CombODDnation: Chicken and Rice Simple Bake

This is so simple, and such old hat to me, I make this every week!  I don't usually even think of these sorts of weekly mundanes as worth posting, until I get to chatting with a friend, and here we go.

You need:

Brown Rice

Any form of vegetable

Any cut of chicken (Yummiest with something bone-in-skin-on)

Water

(Ginger root is a special treat in this, but I was out of that today.)

Preheat oven to 410 degrees Fahrenheit.  

(Re: heat, I would say 425, but I just learned that some of the off-brand glass bakeware can only withstand temperatures to a max of 425, and I don't want to risk that.  So many people have had glass bakeware shatter on them recently.)

Take any size pirex or pan.  Yes, really any size.  Make sure your chicken will fit in it, that's all.  Here I'm using my new bake-able tupperware container, it's pretty deep, but usually I use a 9x11 inch.

Start by covering the bottom of the pan with a thin layer of brown rice like so.  This is about a 1/4 inch deep, that amount or less is good.  

(I have used baby lima beans for this step instead of the rice, and that is also fabulous.)

 Then put your vegetables on top of the rice, it helps to chop them to chunks that are kinda close to bite size.

If you're adding ginger root, this is the time to do it.  Chop the root up to small peices, like the size of a pencil eraser or so, and put that on top.  Not shown, because like I said, I don't have ginger root today.

Put your cut of chicken on top of all of this.  Here we have a half chicken.
Normally I just get the family sized pack of chicken thighs because that lasts me for every lunch for the whole week, allowing me to take lunch in just once on Monday, stick it in the fridge, and have a little every day.  However this week, I'm on winter recess, so packing lunch isn't on my chore list!

Fill water into this until the water just touches the bottom of the chicken cut.

Put in the oven at 410 degrees.
In a shallower pan, adding 2 more cups of water half way in to the cooking time is helpful.  In a deeper pan like this, that isn't necessary.

Bake for an hour and a half to two hours, skin will be crispy brown and the meat will be firm.  (Other signs of it being done are the juices all running clear when pricked with a fork, and a meet thermometer registering at 175 degrees.)

Crispier than what's shown is okay, too.  If you don't have a meat thermometer, then crispier is recommended.

Let cool enough that you're not going to burn your mouth, and dig in!  The meat will just fall right off the bone.

And now I'll help you go a-wandering to find some other... 

Dinner-type recipes I've posted:

Crock Pot Apple Chicken

Beet Chicken Roast

Sweet Pumpkin Beef

Lamb Stew

Breakfast-type recipes I've posted:

Flip-spice eggs

Sausage foldovers

Baby Tomato Sausage

Oopsie, I'm disorganized, apparently.

I wrote and made a successful carrot cake.  Took all the pictures, served it to rave reviews at a party, AND lost the recipe notes.  Guess I'll have to make it again and see how I do just based on following the pictures!  Being that I was able to make it in just one try on the first effort, it seems very likely that photographs ought to be sufficient for subsequent success.  DERP!

CombODDnation: Lamb stew for remembering Grandmother

I think I actually remember grandma Ruth. And this happened all because the grocery store was selling really cheep lamb breast and I decided to try something new. Last Friday I really heated my house up, it was way too warm for this sort of cooking. But as it started to smell yummy, like it was getting close to done, I started thinking it was a familiar smell. Very distantly familiar.

I made a sort of irish stew. It's made basically by cubing cheep lamb parts (in this case, lamb breast I'd picked up for less than a dollar a pound) and a bunch of vegetables in a tomato stock. I read the "about" section lamb in the joy of cooking, and read all of the braised lamb recipes based on the cut of meat I had.  That usually gives me enough background information to go ahead and invent something different.

Smells are wonderful memory joggers.

It smelled like helping in the kitchen, like a grandmother, but not like the grandmother I grew up with. It was a little confusing at first.

