Columbus Foodie

You all may have wondered where I have been for the past three months. Many of you had a vague notion that I was sick but weren’t quite aware of how sick I was. Truth of the matter is that I was so sick that they didn’t think I would make through alive. I had a raging case of ARDS so bad that I was on a
ventilator in ICU for over 30 days. They transferred me to the current hospital
to wean me off the ventilator and tracheotomy. Unfortunately, while I was under sedation I sustained major nerve damage in my right arm (which is my dominant hand) which means that I’ve had to learn how to type, eat, and function all over again. After this, my next stop is an acute physical rehab so that I can learn to walk again.

While I am back doing Columbus Foodie full-time, it may be a little slow going
in the beginning until I’m fully recovered. I’ve bought a copy of voice
recognition software that will make things easier but it may be a while until
you hear my voice regularly. In the meantime, Paul has been picking up the
slack by being my photographer, proxy at events, and all-around great partner
in more ways than one.

While in a medically induced coma, I had some vivid bizarre dreams that caused me to confuse fantasy with reality. Maybe I will tell you all about that in a separate post, so detailed that it makes for a great story. Expect new content soon. Thanks to all for the well wishes, phone calls, and visits; they did more than you know to lift my spirits and keep me optimistic.

Hello all. It’s me, Paul. Columbus Foodie’s husband.

Becke’s been in the hospital for several weeks now, and likely won’t be out of the hospital for quite a while. She’s currently unable to update columbusfoodie.com, so this blog will remain in archive mode until Becke’s able to begin posting again. I might post some articles she’s got in the queue ready to go, and I’ve got a couple of articles that I sent to her which were ready for publishing. We’ll see.

I’ve got a CarePages webpage up which has been tracking Becke’s condition since April 11th. It is located here.

Please keep Becke in your thoughts and prayers for her complete recovery.

Wow – that was a longer hiatus than I planned for. The truth of the matter is that I’ve been really, really sick. There was even a hospital stay in the midst of my time off.  It all started at the end of October/beginning of November when I went to San Francisco and found that I was unable to maneuver on steps. At the same time, I was dropping weight like crazy, and in my mind, I thought this was a good thing. I must have lost 30-40 lbs from November-end of January.

The past few weeks have been crazy – I took 3 major spills in as many weeks, each one worse than the one before it. This latest fall had me hitting the garage door rail with my face, and busting my lip wide open. Needless to say, eating was the last thing on my mind.

Around Christmas, I started having major problems with getting up from chairs that were lower than knee level. Luckily P. was around to give me a hand so we worked with my limitations the best we could. I was getting weaker by the day, and we had no idea why. I just had no energy at all, but we still managed.

Fast forward to last week, where I was so weak that my legs went out from under me completely when I tried to stand. P. insisted that I go to the ER, and I was in no shape to argue. I got there, where they admitted me immediately because I was so dehydrated and malnourished that my condition was critical. They spent the next few days pumping me full of saline and strong antibiotics (because they thought I had sepsis as well).

One of the diagnosis codes was anorexia, probably because in many ways, my eating is disordered. I may not count calories, but I had many of the same things going on as a late-stage anorexia. Just goes to show that any person at any weight can eat in a way that can be harmful.

I was released from the hospital later this week, and am extremely bloated (I’d say 30-40 lbs of water weight, easily), and now I’m trying to eat and drink the way I’m supposed to. I keep on being told I’m not eating enough, not getting enough water, so I’m struggling with both of those things. Part of it is that my lips still have open cuts on them and it burns like hell when I eat anything the least bit acidic or super spicy. For the most part, we won’t be making any new recipes this month, but I’ve still got a ton of older entries I have yet to post. And P. will be posting a few entries. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up on what’s going on with me.

