Pinterest

I just discovered Pinterest.  As one person said upon hearing this, "You, of all people?"  Yeah, I know.  I just keep all my recipes that I like on my computer.  Ones I've made, I print a copy of and stick in a plastic sleeve in a 3-ring notebook in the kitchen.  Ones that have never quite made it from my computer to my table, are stored in limbo on my computer.  If I need a fancy cake or something, I look through those first, after reviewing my usual suspects.  I have a few key books I review.  I haven't yet figured out how to deal with recipes stuck on my kindle and I have like 500 cookbooks on there.

Some women are shoe whores.  I am a cookbook whore.  Don't judge me!  I found this recipe and made a lot of adaptations.   The crust recipe is absolutely untouched because it's delicious.  Of course, I use whole wheat flour, because while you can take the hippie out of California, you can't take the California out of the hippie.

(Derived from Betty Crocker's Red Spoon Collection, Best Recipes for Chicken, 1989, ISBN 0-13-073065-3)

Mexican Chicken Pot Pie

3-4 cups of cooked chicken (3-4 skinless chicken breasts)
1 can cream of something soup (I prefer cream of mushroom, but in a house of fungi haters, I use low-cal cream of chicken.  I have also used cream of celery to good avail.)
1 cup of sour cream (substitutions include a cup of nonfat yogurt or a cup of nonfat sour cream or half and half of each)
1 can of chiles, drained and/or a half cup of chopped jalapenos or bell peppers
1/2 cup of chopped onion
2 cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1/4 cup of green onions
1 tablespoon oregano
1 tsp chile powder  (may be omitted for lightweights or increased for chile heads)
1 tablespoon cilantro
Optional:  1/2 c. chopped spinach, grated zucchini or summer squash

Crust:
2/3 cup of shortening
4 cups of flour (I do half whole wheat and half all purpose unbleached)
1-2 tsp of salt ( I use less salt)
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1-1 1/2 cup of warm water

Preheat over to 400 degrees.  Make the crust first by cutting the shortening into flour, salt and baking powder until mixture resembles fine crumbs.  Stir in water with fork until dough comes off the side of the bowl and rounds into a ball.  On a lightly floured surface, knead the dough just until smooth.    Cover and let rest about 15 minutes.

After the dough has rested, roll it out about 1/8"-1/4" thick.  The original crust recipe was half the recipe I put up, but that was never enough, so I always double it, so therefore, the recipe above :)  I use an 13" by 9" pan.

Put your dough in your pan with a good 4-5 inches of dough hanging over the sides.  Put the chicken on the bottom.  Now, take the soup, sour cream, chiles, onions, oregano, chile powder, and veggies and mix together over medium heat until hot and cooked through.  Then dump over chicken.  Sprinkle cheese and green onions and cilantro over chicken mixture.  You're going to pinch off one end of the crust, so stuff doesn't leak out.  Then you're going to pull and pinch the dough together on top.  Then either knife or fork through the crust a few times to let steam escape.

Put your little stuffed pouch o' dough in the oven to bake 45-50 minutes until the crust is a golden brown.  I like to serve this with salsa.  Although some ranch blended with cilantro on a nice green salad is good, too.

I've been feeling like crap the past couple days.  I overdid on Saturday.  I've been keeping track of my sugars and fighting through the prednisone, but I way overdid on Saturday, so I've been paying.  Yesterday, I spent most of the day cooking and enjoyed it, but I was so exhausted.

My sugars are pretty nuked, but hey, it's prednisone.  I see the specialist tomorrow, so here's hoping.

Today started off at 550AM.

I woke up with a round or two of IBS.  We dropped Genny off at school, went to breakfast at Cracker Barrel.  I had eggs, bacon, and whole grain harvest pancakes.    I used a combination of maple and no sugar syrup and ate half the pancakes.  It was a lot of food.

I dropped Mike off at work, dropped Russell at the pulmo for his allergy shots, then, I got my favorite drink in the entire world, iced sugar-free cinnamon dolce latte from Starbucks.  I had started hiving before that, but I seemed to get worse after, so suspicious of the syrup.  I grabbed water and jerky for Russell and I, while we waited on Genny to get off school.  With his stomach issues and the several times I had been to the bathroom thusfar, I figured I'd better eat some protein. Then we picked her up and I took them to lunch at an Indian Buffet.

I've eaten there before without much trouble, but towards the end of the meal (I'm pretty sure I ate my weight in nan, vegetable rice, and onion pakora) I started realizing I was going hoarse and my throat was closing.  I quietly got the kids stuffed into the car, messaged Mike and drove the couple blocks to his work to have him drive me to the hospital.  Tonight, I told Russell if my throat is closing, that he should drive me to Dad, next time.

