friday+saturday+sunday

[black bean burgers on gluten free bun+roasted sweet potatoes.]

[gluten free/vegan bagels+daiya strawberry cream cheese.  yes]

[confused]

[lactofermentation! this is cortido+can't wait to try it]

[depressed]

[sour stomached pitbull]

[sweet potato+kale chowdah]

recipe:

1/2 onion

1 sweet potato

3 red potatoes [can be replaced with additional sweet potato]

1 Tbl. coconut oil

-combine and saute-

salt/garlic salt to taste

pepper to taste

thyme to taste

1 1/2 boxes of vegetable broth

-cook until potatoes are soft then mash to desired mashiness-

4-5 kale leaves sliced in thin ribbons.

2 Tbl. nutritional yeast

-simmer for a couple minutes-

-eat-

-fill bowl again-

-repeat-

-add and simmer for a couple of minutes-

needling.

3 acupuncture sessions in one week is harsh.

  HARSH! 

I love acupuncture but today as I lay on the table I hated it.  I wanted to rip the needles out.  All of the sudden they were too intense.  It was as though I could feel electrical pulses shooting to the various meridians that were tweaked by those tiny needles.  

Luckily now I have a week and a half off for my body to recalibrate and start to heal.  

Here are my goals for helping it along.

[I have Liver qi stagnation, so I plan on eating accordingly.]

-EAT SPINACH!  Spinach in smoothies, salads, juices, wherever I can hide it.

-Avocados.  They're green.  Green is good.

-Lemon and lime in everything

-Melon

-Berries and Peaches
-Fermented foods, lost of probiotic filled foods!

-Gluten-free beer?  It's on the cooling list.  I'll take it.

My uncle sent this to me last week.  My conniving brother and myself planning a sneak attack.  Apparently we were also playing croquet?  I didn't know I had played croquet before this year.  Be jelly of the fro.  It's killer.

tortillas

Justin ate at Panchero's a couple of weeks ago.  He loved it, so I decided to replicate it at home the best I could.  Of course that meant spending $5.99 on a pack of 6 gluten-free tortillas.  Seriously?

This weekend when I was planning meals and decided to do a re-do of the vegetarian burritos, obviously I had to figure out something cheaper as a tortilla option.  I found a recipe for gluten-free flour tortillas online and holy smokes.  They were excellent.  They were quick to whip up [the recipe said 50 minutes, but honestly I started making them, had to run back into work and then came home and finished cooking them off in a total of about 50 minutes.]  They bent without breaking, like rolled my tortilla into a complete round burrito and it didn't break.  It was a miracle.

I got the recipe here.  I'll never buy tortillas again.

The perfect bite.  Black beans, guacamole and tobasco sauce.  I love tobasco sauce.

That's all I have to say about that.

panic.

In Iron Man 3, Tony Stark suffers a couple of short lived seconds of extreme, out of control panic.  I can't even begin to describe how jealous I am that his panic attacks last only seconds.  He gets to run from nothing for a couple of seconds and then he decompresses and equalizes back to normal.

I've been having panic attacks since I was 11 years old.  I remember the first one like it was last week. It was a cool, grey October day.  I had gone to the corn maze with my youth group.  My friends decided that they all loved the weird kid's dad and chose him as their chaperone that day.  I'm sure he was as surprised as I.  I was not pleased and kept my distance- you know- the apple doesn't fall to far from the tree.  Then we went home.  The sky was still grey and my dad made pork chops on the grill for dinner.  I didn't feel right.  [background: I have a severe, irrational fear of vomiting.  Ask my friends, family, co-workers, nursing instructors from 4 years ago.  It's intense.  I learned this year that it's called emetophobia and there are other people like me, halleluja!] 

So, didn't feel right.  The pork chops.  I think I tried to eat them, but they didn't taste right so I didn't finish them.  I thought I was going to vomit so I ended up  in my parent's bathroom sitting in front of the toilet crying and gasping for air.  Unhinged.  My dad sat with me trying to calm me down.  He was wearing his red sweatshirt with two dueling knights on it.  It smelled like charcoal and grilled pork chops.  Eventually I got my wits about me and was able to relax, but with apprehension.

My mom is convinced that was when my celiac disease started.  I tend to agree with her.  I lost 8 pounds as an already skinny sixth grader.  I went to the doctor on numerous occasions for complaints of nausea and stomach issues.  And my mom had to call my teacher to tell him that I was having some problems eating and if at any time during the day I was hungry, he was to allow me to eat whatever I wished out of my lunch box.  He was a peach and did and I eventually ate lunch at the proper time.  And went back to gaining adequate weight.

Fast forward almost fourteen years [sigh, I'm getting so old] and I still experience panic attacks.  The complete unhinged feeling, like I can't hold onto myself. Something else has control of by body and I'm inside trying however I can to gain back control. I have gone for months without them in the past, but lately they've been frequenting my life.  Ever since my ovarian cyst ruptured they have increased dramatically.  I'm nervous every time I go to work.  Every time I'm in the car.  Every time I'm anywhere that isn't "safe".  Whatever that means.  I go today for my first visit to an acupuncture specialist in Dubuque.  Acupuncture has helped in the past, hopefully it will help again.  

My anxiety issues are part of why I started eating vegan.  I can't say that it has helped yet, but is hasn't hurt either.  I had to leave work today because I had a panic attack at my desk.  This has got to stop.  It stops today.  [It started stopping yesterday and last week and two months ago too, but seriously.]  

weekender.

I've decided I'd like to be a professional weekender.  I would like to get paid for this position.  A cool 2 million per year would suffice just fine.  I'll need a little extra cash, you know, for all the DIY stuff I'll have time for.  With includes but is not limited to:

-Gardening

-Building furniture [with what tools....?]

-Painting

-Baking

-Inventing new recipes

-Potting plants [this is different from gardening]

And other various good ideas from pinterest.

I wouldn't mind if this job didn't include digging out plants [which we did this weekend], lawn mowing [our mower isn't self-propelled], tilling, getting attacked by bugs, and the like.

This weekend was the weekend of spiders.  We did yard work and encountered thousands of spiders. Big ones, little ones, hairy ones, ones with white bums, and I'm fairly certain, a tarantula.  Do tarantulas live in Iowa?  To top it all off, I went to put a glass in the dishwasher this morning and there was a daddy long leg spider in it.  Yuck yuck yuck.

I'm fairly certain that Justin is afraid of spiders too.  He denies it, but I know the truth.

And now let the iPhone photos of the weekend commence!

 

Can Rady has some pancakes?

Prease?

The menu for vegan week four.  We're still rocking it.  Some of us miss meat a little more than others...  Some of us might be grumpy about it.  Some of us may have even requested to go to taco bell for lunch even though that one of us hates taco bell.  Basically I'm winning at veganism.  But I've lost 10 pounds so I made this:

COWBOY CAVIAR!  And we finished it in less than 24 hours.  I expect to have gained at least two pounds from this weekend.

And finally, we got this little Lady a year ago from this weekend.  As Justin said, she seems to have adjusted just fine...  Spoiled.