Tag: food

Food Gratitude and Hushing Exercise Talk Ahead of Holidays

Before we begin today, let’s take a moment to acknowledge holidays can be difficult for a variety of reasons and for many around the world that struggle with eating disorders (past or current), body dysmorphia, discomfort with their size (feeling they are too big or too small) this time of year can be more challenging than it needs to be. As we sit around our own tables or gather with friends or family, let’s remind ourselves we should not be commenting about someone’s choice to eat or abstain from eating certain dishes or drinks. If someone wants a single serving or seconds, that’s their decision. No one should be chided to “walk off” their dinner or earn a slice of dessert either. (I personally like a nice walk after a Thanksgiving meal, but it has more to do with the fact it’s finally cooling down here in Arizona instead of feeling like the inside of an oven.)

Holidays started to be a struggle for me a few years ago when I learned the hard way I had developed lactose intolerance. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it often felt like there wasn’t something that wasn’t full of butter, heavy cream, milk, or half and half. I started to dread the holidays, because I’d have to carefully consider what amount of dairy I could tolerate based upon taking Lactaid. I often found Lactaid worked well enough when a meal or snack was simple and only had one dairy source. It didn’t work at all for anything that still had lactose as an added ingredient, so I had to give up a lot of my favorite childhood mass produced chocolate candies like M & M’s. My husband discovered a better lactase enzyme tablet from a company called LactoJoy. It’s great for days where I don’t know if a meal will have a variety of dairy products in it although I am still hesitant to ever try M&M’s again. LactoJoy makes me less anxious about holiday meals, but I still work a little to reduce my dairy consumption around the holidays.

Having a holiday meal where it’s just my husband, daughter, and I is an easy way to find balance. Not that it’s always the case, but I do breathe a little easier when I have full control over the menu. This year we’re enjoying chipotle braised beef cheeks (from Olive magazine’s recipe that uses ox cheeks) over mashed potatoes and celeriac using lactose free milk and ghee and some cornbread muffins (my goal is to pick up Abe’s mini cornbread muffins, which are vegan). For this year, all the regular dairy comes from my dessert selections: a Maine Pie Co. gluten free pecan pie and homemade spiced apple cider ice cream using Yes to Yolks’ recipe. Our super easy Thanksgiving meal and dessert wasn’t really focused on paring back on the number of food dishes to avoid dairy this year so much as it was a way to avoid a lot of food prep that is difficult for me right now. (I made the ice cream last weekend to spread out the labor.) I am still working through a number of medical tests to determine if I am correct and this is an autoimmune disorder I am struggling with for any newcomers to my blog.

This has been a year of appreciating snacks and special treats. I thought about sharing some photos of great meals I’ve enjoyed out at local restaurants, but I think the simplicity of snacks cannot be overstated this year. Going out to a restaurant is work (certainly not something I thought I’d every say!). It’s work on a relatively healthy day to get ready, wait for a table, and wait even more for appetizers, meals, or drinks to be delivered; and it’s more work to go out on days where my pain level is worse and restaurants are colder than expected, there’s no seating available during our wait for a table, and I’m stuck standing around outside in the sun as my skin has become more photosensitive.

I know we all have our favorite snacks. As a huge fan of Oreos, I will tell you we currently have packages of regular Oreos, apple pie Oreos, and blueberry pie Oreos on hand. I can eat Oreos any time of day, but there’s been some other fun stuff I’ve come across the past several months.