Six benadryl later, I got to the hospital, I took my sugars two hours after I ate, and they were like 161, which wasn't bad, so I piggybacked a little bit of insulin on because they gave me a couple shots of steroids and benadryl and made me down some tagamet type stuff (a lot of the belly meds have a form of antihistamine in them).  After I rested for an hour or two, while Mike took the kids away to Walmart to get Genny's school supplies, I messaged him that they were going to release me in a bit, so he came back and eventually, took me home.

I slept for five hours and I had a hamburger on two slices of ww bread from last night, a giant bowl of salad, two celery sticks and a probably a half cup of almonds Mike brought me along with a bit of sf candy to deal with my sweettooth from the steroids..  I wasn't very hungry, after I woke up, but I ate anyhow.  I think that's just kind of me being used to my diabetes.  I really wish I hadn't.  My after sugars, even with some jiggling was 275, so I took insulin for that.  Then, the most recent test was 195, so I took insulin for that, too.
I'm going to take my metformin and hope for the best.  Not looking forward to steroids tomorrow.
___

So I am here at 230AM, not sleeping and starting to sprout hives across my scalp and face.  I'm so desperate.  No one understands what it's like to suffer under the itchy uncertainty of hives.  Not knowing, if it's suddenly going to affect my breathing, speech or general features.  It'd be nice, if I could at least be wearing long sleeves and not be in the hell that is August in Tennessee.  Humidity of 94%.

I can't breathe well in that, even when uncompromised.

My doctor wants me to lose weight, but I've got to take steroids again, just to survive.

I'm beyond desperation.

I pray our Heavenly Father keeps me safe, keeps my weight down and holds me up, when I can't do that myself.   I'm tired.  I'm scared.  I'm sad.

I called the emergency room and told them my hives were coming back and asked if it was OK to take my steroids earlier than anticipated.  I was told yes by the nurse and to take benadryl for another day or so, along with the tagamet.

Please God, keep me safe with the tools at my disposal.  Amen!

Fasting sugar was 150 again.  Gah.

I had an almond butter and jam sandwich.  I slept a lot. I slept from 12-330, 5:30-830, and 1130-300.  Yeah, it was erratic and I was sooo tired from it.  Two cups of coffee didn't make much dent, sadly.

After a couple hamburgers and a bunch of salad, I went to bed.  I had to piggy back on some insulin (175 and 195 sugar) and then, I woke up at midnight, hungry, so I had a couple chobanis.  My sugars were 92, so I overshot a little.

My hives were horrendous after dinner head to foot, so six benadryls later, I conked.

I'm writing this for Thursday, even though it's Friday. :P

I have to get up, drop Genny at school, drop Mike at work, take Russell to breakfast and then to a couple of doctor appointments.  Then, I need to swing back to get Genny from her first half day and pick up some school supplies and grab her brother and lunch.

I'm going to try Indian food and hope it works out for my splurge.  I found the dessert seemed to set me off last time, so going to forgo that and try to stick to rice, nan, and entrees.

My weight is up again.  I don't know why.  I'm not eating like a ton, but I guess I'm not moving lots and lots either.  I'm looking forward to Genny being gone, so I can get stuff done.

Pain upon wake up was pretty nominal, so like a 3, but the fog, was severe, like a 9.

I woke up at 1230. Fasting sugar was 151.  To be fair I slept for 13.5 hours.  I went to bed last night about 1030 because I had to take a lot of benadryl for some really bad hives.  I'm still pretty hive-coated, so meh.  Brunch was whole wheat bread and a slice of  bologna.  My feet are still pretty swollen, but not quite as bad as yesterday.

Exhaustion-wise, I'm feeling pretty wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.  One would hope after that much sleep, I would be, too. Today's tired rating puts me at a 1.  I'm still a little foggy-brained, but mostly pretty good. Pain is another matter.  I slept on my back for several hours, so I'm at an 8 in pain. My low back is very stiff and sore today.

_________

I had a couple cheapy hamburgers because I was ravening, which caused hives and two benadryl down.  Had Tuna melts for dinner with salad.  Going swimming.

In the middle of the night, I got up to take my meds and had a couple of chobani.  I checked my sugars after the two and it was only 129, so I guess I woke up for a reason.

So I am going to keep a food/caffeine intake and "how are you feeling" journal for a couple weeks.  I have a friend who's been really into this vitamin program and while I take vitamins (prenatals if you must now) because of my leaky gut, I've been feeling kind of crappy this summer.  Between taking a ton of benadryl on a daily basis for the hives reaction I'm having to foods I eat and a reduced dose of thryroid, I'm wiped.