Then, as the stew got closer and closer to done, it started to smell like being shorter than tomato plants, looking up at the bottoms of ripe tomatoes on the vine, like being carried by a woman who was showing me plants, and like standing on a tall bench to be able to reach the counter and then sitting in a booster seat so I could reach the dining room table. It was becoming obvious this was a very early memory.

But could it be?

There are pictures of me on a visit to longisland, with Ruth holding me, and grandfather raking some fallen leaves, when I was not quite two years old. It looks like it was late September, from the pictures, and I have a tiny red jacket.

Maybe it could be.

I tasted the stew, and it tastes like understanding for the very first time that food can come from the ground, like someone taking a lot of time to really show me how plants are in the ground, how good garden dirt crumbles, and how plants can make food, how bits of plants can go in the compost and make more dirt, and then later, how the garden food can be made into something yummy.

In my memory, eating this soup that we made was the very first time I truly understood that what I was eating was something that was grown and cared for in somebody's back yard. I was sitting in my booster seat, I had a little glass of milk off to one side, and I was kicking my chubby little legs, and thinking about how awesome my grandmother was for showing me all of that.

Could that be Ruth? Is it possible I might actually remember her? Her sister thinks it could be, Barbara says Ruth loved showing things to children, and had a vegitable garden on long island, though she can't recall if there was compost. Her daughter thinks it could be, too, Mary says Ruth made amazing stews. I sure hope so, I hope I remember her, even if it's just a few short moments of memory.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I didn't take pictures while I made this. I wasn't really thinking it would be worth a share, I expected this to turn out mediocre at best. Turned out fantastic by surprise, so I wrote it all down for you, sorry to be lacking pictures. Here's the recipe for grandmother memory inducing stew.

     With approx 2lbs of lamb breast -
           this will be inexpensive meat when available,
           the breast meat is sometimes discarded as it
           is considered inferior quality with lamb.

Cut any skin away from the lamb breast, and cut  the meat into 1 inch cubes.
Prep a very large and deep skillet (check my out skillet prepping tips).
Brown the meat for 10-15 minutes. Do not drain fats.

Add to the skillet:
     3-4 yellow onions, cut into chunks
     1/2 cup carrot pieces cut to bite size
     Celery - cut half a bundle into bite size peices
Simmer covered for 15-20 minutes on medium low heat.

Add to the skillet:
     16 oz tomato sauce
     2 cups water
     One yellow squash, cut to 1 inch cubes
Simmer covered for additional 30-40 minutes.

Cool, and serve.

HealthNote: Celiac before diagnosis

I kinda feel like inventing a carrot-cashew-coconut cake for my birthday.  I just wish I had time right now.  So for your enjoyment and my future research, I'm just going to set down this idea sheet I found, I'm going to set it riiight here.  Feel free to go wonder off and enjoy.  Many of those listed at that link are vegan, too, however mine certainly won't be.  I'll let you know if I do go and make that invention.

Today, I'm thinking about the F.A.Q. for people with celiac disease.  The list is pretty common.  I field a few particular questions quite frequently.
-What happens if I get gluten?
-Is it any better now?
-How did I figure out what was going wrong? or How do they diagnose?
-What was it like before?

There are of course a litany of other questions, many of which annoy me, and many more very interesting ones that are just less common.  Perhaps at some point I should do a "What not to say to a person with Celiac."  Hehe.  And actually, it might also be a helpful thing to do a "What I probably should say when I feel like panicking or flipping out about food," even though I'm still not particularly great at that latter point myself; I do remember when I was a good deal worse at it, so at least I've improved from baseline.

But anyway, today I'm going to look at that last question:
What was it like before?

I was 27 when I figured out I had Celiac disease, and my health had reached a state of collapse.

Just for clarity,  I am indeed about to describe some detail of a digestive health crisis.  If you'd rather not think about such things, now would be the time to go looking for something else.  Here is my most popular recipe, for your distraction-enjoyment.

And if you're still with me, I think it's safe to assume you're genuinely curious, so let's move on.

