Food Issues

Oh, boy, do I have food issues!  I suppose it started when I was a
baby.  My mother weaned me from her breast with some granulated
white sugar tied up in a bit of rag.  The formula that then went
into my baby bottles was canned evaporated milk and corn syrup. 
As I grew up, sweets were what people used to reward me when I was
good, comfort me when I was hurt, to celebrate my birthdays and
holidays, and to bribe me if I was slow to comply.

I had a relatively easy time kicking barbiturates and
amphetamines.  They were acknowledged to be dangerous and the
latter had to be obtained at great cost and risk of incarceration, from
street dealers or in even riskier chemistry setups.  When I
decided I needed to kick sugar, back in the mid-1970s, I had no
external support system.  I still get some incredulous responses
from people when I talk about how dangerous sugar is.  The stuff
was, and is, everywhere, and I could
smell a bakery on a back street half a mile away as I went by on the
highway with my car windows closed.  I quit and then relapsed
again and again.

It wasn’t just sugar.  It was also vanilla, cinnamon and
chocolate.  Gimme a fresh warm chocolate chip cinnamon roll and a
scoop of vanilla ice cream to cool and sweeten my coffee, and I’d be
back for more just as soon as I’d stuffed it all into my face.  I
kid you not!  What we call “Alaska cinnamon rolls” are HUGE. 
Once, a few years ago at Sheep Creek Lodge, I ate three of them, warm
and buttery, at one sitting.  Then I barely made it home before
passing out from the blood sugar spike.  I was sick, as all addicts are sick.

What an addict!  I hear the stories at NA meetings about the ways
my fellow dope fiends rationalized using and found excuses in just
about anything, and it reminds me of my adventures with sweets. 
When I quit the hard drugs, I didn’t relapse.  I transcended those
addictions and stayed off them because my self-esteem and instincts for
self-preservation gave me the strength to do so.  But that shit
wasn’t strong enough to keep me off sugar.  I’d go to the
laundromat and stuff my clothes in the machines, and then go over and
put some quarters in some other machines and get a Milky Way chocolate
bar and a can of Dr. Pepper to reward myself for doing the wash. 
When whatever guy I was with pissed me off, I’d calm and console myself
with candy.  Like the other dope fiends say, I got loaded at him.

What finally got me off sugar, and chocolate, and all that sweet gooey
jazz, was desperation.  I nearly died after preparing a feast for
about fifty people one Winter Solstice and then having only five people
show up because of bad weather and an epidemic of hangovers in the
neighborhood.  I ate half a dozen pies and three or four cakes
with very little help from anyone.  Before they were all gone, I
was hiding the leftovers from my family so they wouldn’t get
them.  That precipitated a slide into three years of misery and
debility.  I couldn’t walk without help or breathe without
medication.  If I had to fight the covers to turn over in bed at
night, the covers would win.  I got so sick and helpless that at
one point Greyfox decided to just cut his losses, “let nature take its
course”, and allow me to die.  But Doug helped me persuade him to
get my prescriptions filled, and I survived.

It was a long road back, littered with diet books such as the one for carb addicts, and The Zone.  I had an uphill fight and got nowhere until I found Charles Gant’s book, End Your Addiction Now. 
He’s an MD and PhD now retired from the practice of orthomolecular
medicine.  Following his guidelines, I applied the principles he
had used to cure drug addicts, took the amino acid supplements he
recommended, and lost my craving for sweets.  How sweet it
is!!  Then, when Greyfox decided to quit marijuana, tobacco,
alcohol, and sugar all at once, I had him do Dr. Gant’s checklists
and made up a set of supplement packs for him.  Now we both
occasionally will piss vocally into the wind at 12-step meetings trying
to tell people they don’t have to relapse and don’t have to suffer
white-knuckle withdrawal, but most are too firmly programmed into their
powerlessness to hear us.

