Tolerating Intolerance

This middle-aged body has become lactose intolerant in the last six months. As the current partner and roommate of the provocateur at bowlofcheese.com cheese and other dairy treats have been an essential part of my life for a long time.

Needless to say, lactose intolerance is taking some adjustment.

I've been moving through Kubler-Ross' stages of grief as I mourn the loss of cheese. I started with denial. "What" This can't be true. It must be a stomach bug."

So I kept eating cheese and dairy. And I kept feeling bloated, crampy and uncomfortable.

Now? I vacillate between anger, bargaining, and depression.

What does this look like? I'm testing the boundaries of what I can and cannot eat (bargaining).

• A little bit of blue cheese on a salad - ok
• Caesar salad with Parmesan shavings - most assuredly not ok
• Homemade pizza with glassy soy cheese - fine, if you go for that sort of thing
• North End pizza with mozzarella - stomach churning
• Hollandaise on eggs Benedict - fine
• Croque madame at Brasserie Jo - never again
• Saag paneer - not so bad in small amounts
• Sour cream-based veggie dip - also do-able in small amounts

And the anger? The depression? At the grocery store, in restaurants and watching Top Chef and other food shows on tv when I realize there is one more thing to add to my list of foods I'll ever be able to eat a full (or even a half) serving of again:

1. Ice cream (Don't give me that "But you can have sorbet!" b.s. Sorbet is NOT the same as ice cream)
2. Grilled cheese sandwiches
3. Macaroni and cheese
4. New England clam chowder
5. Yogurt
6. Chicken cordon bleu (I didn't eat this a lot, or ever, but now I want it simply because I can't have it)
7. Cottage cheese
8. Nachos

The Lactaid pills (and their generic equivalent) don't seem to have much impact on the issue, and I'd rather just avoid the food that makes me feel so uncomfortable, than put my body through the turmoil of having to adjust to something I naturally shouldn't be eating.

And over time I'll pass into acceptance. I smile wryly when I hear myself saying "I love soy milk and coconut milk ice cream WAY better the original," and can see the bright side of savoring a nibble - rather than a gobble - of fine cheese when we visit places like Formaggio and Farmstead. This is my body. I can't fight it, so instead I'm trying to tolerate my intolerance.

*****

Have you adjusted to lactose intolerance? How'd you do it? If you HAD to give up dairy, what would you miss the most?

My ♥ Belongs to Wegmans

My hometown grocery store, love of my retail life, opened it's first store in Massachusetts today. (Unless you live under a social media rock you already know Wegmans opened in Northborough on October 16, 2011.)

What you may not know is that this store is 47 miles from my house. One way. The travel time is nearly 1.5 hours. One way.

I live within three miles of three other grocery stores. Go seven miles further and you find three more grocery stores. That's six grocery stores, that I'm aware of, within ten miles of my home.

And now, today, after having made the three-hour round trip journey, where I shopped and laughed for four hours, I cannot imagine shopping anywhere else.

I forgot to buy paper towels and plastic wrap at the hometown market today. Yet I cannot bring myself to drive the 1.5 miles to the nearest grocery store, park the car, and walk through the sad, fluorescently-lit aisles. I just can't. It depresses me.

94 miles round trip is a ridiculous and wasteful distance to travel to buy groceries, particularly when I can do the same household errand in 3. That's 1/3rd of a tank of gas versus 1/100th of a tank of gas. My conscience won't let me make the hometown market my one and only.

But my ♥ belongs to Wegmans.

Guess will be living without paper towels for a little while.

My Vegetarian Experiment

October 1 is annually World Vegetarian Day (WVD) and October is Vegetarian Awareness Month. I responded to a challenge issued by the organizers of WVD. The challenge? Experiment with being a vegetarian for a day, a week or a month.

I made a pledge to try vegetarianism for a week. If I succeed I'll be entered into a drawing to win $250. (I pledged to try vegetarianism for a month the drawing prize would be $1,000.)

I'm day five into the challenge. And, what a challenge it has been. Here is a taste of my week.

Monday - Columbus Day holiday
On a "normal" holiday Monday?

• Big breakfast with BMG at one of our favorite local diners, complete with mounds of bacon and sausage
• Big lunch out with BMG at a spot near the water
• Small dinner with copious amounts of wine as I geared up for the work week

During vegetarian week?

Toast, with butter for breakfast

Frozen bean and cheese burrito from Trader Joes for lunch (with an apple cider chaser)

Monstrous amounts of baked potato chips

Picked over onion rings from BMG's big lunch out with non-vegetarian friends

Big dinner - spinach, veggie sausage and whole wheat pasta. And copious amounts of wine as I geared up for the work week

Tuesday
On a normal work day?