Hey, if my neighbors across the street can still have their Christmas lights up and on near the January, then it’s not too late for me to blog about it.  Starting this year, I’ve officially passed the gauntlet of hosting the family holiday get-together to my younger sister Maurya, because my health the past few months means that I have neither the stamina nor pain tolerance to do it anymore. The degenerative nature of my health problems have reared their head in an ugly way this past year, and I’ve felt more like a spectator to my life than an actual participant.

I love my sister’s pot roast – she changed it up a bit this year, but it was excellent nonetheless and fall-apart tender. I used some Wondra and it ended up with a great gravy. I’ll really need to get the recipe from her so I can post it here. It may not look like much but it’s the best I’ve had in a while, flavor-wise.

The mashed potatoes were just your basic butter-cream-salt types. Insert your own family recipe here.

What I really liked, however, was this recipe for candied carrots – it brings out the best of the vegetable’s sweetness. She used crinkle cut fresh carrots to save time.

Candied Carrots
recipe from AllRecipes.com

1 pound carrots, cut into 2 inch pieces
2 tablespoons butter, diced
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 pinch salt
1 pinch ground black pepper

1. Place carrots in a pot of salted water. Bring water to a boil, reduce heat to a high simmer and cook about 20 to 30 minutes. Do not cook the carrots to a mushy stage!

2. Drain the carrots, reduce the heat to its lowest possible setting and return the carrots to the pan. Stir in butter, brown sugar, salt and pepper. Cook for about 3 to 5 minutes, until sugar is bubbly. Serve hot!

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She also made some green beans with jowl bacon – tasty, smoky wonderfulness.

P. and I made some appetizers and desserts that we brought with (more about those in separate posts), but honestly, my sister worked her butt off putting a wonderful meal on the table.

But as much as I love food, I think Christmas is all about the kids – they always have such an excitement and curiosity for the world that we sometimes (hell, nearly all the time) set by the wayside as we get older and purportedly wiser. We got my 9 year old nephew Brandon his very own digital camera, an upgrade from a V-Tech kids model we got him a few Christmases back. He loved it, and has been nonstop been taking pictures of himself and food. We may make a food blogger out of him yet.

Autumn, as the middle child (7 yrs old), is the most fiercely independent of the trio. She has an endless source of energy, and is a joy, but one heck of a handful. She’s going to be a reckon to contend with once she gets older. Hopefully she’ll contain some of that energy in athletics – we’ll see. She loves Littlest Pet Shop, so we got her a few collections plus a storage case. She’s probably the hardest to shop for, since she’s at that “in between” age.

Amber, the youngest at 5 years old, is probably the most sensitive of the bunch. Also probably the one with the most amount of empathy and the sweetest disposition. We got her a Leapster 2 along with a few programs.

My mom came along, too – so it was the closest we’ve come to having the whole family together at once in years. How did you all spend your Christmases? What did you have to eat? Do you have any interesting family traditions?

At the end of the year, I’ve realized that I’ve done so much, and rarely posted about any of it. The end result? A “drafts” folder with well over 100 entries in it. I’m going to use January to get all caught up, so you get the information when it’s still fresh and useful.

In the meantime, you may see some posts that are out of season  (summer farmers markets photos, for example), but bear with me – my resolution this year is to make blogging a priority.

Will start posting from the drafts soon.

Here it is, very early on Christmas morning and I’ve been thinking about our families’ traditions through the years – Christmas has always been a pretty big deal when I was growing up, and fortunately, we’ve continued that trend through our generation and the next. But I thought it would be a nice time to get away from talking about food, and taking a moment to talk about the sense of family and togetherness that is behind the holiday.

As long as I can remember, and even before, Christmas Eve was a bigger deal than Christmas Day, because it was when we’d go and visit family. Even baby me was taken around to see the relatives. I love this picture, because it show the tree that my Oma and Opa put up for Christmas. Yes, that’s the Christmas tree – even as a baby, I towered over it. This is me with the tree on Christmas Eve 1973.

