How to make granola!

So, since the only commercial breakfast cereal I can eat these days is Rice Chex (and Corn Chex, but it's not as good), I've been making a lot of granola. It's gluten-free if you aren't sensitive to oats (which sometimes are manufactured on equipment that does wheat and has trace amounts of gluten in it). Oats have been no problem for me and my joints, so I've been eating a lot of them.

The fun thing about granola is that once you get gist of making it, you can make it with anything you want. My mom made this when we were kids, with just oats, almonds and sunflower seeds, so I took the basic idea and threw in whatever else I could scrounge up. The flax seeds are for nutrition rather than any exciting flavor (they've got the Omega-3s and a lot of fiber) but they add a little extra crunch. Here's the recipe I've been making lately...

Coconut-Almond Granola

4 TB of salted butter (if you're anti-butter for some reason, you could use vegetable oil, but I will recommend you to the Weston Price folks who, slight bit of kookery or not, have convinced me that real animal fats are good and that fake, freaky margarine-style fats are evil.)
3 TB honey (or more)
2 cups of rolled oats
1 cup of sliced almonds
1 cup of shredded unsweetened coconut
1/2 cup of raw sunflower seed kernels
1/4 cup of flax seeds
2/3 cup raisins (or however much you want)
2/3 cup Craisins (or any other dried fruit you feel like)

Here's how it works:

1. Melt the butter and the honey in a big sauce pan.
2. Dump in everything except the raisins/Craisins/dried fruit.
3. Stir it all around thoroughly until everything is coated in butter and honey. The mix should look glossy but not wet, and still be crumbly.
4. Spread the granola out onto a jelly roll pan. Bake at 325 for 10 or 15 minutes or until its mostly golden brown, or a little darker. (Check on it periodically...ovens are tricky, and you don't want it to burn. You can bake it at 200 for longer, if you'd rather be more careful.)
5. Take it out of the oven, and mix it up while it's still warm or it'll cool together in clumps. It will stop being sticky as it cools. Once it's cool, dump it in an airtight container (or a leftover Quaker Oatmeal tub) and add whatever raisins, Craisins, or other dried fruit you want.

Done and done.


I eat mine with milk, like a regular cereal. Or with yogurt. Or straight out of the tub.

Diet Day 123 - F-ing Pork

I made these for dinner last night. Garlic parmesan pork meatballs. While I've ruled out beef, and ruled in chicken, pork hasn't made itself an obvious 'yes' or 'no' thus far in my continual arthritis-elimination diet experiment. But I'd been 100% symptom-free for 4 or 5 days straight (no intermittent morning knuckle stiffness even!) so I thought now was as good a time as any to re-test pork where I'd get a clear response, or non-response.

I bought a pound of ground pork from Windy Hill at the farmer's market on Saturday, and thought I'd try making them into meatballs. They're really too simple to be called a recipe, but they were AMAZING, so in case you're interested, here's what I did:

Mix:
1 lb ground pork
1 minced clove garlic
1/2ish cup grated parmesan (maybe less? I didn't measure)
a couple pinches salt
a bunch of black pepper

Heat some olive oil in a skillet.

Roll the meat lightly into golf balls without mashing them up or compacting them too hard.

Plop the meatballs in the olive oil, letting them brown on one side before rotating them around so all sides get brown (tongs!) By the time all the sides of all the meatballs are brown and crispy (a little of the cheese will melt out too and crust up nicely) they should be done inside. Plus all the fat from the pork will render out into the olive oil until they're frying in their own fat. . . mmmmmmm.

I wilted some spinach with garlic, a little heavy cream and parmesan to go with the meatballs. Beautiful, beautiful food.

Until this morning. I felt the stiffness start creeping up in my left hand until by noon it was noticeably sore to bend it back and forth. By 2:00 my range of motion was at about half, and now at 4:30 it's excruciating to move my hand out of a neutral position. Arghh. And there are leftover meatballs in the fridge that I was REALLY looking forward to eating!!

But no. Instead, I am angrily eating marshmallow/coconut fruit salad directly out of the tupperware and hoping my wrist feels better in the next 24 hours. Although, from past flare ups, it'll probably be Wednesday or Thursday before it's back to normal. I miss red meat. Lamb was okay, but it's so freaking expensive. Sigh. Well, if anyone wants my leftover meatballs, they're yours.

Banana bread, xanthan gum, and peppers

My spring break is winding to a close...sadly. This week of not-working has been a tantalizing reminder of what it's like to not have to spend 8 to 10 (to 12) hours of your day, five days a week, doing something that isn't necessarily what you would choose to spend 8 to 10 (to 12) hours of your day doing if you didn't have to pay rent and make student loan payments. Not that, on the whole, I don't like my job - some days I love it, some days I hate it - but overall I just think sometimes what it would be like to have the hours of my day be all mine, to do with what I want.

I spent last weekend with my Mom visiting here in Charlotte, then drove up to Delaware to visit with my Dad and my brother, stopped in Maryland to see my Nana, Aunt and little cousin, and today I'm back in NC with a whole, glorious day to myself.

So far today I have planted peppers (bell and jalapeno)...

made granola...

and taken my second foray into the world of gluten-free baking with a banana bread recipe I found online.

Here's what I've learned:

1) Xanthan gum is expensive. And Harris Teeter doesn't have it. (It's a binding agent, in lieu of gluten.)
2) Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free All-Purpose Baking Flour is made from, and kind of tastes like, beans.
3) Melted brown sugar makes anything taste better.
4) You can actually make normal-textured baked goods (or quick breads, at least) without gluten.

One of the items I brought home from Delaware with me is a kitchen scale. I was going to buy a digital one online before my dad dug this out of a cabinet. Sexy, no?

I keep reading how it's better to bake by weight when you're doing it gluten-free, because 1 cup of rice flour might weigh something different than 1 cup of almond flour which might weigh something different than 1 cup of buckwheat flour (buckwheat is not wheat). And if you do it by weight, then you can sub in whatever flours you have and like the taste of. And since gluten-free flours are like six bucks for a little one-pound bag, this lets you use what you've got, instead of being a slave to what the recipe calls for. At least so goes the theory.

