On The Roof

Communing with autumn

After many days spent on my computer in my room working on a paper, B decided to take a break by climbing through the window and hanging out on the roof of our screen porch.  The weather was lovely and being up high and in a different spot exhilarating.  I am glad it made her happy.  She's been so unhappy lately.

Halloween Scrooge

My street; where I won't be popular.

I love Autumn:  leaves of gorgeous golds and burgundies, crisp cool weather, sweaters, apples and pumpkins!  However,  I kind of hate Halloween.  Hate is too strong a word.  I don't mind the spooky stories and haunted houses and people getting really into their costumes.  That's fun!  But I hate the commercial aspect of it, the way it feeds children's greed for junkie sugary stuff.  We've got juvenile diabetes and cancer on the rise, folks.  There might be a reason for that!  Halloween seems to start earlier and earlier each year.  I heard one young mother bemoaning the fact that her kids had to miss the trick or treat at the local shopping mall due to a conflict.  Their other seasonal festivities included the Halloween party at their school, the trunk or treat at their church, as well as neighborhood Halloween party and yes, trick or treating on the actual night.  This is going overboard in my opinion. We are poisoning ourselves to death with candy.  We get sick and the corporations who own chocolate (I think there are 3 or 4 huge multinationals that basically control the chocolate in the world) get richer.

I hate to be a party pooper but honestly we are lemmings, we are like the Roman citizens who don't mind being treated like slaves as long as we get our bread and circuses.

I live with someone from Cote D'Ivoire.  I don't have time to cite various reports right now on this blog, but these huge cocoa companies are responsible for deforestation and child slavery in that country.  It is exploitative colonialism all over again.  But it's ok because we are addicted to chocolate and our own pleasure and screw the rest the world!  Leave me alone in my little bubble please!!!  I don't wanna disappoint my spoiled rotten kids who have come to expect to be showered in junk candy from October through January (a little reprieve and then on to Valentine's Day!!!).  And that's why it's ok to let little children be kidnapped and forced to work 12 hour days doing the dangerous work of growing chocolate for us.  Let them be beaten and half starved to death.  And they never eat the chocolate themselves.  Never!

I tried to order Equal Exchange chocolate last month but for some reason the order didn't properly go through and I never followed up.  I've done a little research and it looks like Lindt Chocolate, a Swiss company is more conscientious than say Hershey and Nestle.  Lindt only buys cocoa from South America (or maybe Central America?) where there is far less child slavery.  They do source some cocoa from Ghana but they don't buy on the commodities market, but source from specific farms where they know the working conditions.

So I am going to get some Lindt chocolates.  To cut on down on the plastic wrapper waste (a whole other ball of wax - how much trash gets generated by Halloween??) I plan to mix in some things like pencils or some other fun little things I can find that aren't plastic or junky and might have some real use.  I did see someone's pinterest idea of coloring little jack o lantern faces on clementines.  I might do that.  Assuming parents will let their kids eat the clementines.  I won't be the most popular house on the block.  But I don't care, frankly!

Grabbing Hygge Where I Can

It has been a very rough week.  My back has been giving me lots of pain, along with my knee and my neck.  I do think things are on the mend, but it is slow.  All week I felt like I was drowning.  And extra things kept coming up to add to the overwhelming feeling.  We are still trying to deal with the affects of Hashimoto's on my 16 year old. She's really been struggling with depression and that is a total emotional drain on everybody.  Plus this week we had to watch our houseguest's toddler much more than we usually do, due to her variable work schedule.  So many forms and checks etc were due this week.  I just couldn't keep up.  And this morning I and my sister are going to a court hearing on changing guardianship for our youngest sister who has Downs.  She's due here at 8 and the hearing is at 9.  And I'm not even telling you everything that is going on right now.  Whew.

But I know many people have it way worse than I do.  I have so many blessings.  Life has its little overwhelming periods.  Pain makes it hard to function though.

My escape has been my youtube videos.  One of my favorite channels A Baltic Homestead made a couple new videos.  I just love getting a glimpse into people's lives in such exotic locations (at least to me!).  I'm trying to promote this guy's channel because he just started it and he needs more subscribers. 