I spent my first couple of years with my maternal grandmother (Edith Mama was what I always called her) because my mom was taking some time away to get her life together so she’d have a suitable home to bring me up in, and my grandmother and my maternal great-grandmother (Oma) were inseparable. Needless to say, that meant I spent a lot of time over there, including the holidays. She died when I was very young of a heart attack (at age 46), but I still think of her often, especially during holidays – I wish I had the opportunity to get to know her better.

At 6, I still believed in Santa, so needless to say I thought it was the real thing. This is me and Santa during Christmas 1978.

From my earliest memories, I remember that we had a tradition every Christmas Eve, to visit all of the relatives in the same order every year. The first stop on the trip was to my Grandmom Jones, my paternal grandmother and to my Aunt Doreen, who lived with her.

Grandmom Jones always had milk and cookies, coffee or tea for the adults, and a kind word for everyone. And she was an equal opportunity Grandmom to everyone – even though my sister Maurya was not her granddaughter by blood, she treated her just like she was. What a wonderful woman. She died a few years ago, and I regret not visiting her more often.

My Aunt Doreen always had a child-like excitement about Christmas, and her excitement was contagious. I think she enjoyed the holiday most of all.

This is a picture of me, my Grandmom Jones and my sister Maurya in like 1983 or so.

After going to my Grandmom Jones’ house, it was off to visit Nana and Puh, my great-grandparents on my mom’s paternal side. They lived in a trailer in South Jersey part of the year, but also lived in Massachusetts (or was it New Hampshire?) as well, so they had these really cool Bostonian accents. Here is my sister Maurya at 2 or 3 years old with Puh.

Nana, as a Christmas gift every year, would knit or crochet some of the ugliest hats, scarfs, etc. ever. But since it was your Nana, and since you know that she put love and care into it, would thank her profusely while thinking in the back of your mind that you’d never been seen in public with it on unless you were going to visit Nana. I’m sure all of us have gotten that kind of Nana gift. Here’s Nana with Maurya.

I believe that they passed away sometime in the late 80′s or early 90′s in their eighties, and again, they are sadly missed. My mom could pinpoint the dates for sure, since she’s really into genealogy, a hobby that Puh got her started in by gifting her with a family tree that he had started and that she later on seriously expanded.

My mom has many of the same Christmas memories that I have, because they spanned generations. Here she is with Opa at Christmas when she was a young child.

And here I am with Opa, on Christmas Eve, almost 30 years later. Notice that my right eye is almost swollen shut. Nana and Puh had 2 Siamese that I had a severe allergy to, so all pictures of me at Christmas at Oma’s and Opa’s have that same oh-so-flattering look.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate a picture of Oma and me during Christmas, because she was usually the one behind the camera taking pictures of me and Opa. And they took TONS of pictures. I don’t think a week of my childhood went by where there wasn’t a picture taken. This is Oma and me (as a baby), but it’s a great representation of how to age gracefully. To me, my Oma was the most beautiful person in the world. Quite literally, she *was* my world growing up – the person who kept me centered, who was always supportive, and who always wanted the best for me. She died in 1995, and I still miss her like crazy. Each milestone of my life, I get a bit sad that she couldn’t be there. In many ways, I live my life now as a tribute to her – I always try to do the right thing that would make her proud.

But the Christmas Eve festivities at Oma’s and Opa’s rocked. They would transform my playroom in the attic into a magical Christmas wonderland, with decorations, homemade cookies and other goodies, and presents out the wazoo. Oh, how I always looked forward to that day. Even Maurya got in on it, when she was old enough to understand what was going on. Here she is at all of 2 years getting a present from Opa.

Afterward, we’d head back home and go to sleep, so we could get up at the crack of dawn in the morning to open presents. By then, I didn’t believe in Santa, but I wasn’t going to spoil the magic for my little sister. Here is a pic of me, my sister Maurya and my mom in front of the Christmas tree.

Mom, like most Mom’s, always locked herself into the bedroom to wrap presents so we wouldn’t walk in on her.