Since the recipe I used called for a brand-name pastry flour mix, which I didn't have, I used the aforementioned Bob's, plus a little buckwheat flour. Buckwheat is grainy, but it doesn't taste like beans. And in fairness to Bob, his flour didn't really taste too much like beans after I'd combined it with the other flours and turned it into banana bread. Not TOO much like beans.

I haven't had anything remotely bread-like in weeks, so the one slice of banana bread I've had was incredibly filling. And tasted decent, if not remarkable. It wasn't really very banana-y, despite having two whole bananas in it. It was good enough you'd eat a second piece, but not so good you'll eat the whole loaf in a day. You can definitely tell there's something different about it (like, it's made out of BEANS), but it's in the flavor, not the texture, and I feel like the flavor can more easily be tweaked by using other flours.

As much as I'd love to have exact gluten-free replicas of every wheat-y food I've ever loved, I realize that isn't about to happen. I also know that, since I don't have Celiac disease, if I really wanted to eat a baguette or something, I could. I'd just pay for it with joint pain later. I'm hopeful that the longer I go without gluten (and onions, beef, and tomatoes...my other nemeses) the more likely it will be that I can eat them again in small quantities down the road. In the meantime, I will likely stick to foods that don't require xanthan gum to work. Things like roast chicken, and buttery kale, and baked custards, and Rice Chex covered in melted marshmallows a la Rice Krispy Treats.

And roasted red peppers, which hopefully I'll be able to make from my own peppers this summer.

Strawberries, and Carolina BBQ Pork

Two successes for the day. One, I bought a strawberry plant at the farmer's market this morning. I think if you had asked me to describe how strawberries grew, I'd have fumbled around trying to remember if they were a bush, or creeping thorny plant, or if the berries grew in clusters, or what exactly. But I know what a strawberry looks like, and when I saw a plant full of them, in various stages of development, I bought it.
Five bucks! The farmer who sold it to me promised it would produce continually until about June, or whenever it starts getting really hot. Then, he said, it sends out daughter plants! So I buy one plant for five bucks, get all its strawberries, plus the little baby plants it'll make. All I do is win.
Second success: pork! Specifically, Carolina-style pulled pork. I used this recipe, and a three-pound Boston butt roast I had in the freezer from Windy Hill Farms.
I covered the pork with its dry rub on Thursday night, Saran-ed it and left it in the fridge until this morning. I took it out, let it rest an hour, seared it, and threw it in a low oven for the long haul. So, while I graded students' work, ate a leisurely lunch (reading Omnivore's Dilemma), and took a nap in the grass outside my apartment, my pork cooked slowly into a mass of soft, flavorful shreds of meat. It was beyond falling-off-the-bone. The whole thing was so tender the bone actually fell out of the meat, and not the other way around.
Gorgeous. Generously doused in vinegar-based bbq sauce....mmm.


In other news, there are 13 school days left in the third quarter. And tomorrow I get an extra hour of daylight to enjoy after teaching every day. Summer is getting achingly close. Eight weeks of total freedom! I am so much more excited about the summer as a high school teacher than I ever was as a high school student.

Gluten-free Blueberry Muffins

In celebration of my 60th day on my new diet, my fingers decided to be sore this morning with no explanation. Really just my right thumb, but still enough to catch me off guard when I tried to use said thumb to hit snooze at 5am and discovered it wouldn't bend. I didn't eat anything new yesterday, except these really tasty cornmeal/blueberry muffins I'd made the day before (gluten-free!).
I have tested corn a couple times, and am pretty confident it's okay, but I also used some gluten-free Bisquick mix I hadn't tried before, so it's maybe possible something in that threw me off? It's also possible that although my symptoms are pretty much gone, my body still might not be 100% perfect, and little minor flare-ups might have to be okay for now. My hands were fine by the time I got to school, except for a little residual soreness in the one thumb joint, so all in all, hardly a big deal.

And I will put in another plug for the barefoot running. I've been absolutely loving it. I went for a 2 mile run on Sunday after we got a bunch of rain, so I got to run through puddles and mud, which was just SO much more fun than running in shoes. If you wear sneakers and run through puddles, you get squishy wet socks that slosh around for the rest of your run. If you're in your bare feet, you can leave barefooted footprints in the mud and splash as you run. I might have to break down and buy those ridiculous Vibram five-toe foot-condom shoes once it gets to be winter, but for now I can't imagine giving up the feeling of mud and water and grass and asphalt on my feet. I did another two miles yesterday, and cut my time down by a minute without feeling any extra effort (16:30). Running has always been one of those things I had to make myself do because I knew it was good for me. Since I took off my shoes, it's become something I want to do because it feels good.

Here's my recipe for gluten-free muffins that might have made my joints hurt but maybe not (adapted from this one that my aunt sent me - because I couldn't find almond flour). They have the grainy texture of cornbread, but are just sweet enough to be dessert-y.

Blueberry-Cornmeal Muffins (Gluten-free)

4 eggs
1/4 cup water

1 stick melted butter

1 cup Bisquick gluten-free baking mix

1 cup whole-grain corn meal

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup honey

cinnamon (several shakes...a couple teaspoons?)

blueberries (I dumped a bunch in...maybe a cup?)

2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

Pre-heat your oven to 350. Mix the dries, add the wets. Fold in the blueberries last. Taste it, and add more sweetener (either the sugar or honey) if you want. Batter should be pretty thick. Spatula the batter into a 12-muffin tin - you can fill the muffin cups up almost full because they don't rise too crazy much. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the tops are golden brown and a knife inserted into a muffin comes out of the middle clean. Cold pat of butter and a drizzle of honey...

Kale and cabbage gratin! Gluten-free!

I hadn't made very much new or interesting food in a while. I've been eating things like baked chicken legs, and roasted sweet potatoes, and rice pudding. All are wonderful, and have become comforts foods in lieu of Honey Nut Cheerios, or Vienna Fingers, or Chips Ahoy, but they've been starting to get a little boring. I came across a recipe in the NYT the other day though, for a kale and cabbage gratin, and was intrigued. Gratins are one of those dishes that I feel are always being bruited about in my Food & Wine, but I've never quite had a handle on what one was, save that it involved cheese. As the culinary fates would have it, I had just picked up a bag of kale at the farmer's market on Saturday (another plug for Atherton Mill and Market!!) and I had half a head of cabbage left over in the fridge.

