Blogosaurus Vex

I made my first bundt cake today, using my festive new Christmas themed bundt cake pan.  Here is the result:

We are about to dig in and try a slice, but before I do I thought I’d tell you all what we ate around here over the holidays.  Christmas: vegan style!  (Well, mostly.)

On Christmas Eve I served the following for dinner:

Cabbage rolls (mushroom and onion rice stuffing, savoy cabbage leaves, and a thyme, onion, bay and rosemary tomato sauce)

Chickpea soup (chickpeas, faux chicken broth, fresh sage and thyme, garlic, onion, carrots, celery, and wild rice)

Green beans steamed and tossed with a little marg, salt and pepper

Potatoes boiled with skins on, also with the marg and S&P.  Sauce from the cabbage rolls provided “gravy” for these guys.

Fresh rolls

Green salad with basil leaves

And Christmas day I served for dinner:

Turkey, unstuffed but with some celery, onions, carrots and thyme in the cavity for flavour.  I brined it and barbequed it using four different positions in series to ensure the dark meat got cooked at the same time as the white, rather than the usual way which results in overcooked dry breasts (shudder!).

Dressing, made with French bread which I allowed to dry out over two days and tossed with some fat, fresh rosemary and thyme, sauteed celery and onions, and faux chicken broth.  I baked it in a casserole.

Mashed potatoes with minced green onions in.

Gravy: the long-process turkey gravy and a mushroom gravy for us vegetarians.

Broccoli and cauliflower steamed and tossed in a butter mix with dijon mustard, capers, lemon zest, minced garlic, and salt and pepper.

Fresh rolls

Green salad with basil leaves

On both days:

On both nights, I served my chocolate pumpkin fudge pie for dessert.

I also set out a variety of snack trays, including five different types of olives, pickles, After Eights, a Terry’s chocolate orange, a nuts and dried fruit mix, candied citrus peels, mandarin oranges, a variety of home baked cookies, crackers and cheese, chips and salsa, Ferrero Rochers, and of course a bunch of drinks.

So the vittles were mostly vegan, with cheese and turkey and some of the chocolates being the only non-vegan items provided for my dad and brother.  Overall I would say it was a hearty feast – a feastly feast!

Posted in Cooking, Domesticity, Veganism | 1 Comment »

It’s early in the morning and I’m the only one up.  Merry Christmas to me!  (And you.)  I’m a bit sad actually – this is the first time in 18 years that my brother and I haven’t gotten up together, the rule being the first to wake wakes the other, so that we can share the moment of arriving in the living room, glowing with tree lights but otherwise dark due to the early hour.  And then we open our stockings together, creating little piles of chocolates and toiletries and minor presents, books and magazines and socks.  All this followed by the wait until seven, the official hour when our parents may be roused and the grander festivities of present opening and breakfast begin.

Though our parents haven’t been together for probably ten years now, and I’m married.  This is the first year Christmas dinner is being held at my place instead of Dad’s, and Dad and my brother are currently at his place, while I am here.  Awake first, and now awake alone.  Husband enjoys the holiday I think mainly by watching me enjoy it – that’s good enough but doesn’t make for a fellow early riser; I won’t wake him.

So I’m eating tortilla chips and drinking a pop and thinking about the gravy I’ll make for the turkey eaters – yes I am providing a turkey for dinner – why not?  Once a year I can buy a bird.  It’s not as though I will be forced to eat it.  Though I have become paranoid about its bacteria, because of my recent bird-related illness as well as a long established tradition of a meatless kitchen where nothing I cook requires sterilization procedures to maintain my health, so everywhere the bird touches as I brine it and rinse it and dry it and prepare it for baking requires a vigorous soaping followed by bleach to disinfect.  I will say I am greatly enjoying working with the bird, reengaging with the little rituals of creating a roast.  Buying it was sad but trussing it is fun.

My dad is sick.  I don’t want to give much in the way of personal details but things have been very complicated with him lately.  A combination of lifestyle choices and medications (prescribed) has coincided (in the literal sense) with an as-yet undiagnosed but potentially very serious illness – it’s complicated because what’s going wrong may be in no small part due to things he’s done knowingly to himself.  I am sad and angry and afraid.  Mostly I just feel anxious and worry about whether he’s getting the right tests, and what we’ll do if the organ in question just quits.  Part of it is he feels constantly like he has a terrible flu, so it’s hard for him to drive out here (also his rheumatoid arthritis is so bad he can’t make a fist, and it hurts his hands and knees and feet to drive).  He wears out easily.

