​May 31
Going to work again-- I normally wouldn't today, but my boss's daughter is graduating from high school this morning.  Breakfast: lemon water, black coffee, smoothie made from carrot juice, hemp protein powder, peanut butter, canned pumpkin (left over from kid's vegan cookie baking), strawberries and kale.  The smoothie is delicious, but distinctly autumnal, between the carrot and pumpkin influences and the intensely-flavored kale.  Just like the farm lettuce, the farmer's market kale has a lot more flavor than its supermarket counterparts, even the organic ones.  Hopefully the same goes for its nutritional value.

This time I remember to dole out the chocolate tart to my coworkers.  At work, I manage a cup of decaf with half and half, and also drink a juice that was made in error by a new employee: cucumber, celery, and apple.  It tastes incredibly sweet.

At home again briefly in the afternoon about 2:45, I eat a reprise of my Saturday night diner dinner: big glob of tuna salad with cheese melted on top, some coleslaw, four big onion rings.  Also drink a cup of coffee with half and half.  Then I have to quickly rush over to the middle school with kid's cookies.  I have agreed to meet kid in front of the school at 3:20 (they will get there via the high school school bus).  At 3:16, kid texts me: Are you almost here?  This happens almost every time kid arrives someplace before I do, even if I am not late.  Do cell phones mean that kids cannot be patient for 4 minutes anymore?  Do they imagine that their texts will cause our cars to go faster?

A few errands, home again to finish that cup of coffee I started, make another cup, decaf this time.  Do some household bookkeeping.  Back out to the store.

Shopping (Co-op): 2 bunches bananas, organic lactose-free 2% milk, organic whole milk, Equal Exchange coffee, unbleached flour, cage-free brown eggs, 3 kiwis, 3 plums, whole cantaloupe, 2 lemons.  $43.

At 5:00-- or maybe closer to 5:30-- I start baking the "Birthday Cake" from Jennifer Reese's book.  This did not go incredibly well.  First of all, I forgot to put any salt in the cake.  So, while it was OK otherwise (texture, etc.), there was a noticeable lack of flavor.  Second, I don't get Reese's "White Mountain Frosting."  Why would you make frosting with egg whites?  And why didn't my frosting work?  It was way too runny.  Perhaps the problem comes with the instruction to "beat egg whites until foamy."  I feel like I have misjudged "foamy" before.  I know what "stiff" is, or "soft peaks," but in a literal sense egg whites become foamy almost immediately.  So, I stop beating them, start beating in the sugar syrup.  Maybe this is wrong.  Anyway, you can see from the photo how I ended up simply pouring the frosting over the top of the cake.  It never did do anything except become sticky, like a thin, slick layer of marshmallow fluff; certainly none of the crunchiness Reese mentioned ever came to pass.  At least I remembered to put salt in it.

​While the cake sat there in its puddle of sticky white glory, we ate some dinner: open-face egg salad and tomato on whole wheat bakery toast, garnished with parsley; sauteed farmer's market kohlrabi and shiitake mushrooms; sliced Gold Rush apples, also from the market.  Then I removed the cake from its puddle and onto a clean tray.  It looked somewhat less ridiculous there.

​For dessert, while watching a couple of old episodes of The Office, we ate slices of the cake with vanilla ice cream.  It was okay.  Not great.  Because of the salt.
 
June 1
Going to waitress again!  Third day in a row.  Technically I am only supposed to be working 2 days/week, but I have been home from my trip 8 days and have worked 5 of them.  Breakfast: lemon water, coffee with half and half, smoothie made from carrot juice, coconut milk from a carton, plain yogurt, canned pumpkin, hemp protein powder, avocado, strawberries, banana, and kale.  I discover that too much canned pumpkin in a smoothie tastes kind of weird.

I bring half of the imperfect, unsalted, sticky cake to work with me on a tray.  I don't actually witness anyone eating it, although some people claim that they did and it was good.

At work, I have decaf coffee with half and half, and about half a cup of regular at the end of the shift, while I am rolling silverware.  I also buy a side order of bulgogi to take home and use in dinner tonight.

Lunch at home, about 2:45: another cup of coffee with half and half.  The rest of the coleslaw (there was a lot of coleslaw!) from Saturday night. The rest of the asparagus pesto from Sunday night, with pickled shallots, eaten with Whole Foods tequila-lime tortilla chips.  Small dish of the Japanese snack mix I bought at HMart a while back.  After this I have, I think, another cup of decaf with half and half.  But it is difficult to say.  For some reason this afternoon is a blur.