When I think about it, I think I've always been like this.  I just didn't know it.  Looking at pictures and home video, my stomach was already protruding when I was a little girl, not like the other girls.  I was a gawky skinny little kid, but with a stomach that stuck out.  When I was 11 and fell rollerskating, the chiropractor was always telling me I had to stand up straight or it would hurt my lower back, but he didn't understand when I told him it hurt to stand up straight.  Using my abdominal muscles was painful, so standing up straight wasn't really an option.  My stomach was swollen all that time, but I didn't know any different.  When I first started healing from Celiac, I suddenly started to feel healthier than I had when I remembered feeling when I was 4.

The first time I remember vomiting from eating very much of a particular food, I think I was 14, and I know it was popcorn.  I had eaten most of the popcorn myself, and I threw up.  That seemed normal enough at the time, I had eaten a lot of popcorn all at once.  What made it unusual, what made this stand out to me, was that this occasion was only the 3rd time in my life that I had ever thrown up, and I wasn't sick.  My stomach could really take a beating, and here it was rebelling strongly against something as simple as too much popcorn.

At the age of 22 I was "diagnosed" with irritable bowl syndrome.  My PCP listened to my complaints of stomach discomfort and recurrent severe digestive upset, and without checking on anything, just told me I had irritable bowl syndrome.  I cut a progression of foods from my diet, entirely, because it was clear I just couldn't handle them any more.  Red potatoes were a definite recipe for being up vomiting all night, then later the rest of the kinds of potatoes caused either vomiting, or a sequence of painful constipation followed by terrible diarrhea.  Popcorn still made me vomit, too.

By the time I was 24, foods that caused me problems were fitting into broad categories.  Heavy starches would make me vomit.  High fiber caused muscle spasms, painful cramping, and prolonged diarrhea.  Fatty meats resulted in a prolonged burning sensation along with spasms during digestion that lasted nearly a day and was painful enough to prevent sleep.  Dry, textured foods (such as nuts, popcorn, seeds, etc) caused all of the above, simultaneously.  The list of foods I could eat comfortably was becoming very limited.  I tried elimination of all of the 9 listed food allergens, just to see if anything would help.  Medical advice continued to be: stop eating the foods that are causing you these problems.  But now they were also saying: take a multi-vitamin, because you're really going to need it.  Too bad that multivitamin just went straight through me completely undigested.  I started crushing my multivitamins and putting them in orange juice.

Through all this, I was losing muscle mass and amassing fat.  I was weak, perpetually exhausted, and since my body was largely unable to get the nutrients it needed to survive, it was doing the only thing it knew how to do under the circumstances, which was store as much fat for nutrient use as it could manage.

By age 25, digestion was no longer my only concern.  I had my first asthma attack of my life that year.  Then I had several more.  I had developed late-onset allergic asthma.

As you might imagine, I was getting pretty desperate to try anything.  I was 27, and on my way to visit a friend in Baltimore, when my travel companion said to me, "Have you ever heard of gluten?"  I had not.  I was willing to give anything a try.

Fortune saw fit that this same friend soon saw and snagged a free pamphlet in a Baltimore grocery store that had a big bold header that just said, "What is Gluten?"  The trifold explained well, including the sneaky places that gluten can be found in ingredient lists, such as modified food starch, carmel color, and malt flavor.

The year was 2008.  It was October.  I brought that pamphlet home, and got started on the most detail oriented dietary change experiment I'd ever undertaken.  Within a few days I knew I was finally on the right path, within a couple weeks I could hardly believe how good I felt.  I gradually started reintroducing all the other foods I had cut, successfully.  It was a rocky road of recovery, for sure.  I do still have mild discomfort with potato starch and can't handle soy solids very well, but that's okay.  As my intestines healed from the damage, slowly my setbacks became less severe.  Now, five years later, my health is feeling pretty fantastic to me!

HealthNote: Celiac and the damage done

I'm all proud I have a dent down the middle of my tummy now.  It's a soft dent, but hey, it's there!  I'm excited about this.

