Chicken Something for the Soul

I'm home from work sick today. Finally. This stuffy, drippy, coughy, sore-throaty, can't talkie, headachey thing has been coming on, slowly, for a while now. But, the "responsible" inside of me makes it hard to take off from work when I know there are things for me to do there.

I woke up to my alarm at 7:30 this morning. I called my boss and fell back to sleep until 2pm. Whew.

I know I'm feeling better, because I just cooked some chicken goodness. I haven't had vegetables in my fridge for a week. Terrible, I know; but, I missed the farmer's market the last two Saturdays due to seminars and I've been avoiding the grocery store because I blew my food budget before the 15th of the month!

Anyway. Home sick. I walked to the produce stand down the street for some basics: spinach, chard, garlic, apples. Last week, I took some meat out of the freezer to defrost and I had a feeling it was getting near the end of its useful life. I'm taking the ground elk to a friend's birthday barbeque tonight. The other package was chicken breasts. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts. In my parents' house, I ate these for dinner more nights than not. Since cooking for myself, and committing to free-range organic, it's a cut of meat I can't really afford. At $6-7 per pound, give me red meat! (That, and there's so much good stuff in the skin and bones of a free range organic... why bother?) But this package was a gift from a friend who'd held it in her freezer for too long. So I took advantage.

Spinach, Chicken, Feta Surprise

Coat your biggest frying pan with a drizzle of olive oil, and bring to heat.
Rinse your chicken breasts. Place in hot pan.
Season liberally with salt and pepper. Flip. Season again.
Allow to cook through. I'd separated the chicken tenders from the undersides of the breasts. These cook quickly! Keep an eye, so as not to dry them out.

Meanwhile, cut up the half onion that's been lying around, and chop a few cloves of garlic.
When the chicken is cooked, set it aside and put the freshly chopped yummies into the pan. Add more oil if necessary.

Remove the roots from a bunch of spinach. Wash well. Tear, if desired.
Chop or crumble some feta--I used about 3/4 of a carton of Trader Joe's "Authentic Greek Feta in brine" (sheep cheese = okay cheese). Chop the chicken breasts into slices or cubes or chunks or whatever.

When the onions and garlic are fragrant, add the spinach, tossing and wilting until it all fits in the pan. Add the feta. Add the chicken.

Crank up the heat. Toss and mix and cook until the spinach is as soft--or not--as you like, and the feta is as melted--or not--as you like.

Take off the heat and eat up.

Or, do what I did, and store it in something in the fridge until you have an appetite again.

Frozen Grapes

I'm eating frozen grapes in a vain attempt to stay away from the Ben and Jerry's ice cream in the freezer at the 7-11 next door. It's 4 dollars I shouldn't spend and1240 calories I don't need. It's 108 grams of sugar and a pint of dairy. It's a sore throat in the morning, stiff knees and tiny, painful pimples around my mouth next week. It's delicious.

Sticking to the AK diet is really hard for me. Hard enough that I'm not very good at it. One of the reasons I started this blog was to have a place of accountability. So far, I am my own only reader and that is just perfect; this whole writing in a public space thing is new and a little embarrassing for me. I've considered making a formal blog-posted commitment to swear off wheat, dairy, sugar and soy for X number of weeks or months, and to follow it with these posts... but I don't want to fail. Besides, I want to eat cookies and ice cream sometimes--and feel guilty enough about it as it is.

Fail.

That's what it feels like I'm doing every time I dip my spoon back into this pint of "Everything but the..." on my nightstand. That vague sense of "not good enough" just makes me want to eat it more. So does the sense of "I feel a headache coming on" and "gosh, my gut's not quite right." It's such a twisted place to be, mentally.

I do not have celiac disease. I am not a diabetic. There is not a single food I know of that would send me into anaphalaxis. In that sense, I feel blessed--if I want to, when I want to, I can eat anything without really having to think twice about it. At the same time, though, I feel like if I had a more concrete, more immediate consequence, this would be easier.

I poison myself slowly.

After taking the "static" out of my system (unswitched, as we call it), an AK practitioner can test my muscles with and without different foods in my mouth. A strong quad--related to the small intestine--will go weak if I sample dairy. A strong lat--related to the pancrease and spleen--will weaken instantly to sugar, just a pinch, applied to my tongue. I've been involved in demonstrations twice during which our teacher, a highly skilled chiropractor to whom I will refer as DTF, finds my problems and fixes them only to make them reappear by dosing me with one of these foods. Lying on an adjusting table, vulnerable in front of a stadium-seated classroom full of mentors and peers, future colleagues, DTF adjusts a few bones, adresses a few muscles, and clears away neurological disorganization, trigger points and digestive issues, facilitates muscles and increases passive range of motion. Then, he sprinkles sugar or powdered milk on my tongue... and all of the strong muscles are weak again, the subluxations return, the flexibility is gone, the switching reappears.

I know how these things affect me.

But I eat them anyway. And I pay the price.

I've never been overweight, really. I've never suffered from a chronic disease, or migraines, or anything worse than a nasty cold or virus. Before I started getting better, I didn't know I was sick.

I thought it was normal to get dizzy when you stood up, to feel stuffed after a meal, to get tired around 3pm, stay alert until 2am and never wake up rested. I thought that, at 15 years as a sophomore in high school, my wrists and knees were just old. The doctor tested me for Lupus when I kept complaining that it hurt; my tests were negative. He told me to take Ibuprofen, and wrote me a note to get out of P.E.