Oops!  My sister is here early.  Gotta make her a cup of coffee and hit the road!

Anybody Can Do Anything - Book 30

Anybody Can Do Anything is my fourth Betty MacDonald book in a row.  According to Wikipedia, I had the order of the books wrong.  First she wrote The Egg and I, then The Plague and I, then Anybody Can Do Anything and then Onions in the Stew. 

Anybody Can Do Anything was a really delightful read.  I found it fascinating to get a first person account of what working life was like during the Depression for a woman.  Betty left her husband on the chicken farm and came home with her two, very young children in tow.  The Depression has hit and everybody lives back at home with their mother.  Her intrepid and hysterically funny older sister, Mary, thinks anybody can do anything and she is quite good at getting jobs for both herself and Betty (though not quite so good at keeping the jobs).  Thus begins Betty MacDonald's adventures as a working girl.  She goes from one crazy situation to another until finally after years of this, she winds up working for the government and actually gets to rise to a position of authority, though she never feels quite qualified.  (Who would, if you had to be Mary's younger sister?  Betty's inferiority complex mirrors her sister's superiority one!).

Though she does mention her two daughters from time to time, I get the impression during this period, her mother was really raising them.  She goes from job to job, office party to office party, madcap mishap to madcap mishap while perpetually going to night school to try (and fail again and again) to learn shorthand.

An extremely entertaining book that gives you a slice of life right out of history.  Two thumbs up!

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

This Week's Meal Plan

I am just going to whine a little bit here.  My knee is still bothering me, my neck is still bothering me and now my back is killing me!  So I get up in the morning thinking I'm feeling pretty good and by about 2 or so I am completely done!  Today I got up and made pancakes, drove S to his music lesson and back, grocery shopped and then it was 1:40 and I was done.  I had to lay down for a few hours. I really, really, really, really want to feel better.

Ok.  All done whining.

Here are my ambitious plans for the week.  Things got really bad towards the end of this week.  I hit an all time low when I gave B a quinoa chocolate bar and an aluminum can of cherry flavored sparkling water for lunch on Friday.  Hey, quinoa has protein!

I am still trying to keep zero waste goals in mind while I weather the misery of trying to get everyone to eat half way healthfully, gluten free, and keep up with my obligations and activities even though I am next to zero in terms of energy.

My zero waste code: c - compostable, r - recyclable,  bob (bring own bag), boc (bring own container), cp (compostable packaging), rp (recyclable packaging), lfw (landfill waste) pf (packaging free - this excludes things like wire ties, rubber bands and little stickers on fruit and veggies).  My meat is pastured, grass fed from local farms and usually wrapped in plastic except when I get it at Whole Foods where they wrap it in compostable butcher paper.

Saturday

B:  Banana pancakes (eggs, bananas - c) and syrup (rp)

L:  turkey Cobb salad (deli turkey and cheese - boc + pf produce)

D:  Shepherd's pie made with leftover lamb (this didn't happen - the lamb was freezer burned and anyway 5 out of 7 people decided to go to a big corn maze out in the country.  I think they are doing IHOP for dinner.)  Anyway, I am not up for cooking.

Sunday

Brunch:  egg (c), sausage (lfw - locally sourced but wrapped in plastic), sweet potato casserole

Dinner:  grilled steak (lfw), corn (c or r), whatever veggies from CSA

Monday:

B: Scrambled eggs and fruit

L:  turkey Cobb salad reprise

D:  Spaghetti (corn/quinoa - r), ground beef (lfw), tomato sauce (r), veggies

Tuesday:

B:  Cream of rice (r or c) w/ nuts (boc) and fruit (bob)

L:  gluten free mac and cheese (r and lfw - Annie's brand), veggies

D:  Chicken (lfw plastic wrapper), potatoes, veggies

Wednesday:

B:  bacon (c) and egg cup

L:  Eat at chipotle

D:  Leftovers - will probably have leftover chicken combined somehow with veggies and other leftovers. 