Regular readers here are familiar with that story.  It’s mostly
for the new ones, and probably really just because I got carried away
introducing this blog about food.  I’ve been asked some questions
lately about squash and about my gluten-free bread recipes.  First
of all, Ren, I have only one “squash recipe” and that’s really a bread
recipe I improvised last year to use up my pumpkin after Jack
O’Lantern’s light went out.   That recipe, Gluten-Free Pumpkin or Squash Muffins, is in the Xanga cookbook. 

Pumpkin is my least favorite squash, with a stringy texture and watery
flesh.  Just slightly better than pumpkin are some of the common
squashes like Danish and butternut.  These are all “winter”
squash, so-named because their hard shells give them a long
shelf-life.  Summer squash, such as zucchini, yellow crookneck,
and green pattypan, is a whole different subject.  I like them
too, either sliced and grilled or used instead of eggplant in Parmesan
or some other recipe, but they are not sweet.  They’re a vegetable
to me.

Winter squash, in my mind, is somewhere between fruit and
pudding.  When I lived off the power grid, I’d bake them in my
propane oven.  I just split them and scooped out the seeds and put
some butter in each hollow half and cooked them until they were
soft.  The time varies depending on the thickness of the
fruit.  Temperature should be in the “moderate” range, around
350°F.  Right now, I have about 3/4 of a blue kuri squash in the
microwave, and I keep getting up, turning it a bit (Doug let the tray
from the microwave fall out of the dish drainer and break, so now the
carousel doesn’t work, and there’s some screwup with my online order of
the replacement, blah, blah, blah….), and giving it three more
minutes between turns.  After four or five of those cycles, it’s
starting to soften, and it smells so good.

It’s a lopsided 3/4 of a squash instead of a neat pair of halves
because I had to cut a “bad” spot out of one side.  Picking out
winter squash in the store involves careful inspection for mold or
rot.  Greyfox hadn’t gotten the knack yet this year when he
started acquiring squash and bringing them up the valley for me to
store for the winter.  I’m using up the imperfect ones
first.  The rest will last through the winter, I hope.  My
preference is for the sweet, fine-grained varieties.  If they tend
to be sorta “dry” like the hubbards, the plus there is that we get more
fruit and less water for our money, since they’re sold by weight.

These are my favorites, in order, best at the top:

The butternut squash are the next-to-the-last resort, when all
the rarer varieties are gone.  When the stores run out of them,
I’ll go for some of the Danish acorn squash, unless they’re selling cut
pieces of the giant blue hubbards.  I like the hubbard squash but
those big blue ones are just too much for me to handle.  Greyfox
couldn’t even safely lift one, given his herniated condition.

When cooking and eating squash, or corn, or my gluten-free breads, or any
concentrated carb, the butter is an essential addition.  I didn’t
lose that hundred pounds by cutting calories or going hungry.  I
did it by balancing carbs and fats, and keeping the carbs mostly
separate from the concentrated proteins.  No sandwiches, in other
words.  Here’s the rationale for that:  In people like me,
with reactive hypoglycemia (or “fibroglycemia”, as Dr. St. Amand calls
it) it’s not fat that puts on fat or causes food cravings.  It is
the glycemic index of the foods I eat.  The higher the glycemic
index, the more dangerous the food is.  Adding fat to the carb
reduces the glycemic index.  Buttered popcorn has a lower glycemic
index than plain.  Fried potatoes have a lower glycemic index than
boiled.

The “good” cholesterol from animal fats is important to the nervous
system.  I learned that in a promotional audiotape I got in the
mail, called, “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie.”  The author is an expert
in animal nutrition.  He noticed that beasts on cholesterol-free
feeds got stupid, or paralyzed or showed other neurological deficits,
and he postulated that the same thing was true in humans.  My
other earlier reading on nutrition had taught me that in populations
where their animal fats are balanced with oils from nuts and seeds,
they don’t get the degenerative diseases prevalent in our culture or
the clogged arteries from cholesterol plaques.  The trick is in
getting enough essential fatty acids to digest and use the cholesterol
to build nerve tissue.  Those fatty acids are another important
factor in recovery from addictions, especially from alcohol.