Since cutting back on these foods, since getting AK adjustments and taking whole food supplements, I wake up rested. My energy holds through the day. My menses are easy; I don't black out when I stand up, I don't get heart palpitations. As long as I stay off the cookies, my knees don't ache. I don't get tonsil stones, anymore. My tummy stays flat, the circles under my eyes dissapear, my gait is graceful, my posture is strong, my skin clears up.

I don't get "wing bone pain", the dull ache underneath my shoulder blade that plagued me from 8th grade through college, anymore.


On Wednesday, I walked to Trader Joe's during my lunch. I bought a bag of chocolate chip cookies. I ate six of them during my trip back to the office. (I never can just eat one. Of anything.) My wing bone pain returned, even as I walked. The next day, I woke up bloated and stiff. My knees are achey, my throat is sore, I had a headache, which I rarely suffer, and there are tender-sore muscles up and down my spine.

I know what this stuff does to me. I don't enjoy it. I eat it anyway.

I feel like I can't stop. Then, I feel like I could stop if I really put my mind to it. But, I don't really want to put my mind to it. Why not? Because I'm not really that sick. And then I eat some, and then I feel terrible, and then I want to--both, simultaneously-- 1) get hardcore about the diet and 2) binge.

Food is so emotional for me.

Don't get me wrong. I revel in the stuff. I absolutely adore it. I love to eat. And, I love to eat the good stuff much more than I love to eat the bad stuff. But, it's like there's something inside of me that's not okay with this. Something that I don't know how to deal with, yet.

[Addendum: a place of accountability may have been one, teeny tiny reason I started writing here... but more so, because it was about time I started doing something about sharing how we can eat wheat, dairy, sugar and soy-free instead of just telling people to do it.]

10pm

It's 10 o'clock on a Thursday night. My kitchen smells so good right now; I wish I could make this scent into an air freshener to hang over the rear view mirror of my car.

In a pan on the stove, bacon sizzles loud and proud.
On the next burner, thinly sliced leeks melt, low and slow, into Kerrygold butter.

The bacon, cut into one inch squares, turns dark and crispy in a bath of clear, rendered fat. I drain it on a paper towel and pour most of the fat into the tin can I keep under the kitchen sink for that very purpose. A few tablespoons, though, go into a bow next to the stove and a teaspoon or so remains coating the bottom of the pan. I add a half of a leek--the firm, pale, stalk-half, which I've reserved from its melty fate and diced into tiny bits. These cook and crisp over medium heat; I'm careful not to let the bacon grease smoke (a sign that it's too hot and shifting shapes). Then comes the remainder of my red wine vinegar, about a tablespoon and a half. It protests loudly, bubbles and smokes, when it hits the hot pan. I swish it around with my coated tongs (my favorite kitchen tool, I think), scraping the bacon bits off the bottom of the pan, freeing all of the goodness. Oh, the smells. The thick, slightly acrid, buttery, bacony smells.

I squirt in a tablespoon or so of my housemate's local Dijon mustard (oops. I don't think he'll mind.) and stir vigorously. The mixture congeals, slightly. Before it begins to darken I dash it with sea salt and cracked pepper, and drizzle in a few more tablespoons of the still-warm bacon grease. Stir, stir, stir. Then I add, tong-full at a time, a whole head of frisee lettuce. It wilts, batch by batch, as I turn it against the bottom of the pan, wiping up the bacony, leeky, mustardy goodness. Not more than two minutes--it's done.

I put it in my favorite Indian pot and sprinkle it with bacon. Warm, like it is right now, I think it's my favorite salad. Cold, for breakfast, it's still tasty. I'll poach two eggs when I get out of the shower and their warm, golden yolks will seep through the soggy lettuce, coat the crispy bacon, and make my morning amazing.

This is that salad, made for a friend last week.
The bacon was burnt, the dressing to scant and I should have
poached two eggs each--but it was still delightful.
I need to work on my picture taking skills! I promise, it tasted better than it looks.

I'm drinking a "Natural Brew" ginger ale. (Oh! The sugar!! oh, the sugar.) As I dance around my kitchen at 10 o'clock on a Thursday night, it's perfect.

Now, a pound and a half of country sage bulk pork sausage is screaming from the bacon pan. It hisses and pops and sounds, well, delightful! The smell is sweet, like muffins or pancakes, not meat. It will go into an old glass cashew butter jar and I'll eat it cold or room temperature over the next few days, at work and in seminar. When the munchies say, "granola bar!" I'll say, "sausage!" and everything will be okay.

I let the leeks go too long. I became impatient and turned up the heat. Instead of melting into soft, translucent slivers they are mostly crispy and brown, like French Onions on green bean casserole, after they've sat for an hour or so and lost a little crunch. I melted goatzarella into the mix. Its salty stringyness hold the overcooked leeks in a coherent lump. I think I may put poached eggs on this, too, and eat it for lunch?

I am so lucky to be able to eat what I can, to be able to cook what I can, to be able to spend time how I do.

The frisee lettuce with warm bacon vinagrette and the leeks with mozarella cheese were both inspired by Shauna at glutenfreegirl She--her taste, her writing, her recipes and her joie de vivre--is a constant source of inspiration!

The Whole Pie Plate

What you can see: bell peppers from the farmer's market, sauted in olive oil; California avocados x2; scallions; cilantro and spring onions from Joel's garden

What you can't see: one pound of ground elk, browned and seasoned with cumin, paprika, salt, pepper and cayenne; the tub of salsa we didn't need to tap in to; the amazing Portland springtime sun; me and a friend on the front lawn eating meat and vegetables.