Thursday (I work on Thursdays):

B:  scrambled eggs and fruit 

L:  out at 5 Guys (lettuce wrapped burgers!)

D:  Gluten free pizza 

Friday:

B:  peanut butter and fruit

L:  salmon salad (canned salmon (r), onion, celery 

D:  shrimp fried rice (shrimp in c packaging from WF), bulk rice, veggies

Saturday:
B:  banana pancakes again!  

It's Fall!

Evidence of Fall on the front stoop.

Woke up this morning to a chilly house.  I think it might have frosted last night!  Feels delicious to me!  Fall is here!!!

I cleaned out another shelf in the fridge door and I got to the curb for Purple Heart pick up, a box and a big lawn and leaf bag of various old towels and sheets that has been sitting in my room for an embarrassingly long period of time.  Hooray!  Little by little. 

It was quite chilly went I took my giveaways to the street.  But could I find my fall jacket?  Oh no, I could not.  So that's another thing to go on the to do list today.  Where could I have put it???

The backyard.  Soon our privacy screen of trees will be denuded of leaves and we will be forced to stare at the ugly backsides of the McMansion development behind our house.

Fall Clutter Control

I resolve to declutter my kitchen/family room, mud room, garage and master bedroom between now and Thanksgiving!  I'm going to chip away at it bit by bit.

• I decluttered one fridge door shelf that had been really bugging me already this morning.
• This week I focus on the fridge and freezer.
• Next week I'll focus on cabinets.
• Today I am going to try to collect some stuff to have out for Purple Heart to pick up (by 7 a.m. tomorrow morning)
• I've already told everyone next Saturday afternoon, no matter the weather, we are going to tackle at least some portion of the garage.  I'm focused mostly on all the cardboard recycling and some of the junk that has gotten piled in there over the last year.
• Also next Saturday we are going to declutter our souls by going to confession.  Haven't been for a while.

Onions in the Stew - Book 29

I am on a Betty MacDonald jag.  I've read The Egg and I, The Plague and I (both of which I'd read before) and now Onions in the Stew which I had not read before.  This is her third book chronologically.  In this book she meets and marries Don MacDonald who works at Boeing which got such a boost during World War II.  Due to the housing shortage they wind up moving out to Vashon Island to a house right on the beach.  MacDonald loves being close to the beach but this is the Pacific Northwest, so while there are lots of beautiful things, there's lots and lots of rain and quirky neighbors too!  This book basically covers how she raised her children with her new husband; a successful marriage, though there were certainly some tensions.

My absolute favorite part of this book was the author's recounting of raising adolescent girls.  I howled in recognition of the absolute insanity, absurdity and out of the blue tension that happens when trying to parent teens.  MacDonald says it so well, so to the point, so exactly right! 

Highly, highly enjoyable memoir!

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Teaching Hygge?

On Thursdays I teach Latin 1 and Modern European History at an Aquinas Learning Center.  I've been teaching at Aquinas off and on for 7 or so years.  Last year I only taught Latin 1; the year before Latin 1 and 2.  And before that I taught Latin 1 and Literature and Composition, or Lit/Comp as it gets called. 

Anyway a couple days ago the lit/comp teacher emailed me asking if I could take over her class while she went to a writing conference.  I said yes.  Then late last night I got an email saying that the teacher for another lit/comp class and the U. S. History class was down with a fever, could I sub for her?

Oh man, I thought.  I am going to be so stressed out and exhausted!  And my legs hurts so much too!  I was having trouble getting around.  With my own two classes but three others I would be teaching from 9 to 3, with a lunch break, except I had told a student I would tutor him over lunch.  Well, I did it and it was fun!  The day shot past!  Even though I didn't quite know what I was doing in the three other classes I was subbing for, I think I knew enough that they at least weren't a complete waste of time. 