In morning, we’d tear our presents open like little bandits. This particular year, I got a Sony Walkman. I spent the next few months with it as a permanent attachment.

My sister, I think, was more interested in tearing the paper to pieces than what was inside. Although, if it was something Smurf related, she’d let out a squee.

We’ve kept a few of the traditions (opening a gift on Christmas eve, doing Christmas baking, etc) but we’ve ended up making many new ones of our own too. Here’s our tree this year – our old tree’s lights went belly up last year so we replaced it with a white one, which is kind of retro. Every year we get a commemorative personalized ornament for our tree listing the names of us and our pets. Since we don’t have kids of our own, we end up spoiling our nephew and nieces. I honestly get more pleasure out of giving than receiving. I’ve been blessed in so many ways, and love to pay it forward for the handful of people I care deeply for.

Tomorrow, we’re going to my sister’s for Christmas dinner. I’ve decided to hand it off to her after doing it the last decade or so. And tomorrow we’ll create new memories, and new traditions. And afterwards, I can take you vicariously through how our family celebrates the holidays.

What traditions does your family have?

The past couple of days, the temperatures have been downright springlike, with highs in the sixties. There’s this weird juxtaposition of seeing melting mounds of snow in my yard while sitting on the deck in my shorts.

Still, that rise in temperature was all the incentive I needed to whip the covers off my outdoor kitchen to do a bit of grilling out. It’s sort of a ritual for me – the simple act of that first cookout is the beginning of the end of winter for me. As the snow melts, I can feel my depression melting away with it – the warmth of the sun renews my spirit, and gets me excited about waking up in the morning and all of the things I have to do in the days to come. Starting with airing out the house – winter has a way of making the air a bit stuffy, and the act of airing out the house and doing a bit of spring cleaning begins to bring me out of my winter funk.

And one of the things I have been doing this week is planning out my garden for this year. I’m so looking forward to it, and to the farmers markets, and to it being warm enough for long enough for me to be able to fire up my pizza oven.  I can’t wait!

What spring rituals do you have? What are you looking foward to doing in this beautiful weather?

We’re in the thick of winter, so I’ve been feeling really out of sorts lately, not able to find much joy in anything, instead biding my time until the sun starts shining again. Some of you may not know this (although most of you do), but I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and in January and February of most years deal with incapacitating depression – so bad that I rarely leave the house during the winter, and when I do I get extremely anxious and claustrophobic and short tempered.

Knowing this, I stay at home as much as possible, depending on the kindness of my wonderful husband to bring the good stuff to me. And he doesn’t let me down. Just today he surprised me with a lunch of a corned beef sandwich and matzoh ball soup from Danny’s Deli. He does the grocery shopping most of the time, too. He’s a keeper.

A keeper who brings me something for breakfast that actually manages to lift my spirits. I’m quite particular about certain things, and bagels and smoked salmon are two of those things. My dear husband loves me enough that at my request, he got up at the ass crack of dawn to get me super fresh water bagels from Block’s (BTW, a pox on Panera, who wouldn’t know a good bagel if it bit them in the ass, yet charges you a king’s ransom for a subpar product – stick to bread, salads and soups, folks), then hauled his cookies across town to go to Trader Joe’s to get me the one kind of smoked salmon I like (for the record – their sockeye, which is more smoky than fishy, and is a steal at $4.99 for 4 ounces).

So thanks to my sweetie, my breakfast today was a garlic bagel with scallion cream cheese and a nice thick layer of smoked salmon. I don’t tell him nearly enough how much he means to me – I honestly don’t know how I would get through the winter without him. A lot of people expect grand romantic gestures as a proof of love, for me, it’s about the small things – about him being thoughtful enough to go out of his way (and with very little sleep) to do something that he knew would be a bright spot in not only my day, but my entire week. I love you, Paul Hope to return the favor this summer when I’m feeling like myself again.