So I noticed an anomaly in my abdominal muscles last week.  Then a couple more.  All on the left side.  The right side seems to be fine.  I spent some time inspecting my muscles, and finding that just above my hip bone there's about a 2 inch tear in the muscle.  Just below the ribs, a smaller one, and to the left of the belly button, just a very small one.  All on the left abdominal wall.

And because I curiously poked at these, determining my muscles were indeed torn in those places, afterward my abdomen was swollen for 5 days.

(My chiropractor is now keeping an eye on it, he's a soft tissue specialist.)

Honestly, I'm not too surprised I poked myself enough for it to swell up for several days - I don't seem to have a very good sense of pain.  I've figured myself "fine" on more than one emergency occasion.  I've many times failed to react to my own injuries with anything more than an after-the-fact "Oh, wow, that's gross, anybody know where a first aide kit is?" or an "Oh dear, this might be a problem."

But the point is, Celiac disease has torn me up.  Literally.  

People often ask me what will happen if I get gluten.

When I get gluten, my abdomen swells up.  I consider this a blessing - a swollen stomach is not going to immediately kill me.  I don't need to carry an epi-pen, I don't have to rush to the hospital.  This is good.  But, the amount of swelling can be severe.  We're talking muscle distension, and within two hours, my abdomen can swell such that it is visually similar to the size of 6 month partum.  It is very painful.

My intestines have healed a lot.  My swelling reaction is not nearly as frequent as it once was.  For example, I can get through a 'wrong kind of carmel coloring' goof-up with only minor digestive complaints.  If you aren't familiar with celiac damage, here's a nice, scientific, non-icky description for you.  And if you don't feel like reading that, the simple explanation is that the more wheat/gluten I had (before I knew what was wrong with me) the more my upper intestines were bleeding.  I've healed quite a bit, the fact that I can get through a minor food oops relatively comfortably is a major triumph.

I think the abdominal tears were probably a result of my healing process.  When I first eliminated gluten from my diet, my body was starting to get used to being not swollen, but was still so sensitive to the slightest thing, and I also was still learning how to get my diet right, extreme swelling flares were still relatively frequent.  I think that is the time when my stomach muscles would have torn.  I did have to go to the ER once for abdominal pain during that time, and they never really figured out what was wrong, and I ended up prescribed for pelvic floor physical therapy to re-build the muscles that didn't know how to function without the swelling that had always been there.  That episode was 3 years ago.  And things have been mostly well since then.  The therapy was no fun to do, but was tremendously helpful.  

So I'm hoping this is just something that is still trying to heal and with a little TLC just won't give me any further problems.  

And, clearly, I shouldn't poke it.

Meowscellaney: complications of becoming a fitness geek

It's true.  I did.  I turned into a fitness geek during my period of absence from this blog.  (Amazing, really, because, do you remember how unhealthy celiac disease had made me by 2008?  Oddly, I didn't seem to have made a post on that in this blog - thought I had, must have been in my hotmail one back in the day - okay, a challenge to write more! And challenge met, you can read it here.)

Fitness Geek is the correct term for how I feel about this.  I think so.  Definitely.  The process itself really fascinates me.  I can totally dork-out about it.  And it's been kinda scary, and I fuss about it.

It all started with physical therapy for having broken my arm last year.  Subsequent to that, I set a goal to be able to once again lift the kayak onto the roof of my car last year.  Broke my arm in February (hairline through the greater tuberocity, which is the part of the arm bone where all the muscles connect to the shoulder socket).  By June I was kayaking again, transporting, lifting the boat, the whole deal.  By late July, I was kayaking 10 mile trips and still lifting the kayak onto the car after the trip.  And this was all very exciting.

Hitting the gym for the physical therapy every week encouraged me to look into other exercises, equipment, circuits, which all lead to visible differences in my body composition.  Which just keeps fascinating me.  I started making up my own words for stuff and researching and other such whatnot.