So Christmas this year may be a somewhat abbreviated affair.  Dad and my brother will come around lunch time, and leave soon after dinner I imagine.  I wish it was like our Christmasses of years past, with a full day spent together from waking to bedtime, but that can’t happen at my place.  And holidays at Dad’s have become a bit depressing to me.  I can’t quite explain it but I find his big bachelor’s house saddening, more so even in recent years than in the ones immediately following the divorce.  My apartment is cozy and warm, full of lights and decorations and music, and feels very Christmassy.  Dad’s house feels like he tried to make it festive but it didn’t work out.  So I wanted them to come here, and so they are.  But the price is, I only get them for part of the day.  And I have the morning alone.

But I think I’ll go wake up Husband now anyway – we’ll eat cereal and play Bing Crosby and we can behold the turkey sitting naked in our fridge and say “Ewwww!”, and it will make the waiting much pleasanter.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Posted in Personal, Veganism | 2 Comments »

First off, holy crap, is this Vancouver?

You can’t tell in this picture but it is snowing like a mad bastard out there.  It’s like Halifax!  How the heck am I going to get groceries today?  The Sprite Car is not snow worthy and I am not capable of much in the way of carrying and lifting on my own – I am crazy weak.  Please do not laugh when I tell you I have to take breaks from typing because my finger muscles are too tired to do long stretches.  Walking around the kitchen to do a load of dishes utterly did me in last night. Turns out five days with virtually no food is… weakening.

So yes, woman cannot subsist on antibiotics alone. Though, it does seem something of a shame to restart the appetite train when I’m skinnyfying so successfully!

Anyway, I may have to conscript Husband to help me shop today.  He has been my chief assistant on Gatorade runs (note: I actually prefer Powerade, which tastes less sugary but has more calories, a major plus when you’re on a liquid diet) and today may have the distinct honour of dragging our little rolling cart back and forth to Safeway for provisions.  Through the snow.  Because the Sprite Car cannot handle this weather.

He’s still sleeping right now… don’t ruin the surprise, okay?

Posted in Domesticity, Health | No Comments »

This morning I went to the local Carepoint Clinic because I decided three solid days of this crazy bad illness was enough to tolerate without expert opinion.  And though I have not submitted a stool sample for formal testing (!), it is the doctor’s opinion that I probably have salmonellosis.  Which frankly I find outrageous, because I don’t eat anything typically associated with salmonella poisoning – poultry, pork, eggs, or milk.  Good grief!  You’d think one of the advantages of veganism is avoiding food poisoning like this but apparently it is not.  I’m guessing something got cross contaminated at a restaurant I’ve eaten at recently because there are no animal products in my house at all.

Okay.  Now for the awesome part: I am now on a clear fluids only diet for an unspecified period of time.  It will depend on when my bowel settles down.  But the antibiotics I’m on are crazy restrictive and I can’t have solid food two hours before or after taking them, which is three times a day – so I figure I’m on apple juice and Gatorade for at least the five days of those pills.

Sheesh.

Posted in Health, Veganism | 1 Comment »

There is one upside to being so sick I can’t eat: I appear to have lost about four pounds, thus reaching the goal weight that has eluded me for the last two years.  Perhaps I should patent this process? “The Cholera Diet,” I could call it, “Where You Shit and Puke The Weight Out! Four Pounds in One Week Guaranteed!”

In addition to feeling constantly on the verge of barfing, I seem to have lost my ability to endogenously thermoregulate.  I alternate between too cold (icy toes and fingers!) and too effin’ hot (sweating!), sometimes at the same time (icy toes and fingers and sweaty torso! Wheee!).  I engage in complex manouvers to add or remove layers and have achieved a workable system: I wear permanently a tank top and jammy bottoms.  Socks added/removed as required, robe added/removed as required, quilt added/removed as required.  Sometimes I wander over to the fireplace for some direct blast heating, but this is tricky because I have to remove the robe to do this (otherwise it could catch fire, and I’m not that cold), thus exposing more skin to the cold air.  But also the fireplace heat.  You see the dilemma?  The tub is heater of last resort, because hot water makes me feel even barfier (but also very toasty) and now my skin is all itchy from overbathing in the dry air, and moisturizer is not helping.