At dinnertime, I try to create the omelet my husband has been craving: bulgogi and sweet potato.  First I cut up the sweet potatoes and roast them at a low temperature (350) in the oven so that they are soft but not excessively caramelized.  Then I make omelets with the sweet potatoes and the bulgogi I brought home from the restaurant.  On the side we have roasted asparagus from our CSA box (this week's batch was lovely, with incredibly thin stalks), and fruit consisting of CSA strawberries (amazing flavor), cantaloupe, and kiwi.  My husband is happy.

​During our after-dinner walk, we discuss his arrival time home from work.  This has a tendency to creep later and later.  Originally we agreed that dinnertime was at 7:00.  Over time, he began to arrive more like 7:15-7:30.  I can live with that.  However, lately the new normal has not been until 7:45-8:00.  By the time we eat the dinner-- even if I have it ready to go immediately on the table-- wash the dishes, and take our after-dinner walk, it is 9:00, or even later.  My kid goes to bed at 9:30 (they have to leave for the bus at 6:45 am), and I tend to go to sleep around 10-10:30.  This does not leave much of an evening for family time.  My husband agrees.  He will try to get home earlier.  On a positive note, no matter how late it is, we are committed-- without any need for discussion or negotiation-- to eating a family dinner together.  Even my kid does not complain about this, though they sometimes spoil their appetite with snacking.  So I should be grateful for a dinner tradition that remains strong.
​
At 9:15, after our walk, we all watch an episode of The Office together, and I eat my second allotted piece of low-sodium chocolate cake, giving bites to my loved ones on either side, who have already eaten theirs.

Some links for you.

​Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental
Jennifer Reese is always recommended reading.  But this personal post is one of her best, exploring marriage, food preferences, individual values, and the distressing phenomenon of the repetitive ephiphany, all with her usual humor and self-awareness.

Whole Foods Nailed for Unsanitary Conditions in Food Prep Plant
Earlier this spring, I tried to research the preparation locations and conditions of Whole Foods prepared foods.  Apparently the information I got was wrong, because 1) indeed, there are regional plants that make ready-to-eat foods for multiple stores, and 2) conditions there are not entirely wholesome.  Read for details of sanitation violations at their Massachusetts plant.

What 2000 Calories Looks Like
​Back to restaurant portion sizes.  The New York Times creates visuals for approximately 2000 calories worth of food (assumed to be one day's allotment) at a number of different restaurant chains, as well as at home.  Take-home message: cook your own.  ...Or (and I hate to even mention this), eat Subway.

The Precarious Reign of the Honeycrisp Apple
Strangely, this article is a sponsored post by Chase Bank.  I am not at all sure what their relationship might be to the topic, and it would interest me to understand it better.  Regardless, this exploration of the past, present and future of the Honeycrisp apple is a fascinating look at how food trends influence agricultural production and retail sales, and can ultimately end up destroying the quality of the very product they aimed to celebrate.

​May 25
Breakfast: coffee with half and half, smoothie made with prune juice, RiceDream horchata, hemp protein powder, avocado, perfectly ripe cantaloupe, a kiwi that I bought two weeks ago which never got ripe, and romaine lettuce.  This is "back to normal?"  But, yet, it feels good to be back here.

Lunch (after work, 2:45): Leftover chili, one fried egg.

Dinner (kinda late, prepared after I get home from yoga at 7:30): two pieces of Rudi's multigrain bread, with slices of swiss cheese melted on top.  Sauteed sugar snap peas, sweet peppers, and (farm!) asparagus.  Salad of romaine lettuce and grape tomatoes with balsamic vinaigrette.  Even though I was hungry two hours later, it again feels good to get back to eating more vegetables and fewer cookies.  The asparagus tasted extra-special; I don't think it was just our imagination.  Kid agreed.  It was a lot younger and fresher than what we tend to buy at the store.
Snacks: 3 other cups of coffee, 2 decaf, 1 regular, with half and half.  Two rice cakes when I had the munchies before bed.

May 26
Breakfast:  water with lemon juice in it, coffee with half and half, smoothie made from a little bit of RiceDream horchata, lemonade, hemp protein powder, avocado, cantaloupe, farm strawberries, and farm spinach.  This was one of my favorite smoothies ever.  The lemonade was an awesome base (although maybe I could achieve the same thing with less sugar by just adding some lemon juice??), the cantaloupe (as previously mentioned) was perfectly ripe, and the strawberries and spinach were super-fresh.  The spinach, especially, seemed to create a brighter, greener smoothie than bagged spinach.  Yum!