• Toast with sliced turkey for breakfast
• An apple or grapes mid-day
• A chicken or beef burrito with guacamole from Boloco or Chipotle for lunch
• Dinner at home or out - likely grilled chicken with pasta or rice and a veggie

During vegetarian week?

• Fat free pumpkin muffin with apple butter for breakfast
• Grapes for a mid-day snack
• Teriyaki "burrito bowl" with tofu, broccoli and onions from Boloco for lunch
• Truffle fries and a veggie burger for lunch

Wine tasting dinner at our favorite Boston restaurant, Brasserie JO, on Wednesday?
On a normal day?

• Mounds of passed appies like mini Croque Monsieurs and foie gras sammies
• Veal and tomato bubble as an amuse bouche
• Seared scallops in a vanilla beurre blanch
• Frisee salad with poached quail egg
• Braised short ribs
• Interpreted beef Wellington with cremed potatoes
• Cheese course with poached pears, bleu pot de creme and tomato confit
• Pumpkin tart with burnt caramel ice cream
• Copious amounts of wine (and martinis) beautifully paired with each course

During vegetarian week?

• Mini martinis during the appie course
• Specially prepared tomato bubble as an amuse bouche (thanks Chef!)
• Frisee salad with poached quail egg
• Cauliflower steak with cremed potatoes
• Gnocchi with a delicious cilantro-esque pesto
• Cheese course with poached pears, bleu pot de creme and tomato confit
• Pumpkin tart with burnt caramel ice cream
• Copious amounts of wine (and martinis) beautifully paired with each course

Thursday and Friday proceeded much like Tuesday.

As I head into the weekend I'm confident I can live with two more days of this. I'm heading to a grocery store opening on Sunday, which is certain to be filled with tempting samples. But I'm certain http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifI'll be fine.

I'm also certain I'd like to go back to being an omnivore. I miss bacon, and my daily turkey toast for breakfast. If I felt healthier or less physically polluted I might consider moving to a more vegetarian diet. But I don't. During the last five days I've eaten the same amount of fat and salt as I do during the week. I've also eaten WAY more dairy, in the name of "getting protein," than I should.

It has been a good experiment. I hope I win the $250. And I'm ready for this to be done.

Recipe Box

I have a tin recipe box, given to me by my mother when I was a teenager. The original gift came with a set of recipe cards that I promptly filled up with favorites from my mother's recipe books and my grandmother's memory. Over time the box became bloated with recipes torn from the newspaper, sloppily copied down on post-it notes, and printed from emails sent from friends.

I love this recipe box. It houses my mom's recipe for baked beans, written in a shorthand only I can understand. Two copies of a scone recipe that I first learned while on a hiking trip in the White Mountains of NH. I have recipes for Copper Pennies (aka carrot disks cooked with brown sugar) written in my grandmother's spidery script, along with all of my family's Christmas cookie standards. The box continues to grow. Over the summer I added the recipe or BMG's mom's curried rice salad.

Back when I started collecting recipes I did so with the intention of turning to the recipe box as my source for cooking inspiration. I now use the Internet as my primary source for recipes, along with the small collection of interesting recipe books I've amassed over the 25 years I've been cooking.

When I thumb through the recipe box, crowded with little slips of paper filled with delicious (and largely unfulfilled) intention, a pragmatic part of me says, "You've never prepared that recipe for Italian chicken stew you clipped out of The Washington Post in 1990; recycle that slip of paper!"

I don't think of myself as a particularly sentimental person. Except, apparently, when it comes to my recipe box.

Waste not

Our refrigerator crashed last night. Two attempts to reboot it were fruitless, so, at 7:30 this morning I started tossing food that was too sketchy to be recovered. In the tossed pile?

• Three sodden TV dinners


• One nearly full gallon and three partially eaten pints of ice cream


• 1.5 packages of gyoza


• A gazillion pounds of industrial grade hamburger patties


• 1/2 pound of sliced turkey


• 4 slices of Canadian bacon (eh?)


• 1 pint of sour cream


• 1 quart of fat free cottage cheese


• 1 mostly empty bottle of fish sauce, and


• 1 mostly full canister of fat free whipped cream.

