my finger and it bled for three days before healing up when I tried to cut the neck off for Oskar. Boo.
2. Don't chop onions when you're have paying attention. Sliced the bejesus out of my pinky.

I think knife skills might need a bit more respect at the moment.

And as for pasta- has anyone ever made rice pasta at home? I have seen gnocchi made with rice flour and it was amazing. Light and fluffy and spectacular. I have not heard of any non-wheat noodles made at home. Perhaps I will be the first!

So food fills my days and nights. I am loving cooking and above you can see the evidence of the first Second Sunday Supper potluck. It was dreamy and delightful. Everyone really brought their best with new recipes. Amazing.

What have you been cooking? Please share recipes, cookbooks, ingredients, adventures!

Wheat's not gonna have me beat.

So. I really opened quite a can of worms when I took on my skin condition this year with the promise to myself that I would conquer it once and for all.

When you've spent 5 years covered in welts that the literature helpfully describes as "resembling leprosy", it can get a bit depressing at times. I have had fantasies of the nunnery creep in more than once. Although... not at the moment as I have had a gentleman caller recently, but he reads the blog so I will leave that topic at that.

Just know that goal #6 is still on my radar. I don't slack on this list, people.

But back to the leprosy.

For all the years I have been shuffling between doctors, immunologists, dermatologists, acupuncturists, chiropractors and basically anyone who stayed still long enough and commented on my skin situation: "Did you bang your elbow?" or "Wow- did you burn yourself?" being common conversational openers on the topic, no one has ever been able to give me a cause for this.

Granuloma Annulare isn't genetic. People with it don't even consistently respond to treatment. Some of it just goes away out of nowhere if you have it less than 2 years. (Insert sad trombone here for me).

The one refrain that kept coming up, though was "It seems to be some sort of strange autommune reaction." They responded to this by turning my immune system off for a number of months last year, which resulted in a total remission of the condition, followed be a full relapse once my immune system recovered, and I got sick enough that I had to have my tonsils out before they killed me with ever higher fevers. (104.8 being the winning temp)

So now there has been a new development. Thanks to the amazing September of Red Carpet Cleanses, I was off everything except yummy raw juice for a week and then did a detox process with Healing Waters in Burbank to get the obscene amount of Candida that was clogging up my system. Yay!

As I started to reintroduce food at the end of the cleanse period, I had a rude awakening. Wheat sent me into an instant digestive disaster. See the bastard grain pictured above. (I'll spare you the gory details, but let's just say I spent more time in the bathroom than at the table when out to dinner having pasta with my parents a couple of weeks ago.)

So, things started to add up. Skin problems, autoimmune problems, digestive problems since I was pretty young. And Celiac disease- gluten intolerance- is pretty much right on for my experiences. Hmmm. Inability to gain weight- just ask all my angry high school classmates who used to dig through my lunches to see what I was eating. Plus the fact that I could never give blood because I was too puny. Still am kind of build like a teenage boy, but I do my best.