A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Channeling My Inner Hippie: Yogurt Cheese, raw honey, & Home-made Granola Redux

Since when did people start making this "yocheese"?  I'd heard of draining yogurt but finally took the time to do it on a whim the other night and then did a google search to see if anyone else was doing it.  You know... I'm always the last to know anything.  I'm always the guy getting excited saying "Hey, y'all, I found this new thing!" People look at me and say "Oh pish, I've been doing that for years."  Sort of takes the wind out of my sails but then I happily go back to my own little world.

From what I've read yocheese has been hot in the Atkins circles for years. Really? That surprised me. I figured it was just a shoot off from the folks who "brew" their own yogurt. Cut me some slack on the Atkins connection.  I never even attempted Atkins mostly because I hate meat. I don't hate it but I don't love it enough to dedicate my life to it.  Purgatory, to me, would be someone sitting me down in a kitchen full of steaks and bacon and saying "Here, eat all you want of this and you'll even lose weight but for all of eternity you can never taste another slice of bread." 

(By the way, the rose is from my garden.  It's gorgeous this year.)

Mexican Villa aka "The Villa"

  There's a Springfield institution called "Mexican Villa" that's like no Mexican food you've ever had before.  Like Springfield-style cashew chicken, it has little resemblance to the real thing but if you grow up here eating it, you get the jones for it when you've gone too long without it.  People who move into this area can be a little condescending, but hey, don't all communities have local eateries like this? Something that doesn't quite fit into any of the right niches but there's always a line out the door anyway?

Gene and I feasted take-out on burritos enchilada-style, queso (monterrey jack and enchilada sauce) & chips, all with The Villa's super hot sauce which is really Rooster sauce.  I know the burrito looks plain. Normally it's topped with mounds of shredded lettuce and finely diced tomatoes but they don't hold up well in transport and there's nothing worse than soggy lettuce. Shudder.  The tomatoes would have been okay as long as they weren't Romas, hehe. Bad joke.

I've always had a secret question.  If Brad Pitt takes Angelina, the kids, and the fam to Arris Pizza, another local favorite, does he ever come home and say "Let's go to The Villa tonight?"  I don't care how fous-fous Hollywood he gets, I bet he does. And I bet Angelina said "WTF?" the first time she tasted a sancho enchilada style from "The Villa". 

Nothing against Angelina, but I also would bet Jennifer Aniston liked it but that Gwyneth Paltro wouldn't even step foot in the place.  Just rambling about some local gossip but I've heard through the grapevine that the one time Brad brought Gwyneth to Springfield he took her to another local beloved home-made pizza joint called Garbo's and that she was extremely hateful about how it wasn't good enough for her.  Her loss. Garbo's is really yummy, cheap, low maintenance dining. Their thin-crusted spicy chicken pizza is to die for. 

Hmmmm...now I'm hungry for local favorites....must control self...must eat vegetables. At home. 

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: Keep Your Hands Busy

Idle hands are the Devil's playground...at least when it comes to my diet.  I can handle eating well up until that late night movie watching time when Gene's in bed and my insomnia's running rampant.  My body has gotten used to a 1am chow time from working nights and even though I don't go nuts on nights at home that I stay at home, even a couple hundred calories when you're not doing anything but wanting to go to bed is a couple hundred calories more than I need to take in.

I remembered the old sage advice about dieting and/or not gaining weight when you quit smoking about keeping your hands busy. It's true.  When you keep your hands busy you don't think about eating or smoking as much.  I used to cross stitch a lot but that was 20 years ago when it was more popular and I could actually see close up out of these glasses (I refused to get bifocals this year and will continue putting it off as long as I can).  I enjoyed cross stitch and embroidery work but you have to pay more attention to it than I wanted late at night and since it does kick in my pseudo-Turrettes more than other needlework, I decided to take up knitting again.  My mom knitted all of our hats, gloves, scarves, ponchos, and sweaters when I was growing up and since she was the 4-H knitting instructor I was the one kid in my class who didn't get to show up and say "Mrs. Haggard, I didn't have time this week to complete my project. I had too much homework."  As an adult I now realize she knew they were fibbing but they weren't her kid and she couldn't smack them on the back of the head and tell them to quit embarrassing her to motivate them to work up the houseshoes or headband or whatever was the weekly assignment.