So, a gratin it was! The NYT recipe calls for breadcrumbs, which I can't eat right now, and for fresh sage, which I don't have. I thought I'd be safe with thyme (really, who's allergic to thyme) but substituted the dry stuff. And since I hadn't re-tested garlic, I took this as an opportunity to do so. Left out the onion, since I didn't have one, and used cheddar cheese, since I DO have that. Without the breadcrumbs, it's gluten-free. Booyah.

Simplified ingredients looked like this (plus olive oil):
Kale, cabbage, cheddar, 2 eggs, a few cloves of garlic, short-grain (I use arborio) rice, salt, pepper and thyme.

Here's how you make it...

Cook 1/2 to 1/3 cup of arborio rice. I dumped some in the pan, so I don't really know how much I used.

While the rice cooks, saute a few cloves of garlic, sliced, in the olive oil. De-stem the kale (you can just rip the fluffy leaves off the stem - it's not a big pain like de-stemming collards). Add a bunch of kale (I used a fluffy colander-full) and thinly sliced cabbage (I used about 1/3 of a small head) to the pan with the garlic. Let it wilt a little, adding a scant 1/2 cup of water once it's gotten brighter in color and slightly wilty. Let it simmer in the water until the water evaporates...the leaves should be bright green, and pliable/droopy but still firm. Add salt, pepper, and thyme to taste.

Grate the cheese!!!

Beat the two eggs in a bowl.

(I made everything in the skillet, but you can mix it in a bowl and then dump it in a casserole if you wanted.)

Turn the heat off the greens once they're done (droopy, still slightly firm and bright green - not soggy). Stir in the cooked rice. Stir in the cheese. Stir in the eggs last, so they don't cook when they hit the rest of the ingredients (mixing in the cold cheese and cooled-down rice first cools the whole thing down). Taste the mixture and add more salt or pepper if you want.

Bake the whole kit and kaboodle at 375 for 30-40 minutes, or just until the edges turn brown and crispy and the top is firm.


Tada!! I ate two-thirds of the pan.

Gluten-free goodness.

I've felt both relieved and sad to realize that I'm going to be giving up wheat for at least several months before trying it again: relieved because I'm confident that doing so will help me continue to feel good, but sad obviously because it means not eating a lot of things I love eating. I know there are wheat-free versions of bread and cookies and muffins and such, but you can't buy them at restaurants, or order them at the Bojangles drive-thru, and they usually aren't what's on offer at social gatherings.

In addition to the practical aspect of just not eating something I'm used to eating, there's the awkwardness I feel when explaining to someone why I'm not eating it. I turned down some girl scouts selling cookies outside the Harris Teeter, and found myself explaining "Gosh, I wish I could, but I don't eat wheat." First of all, I don't know why I didn't just say "No thanks" and leave it at that. And second of all, as I walked away, I realized that I didn't want to say "I can't eat wheat" not only because it sounds so limiting and permanent, but because I'm afraid of the follow up question "Oh, why not?" that I don't have a good answer for.

I don't have celiac disease, which is the one diagnosis people might recognize. I don't have ANY disease according to the four doctors I've seen in the last year. I have no official diagnosis from anybody. And people without diagnoses sound crazy. I can't say "my doctor told me I shouldn't eat wheat" because my doctor took very little interest in my new diet, and I've had to figure it all out by myself. And I start to sound like some wacky alternative health fanatic when I try to explain that "I haven't been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, but I've had a lot of the symptoms, and one alternative theory for what causes arthritis has to do with food allergies and so I did this diet..." Nobody wants to listen through that explanation, and I feel obnoxious giving it.

And if what I've been reading is correct, I could very well eat wheat again in six months and be able to tolerate it again without symptoms. I hate garnering sympathy, and don't want people to think I'm either some hyperchondriac diva insisting on inconvenient food, or some sad case of chronic arthritis, facing a tragic future of disability and deformity. Which is maybe why I like writing about it on here - I can give a cursory explanation to any friend that asks, and then refer them to my blog if they're really interested. I suppose I don't like drawing attention to myself, and I don't like feeling as though something about me is defective.

I swung down the ethnic food aisle of Harris Teeter yesterday. I haven't bought much in the way of packaged food lately, with the exception of a few dairy products, and tea. But after reading a few labels, I found some exciting new foods to add to my list of foods-that-don't-make-me-feel-80-years-old. Rice noodles, and rice crackers, and my favorite....rice chex!!! It's even labelled "gluten-free"! I can finally get my cereal fix.

I've got sweet potato casserole in the oven right now, and the apartment smells like cinnamon. I restocked on fresh fruit, and picked up some locally grown kale I'm going to play with tomorrow. There might be more rice pudding in the offing for later, and I've been looking for some recipes for homemade honey-glazed peanuts that I plan on trying soon. I'm not about to let one missing ingredient stand between me and food happiness. Wheat, I hope we meet again on better terms, but until then, I won't be losing sleep over you.

How to make rice pudding.

Yesterday I was craving something sweet, had run out of grapes, apples and pears, and had already eaten three bananas. I hadn't tested cane sugar yet, but since honey, rice and milk are on the okay list, I decided to make rice pudding. Here's the simple three-ingredient version.

some milk (a little less than 2 cups)
between 1/3 and 1/4 cup of arborio rice
honey!!

Err on the side of less milk, rather than less rice. If it gets thick before the rice is fully cooked, you can just add more milk to the pan.

You can also add a pinch of salt, which make it less cloyingly sweet.

And if you're not into honey's flavor, you can use white sugar instead. Or a little white sugar and a little honey.

And if you aren't presently in the midst of attempting to determine the affect of different foodstuffs on your unexplained rheumatism, you could add vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, raisins, orange zest, or anything else flavory.

Boil the milk and the rice, stirring often to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. It doesn't have to be boiling like crazy, just a nice simmer to keep it cooking. About 15 or 20 minutes. The rice will start to leak starch into the milk and it'll get thicker and creamier, like a risotto. Taste the rice at this point to make sure it's as cooked as you want it - soft and a little chewy.

Once the texture is what you want, stir honey into the rice by the spoonful, tasting as you go. I went crazy and unleashed a good quarter cup into mine the first time - this was a little overly sweet.