Last night, I got about 8.5 hours of sleep.  I'm still pretty exhausted.  I've started off today with a cup of coffee, my meds, some pretty bad swelling in my feet and an almond butter sandwich.  I toes feel like they're swelling, too.  (After I ate my almond butter sandwich, I took a 3 hour nap.  I really was tired.)  I also drank my diet root beer without caffeine.

My sugar after breakfast and coffee was 226, which can make a person tired and I think that played a part, but waking up tired sure didn't help .  I should have done a fasting sugar before my , but forgot, but that indicates I was probably fasting at over 150, which my doctor wouldn't be happy about and well, neither am I.    I did forget to check before bed last night, so I'll work on that tonight.  When I woke up from my nap, three hours after eating, my sugars were pretty stable at 132 and my edema got better from the water pill.

I wasn't sure if I'd given myself my longacting insulin, so I just took that because apparently, I did not. :)

Yesterday, I slept a lot, but I did a lot of canning last night, putting up 16 pints of freezer jam. :)  Today, I'd like to put a bunch of squash into a brine or parboil it for freezing.  There's also buckets of wash to get through.

It's overcast, so I'm feeling draggy and foggy-brained from the fibro.  On a scale of 1-10 for exhaustion, today is an 9 at wake up.  My pain is a 4.  My feet and legs hurt from the swelling and I'm a little stiff.  After nap, the exhaustion is down some, to more like a 4.  Still yawning, my brain is still struggling to come up for air, so still feeling wiped.  My pain is still at a 4, as my edema is making my feet hurt and my body feels like a front is coming in, for lack of a better way to explain it.  I just feel a little bit like a person living under a heavy blanket, like I'm trying to come up for air.

I still have some hives.  Took 2 benadryl at 530.  Hoping it doesn't make me go swimming back under the sleepy blanket.

Dinner of Thai Green Curry Chicken on brown basmati rice did not make me hive, surprisingly enough.  I was worried because there was some kind of weird citrus something in the curry paste.  After dinner and dessert, my sugars were 156, but that means I can swim and not pass out. I am feeling more alert.  Making dinner was kind of a production, but it was delicious and I used a lot of the fresh peppers from the garden for it.  Sometimes, I wonder if I could possibly grow enough garlic and onions to keep this household going.

Took 2 more benadryl at 930, and I don't have hives, but my lips are swollen really really badly, so I took another 2 at 1030.

I'm more alert now at 930, so exhaustion is like 5.

Tomorrow, I want to hoe the greenbeans out and put in leafy spinach or lettuce with some rabbit deterrent.

At 1AM, my sugars were 151, so I piggybacked some insulin on and went to bed. :)

I'm having some kind of food reaction.  It's been getting so freaking bad.  I mean sometimes, I get dots that look like bug bites, but aren't.  I mean they're itchy, but they fade away.  I had a friend joke that I should play connect-the-dots.  I found a pink pen at the time, connected them, and then sent her a picture.  We both snickered.

Other times, I get giant continents of hives reaching toward each other like watching the continental plates in reverse, where it's all slowly going back to Pangaea.   Mind you these aren't just for show hives. These are excruciatingly itchy and painful and extended at one point from my ankles to my scalp.  I found my back scratcher and was going to town because by far, the worst spot is the center of my back where the bra hooks are. Mike would come by and scratch my back for me and I'd moan like a porno track.  I have had moments where I have been quite pitiful, feeling like I'd happily take the chance of being accused of doing something sexual with a fence post, just to get my back scratched.  Around home, I've taken to free-boobing in camisoles because the bra on that spot just makes me holy crap itchy and then having to pull the damned things off and remove the tags.

My skin, over the course of the past month, has taken on bizarre and ever-changing textures and degrees of pink and fire engine red.  I joked with the emergency room doctor that my body is a canvas for hive art.  He was taken aback and then, started shaking his head and laughing.  As miserable as it is, laughing helps me not want to flay myself.  Buffalo Bill would be so happy in a Wendy-coat.

I'm going into day five of steroids, after just losing the last seven pounds put on from steroids a few weeks ago.

Then I had a thought, when despite steroids, a holy crap-ton of antihistamines later, my lips began to swell. The only time my lips have swollen in my whole life due to an allergic reaction is from citric acid or oranges.  I remember distinctly being about seven years' old and after lunch on the kickball field feeling my lips swelling and having to go off the field, fuck up the teams to the dismay of my classmates and go see the nurse.  After a few rounds of that, my mother talked to the neighbor, who was a lunch lady at my school.  They went round and round on the menu and discovered that the school added citric acid to fruit cocktail to keep it from browning. (Can you imagine food so freshly canned that it needed that?)  I got fruit cocktail without citric acid from then on.