9:00 - 10:00
Lit/comp - the book the kids just finished reading was Amos Fortune.  The composition was IEW dress ups like ly words, strong verbs, quality adjectives, who/which clauses and www.asia.b  Dimly, in the back of my mind I remembered all this stuff from when I taught it years ago as a sub myself when a teacher had to be out for a few months.  And also B did IEW when she was in Aquinas.

10:00 - 11:00
U.S. History - we did a Lost Tools of Writing style of debate on Columbus Day vs. Indigenous Peoples Day; then we discussed early interaction of Native Americans with French explorers as well as first hand accounts of encounters in Maryland.

11:00 - 12:00
My Latin 1 class - quiz on 3rd declension, parsed some sentences, did some Certamen prep in Roman history.

12:00 - 12:20 tutored student struggling with memorization of paradigms.

12:20 - 1:00 lunch

1:00-2:00 Another Lit/Comp class - these were older students who'd just finished reading the Aeneid. Did a Lost Tools of Writing essay on: Should Aeneas have stayed in Carthage with Dido?

2:00 - 3:00 My Modern European History class - Reviewed Chapter on 7 Years War, etc; picked out person to do presentation on next week; read aloud to them about Voltaire from George Washington's World by Genevieve Foster.   My MEH kids had also done a presentation on the new foods introduced to Europe from other countries during the age of Enlightenment.  It was on display in the lunch room but I don't think many people noticed it, so I'm going to put it up again next week.

Now I am home and planning to have a cup of tea and rest my leg.  And I have no idea what to have for dinner tonight!

Gluten Free Meal Planning

I feel like I repeat myself all the time.  In fact, I am sure I do.  I have come across stuff I wrote a decade ago and it sounds like I wrote it yesterday or am just about to write it again!  I'm forever spinning my wheels trying to get a good system going but never quite getting there. 

So here I go again!

So this is a gluten free, focus on probiotics, omega 3's, iron for anemia, and limit sugar general meal plan. 

Breakfast:

2x a week - cream of rice (iron!), grits or non gluten oatmeal, with nuts, seeds, honey or maple syrup and fruit.

2x a week - some kind of yogurt based breakfast:  smoothies, parfait made with fruit and granola (probiotics in yogurt!)  Yogurt has been an issue with me because I feel I should be making it instead of buying it to be more zero waste.  However, this means we simply never have it because I never get around to making it.   So I am just going with the yogurt that comes in a jar (plastic seal) because we really do need probiotics in our diet and that is the one I know everyone will happily eat.

3x a week - eggs in some shape or form:  banana pancakes, egg and bacon cup (so easy and delicious!), plain old scrambled eggs or fried/poached eggs over hash or potatoes or omelets. (pastured eggs are high in omega 3s)

NB:  breakfast is always served with fruit and/or incorporates some kind of veggie as well (in omelet or hash or mixed in with scrambled eggs.)  Also trying to eat more nuts and seeds with hot cereal, granola and yogurt.

Lunches:

Lunches are hard because we run around so much in the middle of the day.

1x or 2x a week - good old Annie's gluten free mac and cheese.  My teens like these.  Must eat this with fruit or veggies.

1x a week - lunch at Chipotle (black beans have iron!)

1x a week - lettuce wrap burger at Five Guys (NB limit of one meal with fries each week).

1x a week - leftovers or Cobb salad with turkey and cheese

1x a week - salmon or tuna salad (omega 3s)

1x a week - leftovers/soup

Snacks:

granola
trail mix
peanuts
popcorn
fruit
fruit with peanut butter
veggies
veggies with hummus
yogurt/smoothie


Dinners must always be served with salad and veggie or two veggies.  Salads should include a dusting of either chia or flax seed (omega 3s!).  The more leafy greens and nutritous root vegetables the better!  I need to find a fermented veggie that people will eat.  They hate sauerkraut so that's out.  But I've seen carrots and green beans that are supposedly fermented.  Maybe if I toss them into a salad, people will eat them.

2x - roast chicken and then something made with leftovers from chicken.

1x beef (iron!)

