Just Cake for Cake's Sake

This silly self portrait of Ayla and me makes me laugh.  Ayla is so snuggly and adorable and nearly impossible to photograph.  She always moves at the last minute.  So although this picture is grainy, I'm including it for joy.

I made a box cake tonight.  It's good on a Monday when there is no dessert in the house to consider a box.  We went to Trader Joe's yesterday (yay!!!) - and bought all kinds of yummy things, including a box cake of theirs.  I actually stuck to the box preparation recipe and it was great.  All you add is eggs, oil (or butter but I chose oil), and water.

The bottom line is that I have a real thing for yellow cakes with chocolate frosting.  I mean, I can't get enough of that right now.  I can't even think of baking other things.  I have to keep making different versions of it until I am done with it I guess.  This one had more chocolate in it by melting down Trader Joe's milk chocolate (big giant bars of baking chocolate in the baking section).  It's nice to have a cake without any butter as my last yellow cake was way too buttery.  Also, I'm not a fan of butter in my frosting.  A lot of cream cheese frosting recipes call for half cream cheese and half butter but it's just too much for me.

Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

1 8 oz package cream cheese
1/4 C cocoa powder
1/4 C melted milk chocolate
2T heavy cream (milk would work too)
Blend til smooth.  

Health-wise, I had a tough day.  My nervous system was tweaky today and I spent a good portion of the day being shaky.  I've been diagnosed with MS but it's a weird form of it.  I don't have major attacks and I've just had funky neurological stuff for years and years.  It may be the cause of the esophagus problem but who knows?  Oh, and I have a weird rash on my chest that is driving me batty. I was supposed to see the surgeon today to make some plans but I rescheduled it.  I NEVER reschedule doctor appointments.  I was quite proud of myself for knowing that I needed to stay home tonight and chill out and make frosting and a box cake.  I did, however, talk to the surgeon on the phone and we are hoping to wait until June for the next surgery.  He said it will be same day or one night in the hospital.  Easy to plan and only a few weeks of recovery.  I don't know how I can get myself to feel ready for it, except that the leg pain is so insidious.

You know, I gave myself this blog to think *out loud* about my health and struggles but I feel terribly self-conscious about it.  I think you think, "Is she done whining yet?"  or "maybe this chick should eat less frosting and sugar" or "whatevs get over it already."  Oh, inner critics are very judgey and snarky.
I'm surprised that snarky is not a spell check red line and judgey is (even if I spelled it judgy).  I love making up words.

Anyway, here's pics of cake.  Come on over and sit on my new leather couches and eat cake with me.  And then watch me grade 2 mountains of class work!

Smoothies in Green and Pink

Since I am a smoothie loving freak of a woman, people always ask me about what I put in mine.  So, I have shared this important information with many of you before, but since you will ask me again, it will be here for all of time (or until the death of the internet as we know it).

I have a bunch of pain things to share about today, but this time, recipe first, bitching later.

I have used Spirutein shake mix for a long time now.  I have not had any other flavors beside chocolate because, really, what else is there?

You really have to mix this in the blender for it to come out tasty.  You use 1 scoop of shake mix per person.  Then 8 oz milk (dairy or almond or whatever).  Add 4-5 frozen berries.  I love frozen strawberries in it.

Organic frozen berries are not so expensive.  (You know what else is delicious?  Frozen organic cherries!  I love them heated up a little with some plain yogurt! - sorry for excessive exclamation points but they are so good!)

So if you blend up milk, protein powder and fruit, you get this lovely smoothie right here.  

Nate loves these so I'm guessing many picky eaters would like it.  It keeps you full for many hours.  Lately, I add 2 more things to mine:  Spinach and peanut butter.  I add a handful (1 C ish) of baby spinach leaves and 1 T of smooth peanut butter.  Then blend until no spinach is visible (chunks of spinach leaves is not desirable).  Then it looks more like this.  

I read about green smoothies and decided to try it since I can't eat salad anymore.  This smoothie is very filling.  I had this for breakfast today and I wasn't really hungry until after school (but my appetite is a weirdo anyway these days).  Your question, of course, is "can you taste the spinach?"  The answer is no, not at all if you blend it thoroughly.  I do think the addition of peanut butter helps make the spinach work.  

Enjoy.  What are your smoothie recipes?  Please share in the comments.

Okay, now for some sharing.  I went to the pain doctor today since it has been 22 days since the most recent epidural injection.  I've gotten significant relief but the past 2 days, I have had more leg pain.  Last week, I hardly took any pain medications and the doc and I discussed that I don't seem to have any issues of dependency (whew).  I am so relieved that when I need to stop these, I won't have any problems.  I got some new prescriptions since I was absolutely, completely out of medicine.  I always fantasize that I won't need more and wait until I have none to get more.  

