Spontaneous ∂erivation

This is kind of hilarious and scary at the same time.

Last night, I had one of those dreams—where my current life is a lie, and I’ve never left my parents. I forget most of what they did to me, but I remember retreating to the bedroom and my bed, which was the last defensive position I could hold at home. I was lying there, trying not to count the minutes until my father found me.

And then suddenly cows were there. I knew I had Overcow with me at this point, under my arm, but on the side were Large Round Cow and Cozy Cow. Cozy Cow had even brought hir relative, Flat Cow, who I hadn’t met in person yet. Flatland Cow was under me, kind of like a magic carpet.

The next part is kind of hilarious. Flat Cow… how do I even explain this… opened a rainbow chute out of the dream.

Seriously. A RAINBOW. CHUTE. A CHUTE MADE OF RAINBOW.

Anyways, we all went down it, and I ended up in a dream where I worked in a perfume and board games store. For serious. The cows were no longer there, though. But on the other hand, every single Fantasy Flight game ever made was there. In huge tall stacks. Including all the ones out of print or incredibly hard to find. If you’ve ever had a hankering for an FF game you can’t find or afford and I’ve just exacerbated it? You’re welcome.

I have to watch some movies where there are proper mystic portals.

This is the first time the cows have shown up to rescue me—that I can remember, anyways.

Ike wasn’t in the dream, probably because he was busy holding my glasses.

I’ve been very fine this week, and I need to write that down.

It shows how destructive, last year, ${AUTHOR} had been when ${AUTHOR_PRONOUN}¹ decided to push a trigger of mine. Hard. That resulted in short-circuiting me for months. Ah well, ${AUTHOR_PRONOUN} got ${AUTHOR_POSESSIVE_PRONOUN} pound of flesh out of me. Or pound of sanity, anyways.

It also reminds me how easy it would be for anyone to do this to me; that writing openly about my PTSD had given people ammunition to completely fuck me over any time they like, including out of season.

I thought about this issue, actually, some time ago; and have decided, fuck it. If someone wants to play hardball with me, I will play hardball with them. Names will be named. And I don’t care how revered they are/were in my personal author pantheon.

1. Exports pre-set before opening this shell. [↩]

I’m not cured. I’m just temporarily free-ish from the PTSD—well, I can feel it trying to drag me down, but only when I’m around too many people I don’t know, because my natural paranoia and hyper-awareness kicks in and, well.

I’ve been spending a lot of time getting truly re-engaged at work. Even though I know I’ll lose it in November or October or something. I feel like I’m me for the first time in a long time; it’s just the ability to concentrate that’s somewhat returned.

So I’ve decided that I will cook. Further exploring gluten-free and dairy-free, making applesauce again when the season rolls ’round, and trying to work out new traditions that can start overriding the old ones that my father tried so hard to work but, ah, turned them into days of unending terror instead.

Trying not to think about that.

I have my cows. I know that I’m not completely cured because I clutch them a lot. If they weren’t there, I think I wouldn’t be this sane; it’s just the clutching that is soothing, the ability to hang onto something and hug it a bit harder when the waves of terror come. Fuzzy and soft somethings, preferably.

I wish I could take Ike out shopping but for some reason I’m extra afraid of people staring at me when shopping. But I may have to do so. It’s hard to shop for ingredients I’m not familiar with when I’m starting to drown in paranoia (another sign I’m not cured).

Anyways. It’s late and I gotta sleep. I’m less dependent on the Ambien, too, which is very novel.

I wish it would last… but I know from looking at my blog’s archives that it won’t.

But for now, I’m running with the wind for once.

P.S.: I’m thinking of trying for rice mac & cheez, non-dairy alfredo-ish sauce with rice spaghetti, and nacho cheez with corn chips over the weekend. I have to say, one cup of rice pasta with sauce and tvp is very very very filling. I think I may have to cut down the serving size, it almost feels like too much. Thus far, Tinkyada rice pasta seems to hold up even better than most wheat pastas to abuse like cooking in a rice cooker, baking, and being reheated or eaten cold (or at least, room temperature).

Tasty to some, at any rate.

Hot Cereals

Note: gluten-free oats do exist, if you can find a brand that’s aware of the possible cross-contamination between wheat and oats, and has a separate facility for oats.