1x vegetarian

1x seafood (omega 3s)

2x other (soup/stew, ham, pork, lamb, another seafood, etc)

Going gluten free:
Since we had given up crackers and I'd only been buying bread when it was fresh from the bakery and put into my own cloth bag or brown paper bag (because I am trying to be zero waste and don't want plastic packaging), this had actually primed us for eating less wheat.  We'd have a couple days a week where there was no bread/crackers in the house.  Not that the kids didn't complain about this!  But not having bread doesn't feel THAT different (at least to me).  Swapping out pasta for gluten free pasta is pretty easy.  We already ate rice a couple times a week, now it's more like 3x at least.  And I've been buying more corn.  We've also been eating more sweet potatoes.  And we still eat baking/red/gold potatoes - a couple times a week.  This transition hasn't been as hard as I thought it would be.

Limiting sugar to:

Fruit
maple syrup
honey
Homemade or farmer's market jams and fruit butters
Kombucha (going to try to serve this with a meal a couple times a week.  I just discovered I can buy this from a tap every week at my new CSA!  I actually have 2 CSA's now.

Exceptions:
Allowed 1 soda a week
Dessert on Sundays - ice cream and Tate's gluten free chocolate chip cookies - delicious!

I also want to get the family to take some elderberry juice daily.  Beefs up the immune system!

Weekend Hygge

The weather has been strangely warm and humid.  It doesn't feel like October right now.  And it's been raining all morning as well.  However, in spite of, or maybe because of this, my flowers are still blooming like crazy!

One of the last of the glorious hydrangeas!

The azalea's last stand.

Our Lady of Guadalupe with rose petals.

The rose bush has grown so tall!

A dash of yellow 

Soon the weather will change, the flowers will all drop their petals, the leaves with color and die, the air will turn crisp and chill!  So I am appreciating the last of the summer flowers!

Two other hygge-y things.  Both dealing with annoying aches and pains.  This first one is ridiculous.  Over a year ago we had our bathroom redone.  I love my new bathroom!  But I identity as chiefly a shower person.  I hardly ever take baths.  However, when we were choosing the new tub for our master bathroom, we picked out a soaker tub.  The other bathrooms are too small for anything other than one of those standard, too small really for a comfortable bathtub so kind of a glorified shower space tub.  But we had the room in our master bathroom so we got a big soaker tub.  Nice and deep.  Well, I had never taken a bath in it!  Other members of the family had, but not me.  I had been meaning for months and months to take an epsom salt bath for my plantar fasciitis feet, but I'd only gotten as far as buying a carton of the salts from the drug store.  There it sat unopened on my counter for months.  But yesterday my stupid knee was aching so, I decided to take the plunge.  I had to clean the tub out first, which wasn't too bad.  Then I ran the water and put in a couple of cups of epsom salts.

It was heavenly.

Sheer bliss.

I could feel myself relaxing.  My aches and pains all went away and I just floated in the warm water utterly at peace.

Note to self:  soak in epsom salt bath at least once a week!

The other thing I did because my neck has been really bothering me lately was go to Bed, Bath and Beyond and buy a new pillow.  For years and years I slept on the same old pillows.   Then I hurt my neck and had to get physical therapy.  The therapist said to buy a special foam pillow to support my  neck, so I did.  It was ok but kind of too firm for comfort.  I slept on it for a couple of years but my neck started to get really creaky (literally making creaking sounds when I'd go to turn it!) and I'd wake up with headaches that were not migraines yet but threatened to blossom into migraines.  They definitely were emanating from my neck.  So this past Memorial Day weekend while at our local town's annual fair where they have lots of booths of various merchants selling things, I bought a bamboo pillow.  The guy swore up and down that it was the answer to my problem.  So I bought it and. . . . too thick and the bamboo filling that was supposed to be so malleable always wound up in a big clump that was very uncomfortable.  The last couple of weeks my neck has been super bothering me.  So yesterday I tried again in my quest for the perfect pillow.  I examined all the pillows Bed, Bath and Beyond had to offer and selected the Dr. Maas pillow for back and side sleepers (conveniently on sale).  This morning I woke up neck pain free!!!!!  I felt so refreshed!

