cooking2thrive – in thriver words

Quiet

You can tell it’s a holiday week because it’s so quiet! While the official day may not be here yet, the traffic tells me many people have already put work behind them. I love quiet days with empty streets. My favorite time to be downtown has always been when businesses and stores are closed. It just has a whole different feel.

Like most of our lives in the US, we fill the holidays with activity. Some of us plan elaborate meals with elegant place settings and seats assigned by calligraphied place cards. We clean for hours so we can fill the kitchen and dining room with dishes that will take more hours to clean. We work, work, work only to discover our guests must rush on to another dinner before the ice cream melts on the pie.

We watch parades and football and go back home without knowing what our cousins do for a living or where their kids go to school. It’s amazing how we can busy ourselves into a noisy frenzy that leaves no time for quiet, forget quiet reflection or thoughtful attunement.

How did we get so uncomfortable with stillness?

The barrage of two competing screens is barely enough to distract some in my home. What I keep coming back to is how on edge all that noise makes me feel. Is noise the cause of the anxiety that plagues them?

I guess what I’m wondering is why we create a frenzy and then suffer from the effects of it? Seems a lot like chasing our tails.

What would happen if we sat on the porch or in front of the fire this Thanksgiving and listened to each other instead of watching balloons float down 6^th Avenue or channel surfing through games?

What if we just sat in the quiet? I know it probably sounds like I want to go back to the past. That’s not it.

What would happen if we stopped rushing, pushing, scrambling, hurrying…distracting, distracting, distracting? Especially, when we are actively creating part of our need for distraction.

What if Thanksgiving dinner were a normal supper plus a fancy dessert? Would we take more notice of the flavors and effort put into that one item? Would we take our time and savor it? Would we talk about it while envisioning the preparation? Would it remind us of stories of other desserts at other times – stories that would allow us to connect with the new in-law at the table?

You can say all you want about mindfulness, but quiet stillness as a default would allow us to relax into the present rather than applying laser focus to it.

Where has the ease of being part of the rhythm of the world gone? Perhaps it’s still on the ski slopes or under the curl of a wave. But we no longer feel it in a gallop beneath us on our way to get groceries or hear it in the crunch of a wheel on gravel.

At a recent party, someone asked my Serbian neighbor the biggest difference between living in the US and Serbia. His answer was how much less time we spend sitting and visiting – taking time during the day to enjoy each other and connect.

We have rampant anxiety, violence, addiction, and chronic illness all on the rise. I’m not 100% blaming those on a lack of quiet. But I think it’s worth studying those conditions in order to discover if there are ways in which they correlate with a lack of it.

And I’m certain it’s worth asking yourself why the next time you feel compelled to fill a piece of quiet with noisy, frenetic activity.

Dump Soup – Perfect for a Lazy Day

This morning, I’m making dump soup. I’d like to say it’s because I’m having a relaxing day with nothing else to do. The truth is, I’m sick. I don’t feel like standing in the kitchen, but I want some soup to sip on.
veggies
The good news is, I have remnants of broccoli, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, carrots, celery, fresh rosemary, and ham in my refrigerator — all left over from last weekend’s family meal prep. I also have a bag of small red onions I picked up on sale. The other good news is that the broccoli has already been cleaned, the potatoes were peeled & sliced for scalloped potatoes (but wouldn’t fit in my dish), and the tomatoes were chopped for a salad. I can just dump everything in a pan, no prep required!!!!

Dump soup, unlike a carefully prepared stew, doesn’t require chopping. It doesn’t require potatoes that haven’t turned dark. You don’t need to cut the leaves off of the celery or pull the rosemary off its stem. You can just dump cleaned veggies in a large pot, season with salt, pepper, garlic (dump some fresh in if you have it), and any other herbs or spices that compliment your flavor profile, then add meat & water.
ham
Any leftover or uncooked meat will work — ham, chicken, and bacon are my favorites. Dump soup is a great place to use chicken or turkey necks, hearts, livers, and gizzards. It’s the perfect excuse to skip closely trimming a ham bone. Leaving some meat on the bone will add even more flavor to the soup. If you don’t have meat handy, mixing some chicken stock in your water will deepen the flavor of the vegetable broth.

If you’ve ever made chicken stock, you know that once the broth is flavored, you remove all of the chicken and vegetables because they’re overcooked and have given most of their flavor over to the broth. Dump soup is the same. What you’re going for initially is a flavorful broth. Slowly simmering your mixture for 3-4 hours will result in a rich broth. The lengthy cooking time is another reason it’s perfect for a lazy morning or a day you’re stuck at home doing chores.

After 3-4 hours, dump in whatever you’d like to chew on in your soup. First, remove all the meat, vegetables, and herbs. I don’t worry about straining out little remnants, but you can if you want a clear broth. Today, I’ll probably dump in some brown rice, but pasta, quinoa, or lentils are good options as well. If I felt like spending more time in the kitchen, I might add chopped vegetables and/or meat.