On/Off Rice Cooker or Quick-Cooking Intelligent Rice Cooker

This can be made in the morning, and takes anywhere from 25 minutes to 15 minutes.

Per serving:

Rolled oats: 1/2 cup to 1 cup water.
Mighty Tasty Hot Cereal: 1/4 cup to 3/4 cup water.
Creamy Buckwheat Cereal: 1/4 cup to 3/4 cup water.

Timed Intelligent Rice Cooker

Steel-cut oats need to be soaked for a while, overnight being ideal, so a rice cooker with a timing feature (just about every smart rice cooker has one) is almost necessary.

NOTE: Use the porridge setting, the normal setting will result in too-sticky oatmeal and possible explosion.

Per serving:

1/4 cup steel-cut oats to 3/4 cup of water.

Things to Add

I like to add one tablespoon of oat bran before the cooking for everything but the steel-cut oats. This increases fiber by 1 gram.

After the cooking, I add 1/8 cup of the following: craisins (quite good, and lowest calorie count of these options), currants, raisins (normal or gold), dates (oat-covered pieces or chopped). Fresh fruit can be added instead, of course. Let the oatmeal steam a bit longer with the fruit.

I always use 1 tablespoon of packed brown sugar to sweeten the cereal as well afterward.

Cold Cereal, aka Muesli

I quite like muesli, which come in all sorts of mixes, and even gluten-free mixes can be obtained.

This is quite a quick breakfast, which I use when I need to go to work early and don’t have time for, well, anything:

1 cup of orange juice (or other fruit juice) to 1/2 cup of muesli. Let muesli soak (it can take quite a lot of soaking, even hours of it, and it won’t become mush—unlike a lot of commercial cereals on the market).

You can use milk (cow or the soy, white, or almond replacements; non-flavored yet sweetened works best) instead of the juice; I personally prefer the juice version.

I’ve found that sweetened and somewhat acidic homemade applesauce also does the trick in a similar manner.

Food Replacements

These are the easiest for me.

Replace Rice with Quinoa

Especially if you can find a brand of quinoa that you don’t have rinse before cooking (Bob’s Red Mill, for instance). The taste is sweet, a bit like sesame seeds, and has a bit of a crunch while still being a soft grain when cooked.

Quinoa is cooked in a rice cooker, using 1 part quinoa to 2 cup of water to create four servings. And these are quite expansive servings, with a bit over half the calories of rice.

Replace Ground Meat with TVP

One of the most awesome replacements, and it starts off as dry granules that you’ll have to reconstitute in hot water or broth—unless you add extra liquid to an existing dish and toss them in that way.

TVP reconstitutes at a 1:1 ration between it and water (preferably broth), and takes on flavor very well. After reconstitution, it can be skillet-browned, or put into soups and casseroles, just like you’d use real ground beef.

Today’s recipe, for a kind of baked pasta in a rice cooker, I handled TVP in this way:

1. 2 cups of water; add another half/cup for the TVP.
2. 2.5 tsp of beef broth powder.
3. pour in 1/2 cup of TVP
4. 1 cup of pasta sauce
5. 1 tsp olive oil
4. pour in 2 cups pasta (I use rice psta).
5. stir once with wooden spoon

Hit cook. The end. Makes 4 servings, all below 300 calories.

TVP is quite wonderful, adding extra calories and texture otherwise missing. And you on’t hve to drain meat.

Nutitional Yeast

Not the same as the yeast that makes bead rise. This is yeast you can eat, and it is indeed a slightly cheesy taste. I think of it as a flaky parmesan. Or perhaps a cracker in the store, shredded finely into flakes.

I’m eager to see where the nutritional yeast experiments in The Uncheez Cookbook go!

Lunch is lazy. I was busy yesterday, and this morning I needed to do both breakfast for eating and lunch for eating later.

So I whipped up pasta in a rice cooker. This uses the same recipe as I had done with wheat and ground meat, except I used rice pasta and TVP. And it could cook away while I was showering and eating breakfast (creamy buckwheat cereal with oat bran in the smaller rice cooker).

We’ll see how it goes today. It could fit in half the green box (so it could have gone in a half box and leave the other side for grapes). But tired today.