I continued through the winter on my other sport - cross country skiing.  That's the flat-ground sort of skiing, for those unfamiliar.  Laurel Highlands has some wonderfully athletically challenging trails with hills, steep climbs, scenic trails through rolling hills of trees atop mountains, crest views, just gorgeous.

The process of changing my body has been an adventure, a bit of a rocky adventure at times.
A visit to the gym is over an hour for me, 1-2 times a week.  Core to start, lower body on the machines, free weights for upper body, then core again to finish.  I'm building a great bit of muscle.  It's been both fascinating and scary.  I would not put the word wonderful in attachment with any of it.  There's a grittier side of all this hardly anyone ever talks about.  I want to talk about it.  Cuz it's not all endorphins and sunshine, not by a long shot.

Why don't we talk about the difficulties of the fitness process?  I mean, I think we could learn a lot from each other.  I've had struggles of it, and oddly... ones I don't hear anybody else talking about.  So, I'm going to mark out the highlights here.

Firstly,
My body hasn't looked like this since... the worst time in my life.
Just before my parents split, when I was stuck, when physical abuse was a relatively regular part of my life, I was thin.  I was thin for all of that chapter of my life.  Then my parents split and I took up a lot of home duties to support our smaller family unit in continuing to function, and being at home, doing cooking and such, these new duties resulted in my life being much more sedentary and made it easier to just be eating at any time.  I gained 35 pounds in the first 4 months of my better life situation.

I really liked my body before I started hitting the gym last year.  Loved it, actually!  Succeeding at fitness meant seeing the body type I remembered from my darkest times in life start to resurface.  The body shape I used to see in the mirror when I hated my life, seeing that return was difficult.  I wanted to quit.  Catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror could at any moment remind me of unhappy memories.  The only thing that kept me at it, through this, was setting new strength goals.  Focusing on being able to do things I wanted to do, like lift a kayak onto my car roof after a 10 mile paddle, helped me see my love for myself, gave me goals that were about my life and interests instead of my body.  It helped me through.

Am I losing weight?  No.
Everyone asked at first.  I started at 155 pounds.  I'm now smaller, much stronger, slimmer, and I'm 168 right now.  I'm not losing weight at all.  I'm gaining.  Not the same thing.  We totally need a new phrase for this.
I'm slimming down, and, yeah, is looking good on me.
I looked good before, and I tire of the question.  My body is not a object, it's an aspect of my full self.  I didn't consent to objectifying questions about my body.  Even if they are compliments, even if it is confirming my own assessment from looking in the mirror myself.  If people were asking me if I were getting healthier, asking about that rather than asking if my ass was smaller; that would have been nicer.  But they were inquiring specifically to the cultural-attractiveness-value of my physical appearance.  This was a little extra difficult because seeing myself looking thinner had that historic painfulness associated with it at first.  I didn't want my coworkers to tell me how great I looked, or squeeze my butt cheeks while I was washing out my bowl in the kitchenette.  Yeah.  That happened.  In an academic office.  Seriously.  Realizing how much attention and comment the act of starting to change my body composition was getting from those who see me daily- coworkers, family, strangers who have 'seen me around,' etc: it's something I found unsettling.  It's my body, if I want to work on changes without there being a fuss, I probably should have non-fuss as an available option.  In reality, low profile for this was not possible.

Instead, I deflected.  I answered that I was "losing size and gaining weight" and watched the faces turn to utter confusion.  "How is that possible?"  This turned the conversation onto the topic of fitness misconceptions and off the topic of my body being an object that was okay to publicly question and discuss.  This worked for me, I felt much better with this.  And, I also started carrying things in my back pockets... because it was harder to tell if my ass was changing shape when my wallet, phone, and keys were hanging out in the same space and obscuring the view.