The rice pudding in the photo below is done. I only made about half the recipe, which is why it doesn't look like very much. If you want it a little creamier than this, just add more milk.

A bittersweet tale of bread.

Last night I made bread. The plan was to make the bread last night, wake up this morning, evaluate how I felt after two days plain wheat (i.e. without yeast), and then assuming I felt good and with that data safely tucked away, embark on my bread trial. I knew this would mean baking the bread and not eating it immediately, but for some reason I thought that would work. I'm not sure at what point I realized this was NOT going to happen on quite that time line... I think it was when I started eating the bread dough off my fingers.

Because all-purpose and bread flours typically have barley in them (I had never noticed this), and I was trying to control variables by testing only wheat PLUS yeast, I used 100% whole wheat flour. Most bread recipes call for some mix, because 100% whole wheat is heavy and grainy and kind of abrasive. Okay, so I was trying to control variables, but kind of failed. I omitted the molasses called for in the recipe (because I hadn't tested it), but I didn't have enough sunflower oil to substitute for the olive oil, so I went ahead and used the olive oil. It just seems like such a benign ingredient, right? (The recipe as at the bottom of the post.)

So, cheat number one: using olive oil. Cheat number two: the bread looked so damn good there was no way I could not eat it right then while it was hot.

At first I said I wasn't going to put butter on it, since I hadn't tested butter specifically (although I tested milk without any problems). So I poured honey all over it instead. It was incredible.
The bread turned out wonderfully soft and fluffy, although the whole grain graininess of it kind of made my tongue feel a little bit roughed up.

The honey was so good, and the bread was so steamy and hot, that cheat number three just became inevitable: I slathered butter all over it too.

So - poor experimental design, but amazing baked good that tasted like heaven. I was okay with that.

But...this morning the back of my left hand was sore when I woke up. Nothing extreme, and no sign of the infamous lump, but still enough to be noticeable and make me think, "Crap, I guess I cut out wheat again."

If I had WAITED until today to try the bread, and my hand had NOT been sore this morning, and then it had become sore only AFTER the bread, I'd have been able to say "Oh, okay, it was just the yeast" (or olive oil, I guess). However, because I couldn't wait, now I don't know if my hand is sore because of the wheat I'd been eating for two days already, or the bread I ate last night. Or the olive oil. Or, I suppose, the butter (although that seems unlikely as butter is typically less allergenic than milk). Which means that now I have to re-eliminate them all for at least five days before testing any of them again.

So, because the bread test requires you eat it for three meals for one day, I ate bread all today, loved every minute of it, and will see if my hand is still sore tomorrow. But the extra loaf is, tragically, being relegated to the freezer until such time as it seems logical to test it again.

Frustrating, sure, but not so terrible really, as I've learned to eat quite nicely without wheat by now. Still, I'm annoyed at myself for not being more precise and thorough. And there is still the nagging worry that nothing I'm eating is having any effect on anything and I'm tilting at windmills.

What really DID suck was that our TFA group leader tonight made these amazing, gooey, caramel-filled brownies that were still warm when our meeting started. Everyone got up and helped themselves. The bastards got seconds. Every time they peeled back the tinfoil the room smelled like fudgy brownie. And I sat there sipping on my tea and trying not to drool sadly. THAT'S when I think, "Is this completely bogus? Am I controlling my diet as some kind of control-freak proxy for not being able to control my symptoms? Am I going to turn into a crazy(er) hypochondriac who freaks out about everything I eat?"

PLUS the arch of my foot has been sore and a little swollen the past week; I have not been recording it or relating it to my arthritis symptoms because it's done this before when I've worn bad shoes or started running after a long hiatus (both of which I've been doing recently), and it feels like soft-tissue and not a joint. Back in Chicago I had a podiatrist make me custom orthotics for the same issue. But now I'm thinking, "Crap, what if it's somehow related and I've been ignoring it all week and thus have rendered this whole venture quite useless?" Not to mention the more obvious fact that it's aggravating because I'm trying to get back into shape and be able to run a few miles and I'm just getting into a good routine and I don't want to hurt myself MORE by overdoing it.

Sigh. So, I pray that this experience will help me in some way, and that my arthritis will, perhaps, just magically vanish forever, and I'll finish out the next three weeks of food testing and see what happens I guess. I got Dr. Mansfield's book from Amazon finally, and it's helped to reassure me that this whole idea isn't complete hokum. Still, it's a little frustrating to feel like I'm on my own trying to figure out something that might not be figurable.

100% Whole Wheat Bread - Two Loaves

2 3/4 cup hot water (just from the tap)
1/3 cup oil (olive or anything else)
1/3 cup honey
1 TB salt
7 cups whole wheat flour (max - I probably used closer to 6 1/2)
(2 TB molasses - I didn't use it, but it'd probably make it better)
2 TB dry active yeast (this was a little more than two packets)

Put the water, oil, honey, molasses and salt in a bowl and stir to mix. Add 2 cups of flour, and stir to mix. Then add the yeast (two packets, plus a pinch or two, although you could probably get away with just two packets.) Stir to mix in the yeast.

Add another 4 cups of flour. Stir it in until it starts to look like consistently sticky dough. Don't stir any more than you have to to mix it evenly. Add another 1/2 cup of flour and stir it in. Your goal is to use as little additional flour as possible to get the dough to stay in an even ball like dough, and not stick all over the sides of the bowl. I didn't use much more than 6 1/2 cups. Don't mix any more than you have to.

Once your dough looks like dough, cover it with a towel and leave it someplace warm. (I stuck it on top of the stove and pre-heated the oven early - 350). It should rise a lot (almost double) in about 30-40 minutes.

Grease your two bread pans (or one bread pan and a baking sheet for mini-loaves).

Divide up your dough into whatever pieces you're baking - half the dough is one loaf.

You don't really need to knead it, just shape each piece into a nice ball by stretching it back around itself, so all the seams wind up on the bottom of the ball and the top surface is nice and smooth and stretched.

Put the dough in your pans, and let it rise for another 30-40, or until almost doubled.

Bake at 350 for about 35 minutes, or until it's nice and golden brown on top.

When you take it out, you can rub butter over the crust to make it nice and shiny.

