MindyKatt, MD

Cats, Nature's Pain Distractors

I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge my cat.

It's 5.44am on a Thursday morning and we leave for a fabulous romantic vacation to Victoria in two hours. I've been up since 4.00am with bladder pain. Thought I could handle a green tea. Oh, how delusions of grandeur have battered me down. My own damn fault. Anyhow.

As hard as it is to type while a kitty leans on your arm, this little fur-ball has always been there for me during late night pain sessions. The ones at ungodly hours of the morning where waking your spouse for help would just be plain mean. Even though you know he'd get up to grab you tea and water.

Thanks, nocturnal pur-machine. You're always there at 4.00am with the snuggles and the head-bonks.

Eff You, Flare From Hell

So, it's been a while. I had a super busy spring, then a super busy summer, and now fall seems to be, you guessed it, super busy as well. 

Suffice it to say, I made some bad choices amongst all the busy-ness, and got a bit cocky. (ahem, coffee) it did not end well. 

For the past three weeks, I have been flaring all over the place, like an angry, dying star about to supernova. I have had to cut back on a lot of things to get the constant pain down to a dull roar, and it's been a bit of a metal challenge for me to not only refrain from so many tasty things, but to keep myself from getting seriously depressed about it. And I "it" I mean the pain. 

Living with pain. It sucks. I suppose i could try and sugar coat it. Say something about how it helps you appreciate the little things, and in a way it does. But at the end of the work day when you get home, you're just so utterly spent from having to put as bright a face on as you can muster that there is not much more you can do than switch on the heating pad, curl up in a ball and thank the universe that your amazing husband is making dinner. (Well look at that, pain made me thankful for something)

Anyways. Sorry to rant. But that's what I need right now, I suppose. 

I'm a little tiered of one month being ok and the next month being terrible. I would prefer all my months to be tolerable. So I've done yet another purge in my pantry and fridge. Leaving me with two condiments I can eat, (maple syrup and Braggs) and cutting one of my favourite tea blends out of my life. (Damn you, Stash, why did you have to go and put orange oil in your liquorice spice tea?)

Today is a jumping off point to better things. To breads that don't have lactic acid in them, and to self control. Coffee, you will have no hold on me, I swear!

I even refrained from birthday cake today. 

Green Soup

This is a great recipie! Taught to me by my good friend Pauline, who is gluten free.

It's what I call a Mighty Morphing Recipie, where the ingredients follow loose rules, but the basic structure stays the same. So, lets go over what happened last time I made Green Soup!

I started by chopping up a potato and some fresh dill! Potato is optional, but I find it ads a nice texture and substance to the soup.

If you add potato to this recipie, chop it up in to itty bitty pieces and boil it RIGHT AWAY. Potatoes take longer than anything else to cook. About 10 mintues will do ya once the water is boiling. The dill we will get to later...

Broccolli is the base of this soup, the one ingredient that never really changes. I usually steam about one head of it. Once your water is boiling, it only takes around five to seven minutes to get done.

Then, you grab anything green in your fridge. This time, we had some frozen peas and some spinach hanging about. I added the frozen peas to the top of the broccoli while it was steaming, and added the spinach to the top of the bolied potatoes while they cooled down.

We also had some pine nuts and cream cheese... YUM! We'll get to that later....

Once everything is all cooked up, set aside a bit of the water you used to steam the broccolli, then throw everything but the cream cheese, fresh herbs and nuts into the broccolli water. I set aide a bit of the water to make sure the soup is not going to be watery. If it's too thick, I add a bit back if I need to later.

Next, blend the soup with an immersion blender until it's smooth. That's when I add about half a container of cream cheese to the whole thing. If it's too thick at this point, add a bit of the water you set aside.

To serve, sprinkle nuts and herbs on top, and enjoy! Here, we are using pine nuts and fresh dill, but I had it the other night with parsley, fresh oregano and cashews!

Have fun trying your own combinations!

Noodly Chicken Creation!

What to do with leftovers?

Fry them up in a pan and add spices! Of course... when half the really good stir fry spices have ascorbic acid, citric acid, or soy sauce in them, it's good times. For last night's delve into dining decadence, I took:

1.  6 Leftover sesame chicken thighs.
      Drizzle honey on chicken thighs, sprinkle with sesame seeds, bake in oven.
      These were a bit dull... I am going to add ground up mustard seeds and some garlic next time....
2. Brocolli stems and all, sliced up (one bunch)
3. 2 Med Onions (I don't seem to have an issue with onions, but some ICers do)
4. 4 bulbs Fresh Garlic 
5. 1/2 a bunch of Spinach. stems removed (that's for you, Sheri!)
6. Pine nuts, chopped and roasted (about a cup)
7. Japanese Noodles (two bricks)

I basically chopped up ingredients 1-4 and fried them up in some Sesame Oil, although any oil would do. I cheated a bit on the diet and added a bit of Hoisin Sauce for flavor (only about a teaspoon). I am seriously thinking of making an IC friendly Hoisin Sauce sometime in the future.... The only bad ingredient seemed to be a preservative, and it was way down on the ingredients list.