I’ll serve today’s dump soup with some ratty looking gluten-free biscuits I threw together this morning. I keep the dry ingredients mixed up so that on days like today, I all I have to do is cut in some shortening and add the milk and buttermilk. That means it takes about 5 minutes to mix the biscuits and get them in the oven. Obviously, I didn’t take much time rolling or cutting these! A piece of fresh fruit will round out the meal.

And I’ll have plenty of everything left for tomorrow. Of course, I hope I’m feeling better by then but you never know. Having something warm and comforting already prepared makes me feel less anxious and able to rest more easily while I try to get ahead of this virus. There’s also something comforting about the delicious aroma filling the house.

In a matter of minutes, I cleaned out 80% of the contents of my refrigerator, made the house feel comforting, and created several meals — all by making dump soup. Not bad for a morning when I’m mostly lying around watching TV!

A Painfully Slow Process!

For the past two weeks I’ve been sanding and oiling my countertops; it is a painfully slow process! I have beautiful plank style teak countertops. They are finished with hand rubbed tung oil. I add a coat about every 18 months. A couple of years ago, I did some sanding on portions that had been scratched. Unfortunately, when I oiled the sanded portion, I didn’t check the tung oil before applying it. The oil had turned dark so the repairs took on the darker color. Trying to remedy the color variation, I sanded off the dark oil and used a different kind of tung oil that created a good seal, but yet another discoloration. At that point I lost patience and ignored the color issue.

Now, two years later, I’m fighting two battles: 1)Sanding out some new scratches and blending the sanded part with the rest of the top, and 2)Fixing the problem I previously created. The process requires patience and finesse and is tedious to say the least. The tung oil has to dry for 24 hours before I can assess the appropriate next step. In retrospect, it may have been better to take a belt sander and go back to raw wood and start over.
stain
This process is like many situations in life. We take a stab at something. We proceed methodically with patience and persistence and things improve, but they aren’t perfect. Then we feel frustrated. I know I feel frustrated with this project!

When we feel frustrated, it can be tempting to look around and feel annoyed by those who we believe have an easier time of things than we do. We think that if we could just go back and get the same raw materials they got, things would turn out much better for us. While this is a tempting emotional path, it is never productive or uplifting. Like fixing my countertops, undoing such thinking can be a tedious process. Rather than going down that path, it can be helpful to recognize the following:

No matter who you are, how wonderful you are, how smart you are, how beautiful you are, where you live, what family you’re born to, how much wealth you amass, or what country you live in…

…Life will throw you some curve balls along the way.
It may be in the form of a flood, fire, tornado, disease, job loss, disability, violence or abuse, neglect, success too soon, overwhelming loss, discrimination, injury, injustice, cruelty, identity theft, errant children, disloyal associates, cheating spouses, broken contracts, false accusations, embezzling employees, or thousands of other possibilities. No matter who you choose to envy, they have had, or will have, trials and difficulty during their lifetime. No one escapes this reality.

…Most often, it is not the fact that bad things have happened to you that create an ongoing problem. The problem it is what you come to believe about yourself because of those events.
It is a common response to feel a sense of responsibility and shame when you are a victim of maltreatment. If you internalize the shame, you come to feel that you are wrong, or defective, or unloveable, or incapable, or undeserving of great things. Trying to move past this shame leaves you feeling exposed. It can feel safer to blame the abuse or an abuser than to open yourself to forgiveness and possibility. With courage you can heal and change those beliefs.

…Those who have learned to take life’s curve balls in stride are making a choice.
Not everyone who handles difficulty with grace has always done so. Many of us recognize slowly over time that we feel better when we accept our circumstances, weigh our options, and make an active choice regarding how we will view the difficulty. Sometimes these choices require great courage. To the outside observer, our choices may make us appear to live a blessed life.

…A life in which we own our choices is a blessed life.
There is nothing more empowering than making a choice and owning it. Through this process, you direct your life rather than it directing you. That does not mean all the choices are easy, fun, painless, obvious, or without emotional cost.

…Fear is inevitable.
If you believe other people have more opportunities than you do because they seem to have less to fear, it may be helpful to know that everyone feels fear sometimes. Fear can lead to empowerment or paralysis. Knowing this gives you the opportunity to choose the one that is most appealing to you.

…There is someone better off than you.
You may have the most money in the world at a given moment, but not have as much love or as many children as you desire. You may have the perfect house, the perfect mate, the perfect job, and the perfect children, but your next door neighbor has all of that and weighs 10 pounds less.

…There is someone less fortunate than you.
You may be homeless and healthy with family who loves you while another person is homeless and ill and alone. You may not have eaten today, but there is a mother somewhere who has gone without food for days in order to feed her children.