Lunch: An impromptu pasta dish made from a) some plain noodles my kid cooked while I was gone, which were now languishing in the back of the refrigerator, b) butter, c) sliced carrots, and d) a sprinkling of ancient feta cheese.  Plain, but surprisingly delicious.  Side of cantaloupe.

Shopping (HMart): quart of Dannon plain yogurt, 6 individual La Yogurts, Cheerios, tampons, 3 rolls toilet paper, can of coconut milk, pomegranate juice, green tea Pocky, craisins, Kasugai Mame mix (yum, Japanese junk food), ziti pasta, Jif natural peanut butter, package of house-made injulmi, package of house-made kim-bob, 3 lemons, bananas.  $53.

Dinner: I'm kind of full from all the sushi and injulmi (see snacks below), but eat one of what my husband and I tend to call "Indian burritos," which I'd asked him to put in the oven when he got home from work, 3 kim-bob, and 4 slices of orange.  Then I am really full.

Snacks: 3 other cups coffee, 1 regular, 2 decaf, with half and half.  A couple of pieces of swiss cheese before morning yoga class (when I arrived back at work after my trip, a customer had left me a block of swiss cheese, reportedly brought back from a trip to the midwest.  It had a post-it with my name on it, in his spidery old-man handwriting.  Advantages of working at a neighborhood joint for a long time).  At mall food court with kid, at 6 pm after grueling shopping trip: shared sushi combo, shared steamed dumplings.  Mall food court sushi was not that bad.  Approximately 7 pm, after stopping at HMart for groceries, while driving home: about half a dozen injulmi (kid ate the entire rest of the package, spoiling their dinner).  Small glass of lemonade before bed, because it is hot in the house and I am incredibly thirsty.
 
May 27
Breakfast: water with fresh lemon (how much better this is than bottled lemon, or lime, or plain water); coffee with half and half; smoothie made from lemonade, pomegranate juice, plain yogurt, hemp protein powder, peanut butter, cantaloupe, banana and spinach.

After breakfast and before yoga I make an extensive shopping list, consulting recipes and not just inventorying pantry basics.  So excited to get cooking again!  But worried that I have three different desserts in the works.  I'll need to make a plan to get rid of the excess.  (Seriously, a birthday cake?  But then I'll be finished with Jennifer Reese's book and I can start something new!  Maybe Indian curries.  They are probably healthier, sorry Jen.)

Lunch [photo: I eat yellow and orange foods.  2nd photo: whoops, I forgot the toast!]: baby carrots, mini sweet peppers, Rudi's multigrain toast with butter and local strawberry-rhubarb jam, orange, banana, Japanese snack mix.

​Shopping (Whole Foods): coffee filters, coconut oil, instant espresso, agave syrup, carrot juice, 4 lbs. spinach (!), canola oil, whole wheat pita breads, oats, cage-free brown eggs, sugar, house-made tequila-lime corn chips, unsalted butter, cream cheese, lip balm, whole wheat boule, whole-grain dijon mustard, 2 lbs. yellow onions, dried chickpeas, vegan dark chocolate chips, pint of vanilla ice cream, sliced almonds, asparagus, 3 peaches, 3 avocados, guacamole, 2 cans cat food, organic strawberries, organic tomatoes.  $132.

Dinner: A couple of suggestions made by our CSA farmer regarding the use of this week's vegetables resulted in the following meal: ziti pasta, with bright green ziti-shaped chunks of fresh onion scape, plus a few shiitake mushrooms, and served with fresh oregano pesto (oregano, almonds, parmesan, olive oil, garlic).  Side salad of farm lettuce with sweet peppers and balsamic vinaigrette.  It would never have occurred to me to make oregano pesto-- don't I have to cook the leaves first, I thought, won't they be fuzzy?--  but it was absolutely fine.  I only ate a small amount of pasta, then ate a little more before bed.

​Snacks: cup of peppermint tea, 2 cups of coffee (1 regular, 1 decaf) with half and half.  A bunch of Whole Foods house-made tortilla chips and some guacamole, first while driving home in the car after shopping and then after unpacking the groceries.  I like those chips a lot, but more to the point I was starving.  However, it is so hot outside and in the house that my stomach starts cramping up and I don't feel like eating, anymore.  93 degrees.  Small dish of additional pasta before bed, as previously mentioned-- I got hungrier once it started to cool off.