Now if only my knee would stop hurting.

Somebody turned 2 Yesterday!

Dylan dressed in his Cote D'ivoire outfit.

Happy Birthday!

Yesterday was my husband's 55th birthday!  Just before we started dating, I surprised him with a birthday cake in the lobby of the law school we attended.  That was 30 years ago!  My, time flies!

I bought a gluten free cake from a bakery in a nearby town.  It was pricey but it did taste pretty good.  The cake itself tasted a bit more like a sweet bread than a regular cake.  We got the vanilla on vanilla flavor, since I can't do too much chocolate or I get a migraine.

Pretty, pricey and pretty good tasting as well.

Hump Day Hygge! (More food)

Puerto Rico.  Las Vegas massacre.   Then, my darn knee is still hurting, making me limp around while I do my errands.  And suddenly I am trying to go gluten free.  I know the last two aren't any comparison to the first two, but all of it has made life seem very heavy lately.

So I seem to be retreating into cooking a lot, enjoying the cool early fall weather, and reading.

I made a delicious salmon chowder last night.  Wasn't difficult to make at all.  We eat canned salmon about once a week, but getting the wild caught frozen fillets or steaks is super expensive.  So salmon chowder is a good way to stretch one package of filleted salmon. 

Here's the recipe:  Salmon Chowder  I pretty much followed the recipe exactly.  I trimmed the skin off the salmon though.  It doesn't say whether you are supposed to or not, but I personally can't stand oily fishy tastes.  So I cut/scrapped off as much salmon as I could and then I fed the skin to my dog and cats, which they loved.

I also used the light coconut milk.  I think I've only cooked with coconut milk once before.  It was really delicious!  Made the chowder very delicate and tasty.  We did add more salt and pepper at the table, but once we did that the soup was just scrumptious.

I also made sweet potato fries to go as a side because usually we have bread or crackers with soup so I felt we needed something. 

I took this simple recipe from the Hashimoto's 4-Week Plan book again.  I think these recipes are nice and simple and well done.  I chopped up two big sweet potatoes into matchstick thin sticks.  This took awhile.  Then I melted 2 tablespoons or maybe a bit more of coconut oil in a pain, poured that over my sweet potato french fries then add some salt and 1/4 tsp of tumeric, per the recipe in the book.  I mixed and tossed those thoroughly, then put on a big cookie sheet and into a hot oven at 450 degrees.  Took about 30 minutes.  Some fries were crispy, some were not, but everybody enjoyed them a lot!

Half way through eating my soup last night, I realized I needed to take a picture.  The sweet potato fries on the little plate.

Another win was trying out Cream of Rice cereal.  I was looking for gluten free, non-GMO oats at the store.  I didn't find those but my eye lit on another hot cereal proudly endorsed by the Celiac.org group. 

It's very easy to make, a nice hot cereal you should eat while piping hot from the pot.  I garnished it with raisins, pumpkin seeds and a drizzle of maple syrup and it was quite satisfying.  Apparently, it has lots of iron in it?  70% of your daily recommended amount.  And since I'm feeding someone struggling with anemia, that's a very good thing!

I think this will make a regular appearance at our breakfast table this winter.

Banana Pancakes - Zero Waste and Gluten Free!

What is that saying?  Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.  Just when I announce to the world we are going on the Mediterranean Diet for various health reasons, I decide to go gluten free.  Long story short:  4 out of 7 family members have been diagnosed with Hashimoto Thyroiditis in the last couple of years.  The most recent being my just turned 16 year old at the beginning of August.  She has been grappling with depression, anxiety attacks, fatigue, lethargy, PMS and very heavy periods, feeling cold but then getting hot flashes, dizzy spells, the beginnings of hair loss (her hair is her crowning glory, thick, wavy, down to her waist dark chestnut hair), all sorts of skin allergic reactions, headaches, mysterious aches and pains, weird forgetfulness that isn't normal, brain fog (inability to think clearly or concentrate) and anemia.   The things that used to energize her and give her motivation now all overwhelm her.  She got on synthroid and her numbers got better in terms of TSH but she is still grappling with all these other emotional/focus type issues.  The response of the doctor is just to put her on anti-depressants.  I really don't want to do that if it isn't necessary.  We are wanting to get another family member off anti-depressants and it is a hard and rather scary process.  It turns out that many Hashimoto patients don't feel well and/or struggle with depression even though their lab numbers are supposedly fine.  There is a booming industry out there because of this.

