Home-Made Reality

A woman alone in her kitchen cooking for no one except herself. This is not what people think about when they think about cooking. The celebrated ideal is cooking fabulous food and inviting over all your friends to enjoy the food together. How many times have I felt horrible about not being able to please other people with my recipes? 100? 1000? In my own world, where it's just me and my body and my kitchen, it has been a monumental accomplishment to learn to cook for myself. Monumental, glacial migrating, intergalactic, stupendous, epic, life altering achievement.

A lot of factors have contributed to my not cooking for other people. 1. Most people, even if they prefer healthy or home-made food to processed or uber-seasoned, still want a certain level of sophistication or complexity in a dish prepared by someone else. 2. I'm not a genius at cooking. 3. My super sensitive body has never tolerated soy sauce, wine, cheese, MSG, teriyaki, horseradish, sugar, or dried fruit, and at various periods I have also had to forgo tomatoes, potatoes, dried herbs, garlic of any kind, fruit, vinegre, yeast, and salt.

I have struggled in my life to find and honor my own voice, and keep it from getting drowned out by other peoples' voices and the voice of the world. In my kitchen, the sky is blue, and I value simplicity, freshness, and abstaining from anything and everything necessary to heal my body. I don't need to be the girl that throws dinner parties, and I don't need to be the girl whose nail soup makes people swoon, and my boyfriend doesn't need a mom-girlfriend, he needs a healthy happy partner.

My voice in the kitchen has been feeding my body and my soul for quite awhile now. I would like to thank myself for all the hard work and improvement in cooking. I choose to no longer be swayed by whatever weirdness other people have with food. I know what works for me and I know how to please myself. I'm not alone. I have centuries of other cooks behind me, and it's my own decision to count myself among them, and not excluded just because my voice is different.

Home-made fish sticks are what turned this tide. Last night I bit into a bite size piece of tilapia battered with a mixture of ground pine nuts, arrowroot starch, flax meal, and dry mustard powder, and fried in walnut oil. I didn't even mean to make a fish stick, it was an accident. I didn't even know I missed fish sticks. But a fish stick is what is was, and it was way better than the ones from the box. I whine sometimes about not getting to eat processed food, complex, and uber-seasoned food, but slowly and surely I really am learning to prefer better food.

I am my own chef

This morning for breakfast I crushed 7-8 brazil nuts and 2 walnuts together and stirred in stevia, cinnamon and flax oil. Then I cut up a banana and threw it in. It was super yummy. It was all the warm fuzzy of banana nut bread.

The salads I've been making with savoy cabbage give me a similar warm fuzzy about a salad my mom used to make. My mom's salad was savoy cabbage thinly sliced with cubed chicken, crushed ramen noodles, roasted slivered almonds, and a sweet but tangy dressing whose contents I don't remember. My salad is just savoy cabbage, roasted slivered almonds, oil & vinegre. I was very happy the first time I thought to add the almonds. I've missed that salad a lot.

And this is a weird example, but I also have a recipe to replace stuffed peppers. I never ate them as a kid, but I was missing the smell (and the flavor I thus imagined) of them cooking in my parents' house. I cooked wild rice and let it cool, and then mixed it into ground turkey. Then I made meatballs and put them in a stock pot with oil and cubed green pepper. I cooked it on medium until the meatballs were browned, and then simmered for another 15 minutes. The flavors all cooked together it and it smelled right and tasted even better.

These recipes don't make me sick, and they scratch the itch to eat those foods.

For the first year I was on the rotation diet, I didn't eat flour of any kind. There were so many other things to worry about, I didn't try to bake anything. I was reacting to corn and potatoes, and sweet potatoes were not on sunflower seed day, so I didn't have any chips to eat either. When I first got down the recipe book to try buckwheat pancakes, I felt pretty pessimistic. The ingredients are buckwheat flour, oil, water, and salt & vitamin c crystals for leavening. But I made them and sat down to eat one. It felt so luxurious spreading the tablespoon of walnut oil over the pancake. The emotion of it hit me when it touched my lips, before I even tasted it, and when I tasted it... I cried. It was so smooth and delicate and sweet and the stress of all the deprivation in the prior 12 months and the strange austerity of the whole project, feeling like a monk living alone in the woods. The pleasure of it was just so intense and the sudden full knowledge of exactly what I had been going without.

Healthy Food

I've been wanting to start writing here again but the little voices of self doubt have been standing on a tall stool lately.

Healthy food. I'm on a long road to making it a familiar, comfortable part of my health. A long, long road. I am a very, very emotional eater. Pizza, mac n cheese, and canned soup were like my best friends. I had a very limited taste range that I liked and was/am very attached to -- salty, sweet, savory, and the texture was basically "processed" -- mooshy, flaky, smooth, consistent. In itself such a narrow range is not healthy. A variety of foods is healthy and the foods with the most vitamins rarely fall in that particular range.