Eat it with massive amounts of honey. Or just with butter.

Greenville and Wheat.

Yesterday was the first day of the two-day wheat test, in which I'm supposed to eat wheat (shredded wheat cereal or whole-wheat pasta) at every meal for two days. If I don't run into any problems with the wheat by the end of the second day (today), I can try whole wheat bread tomorrow. Shredded wheat cereal is about as boring as cereals get, but as someone for whom cold cereal is a go-to comfort/convenience/snack food, sitting down to two giant bowls of the stuff yesterday morning felt pretty great. Coupled with the fact that I've been drinking tea for a few days - it felt like a real breakfast.

I decided to visit my sister yesterday, two hours south in Greenville where she's in school. Through the wonder of facebook, I found out that an old friend from my freshman hall at Wake also lives in Greenville, and so I caught up with Ms. Jess Held (now Martin) for lunch! For all the creepiness of facebook, and the immense drain on productive time that it can be, I have it to thank for an increasing number of real-life reunions with old friends, for the ability to keep in touch with people I would probably not have kept in touch with, and even for becoming good, real-life friends with people I knew casually from years ago. Hannah and I had a lovely afternoon in Greenville, and although eating in restaurants proved a bit of a challenge for me still (I had steamed vegetables and plain baked sweet potatoes at one place, and a very boring build-your-own salad at Mellow Mushroom) I was able to enjoy an Oolong and milk and honey drink at a little tea bar. Post-tea, we realized we had not taken any photographs to document our sisterly weekend, and so we quickly took a slew of awkward self-shots on the way to the car.

Today's agenda includes a long overdue trip to the laundromat and, barring any sudden onset of symptoms, baking bread for tomorrow. I haven't baked anything in ages, so that prospect is pretty exciting. I figured, for the full experience of enjoying bread, nothing beats baking it at home, where the oven heats up the kitchen and the bread smell fills up the apartment. Mmmm... Minus my brief encounter with my wrist bump, I have continued to be essentially symptom-free, which is really nice after spending most of November and December wrapping my wrist up in an Ace bandage and taking NSAIDs. I still have no evidence to tell me whether feeling great is a result of the diet, or whether my on-again-off-again arthritis was just about to start an off-again period that happened to coincide with my diet experiment. I keep introducing new foods until February 16, after which point I just keep careful track of what I eat and how I feel going forward. I guess we'll see.

Dinner tonight will likely be sweet potatoes roasted in the cast iron skillet with chicken, which has proven incredibly delicious in the past. Plus whole wheat pasta, I guess, since I'm supposed to have it at every meal. I'd never really known how to do savory sweet potatoes, but roasting them in an oven in a skillet of chicken fat makes them kind of extraordinary.

You need:

Bone-in, skin-on chicken quarters/thighs/drumsticks
Sweet potatoes
Oil (I used sunflower)
a little salt for the chicken once it's done

Brown the chicken in a skillet with oil. Add peeled, cut up sweet potatoes, turning in the oil and chicken fat so they're coated. Cook until the chicken is browned on both sides, and the sweet potatoes are starting to look slightly cooked/brown on the edges. Throw the whole skillet in the oven at about 375. Cook for another 30-40, or until the chicken is done and the sweet potatoes are soft. (If you use thighs it'll take less time as they'll cook quicker. If you use big-ass quarters like I did below, it'll take closer to 40-50 minutes.)

"That's why you're so small, Ms. Andersen."

Eating has become substantially more enjoyable. I had honey yesterday. Something actually, truly sweet. Milk didn't seem to cause any problems, and neither did tea, so this afternoon I made myself a tea-ish sort of latte. Earl grey tea, hot milk and honey. It was glorious. I tested ground pork at dinner tonight, and soy (edamame) for lunch. One of my students came in to say hi today while I was eating my edamame at my desk. When he noticed the soybeans, he was perplexed. "Whoa, Ms. Andersen! What is that!?" I explained it was soy beans. "What's that go with?" he wanted to know. "Like, what meat?" I said I wasn't really sure, but that you get it at sushi restaurants sometimes. He looked skeptical. "That's why you're so small, Ms. Andersen. You eat beans for lunch." Fair enough.

My kids often make fun of my lunches, usually by insisting that it's white people food. It's funny - I can't tell you how many times I've been asked either what I'm having for dinner, or whether I like a certain food (one kid was legitimately surprised that I, a white person, like fried chicken). This morning, one girl explained: "White people be eatin' like, salads and fruit and stuff. Black people eat macaroni and cheese." Maybe black people don't eat edamame?

Tomorrow is a teacher workday, which means I can sleep in until seven, make scrambled eggs for breakfast (!!) and drive to school in the daylight.

Also! Liver enzymes, alk phos, everything is nice and normal again. ALT = 15, AST = 19, AlkPhos = 84. As there is now nothing diagnostically interesting about my blood, I guess it'll be a while before I see Dr. Nami again. Which is fine by me, because last appointment I waited an hour before seeing him for about five minutes, after which they quickly drew four tubes of my blood and sent me home. Sixty dollar co-pay to top it off. I'm just praying that this silly diet reveals something useful and that my joints remain as generally healthy-feeling as they have been. I even went for a run yesterday! (I'm tentatively thinking of running a 5k in March. This would be quite a feat, given that I am still pretty well out of shape and have never run in any kind of race ever...but it doesn't seem un-doable.)

Dreams of carbs....

I was going through my folder of photos and came across some pictures of food I took over Christmas. Food made out of lots of sugar and flour and things I can't eat yet. I'm going to post these photos so that in a month, or a few weeks or whenever I establish I can eat things like this again (hopefully that's what happens, anyway), I can look back at this post and feel especially grateful and inspired.