Either of these elevates a cup of black coffee in the morning, but the kithul syrup’s smokey flavor is a nice touch for fall.
Certified vegan chocolate….and expensive for a chocolate bar, but it’s pretty tasty. It’s normally $7 a bar if you don’t find it on sale. It’s not an every week kind of purchase.
Halloween has a special place in my heart. The moment I saw these chips (aka crisps) I knew I was buying them solely for the novelty color. I already love this brand of chip; the chips are a bit crispier than Pringles and as a food texture person, crunchy snacks make me happy.
If you need a savory snack, this one is perfect. We had a few slices of chorizo on Ritz crackers topped with homemade pimento cheese. I won’t call it “girl dinner,” because it irritates me that we label snack dinners grown women eat as “girl dinner.” This was our low effort dinner during one busy weekday evening.
I popped into this hotel bar for a little daytime date adventure with my husband. We both love a good Manhattan. Honestly, if I had been more hydrated and had eaten a proper breakfast beforehand, I would have finished my $20 barrel aged Manhattan. (So sad drinks have gotten this pricey.) The resort is already decked out for Christmas with glitzy trees, prepping for an ice skating rink, and bringing in/manufacturing snow for tubing. I do enjoy seeing all the holiday decor without having to maintain it myself.

My drink from Twenty6:

Manhattan – (Barrel Aged) 20
Rotating Bourbon (Russel Reserve, Makers 46, Wild Turkey), Port Wine,
Antica Sweet Vermouth, Angostura & Chocolate Bitters

I need to make something similar at home for either Thanksgiving or Christmas but using rye whiskey.

That’s all for today. I hope as we get closer to the end of the year everyone stays safe and is relatively happy. It’s been a crazy year across the globe and we could all use a few more moments in our lives where we are more neighborly towards each other. Open the door for someone in need. Maybe ask someone what book they’re currently enjoying. Offer to share a favorite recipe (it doesn’t need to be a family recipe, by the way!). Just be a good person and let good come back to you, too.

Take care,

Cheryl

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Blessings for Thanksgiving and Time for a Hiatus

My apologies for skipping a check-in here for the month of October.

I let my favorite month get away from me and neglected to post. Instead, I spent a lot of time attending to my life outside this website. As the election drew near, I devoted my time to crafting the stories I wanted to share in my memoir. This long journey developing my first draft is still in progress; I like to imagine if I had a background in journalism, creative writing, communications, or English, my project would already be done by now. Instead, it has been an almost forgotten friendship that I visit–to stave off its death. My memoir has become an apology to my younger self for what I put her through and an exploration of the relationships that sustained me, harmed me, caused me to look to the future and ask myself what do you want to become and how are you going to get there and who is capable of traveling that journey with you.

This past month has been a pivot point as the individual stories are finally connecting to each other. I am grateful for my slow devotion because it is far too easy to give up and say it’s emotionally damaging to look back on my failures. There are a number of ways people showed up for me at the same time other people were barely putting any effort into the intersection of their lives with mine. When I look back at those difficult moments, I wish I had the courage to trust my first instincts. Things I felt didn’t line up the way the should and instead I gave some people a lot of grace given their past poor judgements and decisions. I opened myself up to needless hurt while they were running around destroying their own lives. Learning to see my 20-21 year old self and her struggles, I see she gave a number of people a blank slate to start their lives over and people punished her for the sins of women who came before her. I could have been a different person in some of the most difficult months of my life if I wasn’t holding space for people who treated me like a throwaway character in their own stories. I survived them, and it’s time I am honest about what it’s like to stop choosing to walk through chaos to heal hurt I never caused when I can choose shelter from storms I didn’t foster, peace of mind surrounded by like-minded spirits, and build a happy existence away from bitter souls.

This Thanksgiving I am leaning more into a life of peace and appreciating my blessings. The transition from 2023 to 2024 has been far from an easy one. Losing three family members was devastating. Finding time to sell one house and buy a new one heightened my personal stress as I also navigated moving from one work position to a temporary assignment to my current role. Developing yet another slew of health symptoms a source of frustration. My ongoing health challenges don’t yet have an official diagnosis and I will end 2024 in that same boat. Months of nerve pain and discomfort brought on by physical exertion is forcing me to slow down in ways I would not choose for myself. I would love to know what’s going on, but my new health care provider is having me go through a gamut of other lesser avenues of care and potential pain management through occupational therapy and physical therapy before seeing if we need to consult rheumatology. Right now, I am still waiting on answers for my last round of bloodwork, but the holidays are coming up and I am determined to enjoy my tradition of crafting something new for my family to enjoy.