Lately my strategy for healing my food sensitivities and preventing future ones is to eat the widest variety of foods possible. I am eating things that taste weird to me even after a whole decade of avoiding MSG, and a whole two years of eating okra and buffalo and quinoa on a regular basis. I grew my own brocili sprouts - they tasted fresh, which I do really like, but they were also bitter, and had some other flavor I couldn't identify. I've been making salads with Savoy cabbage. Normally this is fine - I splurge and use a little vinegar to make it taste like salad, but every once in a while I taste the cabbage-y of it, and it kind of turns my stomach a little. And last night I made a salad out of soy beans, water chestnuts, carrots, fresh ginger, oil & lime juice. Last night it all went down fine and I was happy with myself. But I ate the leftovers for lunch today and my brain and stomach are talking to each other about how gross soybeans are. The rest of the ingredients covered up the flavor of the soybeans so I could totally enjoy the freakishly yummy texture, but still... it will take some getting used to.

Last weekend I also finally tried dinosaur kale. The stem goes all the way down the very narrow leaves, which meant a lot of cutting up. (The stems on regular kale are dis-gus-ting, so I made the leap and assumed the same with the dinosaur.) I simmered cubed lamb roast for 2 hours, then added cubed sweet potatoes (the real sweet potato, light brown outside, and very pale orange interior) and the sliced up dinosaur kale, and simmered for another 1.5 hours. It was super yummy. No complaints about this healthy soup at all. I love kale, I just kind of loathe cutting out stems.

Sweet, Boggling

The Boyfriend asked me to tell him what I plan to do tonight, once I've decided. I usually tell him, but he has never asked me to before. It's like one of those accidental things you do while visiting a remote island -- we drank from the same golden coconut on the night of the full moon. Does this mean we're married now?

Today I am boggled by the difficulty I have with doing something everyday. I want to write in my journal everyday because I feel sooooo much less anxious than usual when I do. And I'm thinking about all the times I wanted to do simple things like stretch my hamstrings everyday, but could never remember, or was too lazy. It's very weird to me.

Of the dumb articles CNN has been posting lately, today I read the dumbest one yet. It encourages you to get a job in the hospitality industry. Four of the ten jobs they mention make $21,000 or less per year. Forward this article to all your enemies now! It also mentions several hospitality jobs that earn good money, but they all require skills that are marketable in many industries. Summary: This is not news.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/01/23/hospitality.jobs/index.html

The dumbest CNN article ever was a list of skin products for men, and the details of how those products prevent skin cancer. Cute, fine, whatever, but the article also included the brands and prices of the skin products to use. In the movies it's called product placement. What's it called when it's in the news?

Growed Up

I'm thinking about all the time I spent when I was a teenager worrying about how I look. Because now that I'm a grown up, it's really amazing how un-important it is to occasionally show up at work looking exhausted or having a bad hair day.

Whenever I complained when I was a kid my parents would tell me that it would be much worse when I was an adult. I didn't believe them, and now that I'm grown up, I disagree with them. I see their point. There are certainly things about it that are way more complicated than anything I dealt with as a kid. They just didn't know me very well. They didn't know how much I value my independence, or how I thrive in an environment where no one is yelling. Or how much pain my obsession with my appearance was causing me.

The voluntary simplicity movement has made a big impact on me enjoying adulthood. My participation is pretty minimal but just knowing that I have the option to participate more gives all my hard work a terrific sense of being optional. I don't feel stuck. When work is stressful, I don't think, "I wish I didn't have to work." Instead I think, "This sucks but it pays for the lifestyle that I enjoy soooooo much."

Ever Available

Perfectionism is an ever available excuse for failure.

May imperfection be my new love.

I came to revel in imperfection one day. I was so tired of beating up on myself before I'd even begun. It was one of those desperate moves, but once I'd leapt, the new ground felt like rolling around naked in a pile of money, dirty, pleasurable, taboo.

A new crazy

Orthorexia is being obsessed with healthy eating to an unhealthy degree. Persons suffering from this obsession can get so obsessed they become malnourished. It starts out innocently, eating healthier, but instead of being satisfied with a reasonable degree of healthfulness, they keep striving for healthier and healthier, more and more pure or whatever, until it's all they think about.

For over a year I didn't have anything even vaguely junky to eat that I wasn't allergic to. I was so happy when I finally got a junk food back, potato chips. It was definitely a fork in the road. I considered the possibility that it would be healthier to never eat junk food again. But I felt so deprived all the time. I decided it was saner to eat the chips.

I believe strongly that there is such a thing as healthy enough.

I got a few sour faces in my direction while jubiliantly chattering on about potato chips. Like a, "but potato chips aren't healthy" face. It felt like they were disappointed that I was failing to be "perfect" in my pursuit of health.

Then, I got more junk food back (avocado, more fruit, coffee, more nuts, bacon). Then I did some emotional eating related to other health problems. And I gained two dress sizes, going from a size 6 to a size 10. And several of the people I mentioned it to were shocked that I didn't intend to diet it off. I had stopped the emotional eating. In my mind the problem was solved already. Why would I diet back down to size 6? It seems kind of crazy to think like that.

So here is my new theory, and it's based on this experience plus hundreds of other experiences I had on my journey to healthy-enough.

It is an unrealistic goal is to make massive diametrical changes to myself. But if I dislike myself so much that only a diametrical change would make me like myself, then smaller, realistic goals are not worth the effort. But unrealistic (unattainable) goals, don't motivate me to change, so I was stuck.

Where does this idea come from that health and fitness must be perfect? I believe it is because self worth has become bound with health and fitness. The binding to self worth arose from the idea that a woman is only worthwhile if she's attractive, and then with the last 30 years of model culture, a woman is only attractive if she's perfect.