My dad always makes Norwegian Christmas cookies. These are Smultringer (basically, lard rings). They're little fried donuts.
Although not the best photo, I made this trifle for Christmas dinner. I soaked the ladyfingers in cointreau, and used mandarin oranges, made the custard from scratch and dumped whipped cream on top. And then doused the whole thing in cointreau again. It was amazing, and better the next day after chilling/settling in the fridge.
I've made these cheddar biscuits a bunch of times, and they're always easy and turn out great. The colder you can keep all the ingredients (especially the butter) before mixing and kneading, the better. They're flaky and wonderful and I'd give my firstborn child for one about now.
The recipe is from Ina Garten, here. I never have buttermilk, so I put a little vinegar in milk to substitute and it works just fine.
The last few years, since all the Andersen kids are now adults who don't need to open presents at the crack of dawn, we've enjoyed having a long breakfast on Christmas morning. This year I made sour-cream blueberry muffins (recipe here) and a leek and cheese frittata. We had smoked salmon too, which I love, but the only salmon I can have right now is fresh, which I'm absolutely sick to death of.
Sigh. I do get to eat rice today, although without butter or cheese or black pepper or spices it will be a pretty unexciting affair. Still, it'll be good to eat something truly starchy. I had two bananas for breakfast today, and they've never tasted so good. I've been surprised at how much I've started craving fruit, because it's the only source of sugar I have right now. I dropped eight bucks on a damn sack of grapes and I'll probably eat them all within 48 hours.

Chicken Skins

Chicken skin has never tasted so good. I don't even usually eat the skin off my chicken, but yesterday was my first day of introducing new foods back into my diet, and chicken was on the list. Man, did that crispy skin taste good. Gross, right? But when all you've eaten for a week is fish, sweet potatoes, carrots and pears, bone-in, skin-on, roasted-in-their-own-juice chicken thighs taste like heaven. So do grapes, which I was also able to eat yesterday, but somehow they don't quite compare to the roast chicken.

I ate both chicken and grapes with no apparent aggravation of symptoms or adverse reaction, so they're on the safe list. After today (assuming I don't start feeling terrible in the next few hours) so are green beans and broccoli. It's amazing how four simple ingredients make me feel so much more excited to have a meal.

I thought, since my diet has changed so drastically this last week (and will continue to look very different for a while) it would be interesting to see what, in the past, I've actually been EATING in a day. I went back through my food diary starting at the beginning of December, and nerded out on Excel after I got home from my doctor's appointment this afternoon.

This is based just on servings per day. So the 33% represents an average of 2.8 servings of grains in a day, and the 17% vegetables equals about an average of 1.4 servings of vegetables in a day. Far from the "five-a-day" we're always being told to get, huh? For comparison, here's a snazzy graphic showing you what you SHOULD be eating.
Cute, right? And I didn't even make a category for "foods containing fat and sugar." Point being, since last Friday, I've been eating about 75% fruits and vegetables, and 25% fish. Now I can have chicken, too. But I'm kind of amazed at how wild a shift that really is, compared to my usual eating habits. I mean, I LOVE carbs. And sugar, and fat. Because I've always been kind of scrawny, I've taken that as license to eat, entirely without guilt, giant meals at Bojangles, or huge servings of goopy desserts at restaurants, or like, 15 Christmas cookies in a sitting. Yeah, well, I'm just waiting for my karmic payback to be that all that flour and sugar has made my joints achey. We'll see. I had a dream last night that I ate pizza and pasta by accident and wrecked all my hard, self-denial-y work. Argh!! Rice is Sunday, milk is Tuesday, tea(!!) is Wednesday, butter is Thursday, and then next weekend I spend eating wheat three times a day for two days. I can't wait!!!!

Oh, and I still feel great, which is nice. Doc took some more blood today and is doing my liver enzymes again (they were a little elevated before) and my alkaline phosphatase (also related to liver/gallbladder), along with a few others, including an test they run to diagnose celiac disease, and a test for parvovirus - both of which I'm thinking are unlikely, but heck - I've got plenty of blood, so they can just go to town. My primary care guy warned me that rheumatologists are like vampires...they just want your blood.
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Last day of complete food boredom

Tomorrow I can test out avocado and chicken. I'm really, really, really excited. The next day is grapes! And green beans!! And then Saturday is beef, and tomatoes!

I'm starting to worry though about whether this is worth it or not, and whether I'll really get an obvious reaction to something or not. What's supposed to happen is that I keep track of how I feel after eating each new food, and supposedly something will eventually cause my symptoms to flare up, or me to feel like crap, or something. And then I eliminate that from my diet completely for six months, and then try it again. Theoretically, if I eliminate the foods that cause a reaction, I should be able to control my symptoms by just not eating those things. And then potentially reintroducing them later in moderation after my body's gotten its act together.

But, today one finger and one toe were the usual stiff-and-sore in the morning. Nothing I can't ignore, and they'll be fine in an hour, and it's certainly a WHOLE lot better than waking up with all my fingers stiff, or with weird swollen lumps on my wrists, or with my knees making me feel like I'm 80, but since my symptoms have always come in waves, and then subsided for a period (weeks or months), and then showed up again, and then gone away, I'm worried that November through December was just another bad phase, and now they're kind of on the ebb naturally, and I'll just go through the next four weeks of this, testing new food every day, and nothing will become any clearer.

Even with that possibility in mind though, I'm not about to give up after just spending five days (today will be number six) eating nothing but orange food and pears. I'm also realizing that I'm going to appreciate so much more the amazing VARIETY of food we actually have. I'm limiting my food choices because I want to, but so many people around the world have no choice, or wouldn't even know what to do with an American grocery store if they saw one. And even though I've been eating more sweet potatoes than I ever thought possible, I can eat as many of them as I want. For 89 cents a pound. Unlimited food! I guess it's made me grateful, is all.

I've also realized how much of my time at home I spend entertaining myself by cooking. Not that this is a bad thing at all - I love cooking and I love food and I love getting better at cooking food. But it's just been interesting to realize what an easy escape it is for me from doing anything else.

And as a final positive to this infinitely frustrating way of eating, limiting my choice of ingredients has forced me to get more creative. And now that I'll have more options, increasing every day, I think it's actually going to be a fun sort of creative challenge to see what I can make with relatively limited ingredients. For instance, I probably never would have bothered making sweet potato fries, or perfecting sweet potato chips (I can make them so perfectly crispy now!!) because it's a lot easier to throw a sweet potato in the oven and then cover it in sugar and butter as soon as it's done. I wouldn't have tried drying pears in my oven, but now I know it's super easy and I can probably do it with other fruit and I'll have something to snack on at school besides salted cashews.