Also, how do anorexics get through their day?  I am weak as a kitten for lack of food.  It’s hard to walk around the apartment.  I have taken to whining my needs aloud, which happily has the result that Husband fetches for me so I can continue to just lie on the couch like a wet noodle, listlessly flipping through the shows on our hard drives for entertainment.  I am too sick to read.

Off to watch Inspector Morse…

Posted in Health | No Comments »

This bug is kicking the shit out of me.  I can’t remember the last time I was this sick.  I am constantly nauseated, which I find extrememly horrible to endure.  I cop to being reduced to utter weenieness when I feel queasy – it just slays me.  I’m taking as much Gravol as I can safely ingest and this helps, but my god I feel bad!  For the first day and a half I couldn’t eat anything at all, and just forced down water to stay hydrated.  In the second day and a half, I have managed to eat:

2 mandarin oranges

a small bowl’s worth of tortilla chips, spread out over many hours

2 After Eights (these made me soooo sick, the vile little tempters!)

1 six-inch veggie sub, which also caused intense barfiness

Approximately 1 L of chocolate soymilk

The chocosoy has been my lifesaver.  It’s delicious and full of calories which surely my body needs, also nice a creamy and soothing.  It’s basically the only thing I can keep down with no discomfort.  Whenever the nausea lets up a bit (usually about 20 minutes after a Gravol) I jam down a glass of chocosoy and call it good.

So yeah.  I’m dying over here and the only fuel I have been able to tolerate amounts to basically the equivalent of a hearty lunch.  In three days.  How can I get better with so little food?  But I tell you, the smell of all food is repulsive and I assume this message from my body is important, so I’m going with it for the most part.

At least I don’t feel hungry.

Posted in Health | No Comments »

After a restless, nauseated night of tossing and turning, I called in sick to work today.  I made the decision at 5am when I realized that even if I felt perfectly well in the morning (proper morning, when the alarm goes off) I would be a zombie from no sleep.  So I called in.  And now I am the a-hole who called in right before Christmas.  But I expect to go back to work tomorow so it should be fine.

I finally felt a little hungry today so I had a sandwich, and now I feel awful again.  Urgh.

That’s all from over here.  How are you?

Posted in Health | 5 Comments »

I am sick.  I am feeling too shitty to go into the full narrative, but I will say this: it’s a stomach bug, it’s trying to escape my body any way it can, and because of the snow it took me two hours on the bus to get home from work.  I didn’t leave… anything behind on the bus but it was sheer torture getting home to where there is a bathroom.

I feel absolutely wretched.  Just wretched.  My stomach hurts, I can’t eat, my nerves are going bananas, I groan just sitting on the couch.  And the worst part?  I have only two days of work left before a two week vacation.  What kind of a-hole calls in sick on Thursday and Friday before the holidays?  No one will believe I am actually sick.

I am feeling very sorry for myself.  I hope things are going well with you.

Posted in Health | 2 Comments »

As you know I am the person responsible for housework in this marriage, and it works well, mainly because Husband is naturally tidy.  Of course he is my fabulous darling muffin pants, but even so he does have one or two annoying habits, and one of them has been really tasking me lately.  It is this: he comes home from work, takes off his sweater, and drapes it over a chair someplace, abandoning it to its fate.

And every day when I tidy up I end up putting those fucking sweaters away.  (In the beginning I thought of them just as “sweaters” but after ages of daily removal they earned the expletive.)  Early days I almost didn’t notice, then it bugged me a little, then I went through a passive aggressive phase where I’d put them in the drawer but I wouldn’t fold them first, and then I just got mad.  So today, I said to Husband (immediately after he stripped of today’s sweater and hung it over a chair): “Do you think you could start putting your sweaters away when you take them off, instead of hanging them somewhere in the living room for me to deal with?”

He looked around with surprise.  “So that’s where they’ve been going!”

“What do you mean?”

And he said, “I sort of noticed they weren’t where I left them.  I simply assumed I must be putting them away.”

HO HO HO.  I just CANNOT get over this.  I must be putting them away. Indeed!

My husband, the Manchurian Candidate of laundry.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

There two items on the agenda tonight, and I would like to begin with my soon-to-be-traditional Christmas season Bible quotation.  Behold the word of God:

Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathens are dismayed at them.

For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go.  Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.

…

But they are altogether brutish and foolish: the stock is a doctrine of vanities.

Jeremiah 2-5, 8

Delicious!

Item the second: editorial delete!

Posted in Religion | No Comments »