As is my tradition on the last day of the year, I take a few moments to evaluate how well I stuck to last year’s foodie resolutions,

- Be a lot more proactive about working on the blog. I’m so far behind right now (33 drafts in my folder right now, the events and menus haven’t been updated in like forever, etc) it’s not even funny. I need to devote as much time to the blog as if I were working.

Did horribly on this one – if anything, I’m even further in the hole – over 100 posts in my drafts folder. Lots of events I went to but never wrote about, reviews never posted, etc. I’ll try to salvage what I can, but a lot of it is hopelessly outdated now.

- Take better food photos, and learn how to use a DSLR camera. To this end, I’m starting back at CSCC in a few days to learn photography from the ground up.

I never did buy a DSLR camera (lack of employment keeps such luxuries out of reach), but I did indeed start back to CSCC, although not for photography. College has taken up much of my time for the last few months, and promises to do so for at least the next 2+ years.

- Take a foodie road trip to a nearby city (somewhere within driving distance, like Cincy or Cleveland, western PA, somewhere in Indiana, Kentucky or West Virginia) to check out their food scene and blog about it.

Did this one, sort of. I took a couple of trips to Athens, OH this past summer, and have posted about some of it, but still have a couple more restaurants I visited.

- Learn how to pressure can.

Nope, didn’t do this one.

- Cook at least one recipe from each of the cookbooks I own (who needs hundreds of cookbooks if you don’t use them?)

As if. Most new recipes I made this year were from the Internet or magazines.

- Work harder at cutting sugar out of my diet. Even though I lost almost 100 lbs this year, I know I could lose more (and break this damn plateau) if I ate less refined carbs/more protein. I want to make my health a priority and lose at least 50 lbs. this year.

Not nearly as successful with this one as I wanted. I lost about 15 lbs. this year. Better than gaining 15 lbs, right?

- Cover at least one local event per month for the blog.

I did at least one local event per month will all intentions of blogging about it, but never did get around to that part.

- Learn how to eat well on a limited budget.

I kind of had to do this, more out of necessity than desire.

- This summer, visit a local farm for a tour and blog about it.

Did this, never got around to blogging about it. It’s in that famous drafts forward, and somehow it seems wrong to blog about it when fresh veggies are months away. Thoughts?

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So, that was last year….my goals for this coming year? Will be limited, that’s for sure. Being back in school means less time for things I love. But I do have a few hopes.

- Cooking time is at a premium, so I promise to make (on average) one new recipe a week.

- Still need to lose weight, and I know the key to that is to eat less carbs. I’m going to try to limit my consumption of refined carbs to one meal a day. Hopefully this will allow me to lose 50 lbs. in the next year.

- One of the Christmas gifts I got were brioche roll pans. I want to learn how to make brioche. And foccacia.

- I got a pizza oven this past year. I resolve to make time to use it at least twice a month once it gets warm enough to safely do so. Will probably use it more than that, but that’s the minimum goal I’m setting for myself.

- I want to make a batch of cheese from scratch this year. I may be something as simple as homemade ricotta, but I do want to give it a try.

Those goals are definitely within reach for me. What are your foodie goals for 2010?

One of the misconceptions people (especially readers of my blog) have about me is that I cook every meal from scratch, and don’t make “normal” meals like Hamburger Helper, franks and macaroni and cheese, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. While it’s true that we do cook more often than a lot of people we know, we too like convenience products. I’d say, in all honesty (at least this time of the year), we cook convenience type dinners (or repeats of our standbys) 3-4 days a week. The other days we’ll try out new recipes, or go out to eat. This is an example of one of our convenience dinners:

One of our favorite places to shop in town is Trader Joe’s – there are so many delicious things there that I can (in my head) come up with meals on the fly as I shop. This one, in particular couldn’t be simpler. Three main ingredients:

So tell me, what do you guys do for convenience foods? What are your go-to busy night meals?