I'm venturing out today, to poke around Plaza Midwood with my friend Sarah and hope that some shops are open. I'll be really glad in a week, when I can venture out with some possibility of buying food at a restaurant. I'll also be really glad when my breakfasts can be things like eggs or cereal or bacon, and not pears and sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes and pears. john mansfield elimination diet rheumatoid arthritis alternative health joint pain arthralgia hypoallergenic diet

Day Three: Oil!!!! (and Sweet Potato Chips)

After a trip to one Harris Teeter and a phone call to another, plus a call to Trader Joe's, I finally found sunflower oil at Berrybrook Farm on East Boulevard. She even had the bottle of oil waiting for me behind the counter. I poked around the store a little bit, and good lord, granola has never looked so good. And the frozen foods! Burritos!! Argh!!

No wonder there are so few published large-scale studies of diets like this one - getting people to stay compliant would be a nightmare.

But the oil really has made everything better. I had no idea how much I was craving fat until I found myself running my finger along the inside of a bowl to lick up sunflower oil as if it were chocolate frosting. It doesn't even really taste like anything; it's just a plain sort of salad oil. But it has made my food infinitely more tasty.

Look! I can roast vegetables! Turnips aren't even so bad when they've got crispy edges and lots of sea salt! (They kind of taste like a big, bland radish.)
And sweet potatoes! I can make chips!!

Sweet Potato Chips

Sweet potatoes
Sunflower oil
Cast iron skillet

Peel sweet potatoes, and slice thinly. I like them a little thick (like in the photo) so they get chewy in the middle.

Heat up the oil in a cast iron skillet or pan. It doesn't need to be very deep - about a quarter inch.
Cook the sliced sweet potatoes in batches, turning them over until they're browned and crispy on both sides. Put a bunch of paper towels on a baking sheet and put the chips on that as they're done. This will let you drain them and keep them warm in the oven while each new batch cooks.

If you do more than one or two medium-sized sweet potatoes, you'll need to add more oil as you go along. Let it get hot again before adding more potatoes.

If you aren't on a wacko diet, you can put salt on them, or cinnamon and sugar.

I marked on my new 2011 calendar which days I reintroduce which foods. First up are avocado and chicken. That's on Thursday. Next day is green beans, grapes and broccoli. But Saturday is what I'm most looking forward to... tomatoes and beef!!

Of course, really I'd rather have one of those things cause some reaction than the more likely culprits: wheat and dairy. But in any event, it'll be good to eat foods that aren't root vegetables again. The grocery store was torture today. There were Ding Dongs by the check out at Harris Teeter. I don't think I've ever even had a Ding Dong, but holy hell did they look good.

Diet...Day Two

I think I'm finally done with caffeine withdrawal. I've been drinking mugs of hot water, pretending they're tea. It's all very sad.

I've also discovered that cooking without any fat or oil is incredibly difficult.

Exhibit A: Miserable, leathery little spears of sweet potato.

I tried to eat the insides of a few of them but ultimately tossed them. Dr. John Mansfield's elimination diet does not give recipes. All it says are things like "boiled" or "raw or boiled." Reason being, there ARE no recipes when you only have ONE ingredient.

I did some more research today, and found another doctor's version of Mansfield's diet. It's a little more lenient (allows kiwi, lamb, and sunflower oil). I'm going to pass on the kiwi and lamb, just to be safe, but I might go buy some sunflower oil. If I can fry things in oil, this will be much, much easier to do for a week (plus I need the calories). I could saute things again. And pan fry my fish. Besides, I can't remember the last time I ate a sunflower-anything, so somehow I'm doubtful that sunflower products are causing my (rheumatoid? mysterious?) arthritis.

The Atherton Mills farmer's market provided me with some more food this morning, although it was very hard to walk past all the little sample trays of bread and olive oil and granola. Arghh. I'm allowed turnips, according to Mansfield, so I got three small ones. I have no idea what in the hell to do with them - I guess you can boil them like potatoes and mash them up? Once I get some sunflower oil, maybe I can fry them? Roast them in little chunks?

Also, trout is freaking 10 bucks a pound. I got two pounds, so I can eat one ziploc bag today and one tomorrow. I baked some for breakfast when I got back from the market - it was the first thing I've eaten in almost 48 hours that actually tasted GOOD. Baked a Bosc pear too, which was equally delightful (although would have been better slathered in butter and brown sugar!!!).
I have no symptoms today except a vague and lingering headache/foggy feeling. I kind of wish something felt terrible, so it could then go away dramatically by week's end, and then reappear dramatically when I introduce some malicious food item. Ah well...I guess we'll see how this turns out soon enough.
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Elimination Begins...!

Dum dum dummmm. The elimination diet started today. I went to Harris Teeter on my way home from UNCC last night for a meeting that apparently I didn't have to go to since I'm dropping my classes this semester and taking them next year (hassle of the century). That was irrelevant. What's relevant is that, in my quest to fix my unidentified rheumatological issues, this is what I'll be eating for the next week:

Yep. Like, literally. That's it. No oil, no tea (!!!), no grains, dairy, red meat, eggs, nuts, booze, sugar or anything other than what's in the picture. Except trout. The fish in the photo is salmon, which I can also eat. Salmon, trout, carrots, sweet potatoes, pears, and sea salt. Tasty treats. If anyone's interested, it's a diet developed by some British doctor named Mansfield. A slightly less severe version of it is here: What I'm kind of concerned about is eating enough calories to like, live. In looking back through what I've eaten the last month (yes, in Excel form) I probably eat between 1000 and 1200 calories on an average day. It seems my only real option to keep that up is to eat a pound of fish every day. I'm not trying to be skeletor in a week, so it's a good thing I like fish, I guess. Bad thing I can't do anything WITH it except bake it, or poach it, plain, with sea salt. I'm going to desperately miss oil and flour.

While I can't say I'm looking forward to this, I also know that if I let Dr. Nami the rheumatologist put me on some daily pharmaceutical product, I'm going to constantly be wondering if it's really necessary or if I could have fixed my problem in a more natural and permanent way. I don't want to treat symptoms if I could fix the problem. I also know it could totally do nothing. I could just feel like shit for a week, not notice any of the promised symptoms of "withdrawal," or the eventual "clearing," and not notice any reactions to any of the foods I test. It could just be a sad, sad month of food deprivation and misery. I'm hoping, of course, that won't be the case. I guess only time will tell. Time, and my magical, wonderful Excel charts.