My mom would load me up on benadryl until the reaction ended.  In those days, my pediatrician, Dr. Purington was at least a half hour drive away, and the hospital was about an hour away, so my throat would have been closed and I'd have been dead by the time she ran me to either location so she treated at home.

I've been mostly treating at home.  First I was using three zyrtec, per the allergist, who informed me that I don't show "true" food allergies.  Translated that means that the leaky gut from my fibro is letting food sensitivities re-erupt.  I went off that and was taking benadryl.  I had a doctor tell me that the only reason I shouldn't take more benadryl is if it was knocking me out.  No such luck.  I've been generally taking it every two hours when it's bad. I suspect I'm waking up after 4-5 hours because I need another round.

After the first lip swelling incident, I started reviewing the food I'd eaten that day.  Nothing with citric acid.  Nothing with oranges.  Then, I checked my splenda coke.  I've been so proud of the fact that I've gone off aspartame and just to splenda to help my fibro.  Not far into the ingredient list was the evil citric acid. Dammit!

Mike made me splenda sweet tea with cardamon. I have a big vat of it in the fridge.

Yesterday, the hives were more like dots again.  Today, I'm hoping they'll fade entirely.

___

Meanwhile, in the realm of everything else that could go wrong with my health, I found this big hole in my cpap hose.  The past month, I've been sleeping all the damned time. As soon as my head hit that bed, I was out and I seemed to be no good to anyone unless I had 12 hours of sleep, plus naps.  This has been going on for a month or more.  I'm used to sleeping seven to nine hours and feeling pretty good.

I got up after five and a half hours and did chores like a crazy person.  I cleaned places I haven't cleaned in months.   I weeded the garden.  I did laundry.  I did floor boards.  I picked up all sorts of stuff.  Lately, I had hardly been able to move around the house just from the bed to the chair and back.  To do all that stuff, means that true sleep has returned.  Two nights running now, I am waking up after four or five hours and doing all this stuff, including this blog post, and then crashing for a few more hours, waking refreshed, rested and ready to roll.

My entire household would like to have me duck-taped to the ceiling or wall. Ha! Sucks to be them!

I am thunderstruck by spring.  I mean, there's that whole adoration of my husband that happens this time of year.  He has been humping anything on my body (and I want him to) like he's a sex-starved single male baboon at the zoo lobbing feces at the tourists in boredom and suddenly, the zookeeper brings him a ravishing she-baboon with a pink bow on her head.  It's freaking spring!

Our love-life aside, spring in Tennessee is just like a post card.  There are all of these homes that scream neglect and sharecropper tossed between mansions of some country music mogol or some master of old that seem ill-placed interspersed between vegetation and dilapidation. Blooming dogwood looks wonderful in any yard with its big, creamy, floppy flowers floating in the air like the peace one finds in a Japanese tea garden. Forsythia in bushes everywhere, sculpted and not.  Magnolias bloom like Georgia O'Keefe paintings, flowers like huge biblical revelations of life after death.

I find myself eyeing over thickets hugging fences and looking for the sign of blackberry blossoms and poison ivy.  I'm finding places to put strawberries as groundcover in my front bed amongst the bulbs -- daffodils, crocus, hyacinths and the occasional wild onion.  Every newly mowed lawn smells like a slice of freshly sliced vidalia onion and I find myself leaving the windows open to inhale it.

The true revelation of the South is the azalea bush.  I saw some with buds with the petal colors starting to show through the edge of the outer green.  Pinks, reds, oranges and whites like cotton candy at a carnival will explode here for weeks and then just as suddenly, fall silent and die out.  While it continues, it's as if to give a distraction from that awkward stage where the trees are starting to leaf, but the forests aren't yet completely green and dark with decidiuousness.

In a month, it will be lilies everywhere, wild in ditches and in carefully constructed yards with mulch and bricks. Someone somewhere will be selling them from their house and their yard will have a fence that does not require posts because there are lilies to support it.

I find myself watching people's porches for chairs that look like they will be used and thinking about what I will do with Genny this summer, how many of my chairs will be used, if Mike will ever fill the umbrella stand with the sand I finally convinced him to buy, swimsuits and flipflops.

Spring is that harbinger of summer, much as this winter seemed to go on like the nightmare you can't wake up out of for a while until you are good and terrified.

We covered up a few plants, as we are trying to get the garden in, but Mother Nature keeps stamping her feet and keeping Old Man Winter around for her pleasures before she laces the flowers of spring into the hair of summer.