So, I eat all I want to eat.  The calorie restricted diets I tried
in the past got me in trouble.  I’d end up gaining weight and
losing health.  I try to remember to eat before I get hungry, to
keep my blood sugar stable and prevent the overeating that occurs when
I get too hungry.  For me, low blood sugar is the pits.  I
get irritable, depressed, weak and shaky.  When I eat carbs, I
make sure I get fats with them and don’t eat meat at the same
time.  Combining meat and carbs at a meal slows down the digestion
of the carbs and can lead to fermentation in the gut instead of healthy
assimilation.

I eat all I want of safe foods.  Many foods contain peptides that
are addictive.  These include the gluten in wheat and some other
grains, and the casein in cow’s milk.  I can handle fermented
milk.  Yogurt has become my substitute creamy sweet, instead of
ice cream.  I add a few drops of stevia extract for sweetness to a
dish of whole-milk yogurt (because low-fat or non-fat is too glycemic),
add a tablespoon or so of flax seed oil and some vanilla extract, stir
it all up and I’ve got my comfort food.  It is yummy and I can
feel virtuous eating it.  I used to believe that my problem was
that I loved food.  I thought I had to stop loving to eat and stop
eating foods I loved.  That approach never worked.  As soon
as I simply cut out the addictive foods and started watching WHEN I ate
to stay off the glycemic roller coaster, I was shocked at how fast the
obesity subsided.

My mainstay is the muffins I bake every two or three weeks and stick in
the freezer.  I nuke one first thing when I get up each morning,
and then a cup of tea, and the second muffin goes in the microwave while
I consume the first.  Muffins are better than loaf bread for me
because there’s portion control.  I know that two muffins are okay
and three would be a glycemic overdose, even with butter.

 Some of my recipes in Xanga’s cookbook ended up with Kathy’s name on
them.  It’s my name too, but the Kathy who has that as her Xanga
username and contributes to the cookbook under that name is a different
woman.  Anyhow, even though the index says some of these are
Kathy’s, all the links come back to SuSu:

They are all variations on a basic recipe I’m still experimenting
with.  My latest batch contains bits of dried figs.  The
flours I use most are sorghum, garbanzo and fava bean.  Because
gluten is the stuff that makes bread stick together, I use xanthan gum
(a fungoid product) to keep my muffins from falling apart. 
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with pancake recipes.  
Most of my flours, and the xanthan gum, come in packages with Bob on
the label.  Not J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, but Bob of Bob’s Red Mill.  His website also has a collection of gluten-free recipes.

I’ll go vote tomorrow.

I don’t suppose my vote in the presidential election will have any more
impact than a fart in a hurricane, but I’ll cast it anyway.  Most
of my fellow Alaskans are either Republicans or disaffected
non-voters.  I’d be dumbfounded if Alaska’s piddly bit of
electoral clout went to Kerry.  It’s mostly for the local races
and a few important ballot measures that I’m going.

One initiative seeks to remove the governor’s power to appoint a U.S.
Senator to fill a vacancy.  That’s because Frank Murkowski abused
the power by appointing his daughter to fill his seat when he was
elected governor.  Some of the propaganda being mailed out for
that measure says, “Some things should be handed down from generation
to generation, but a senate seat should not be a family
heirloom.”  Yeah!

One other hot issue concerns bear-baiting — specifically, putting out
food to attract bears for hunting, viewing or photography.  The
state fish and game department’s official stand is that baiting bears
contributes to “problem” encounters between bears and humans and forces
their officers to kill too many bears who become garbage-eating
rogues.  Proponents of the measure, in addition to the fish and
game management people and many environmentalist and animal rights
activists, include celebrities such as Lowell Thomas, respected
Alaskans such as a former governor, and a native subsistence hunter who
says in a radio spot I heard that bear baiting is “beneath human
dignity.”