Has anyone ever told you that your fitness progress is making them feel bad?
Apparently this is a thing.  The guy that prompted this book review made such comments, and I listened.  I stopped.  That was different because I was scared.  But even in better situations, it still feels crappy hearing that.  It's still hard to talk to people who express such thoughts.  This is where I bring in and loudly express my exuberant belief that "strong is sexy" without respect to body type.  Skinny tiny women who are strong and healthy, muscle bound body builder ladies, or gorgeous ample energetic curvy women - it's all completely amazing and sexy.  And I'll tell that to anyone who says my choices about my own body are "making them feel bad."  I'll tell them all about how sexy women are - of all body types - until that person is too uncomfortable to stick around... or until they start to appreciate their own body a little better.  Whichever comes first.

Tissue is interesting.  Does strange things.  Doesn't like changing.
Skin, fat, muscle, these all react to composition changes in unique ways.  I'm pretty darned sure it's very very different on everyone.  Though I think I can universally say that thinning out won't give anyone's body an airbrushed look.  Only airbrushes imbue the airbrushed look.  Real life isn't going to be picture perfect, and for me this was a specific list of things to grapple with.

I spontaneously decided one day to call that particular moment when skin and muscle first meet, the moment when there's all of a sudden no fat dividing some small spot in the skin from the muscle tissue, I decided to call it "touch-down."  And for me, these moments are super awkward looking at first.  Funny puckers, off-centered-ness, unnatural looking contours.  They work themselves out in time, tension of asymmetry pulls things into the proper placement eventually, and smooths out the odd angles.  Eventually.

Skin that's been part of a fold or crease for a long time doesn't like adapting to consistent exposure to air, either.  Acne, irritation, and red lines can take a long time to diminish.  I think of these marks as a form of measurable proof of how much I've accomplished, which helps for me.

Metabolism takes effect in unusual patterns, too.  Muscle mass, for me, builds before fat loss really starts to take hold in reaction to the muscle metabolism boost.  This means that I often get bigger before I get smaller.  Makes it a bit of a rollercoaster of sizing.  Plus skin doesn't always have the elasticity one might hope for.  Bicycle short wearing days here and there helped put some perk back in my skin when perk wasn't happening on its own.  All of it is a process.

All of this contributes to moments when I'd look at my outcomes in the mirror and feel weird about it.  I decided to be fascinated by the awkward moments.  That was the best answer for me.  It turned out it was very fascinating to see the changes settle in over time as new changes took on the awkward look instead.

Some changes are very personal.
This, I'm going to address scientifically, because it's both taboo and very personal.  Something that ought to be private, definitely.
So I'll take scientific wording as my ally for this topic.
Females may find that changes in body composition include changes to intimate anatomy.  Smaller bras may be required to maintain proper support, as you might expect.  Sensation and sensitivity may also change.    There's no gentle way to explain an additional component, which is that labia lose fat, too, which can change, though not necessarily improve, sensations with intimate touch.  You may find a need to re-learn your body as a result of this process.

This information is uncomfortable to think about, isn't it?
I guess that's why I never hear anyone talk about it.  Have you had deterrents to healthy behavior that were hard to talk about or weirded you out?  Have you already found your own examples of how the romanticized idea of fitness perpetuated in our culture are just plain inaccurate?  Do you have your own input, your own struggles that have made pursuing a fitness goal problematic?

You're beautiful right now.  Believe that, please try.  Strong is sexy, but what's even sexier is happiness.

AND I want to do a writing about how awesome the process of fitness is, too.  Because it's also awesome.  In addition to awkward and uncomfortable, also awesome.  It's totally a mixed bag.  Plus a writing about how sick I used to be before the gluten free diet, now that I realize this is apparently missing... that couldn't hurt, I guess.

I've forgotten what wheat products ever tasted like.  I've forgotten how to think that the smell of wheaty products is anything other than icky.  I may be losing my touch for creating recipes due to lack of base perspective!  So I think I'll take a short turn to get myself back on the active here at the Glutenless Garden.  A turn to fitness discussion for a bit.  Cuz why not.