The doc just had to put his 13 year old wheaten down last weekend and I practically jumped to talk more about Orso (pictured with me above).  Orso passed on about 6 weeks ago and my heart aches for him daily still.  I tell Nate everyday, "I miss Orso."  That's all I can really say.  

I went to fill the prescriptions.  I used to be totally anonymous in this town.  After teaching for 4 years here, not so much anymore.  The pharmacy tech is a student teacher at the high school.  She knows what I take for medicine.  I am not invisible.  One of the meds requires a waiting period because they don't store it in the store.  I would have had to wait 2 days, but the nice student teacher offered to drop it off at the other CVS so I can pick it up tomorrow.  She didn't think I was a junkie.  She thought I needed help.  Sigh.  I was so caught up in feeling self conscious, I almost missed a human being being super kind to me.  

The pain doc thinks it's really promising that I got some relief.  It means it's not hopeless.  The nerve is not permanently damaged.  He generally thought I seemed much better overall after the fusion.  That seems like really good news and feedback, but it doesn't actually go all the way into my brain.  As long as there is pain in my leg, there is pain in my leg.  

The other day in school this woman that I have never met took out her pointer finger and pointed at me up and down and said, "You got really skinny.  You weren't heavy or anything, but you got really skinny."  I tried to decide if this was a complement, a complaint, a general statement.  I said, "Yes."  I am such a wackadoo sometimes.  What should I have said?  

So I am starting to consider this week's baking adventure.  I have this lemon yogurt cake in mind and my friend made it and said it was wonderful.  I've also been wanting to reproduce Bertucci's rolls.  And I want to try to make chocolate eclairs!

Cute Little Chicken Pot Pies

This is me in my fantastic cooking chair.  Nate calls it the captain's chair.  You see how tiny my lil kitchen is and how I can basically push myself all over.  The chair cost about $150 and it's from Staples - it was their last one so you'd have to order it online.  The gate is to keep Misty the Cat from being under the wheels.  When I cook, Misty thinks it is all for her and will hang out under me.  I think she may have possibly noticed how much stuff falls to the floor when I am at the helm.

Over my February break, I made these chicken pot pies for the first time with my friend Cindy.  We knew we would want lots of them so we made tons extra and froze them.  Since then, I have made them twice more - making tons extra for freezing.  Freeze them before baking.

Today I came home feeling a way-too-swift return of my leg pain post-epidural.  No doubt made worse by the fact that I never got to really sit down today.  I didn't really get great sleep last night so the combination of low sleep and a stressful day may have increased my inflammation overall.  While I'm at the complaining part of this post, I will say that my esophagus was in full spasm several times today too.  I don't have great management of the esophagus right now.  The medications for the esophagus are all heart medicines that relax cardiac muscle.  They also relax the smooth muscles of the esophagus.  I was on one that worked amazingly well until it led to EXTREME ankle swelling (sorry for yelling it).  The next one I tried didn't work at all.  Now I have a new one to try but apparently it gives everyone terrible headaches (the dr said that's how you know it's working - wtf?).  So I'm sort of holding off on that.  I've been getting by using the medicine I have for acute esophageal spasm.  Eating and drinking remain a challenge.

I used to have salad type things every day for lunch at school.  Now, I usually have a yogurt and some fruit.  Yogurt is so easy to digest and swallow.  I have eaten more yogurt in the past 2 months than ever before in my life.  I'm totally hooked on chobani.  Right now, I'm all about strawberry.

So I had big plans of making a new recipe for dinner so that I would have something to share here.  I guess that will have to wait.  I was so grateful that I had these little chicken pot pies left in the freezer from a few weeks ago.  I based them on this recipe from the Food Network by Melissa d'Arabian.  I never have followed the amounts - I just make large amounts of the chicken mixture and 2 packages of puff pastry.  Here are the amounts approximately that I have used:

1 large onion chopped
1 bunch celery chopped
4-6 carrots chopped
5 cloves of garlic
3T flour
1 C white wine
2 C chicken stock
2-3 T dijon mustard
1 C peas
2 packages of chicken breast, cooked and chopped small (I boiled the chicken)

Follow her recipe for cooking, deglazing the pan, etc.  You end up with a beautiful gravy surrounding chicken and veggies.  Roll out the puff pastry.  I made each turnover a rectangle about 4X6 inches then fold it over and seal the edges.  Freeze them like this, then you can just pop them out onto parchment paper and bake at 350 for 15 minutes.  If you cook right away, you end up with a better puff pastry.  This is sort of a labor intensive meal because you have to boil and cook all that chicken, and then stuff the pastries.  It's worth doing on a weekend when you have time and making tons of it.  Trust me, you'll be glad to have these little babies in your freezer.

Eating With Love

Baking to Heal as a concept began in January of 2012.  After having a spinal fusion in December, I ended up in the hospital for a week with esophageal spasms.  Over the week of not being able to eat or drink anything, all I thought about was cupcakes.