Those who oppose the measure are bear baiters:  hunters,
photographers, and tour operators who need those bears in a certain
place at a certain time because they have promised a bunch of tourists
that they will see bears.  Some of them simply claim that the
government has no right to meddle in their affairs.  Others are
using scare tactics, telling us that the measure is poorly worded and
will result in innocent people being jailed for their bird feeders and
garbage cans.

Having once, in my ignorance, inadvertently attracted a bear by leaving
a bag of apples outside, I’m opposed to bear baiting.  That bear
got shot for my carelessness, but he wasn’t killed.  He stayed
around the neighborhood for years, getting into garbage cans and
compost piles.  He was recognizable by the scar on his side. 
He hasn’t been seen for a few years, and I suppose someone eventually
killed him.  I’d be in favor of anything that might prevent fatal
encounters — fatal to either the people or the bears.

I haven’t read the exact wording of the measure, but if in fact it only
mentions food lures, it isn’t broad enough in my opinion.  I’ve
been told that one of the best lures for a bear is a woman’s used
tampon or sanitary napkin.  I’m guessing that’s not mentioned in
the proposed law.

Is it something about November,

or something about me in November?

I just blocked another Xangan from my site today.  That took me to
my blocked users list, where I noticed a pattern.  There are eight
names on that list.  Five of them were blocked during the month of
November, of 2002, 2003, or, now, 2004.

There was another pattern evident, too.  Half of the sites I’ve
blocked have been inactive for at least six months, and two of them
stopped updating within three weeks of the time I blocked them.

Those things were evident from the stats displayed.  Another
pattern revealed itself when I thought back to my reasons for blocking
each one.  Most of the users I blocked, and all of the ones who
have subsequently stopped updating, were blocked for spamming me. 
I think it’s a fair guess that those accounts might have been
originated for the purpose of spamming, and were abandoned either by
premeditated intent when their usefulness wore out, or out of
frustration when enough Xangans had had enough and blocked them. 
Some of them could be reincarnated with new nics, I suppose.

Following those observations and deductions, I started wondering how my
blocked users list might compare to others.  I wonder if I’m any
more or less tolerant of spam than most of you.  I noticed that
the spammers I’ve blocked were blocked at the first offense, no second
chances.  Since there were none on the list for whom I can recall
more than one offense, I must conclude that nobody has spammed me more
than once, so I wonder if I was hasty in blocking them.

I’ve blocked some for proselytizing, but I haven’t blocked anyone for
disagreeing with me, and I’ve not blocked everyone who has insulted or
reviled me.  Some of my favorite Xangans have engaged me in some
engaging arguments.  I enjoy that.   Sometimes I respond to
insults by stating my opinion in the insulting one’s guestbook, and
none of them that I can recall has come back to dispute that opinion or
start an argument.   That door is always open.

One fourth of the users I blocked, I did simply because they bugged
me.  They pestered me and played head games, not arguing but
simply attempting to engage in a battle of wits sans ammunition. 
I played along until it became burdensome, then cut it off.  I cut
each of them off when I did not because I could not bear their
ignorance and impertinence, but because I knew that if I continued to
play the game I would get rough and then feel bad for playing the bully.

This little excursion has served nicely to get me through the morning
mind fog.  For a while when I got up today, I thought it might
turn into another do-nothing day for me because the brain was socked in
securely, in fog thicker than pea soup, more like oatmeal.  I
don’t know how I look now but I certainly feel bright-eyed. 

Good morning, Xanga. 

We’re past the autumnal cross-quarter.  Presumably the restless
spirits from last night are again at rest or at least in chains. 
My sad little punkin has slumped a bit from the heat of his inner
flame, which burned out around the time I turned off the porch light
and went to bed.  I tossed candy bars to three little costumed
kids last night, the first trick-or-treaters I’ve seen in several years
here on this back road.  Now Doug gets to finish the bag of
candy.  It’s not his favorite kind.  He himself admitted last
night that was good thinking on my part.  Otherwise, that bag of
candy would not have lasted from Thursday when I brought it home until
Sunday when the treaters came around.