Then, I added the spinach, pine nuts and noodles, about a 1/4 cup of water, mixed together and covered until the noodles were soft.  And TADA! Dinner!

The husband thought it was quite yummy..

So does the cat at work... Again. 

Success!

Tuna Casserole!

Omnomnomnnom...
Meal #1 of the meal planning experiment was AMAZING!
It's from Beverley Laumann's Interstitial Cystitis: 100 Simple Recipes for IC Sufferers.  It may not look to pretty, but it was fairly simple to make, and tastes great!

I modified a thing or two, just due to what I had on hand in the kitchen, and the type of soup I bought, so here's my modification!

3/4 package of egg noodles (cooked)
2 cans tuna
2.5 tablespoons butter
seasoned breadcrumbs
1 large can mushroom soup (not condensed)
     Beware any ultra-processed mushroom soup. Check the ingredients for bad preservatives. I find things with 50 syllables are usually bad.... Keep it simple!
1/4 cup grated cheese (mozza, or monteray jack)

1. Melt the butter about half way, then whip the butter until the texture is consistent.
I used the microwave, for about 30 seconds on high. It melted around half of the butter, and then I spread the heat around by mixing.

2. Add seasoned breadcrumbs until the texture is crumbly.
I eyeballed it... The original recipe called this mixture a 'sauce', but since I was not using condensed soup, I already had sauce a-plenty, so I threw more breadcrumbs in there to get a thicker texture.

3. Fry the breadcrumb mixture and (drained) tuna.
This is a little add I did, it nicely browned the breadcrumbs and got a bit of the seasoning into the tuna before the next step.

4. Add soup, breadcrumb mixture, tuna and noodles into a casserole dish.

5. Sprinkle breadcrumbs and grated cheese on top.
Again... I eyeballed it here. I do that a lot. I guess it depends on the shape of your casserole dish. But I added enough cheese to cover it nicely, and then sprinkled some leftover breadcrumbs on there too.

6. Bake in 350 F oven for 30 mins!

Adding cheese and crumbs on top made it really yummy (I can't get enough of melted cheese....).

Next time, I think I might add some fried mushrooms and other vegetables (zucchini?), just to mix it up a bit! Although, the cat at my work seems to like it well enough... BAD KITTEH!

Meal Planning

I hate meal planning. My style of cooking (let's be honest) is grabbing random ingredients at the grocery store and just seeing how the week plays out. I'm also very busy... I am involved in the local theatre, so after work I sometimes have a scant hour to grab food. The drive-through has been my friend for a long time, and it's something I am sad to have to give up. But let's face it! Drive through... not long term healthy anyways.

So, in light of my new cookbooks arriving, I am doing some meal planning this week. Huzzah!

Here's a GREAT post I found with some tips for meal planning: 15 Tips for Better Weekly Meal Planning
I especially like tip number 11 (Prep food as soon as you get back from the store). Helen Mirren did it in Hitchcock, so it's got to be a good idea. Always trust a dame!

As for tip number 2 (Create a space to save recipes and keep in simple)... This I have always had problems with... but I really do like the idea of using Pinterest! I think I'll give it a go!

New Cookbooks!

I usually buy used books (I'm cheap that way), but I bit the bullet and bought a few new cookbooks on amazon.ca a while back, and they have arrived! Yay! It's my little Christmas Present to myself.

Pictured here are A Taste of the Good Life: A Cookbook for an Interstitial Cystitis Diet

 by Beverley Laumann, and Interstitial Cystitis: 100 Simple Recipes for IC Sufferers

by Tanya Glover. I can't wait to test them out and let you know how it went.

My husband's Christmas Present to me was an AMAZING immersion blender set! I am excited to try out some kind of salsa substitute with it. A few weeks ago a did one up that was mostly corn, and I was less than impressed. I'm going to see if either book has something else for me to try out, and if that fails... I will begin testing out some ideas of my own!

I also need to go through all my spices and weed out the baddies using the ICN Food List App! I cannot praise this app enough! It's a lifesaver for me. I use it when I eat out and when I shop for groceries. After all, we can't memorize our good, bad and maybe foods.