Conventional medicine doesn't seem to focus on why autoimmune diseases are becoming so prevalent.  They do tell you that if you have one you are more likely to develop another.   I'd like to see if we can fix the auto-immune system. Conventional medicine doesn't seem very keen on trying alternatives to medication.  Enter functional medicine.  I am really skeptical about this kind of stuff.  While acupuncture has been found to help with pain, which makes sense when you think in terms of nerves, I don't see how it helps reduce nodules in your thyroid for example. And I don't get how chiropractors can actually fix thyroid issues.  I think the only true thing chiropractors do falls under the realm of physical therapy.  In fact that is how they bill for insurance companies.  But when they get into fixing things like autism, etc, I just don't see how that works.  Same with essential oils.  I am sure some essential oils have enough concentrated chemicals in them that they help some conditions, but I don't believe there is an essential oil out there for every condition! 

But I have been hearing a lot about gluten free helping with auto-immune stuff, especially Hashimoto's, so we are going to give it a try.  My 16 yo is kicking and screaming about it all.  But emotionally she is locked into resisting everything upon first exposure to it.  Anyway, yesterday was our first day and the very first thing I made was a hit!  And I realized it is zero waste too!

I got this recipe from Hashimoto's 4-Week Diet by Karen Frazier.  It's an elimination diet.

This recipe is so simple and it turned out really well!  These things look and taste like pancakes!  It only take 4 ingredients, all of which I had on hand.  (Zero waste notes are in the parentheses).

This recipe is supposedly for 4 servings.

2 bananas, mashed (compost banana peels; stupid sticker is trash)
4 eggs, beaten(compost egg shells; recyclable cardboard egg cartons)
1/2 tsp cinnamon (glass jar with tin lid)
some coconut oil for the pancake pan (glass jar with tin lid)

Mix the first 3 ingredients together to get a 'batter.'  Melt the coconut oil to coat the pan well.  Make sure the pan is hot.  Then pour in scant 1/4 cup of batter for each pancake, and cook for about 3 minutes or until you see bubbles forming and the edges getting firm.  Flip and cook for another minute or two on the other side.

The recipe called for serving with fresh raspberries, but I didn't have any, so I topped with some homemade blackberry jam.

Delicious and so easy!!!  A definite keeper!  I might make these every Saturday morning instead of our usual bagel run (which is very hard to give up, especially for my husband).

For dinner I made spaghetti with meat sauce (I keep forgetting about Meatless Monday - it seems I tend to want to be meatless on Tuesdays instead!). 

Spaghetti:
Non GMO corn pasta by De Boles (small plastic window in cardboard box)
Brown rice pasta by De Boles (same)
Jar of marinara sauce (glass jar with metal lid)
ground beef - (local, grass fed, but wrapped in plastic)
topped with a little parmesan cheese (glass jar, metal lid)

The Plague and I - Book 28

I am on a Betty MacDonald kick.  Right after I finished The Egg and I, I started on The Plague and I which I remember really enjoying when I first read it many years ago.  I enjoyed it again!  I confess I find the peek into a TB sanatorium before World War II fascinating.  MacDonald describes the atmosphere, the people, her emotions and experiences in such a way that the whole book was a pleasure.  It wasn't as funny (or trying to be as funny) as The Egg and I but since I found the humor a little forced when I reread The Egg and I, I kind of liked that aspect of it.  I think her writing was just better in this book.   It flowed better to me.  And I wasn't cringing at her characterizations of Native Americans and such.  In fact, her dearest friend from the sanatorium turned out to be a young Japanese girl with a wicked, dry sense of humor.

Definite two thumbs up!

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.