Dear reader, I have failed you.  If there is any point at all to so navel-gazing a project, it is at least accuracy and thoroughness.  And yet this is a post about the times in life when things fall apart for no good reason.  Nobody died.  I didn't lose my job or my relationship or my mind.  And yet, for a solid 3 weeks (and I honestly thought it was more) I've been crawling along at the bare minimum of functionality, and the food diary, though not the first thing to go, ended up a casualty.  It's not a matter of being behind in arranging my notes and adding photos.  There are no notes, and (virtually) no photos.  I just stopped.
​
What happened, more or less, was this:

I continued to be sick and we did not drive to Massachusetts on Tuesday Mar. 29 as I had hoped.  The whole trip was canceled, a disappointment to everybody.  It was, however, the correct decision.  On Wednesday I went to the urgent care and was immediately diagnosed with strep throat.  I believe it was overnight Wednesday that I was awakened by my kid at 2 am.  They were freaking out.  They had had a sudden vomiting episode in the bathroom, made a mess, attempted to clean it up and made things worse.  And they were dizzy and half-asleep.  I, too, was dizzy and half-asleep, but after a few moments was able to mostly clean up and then go sit with the kid.  Thus began my dear kid's encounter with the same apparent stomach bug that my husband had had on Sunday.

It was strange: I had strep and they seemed to have some kind of GI thing, but none of us ended up catching what the others had.  I never started vomiting (to my great surprise and delight) and nobody else had much of a sore throat.  It didn't really make sense.  Can strep cause only vomiting and fever, with no throat or respiratory symptoms to speak of?  Internet research suggested this was unlikely, especially to occur in two people in a single household.

While we were home sick together all week long, my kid and I spent some quality time with each other.  We played Magic.  We watched TV.  We hung out side by side with our separate electronic devices or books.  When eventually my kid tired of spending all their time with Mom, and retired mostly to their room, I felt strangely bereft.  First of all, I discovered I was still capable of becoming just as obsessed with Magic as I was when I played with my foster son a dozen years ago.  Now kid didn't want to play anymore (and hasn't since)?  What a dork I am.  I am a 44-year-old mom.  WTF. 

Secondly, and more important: the awareness that there are only three more years before kid graduates from high school started hitting me hard.  I enjoy my kid's company so much.  I will miss them so, so much when they do not live with me anymore.  Yes, I know we will continue to have a close relationship, and matter to one another, and so on and so forth.  How often do I talk with my mother on the phone?-- somewhere between twice a week and once every three weeks, depending on circumstances.  How often do I see her?-- probably two or three times a year, on average.  There are little email exchanges, mostly prompted by her, to which I return replies remarkable mainly for their brevity.  Can I really expect much different from my kid?  That is not the same, at all, as living with someone and hanging out with them every day.  So shut up, you empty nesters who've already processed all this and say it will be fine.  It is not fine.  I have no idea who I will be when the day comes that I am no longer A.'s mom first and foremost.  That is painful and scary.

A beautiful post on the same topic from Jennifer Reese, who besides being the author of a frequently cited book, is also one of my favorite bloggers. 

The abovementioned emotions are likely why the ensuing two weeks also went all to hell, at least initially.  By April 6 or so, I was feeling pretty much completely recovered from my strep, but unable to shake the inertia and low energy state that had taken hold during a week of staying home and feeling sick and sad.  I did the things I absolutely had to do: went to work my two days/week, made box lunches and family dinner, washed the dishes, purchased food when necessary, drove my kid around to appointments and rehearsals.  My husband would probably point out that all this is not nothing.  I suppose it isn't.  But it felt like nothing.  For instance, on April 3, I cooked a real dinner for my family for the first time in over a week, and wrote the following in the diary (the only entry in those three weeks, presented in its entirety):

4/3
I'm finally back to doing my job.  But then I'm immediately struck with doubt.  Is it an important job?  Does anybody actually give a fuck?
​
In all the long, in-between stretches when I was doing none of these required things, I was holed up in my bed, playing Civilization on the computer or reading J.K. Rowling's (oops, I mean Robert Galbraith's) "new" Cormoran Strike detective series.  Well, they are new to me.  I love them.  Which should not be a surprise, since I love Rowling and I love mysteries, but it did come as a surprise.  What a treat to read that she plans to keep writing them "indefinitely!"