I'm proud to report that, with the materials we recovered, we made the following:

• Succotash - 1/2 bag of frozen lima beans, 1/2 bag of frozen corn, and turkey bacon (with Old Bay for flavor)


• Curry chicken salad- 2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, poached and tossed with lo-fat mayo and Key Lime juice (+ a bunch of other stuff)


• Mashed cauliflower - head of cauliflower, boiled and then mashed with leftover fresh parm, plain soy milk, and onions and garlic cooked in (turkey) bacon fat, and


• Spanish rice - 1 bag of frozen peas, (rice), 1 jar of salsa, 1 jar of sliced Spanish olives, and leftover cooked hamburger and crispy pork belly

We also cooked 4 steaks, and are hanging on to toaster strudels, all of our eggs (Europeans don't refrigerate eggs, why should we?), 5 pounds of hot dogs and one pound of hot dog minis (don't ask), three types of block cheese, veggie burgers and a host of cookies and spices in the freezer. I steamed green beans for salad, and have roasted asparagus leftover from a nice dinner out that will also be added to salad. Today BMG ate a bag of salami and 1/2 pound of cheese to help with the "eat down."

We could have thrown everything away. A new (to us) fridge comes as early as tomorrow, and as late as Wednesday. We don't have sufficient cold storage, save for the vaguely cool fridge. And every time we open the fridge we lose a little of the cool to the warm air. So, keep food - even cooked food - is a giant pain in the neck.

But...

I hate wasting food more than almost anything else in the world. There are people in the world who are literally dying of hunger and malnutrition. While I know I'll never send my uneaten dinner to the starving kids in China (or Ethiopia, or Boston), I do want to feel like I'm not contributing to the problem by throwing away perfectly good food just because I am inconvenienced by not having a fridge for a short period of time.

PS: Want to see what our fridge used to look like? Take a peek via our 2007 posting on Fridge Watcher.com.

Hello 42!

You've heard the question before, "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" Or, "What are the first things you would you do if you won $700 million in the lottery?" Both are variations of the now popular "bucket list" idea. You know, where you make a list of all the things you want to do before you die?

I welcome the start of my 42nd year on this planet tomorrow. Birthdays always put me in a reflective mood - considering how I've grown in the past year, and who I want to be in the next year. The start of my 40s was filled with excited anticipation, and the prospect of being free to really dig into my "bucket list", which includes:
1. Live in NYC and/or Paris for at least six months
2. Learn to speak French
3. Successfully grow a giant pumpkin
4. Carve a giant jack-o-lantern
5. Hike Mt. Kilimanjaro
6. Provide some sort of service work (e.g. Peace Corps, NPS VIP Corps, etc.)
7. See as many of the US national parks as possible
8. Be a more diligent biker or kayaker
9. Do "the" road trip across the US
10. Water ski.

At first blush the last year has been a disappointing one because I haven't come substantively closer to achieving any of these things.

No one WANTS to be disappointed with themselves. Well, at least I don't. So I dug a little deeper. How would I characterize my 41st year?

One of the most significant changes is the evolving sense of peace I feel in my relationship with my mom. A light bulb was turned on and I realize that, while I am fundamentally different than she is, this doesn't preclude our having hundreds of ways we can appreciate and enjoy one another.

"Coming to peace with mom" isn't on my bucket list. But it probably should have been. Not only because being at peace with one's parents is a noble endeavor but also because, for me, the energy I put into my psychic wranglings with my mother (my childhood, my (mis)perceptions of my adult capacities) kept me from feeling the confidence I need to take bold steps towards achieving my goals.

I'm one year deeper into my life, and not outwardly any closer to crossing anything off my short list of aspirations. But inwardly, I'm ready for year 42 to begin.

When I First Believed in God

I first believed in god after my initial glimpse of Yoesemite Valley from the road to Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park.

I was struck by the clarity with which I could see the power of glaciers that sheared off Half Dome, carved the valley to Mirror Lake and Tuolumne Meadows, and created water ways from the Sierras to locations like Vernal and Bridal Veil Falls. I know the geological mechanisms that continue to shape the topology of this National Park. I also felt the presence of something much larger than myself as I entered the park for a six-day car camping trip in 1999.

The last 24 hours in the Park I went backcountry camping through the the Wawona region, in the less traveled southern part of this national treasure. At the start of strenuous 8.2 mile hike, through endless switchbacks to the curvy Chilnualna Falls, I fell in love with the gorgeous ingenuity of the manzanita shrubs that covered the mountain side. At the end of the first day of hiking, tent pitched in a dry creek bed, I had the privilege of seeing the Northern lights, confused at first for white fuel-induced visions. The beauty of the earth and the sky, along with my own triumph at having accomplished the hike, only reinforced my sense of a power greater than that of any single species.

*****

The blog post was written in response to call for stories about the National Parks. Share your story with the National Parks Conservation Association.

Photo credits to The Cachegetter.