So today I've had a pear and a bag of baby carrots for lunch. I drank hot water in my travel mug this morning instead of tea. I have two salmon fillets in the broiler and cut up sweet potatoes in the oven. I have a headache and feel vaguely dizzy. Let's get started!!!
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My sister likes sweet potatoes a lot (Sweet Potato Latkes)

Today I did very little that was productive. It was great. I slept until 11, which I haven't been able to do in months because my internal clock is set for 5am. I checked on my Amazon order (Appalachian Trail Guide to Tennessee-North Carolina -- more on that plan later). I changed out my oversized men's sweatpants for my cowboy-print flannel pajama pants. I ate Christmas cookies. That was the first half of my day. Very worthwhile.

In the afternoon, I took my car up to the shop for an oil change and walked back home. I went and traipsed around in a field or two briefly as a detour. It's cold and snowy, but it was really nice to get outside and breathe cold air after so many days curled up in the house wearing flannel and eating cookies.

I walked around the Cauffiel House across from the park, and looked at the Delaware River. Across the river, New Jersey looked very cold.


Then I walked back up Philly Pike.
Then when I got home, I made sweet potato latkes (1 grated sweet potato, an egg, some flour, cinnamon). Hannah put maple syrup on hers and liked them a lot. Here's how you make them:

You need:

1 large sweet potato
1 egg
3-4 Tablespoons flour
Cinnamon
Frying oil (sunflower is best, or you can use canola, or mix butter into either)

Grate 1 sweet potato. Put the grated potato into a towel and wring it out to drain some of the excess moisture. Put it back in a bowl, and mix in one egg, and add flour. Add as much cinnamon as looks good to you, and stir it up until it's well-mixed.

Heat the oil in a cast iron skillet, until it's shimmering and hot. (I flick a few drops of water in it - if it sizzles angrily, it's ready.)

Scoop up the potato mixture by the spoonful and drop it into the oil. You can kind of smush it down a little to flatten it. Let it fry for a minute or two on one side, then flip it over and do the other. They're done when both sides look crispy and lightly browned.

Fun times with arthritis and Excel

Those of you who are unfortunate (and wonderfully patient) enough to listen to me complain about things, or respond to frantic phone calls that I'm dying of some bizarre food poisoning or rare disease I came across on the internet (okay, so I have a problem with googling things), know that for the past year and a half I've been treated to a diverse assortment of mysterious joint pain. Random arthritic knees that show up for a couple days and then vanish. (Yes, knees themselves appear and then disappear.) Fingers that are stiff in the morning. Or fingers that are inexplicably swollen and so I can't bend them and so when I hold the pole to stand on the bus all my fingers grip it except my middle finger that sticks out awkwardly straight so it looks like I'm flipping off everyone around me. Always good for a chuckle.

Anyhow, assorted docs in Chicago assured me they could find nothing wrong with me.

Well, they thought it was Lyme disease at first; despite the fact that I could think of approximately one-half of a very remote chance I'd been anywhere near deer in the past six months. Managed to rule out gout (oh boy!) and finally gave me a quasi-diagnosis of "Well, you're just hypermobile, and sometimes hypermobile people have unexplained joint pain. You should try some strength training." Right. I mean, okay, yes my fingers can bend backwards kind of strangely, and yes, I googled the living crap out of "Benign Joint Hypermobility Syndrome" and it's a real thing, but should I be lifting finger-weights? What?

So...here's what I am almost embarrassed to be proud of. I've got an appointment with a new rheumatologist down here. And, thanks to my time in the hedge fund industry plowing through spreadsheets, and my TFA indoctrination (data! data!! DATA!!!) . . . I have determined to solve my rheumatological mystery with Excel!!


Yes, I really made a graph. I am a huge loser. But when you have data over like, 18 months, and you can turn it into numbers (I rated how inconvenient/painful my joints were each day, and how many joints were involved)...how can you NOT want to make that into a graph? I need Edward Tufte to make me some beautiful, visual data.

Anyway. I am determined to get some doctor to give me something I can do so that I don't have weird swollen lumps of fluid popping up on the back of my hand (even if they're useful to gross out students with). At the very least, I will show up to my appointment with enough paper in hand that someone will have to diagnose me with something before I leave. I'm the obnoxious patient who gets made fun of on "House" because she read something on the internet and is insistent about it. Well, unless Hugh Laurie wants to be my doctor...I have no shame. I come equipped with records of symptoms and my diet and ... oh yeah! That's the other fun part!

I've been reading on the internet (I know, I know, where all the wacky alternative health crazies hang out) a lot of anecdotal evidence about people with rheumatoid arthritis (oh yes, this is my tentative self-diagnosis, by the way) have eliminated certain foods from their diet and been symptom-free for months, or years. Scared it into remission with leafy green or something. Some people think food intolerances can trigger autoimmune responses and blah blah blah, whatever. Point being, after Christmas, I am going to be trying an "elimination" diet of typically-hypoallergenic food (lamb, pears, salad, olive oil, and approximately four other things that don't go together...venison is okay, for example, and bananas) for a couple weeks to see if my symptoms go away. Then if they do, I reintroduce food groups back into my diet to see if anything triggers symptoms again. It's like a fun (okay, 'fun' might be an overstatement) puzzle, with lots of data and lists and tracking (TFA!! Get out of my head!!!) and other fun stuff. Like, am I a huge fan of lamb and pears? I mean, when I can't eat them with anything good like sugar or rice...not so much. I'm not going to like going carb- and dairy-free for a while. But. I also like having full use of all assorted limbs, thank you very much.

That will be the big adventure upon my return from break. To be honest, I need some joint or another to stay painful until then because otherwise I'm going to find the motivation hard to come by. I like food. A lot. All kinds of it. But I also like keeping track of data and trying to find patterns and being OCD about lists of things. And as mentioned before, I like my joints. Bring it, Dr. Something-Persian-sounding whose practice is all the way in Ballantyne. Brace yourself. I come with spreadsheets.
john mansfield elimination diet rheumatoid arthritis alternative health joint pain arthralgia hypoallergenic diet