Oh, the other thing that I did was get my husband and I set up to start our Clean Gut diet.  We had to wait a week longer to get started than I had planned, because it seemed pointless to attempt gut biota repair while I was simultaneously taking antibiotics.  I finished the antibiotics on the morning of April 9 (my dad's birthday, which I didn't get around to acknowledging, because of the inertia.  If you knew my dad, and the fact that he almost always forgets my birthday, this would not seem as terrible as it sounds.  But I still felt guilty about it).  We started the intro diet on Sunday, April 10.  Basically, the Clean Gut diet allows most meats (not processed stuff); eggs; all vegetables except really starchy things like potatoes; berries; nuts; lentils and peas; and quinoa.  It does not allow: Sugar.  All grains except quinoa (not even rice, dammit).  All fruit except berries.  Dairy.  Soy and other beans.  Bacon.  :(  Potatoes.  Coffee.  It's extremely low-carb and not easy.

So, for three days we simply followed the dietary guidelines, in order to get used to the new way of eating.  It wasn't so bad.  On the fourth day, April 13, we began the cleanse protocol, which involves a morning shake, a regular lunch adhering to the diet, and a big dinner salad.  Also a bunch of supplements: B-complex vitamins, digestive enzymes, probiotics, antimicrobials (and, no, I don't really understand how those last two do not, to some extent, negate one another).  By that evening, I began to feel queasy and headachy and sick.  I did some research and decided we were taking too many of the B-vitamins, cut back.  The next afternoon and evening, the 14th, I felt the same, only worse.   Maybe even one B-vitamin was too much?  Maybe it was the probiotics?  I decided to cut out all the supplements (for myself; my husband was fine) and then reintroduce them one by one.  On the 15th, taking nothing, I mostly felt better, but still developed a bad headache late in the evening.  Made it through the 16th, despite a long day at work and grocery shopping in the early evening, without any particular suffering.  Time to try the B-vitamin again.  I took it on the 17th-- okay.  Again on the 18th-- okay.  On the 19th (yesterday, as of this writing), I added two doses of the mega-probiotic pill, my second suspected culprit for the nausea and headaches.  So far, so good.  We'll see what happens.

Clean Gut requires a fair amount of organization.  First, when you are on an extremely restricted diet where many things are off-limits, you have to shop often and shop carefully, in order to ensure that your limited variety of staple foods are well-stocked at home.  Then there is the prepping.  My first-thing-in-the-morning routine, always somewhat elaborate, has now ballooned to 45 minutes or longer.  1) feed cat.  2) take my one prescription med.  3) see if there are any boiled eggs left in the refrigerator and, if not, boil a few.  4) pour tall glasses of water for my husband and I, and squeeze half a lemon into each (another detail of the Clean Gut protocol).  5) make a big pot of green tea.  6) Make box lunches for my husband and kid.  Since they both have wildly different dietary requirements now (did I mention that kid has become a pescatarian?), this takes some concentration.  7) Make a double-batch of breakfast shake for my husband and I, generally consisting of some kind of liquid such as almond milk, a little bit of hemp protein powder, an added fat such as coconut, nut butter, or avocado, some berries, and a few handfuls of greens.  8) dispense supplements.

The dinner salad is labor-intensive too, given that one is not supposed to snack after dinner or overnight: the salad itself must be full of enough calories and protein to qualify as a hearty meal.  A base of mixed salad greens/herbs and various raw vegetables can be supplemented with meats, nuts or seeds, boiled egg, avocado, and-- my favorite add-on lately-- roasted vegetables, which bring out the sweetness we desperately crave.  So around 6:15 you can find me going into the kitchen and starting some broccoli or squash or brussels sprouts to roast in the oven, perhaps cooking some chicken or steak or (last night) lamb kofta, maybe boiling some frozen peas or artichoke hearts... and then assembling large salads out of this most-of-a-meal that I have already created.  They are really very satisfying. 

Oh, and my husband-- for whose sake I undertook this project in the first place-- is doing very well on the diet.  He has not felt sick at all and has had remarkable self-discipline.  On certain days he feels very hungry, and then I try to up the calories and protein that we're providing, and he'll go buy a little bag of nuts at the store.  He's a big man and he needs to eat more than I do.  But, overall, I am very pleased that this process seems to be working well for him.  He even loves the morning shakes, after looking askance at the first one.

So, reader, I am finally ready to return to you, with improved health, recovering spirit, and clean gut.  I hope that we can enjoy our time together and try new experiments.  Here are the few photos I managed to take during my hibernation (probably also on April 3; note the extensive documentation regarding finishing up our boiled Easter eggs):