The other stuff is half-ounce (weight) of veggie stix and one of those bento chick seasoning dispensers. It dispenses nutritional yeast instead of Parmesan. It could go wrong, so I left it in the chick to sprinkle on small portions and see if I like the taste.

By the way, a 18 oz klean kanteen non-lined stainless steel bottle is similar to 20 oz PETE plastic water bottles of comparable girth. And as leak-proof with the traditional stopper It makes me happy.

You can also how thin this eBags lunch box is. Yeah, I know, lime green, it’s more cheerful than dark blue or black.

Day 81 was fairly uneventful on all sides, apart from gluten-free baking.

Unfortunately, the results of the baking made me sick—not because the bread was bad, it was quite good, but I’m allergic to some compenent(s) in gluten-free making. Really allergic. Like I’d eaten a tub of real ice cream allergic (lactose intolerance, whee). I got quite ill.

I’m fine(ish) now, enough so that I ate my usual porridge breakfast, and am on the ferry to work—late, but I think I can handle it.

The problem, though, is that I feel incredibly vulnerable now. My body feels like it’s confusing the bout of sickness with the one brought on by the extreme anxiety of the depths of my PTSD. But I also remember that my father used illness as justification for further abuse, so I never got a break when I was sick during my time with them.

It was a strange play of good-cop bad-cop, or maybe good-parent bad-parent; my mother nursed me to health, my father screamed at me and did a little light beating so that I would get off my lazy ass and stop “acting sick.” And my mother didn’t stop him or argue with him.

So you can imagine what I think of myself when I get sick.

I think I’ll just hug Ike for the rest of the day. I feel exhausted already.

Yeah, so, lovely intestinal distress strikes again after today. Looking on the web, there are three likely candidates that people talk about the most:

• Sweet sorghum (flour form). This is a somewhat common allergy, and it’s present in both the GF All Purpose Baking Flour from Bob’s Red Mill, and the GF Wonderful Homemade Bread Mix from same.
• Xanthan gum. Also a common allergy (present in a LOT of processed foods other than gluten-free as well), and present in both recipes.
• Guar gum. Only present in issue #1, but not in issue #2. So it may be an innocent bystander… or also involved in mugging me. Some people are allergic to xanthan and not guar; some people are the other way around; some people are allergic to both.

But other ingredients are also all suspect, apart from the common ones like sugar and salt.

Apparently Xom is currently watching over my baking and me. I’d almost go back to the wheat and the allergies (which at least were mild… most of the time…) and the tonsiliths from hell….

I’ll start figuring out what the cause is; I still think it’s xanthan gum, as everything I’ve eaten today had xanthan gum.

It’s a shame—the breads I baked were quite good, and I miss them already.

I ordered some chia seed flour, which is supposed to have a lot of qualities of wheat flour without needing to add extra flours or the gum additives. Including where bread is concerned. If this works out, I will so buy a decent amount of it. I miss my King Arthur flour. :(

So last time I had some, ah, digestive distress after eating a gluten-free bread with guar gum in it. If you google for guar gum laxative, well, there you go. Supposedly small amounts of guar gum, as used in baking, should not result in a laxative effect, but Cybele Pascala compared xanthum versus guar in gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. So yeah.

Anyways, I’m not using Bob’s Red Mill’s pre-made gluten-free bread mixes—nor other pre-made gluten-free bread mixes, as many (if not all) use guar gum. Sigh.

However, I did turn to using a GF sandwich bread recipe from Bob’s Red Mill anyways for my second attempt at gluten-free, guar-gum-free bread in the Zojirushi Mini Home Bakery, along with some other tricks.

I know the recipe is made for a conventional oven, but the wonderful thing about bread machines is that you often can just use straight conventional recipes straight. Just make sure you put the ingredients in the pan in the order that the manufacturer suggests, not the recipe.

This is getting longs—pictures and stuff beneath the cut.

Click here to read more →

But hey, have some more Star Trek facepalms and miscellaneous “*headdesk*” category images below the cut! Doubtless in the future I’ll have reasons to use them.

Click here to read more →

You no can has context.

However, below the cut, you can has animated gifs.

Click here to read more →