…You can prepare for the worst and the worst will turn out to be something you never anticipated.
None of us can absolutely or accurately predict the future. Sometimes we will be prepared and sometimes we will be facing a perceived danger on our left and get hit from the right. The person who you envy may look blessed to have correctly predicted so far, then tomorrow have a child killed by a random bullet or maimed by a bomb at a marathon.

…Expressing gratitude for your difficulties will pave the road for healing.
If you can find a way to express gratitude for the even the smallest of things, through practice you will find a way to remain vulnerable enough to receive joy.

….Healing your body will help heal your mind and your spirit.
Studies that indicate a direct correlation between emotional conditions and gut bacteria or gastrointestinal health are growing. We also know that exercise and mood are related.• If you tend to feel depressed, deprived, down, envious, or angry, regulating your eating, sleeping, and exercise habits can make a huge difference toward a more positive outlook.

Repairing countertops and healing wounded thinking can both go slowly. No matter how frustrating that may seem right now, it all becomes worth it when you can see and feel the results!

countertop

*http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/can-the-bacteria-in-your-gut-explain-your-mood.html?_r=0

http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/exercise-depression

Pharmaceuticals Are Drugs. Over-the-Counter Medicines are Drugs. Supplements Are Drugs. Period.

pretty pills Pharmaceuticals are drugs. Over-the-counter medicines are drugs. Supplements are drugs. Period. But sometimes we don’t really act that way.

We take supplements along with prescription drugs without ever checking to see if there can be a bad interaction between the two. We don’t research the company that manufactures our supplements to see if they’re reputable even though we know the supplements are not regulated by the FDA. We pop Tylenol after a late night of drinking with no consideration of the consequences to our liver. We tell our children not to use marijuana, heroin, meth, ecstasy, or bath salts, but encourage them to take Adderall, Dexedrine, Xanax, Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, Luvox, Celexa, Zoloft, Lorcet, Lortab, Norco, Dilaudid, OxyContin, Oxyfast, and Percocet without always exploring non-drug treatment options.

It’s like we have collectively lost our healthy respect for the power of these substances and their possible detrimental side effects or perhaps it’s overshadowed by our collective expectation of a quick resolution to all of our immediate problems. Whatever this attitude shift is, it’s affecting our health and our society. The CDC reports that since 1999, the amount of pain reported by Americans has stayed about the same, but the amount of prescription pain relievers prescribed and sold has more than quadrupled (1).

I have noticed a change in the way my doctors and dentists approach treatment and the use of medication. When I had all of my wisdom teeth out a few years ago and was visibly bruised down to the base of my neck, I was prescribed two days worth of codeine. More recently, I was prescribed a week’s worth of hydrocodone following the removal of a single root from one tooth in a 15 minute procedure. I filled the prescription on the way home assuming I’d be in severe pain when the deadening wore off. Interestingly, my pain was hardly noticeable and only required one day’s worth of Extra Strength Tylenol. My family physician now uses a medicate-and-see mode for diagnosis rather than the remove-all-medications-and-see-what-happens approach to diagnosis that I experienced at the Ochsner Clinic in 1989 when I had psittacosis.

I have a friend who calls her doctor for Vicodin whenever her life gets stressful, another who calls her gynecologist for Valium when she needs to take the edge off, and several who swear by their longstanding prescriptions for Xanax. All of them are well supplied and none of them are in therapy. None of them think this odd.
needle
This sort of matter-of-fact incorporation of highly addictive substances into our everyday lives without examination is leading to alarming trends. According to the CDC, 44 people per day die in the US from prescription drug overdose(2), and some users turn to heroin as a less expensive alternative. The number of chronic heroin users in the US in 2014 was reported by Forbes as being estimated at approximately 1.5 million.

While many of us have no experience with addiction, we all know that pharmaceuticals have side effects. Many times it takes years on the market and numerous injuries before a drug is deemed unsafe or prescriptions for it are limited. Perhaps it’s best not to treat drugs casually at all.

I’m not saying we should avoid doctors, their advice, or all medications or supplements. It just seems that now is a good time to get curious about everything we choose to ingest. It’s easier than ever to access information, so why not learn as much as we can about medication, supplements, and food so that we can make informed choices?

Where should the research begin? You can start with anything. Pharmaceuticals are drugs. Over-the-counter medicines are drugs. Supplements are drugs. All of these substances deserve research. Responsibility for our health and the quality of our lives falls appropriately on our shoulders.

When we fail to get informed, we relinquish some of the power we have over our own destiny. Hopefully, when we make that choice it is deliberate rather than by default. Otherwise, we will feel diminished by the process rather than empowered by our choice. My wish is for all of us to choose well and feel powerful.

pouch pills

1)http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/
2)http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html
3)http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2014/03/10/how-many-daily-heroin-users-are-there-in-the-u-s-somewhere-between-60000-and-1-million-maybe/

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”