Now I'm glad I know how to do it and I find it relaxing.  Knitting is something that up to a point, once you're familiar with the pattern and it's relatively easy, you can just let your fingers do the walking while you watch a movie or carry on a conversation or just let your mind drift off so it's a perfect evening activity that keeps me from wandering into the kitchen for something packed with sugar or salt and no nutrition that I shouldn't have bought at the grocery in the first place.

I've begun working on Christmas gifts.  This year I'd like all my gifts to be hand-made. I've always wanted to do that. I made a few hand-made gifts last year and they were my favorite to give away.  There's something special, if you'll excuse my use of an overused word, about picking out a pattern, the perfect hued yarn, and working for several hours thinking about a person that makes that gift much more of a pleasure to give.  And since life is all about me (did I say that out loud?) this year I'm going to make gifts that give me as much pleasure as I hope the receiver gets.

In between family gifts, I started these little baby hats with matching bears for our NICU.  I had read in our company magazine that our nurses made all of our preemie baby hats, and since then, have found out online that there are groups of knitters or individuals who regularly knit (or crochet) preemie hats for NICU's all over the country.  I LOVE that.  Talk about a warm fuzzy...  Carol showed me where we keep the big plastic bin of hand-knitted caps and told me that we always have a need for them since we do send babies home with them sometimes.  I love that too.  The teddy bears are my addition. I found a cute pattern that's easy to make and I like the idea of them after seeing all the home-made quilts and blankets knitted, crocheted, and sewn that adorn the beds in our unit.

So here are my first additions:  the mint, lavendar, and yellow bear with it's matching caps that will fit a 3-4 lb preemie, and then just because I only saw traditional baby colors in the cap box and thought we needed some camo to represent the fact that we are, indeed, living in The Ozarks, the little camo bear and cap will fit a 1-1 1/2 lb micro preemie.  I laid a regular tablespoon from the silverware drawer next to the cap to give you perspective.  That cap is only 3" tall, it fits INSIDE the palm of your hand, which is what their little heads do too.  The little micro preemie twins I took care of my first couple of days in the unit are less than a foot long and weigh a little over 800 grams.  They're SO cute! They're like frogs with little old man wrinkly butts.

Okay, you sort of have to see them to get a true appreciation of how much cute and personality can be packed into a tiny body the size of LESS than HALF of a 4lb bag of sugar. Think about it the next time you buy sugar or flour.  Their little arms are not much bigger than a pencil in diameter and the tubes to their ventilators are smaller than a drinking straw.  Actually, quite a bit smaller than a drinking straw, maybe half that size.  The numbers and sizes amaze me after working the last few years in the adult world. I constantly laugh out loud at stuff when I see the "equipment' like the blood pressure cuff for a micro preemie is the size of a band-aid.  I'm not kidding.  Their tidal volume on the ventilator is 2-5 ml, not 400-700 ml like an adult.  The smallest diapers commercially manufactured are still so large they'd come up to their little nipples if they weren't folded in half on both ends.

If that's not cute, I don't know what is.

So this is my latest diet achievement:  keep my hands busy doing something good for both me and hopefully for someone else.

Note for all of you who have requested the enchilada casserole recipe from Cinco de Mayo: Yes! I hear you and I want that recipe too. Kim (and Dirk who is also being trained) with Carol and I in the NICU tonight so I promise I will find a time during that 12 hour shift to make her write down the recipe for us. Cross my heart and promise.

Jordan and Isaac's Birthday Party and "Cakes"

I've mentioned before that my siblings and I grew up in the home of a cake decorator so birthday cake held no special allure to us. We were used to the smell of buttercream and cakes baking every day so it was no big whoop to have "birthday" cake. 

My nieces and nephews aren't as blase as we were but they still had had plenty of cake so this time I decided to go out on a limb and be more adventurous.  What could be more fun than a Spiderman skyscraper for Isaac and a little Love Bug for Jordan made out of rice krispy treats?  I'm sure there are more adventurous things in life but I know we all ahd a good time with it, especially since the treats were a fun, tongue-coloring blue.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: I've got tomatoes!!!

Pardon my excitement about my little container garden this year but I haven't didn't have the time to grow anything the couple of years I was in school and then that first year I went to work at the hospital.