Lamb is the on the menu for our entree and I decided I would like to add some American Indian/Indigenous persons touches to our holiday given the complex origins and ongoing celebration of Thanksgiving. I cannot really say why I hadn’t thought of it before. I haven’t unpacked whether I was concerned it would be culturally appropriate or whether I wasn’t sure I would be skilled enough to try out the recipes and/or able to find the ingredients. Rather than criticize myself for coming to this late realization it would be good for me as an American to try my hand at making this type of cuisine, I am hoping it encourages someone else to do the same. We’ll be using the New Mexico Magazine sumac Navajo leg of lamb with onion sauce recipe to craft our holiday entree although ours will use lamb shanks and lamb neck due to my lack of understanding I could ask my local butcher ahead of time to order a leg of lamb or a lamb roast, the other suggested cut within the recipe. In lieu of dinner rolls, we will make Navajo fry bread, a family favorite, although I made the mistake of not picking up powdered milk so I will adjust my plans and find a recipe that uses regular milk that I already have on hand. The milk I have is lactose free and this will be my first time frying with it, so I need to watch it in case it behaves differently like how it browns more quickly when baking with it.

Our main side dish is the enkum recipe below. I found this recipe a few months ago in The Cookbook in Support of the United Nations: For People and Planet I borrowed from a public library. In the past few years, I’ve come across a number of articles on making Thanksgiving dinner less beige (think white dinner rolls, gravy, turkey, stuffing) and boring. I love how this is a nutrient dense potato dish and the vibrant colors will make for a beautiful contrast to the lamb entree. I will still keep some “traditional” beige on the plate with the stuffing although this year I found a stuffing mix made from Hawaiian bread that caught my eye.

I have one thing that I absolutely love from my childhood and that’s Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce. I don’t care that it’s not healthy for me with all the added sugar and the fact it’s low fiber. I love it far too much to care that it’s lacking in nutritional value. While I will occasionally indulge in mine or someone else’s homemade cranberry sauce, if we are going for the stuff in the can, it better be Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce. The generic stuff won’t do–it’s not worth saving the $0.30 or $0.40 a can for this stuff.

And for one of the first years in awhile, I don’t have a dessert planned. Originally, I considered making a homemade ice cream with the frozen leftover crumbled chocolate chip pumpkin cookies a girlfriend made for us back in September, but I want a less busy holiday. We have some German Benton’s Spekulatius Cookies we picked up from Aldi’s recently or we could enjoy the Mexican assorted cookies we have in the pantry. There’s always a local family farm we could visit for fudge or pie if we want to venture out in the next few days, too.

Before I leave you all for this month, I do want to say I plan to have a bit of a hiatus to concentrate on my memoir. Whether I stick to said hiatus is another story. I love the fact I am finally past the 300 page mark for my memoir and I want to help see my first draft through completion before the end of 2024. This work has helped me to see the burdens I carried from my service and the blessing of people who want the best for me while I haven’t always worked towards that goal for myself. I’ve gotten to see myself in moments of deep pain and setting big dreams for the future. Next year will be the 20-year mark returning home from my first tour in Iraq and I think a bit fitting of a time to ideally see the draft come together as a finished project I want to market for publication. I cannot juggle that endeavor all that well if I have my regular 40-hour a week job and weeks of planning what to post on this blog. If I do check in, I think it might be a paragraph or two wishing you all well and I hope that’s enough.

I want to deliver this memoir to those who seek to understand our nation’s military better and what service members go through. I want this memoir to show young adults military service is always changing and to help people who have never served to see another facet of the Iraq war. This book is not meant for everyone, like any good story. It is an appreciation letter to a number of people who have worked to make my goal of serving come to fruition, to those who supported me through the unknowns of that first tour, for those who tolerated my anti-social behavior on tour number two, and the ones who met me along the finish line to ending my four year enlistment in the Marine Corps. I do want to see a second book come to light, too, to honor a number of passionate persons who helped get me diagnosed with PTSD and get the treatment I deserved, but it won’t come together as it needs to without book 1 happening first.

Wishing you and yours a lot of blessings this holiday season.

~Cheryl

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