Let me tell you first about what I cook and eat in general.  In my 20s, I worked in a small cafe called Soupe du Jour which had a simple menu of soups, crudite, homemade bread, cheese and pastries.  I learned to cook there and I learned that I love to cook.  Over the years, I have focused on cooking and eating healthy.   I went seven years with no dairy, ten years with no meat of any kind, and somehow wound up here.  I eat some chicken and fish, but still enjoy a mostly vegetarian lifestyle.  That week in the hospital with no food, however, led me to rethink some things about cooking and eating.  

For the past five years, I have been living in pain.  I had a retrolithesis at L5/S1 - basically, one vertebra had collapsed upon the one below and was smushing my nerve root.  I have had relentless nerve pain down my leg.  I have had about 20 epidural steroid injections which have allowed me some amount of functioning.  I gave up a thriving chiropractic practice and chose to teach high school in order to reduce the stress of working with my body and a 45 minute commute.  Teaching is much less physically stressful but I eventually found that to be too much pain as well.  In June of 2011, I had a foraminotomy surgery on the area - they used a laser knife to carve out more space around the nerve root.  This was unsuccessful and my pain became much worse.  So in December, I decided to have the big surgery - a fusion.  They put in a lumbar cage and three screws to stabilize the area.  They lifted one vertebra off the other and put a bone spacer in there from a cadaver.  For a few weeks after surgery, my nerve pain was gone.  It was like a black cloud was lifted out of my brain.  Then, it came back with a vengeance.  After having CT scans just after surgery and a month later, the surgeon found that I grew a new bone spur which is directly pressing on the nerve root again.  I had yet another epidural which has settled it down enough so that I can wait to have the next surgery until the fusion is done fusing.  

With the esophagus hospitalization, the cupcake fantasies were obvious.  I missed cooking.  I had given up most cooking due to the pain of standing.  Baking was always a bigger love for me than regular cooking but I had a lot of guilt around cooking treats.  I reserved baking for Christmas or having company over or some other justification.  I realized I was never just cooking what I wanted.  I was terrified of becoming overweight.  I doubted my control over eating and in the process had excessively controlled one of my favorite creative outlets.  

After living in pain and then struggling to eat, I decided that baking was a love I needed to return to.  I can only eat small amounts of food at a time and raw foods are completely out of the question.  Cake, however, is pretty darn easy to digest.  For me, cooking in this guilt-free, love for myself place has become a part of self-love.  Over the past few months, I have made cakes, cupcakes, muffins, breads, and some wonderful savory yummies too.

I want to tell you about the logistics of cooking in pain.  Pain strips away a lot of joy and it is hard to find this middle ground where you still feel like you are alive and where you are taking care to rest.  Sometimes, I wait to take pain meds until I know I'm heading into the kitchen.  I will work in pain so that I can come home and cook without pain.  Right now, I'm not allowed to take advil or anything similar because it inhibits the proper fusion of the bone.  That means I'm stuck with narcotics.  I refuse to take enough to be without pain because it would be A LOT.  Currently, I'm not too bad because I had the epidural just a few weeks ago and pain management is pretty easy with very little medication.  It doesn't last too long though.  

I have this awesome chair now!  It's on wheels, has no arms, and goes from a regular chair height to the height of my counters.  My kitchen is 6 feet by 9 feet so I can pull and push myself all around the kitchen in the chair.  It's AWESOME.  It has completely liberated my kitchen time.  Granted, sitting is a position that can be the most painful so it's not as if it's a pain free option or anything.  It has allowed me to be less exhausted by cooking though.  I don't know why more people don't have something like this - I think most people would love to sit and cook.  I have my laptop there and I watch crazy science documentaries or mystery BBC shows and cook to my heart's content.  

My heart's content.  That's the whole thing right now.  I am baking to play, to live, to heal, to think, to be with myself again.  All these years in pain have taking some parts of me and buried them.  I am trying to find myself in these recipes.  

It's hard to find this balance between maintaining a positive outlook and being real with how much this has really sucked.  I don't like to be a complainer or to be seen as weak.  I realize, however, that I am not taking the time to express enough of what has gone on inside me over these years.  I'm writing here to just get it all out.  Maybe it will bring someone else comfort or maybe it will just be fun to think about food.  My agenda is to share what I am cooking and what I am feeling.  

These recipes are not health food but I'm sure some of what I cook will meet some standards of "healthy."  I'm so thrilled with how much food blogging has taken off in recent years.  Much of what I am inspired by comes from awesome food blogs.  I hope to give props to the incredible food writers out there in the world.  I tend to mess with recipes.  I start out thinking I will stick to the recipe but I never do.  Recipes with lemon always need more lemon.  I almost always reduce the sugar, not out of guilt but my own taste preference.  I generally hate buttercream frostings so even if the recipe sounds good with it, I will switch for cream cheese frosting or a simple glaze.  

I hope you enjoy reading and that I inspire you to bake, to your heart's content.