My New Toy

Hey, y’all.  🙂

I hope y’all made it thru the super cold stuff this weekend.  It got down in the 20’s here.  Right at the same time the cold blew in my blood got dangerously thin from my blood thinner.  I thought I was gonna die from the cold. (I’m exaggerating about the dying part…but I seriously have never been so cold in my life.)

Today it was almost 80. I was in heaven (and my blood is almost back in range) 🙂

Took this pic this evening around 5pm.  Almost full moon shining bright while the sun was still out.

So when we last met I was waiting on a Christmas gift to show up.

Isn’t she beautiful? My first Vitamix. Red of course. 🙂  Thanks, family.  🙂

Since I’m making my own cashew milk and stuff now I wanted something a little more powerful than the bullet. Bullet served me well for a few years but I outgrew her.

I chose the S30 because of the size.  I wanted something that wouldn’t take up too much space on the counter or in the appliance drawer…and would also be light for lifting in and out of the drawer. I debated between the S30 and 55 but decided the extra money wasn’t worth it for what I’d be using it for.  Plus I wanted red and the 55 doesn’t come in red.  Easy decision then.  🙂

First I made some cashew milk and cashew sour cream (and ghee the same day).  It was restocking the fridge day.

Then I used Vita (I call her VEETA…ya know…because I like to play like I’m British and they call vitamins VEETuhmens) anyway…I used her to turn some cashews, cashew milk, red pepper, nutritional yeast, chicken broth base, spices into…

Cashew QUESO, y’all. 🙂  ‘Cheese’ without cheese.

This stuff is every. thing.

I’m going to add some jalapeno’s to the next batch to get it a little more Texan-y.

I used this dude’s recipe but he’s vegan (I think) and he doesn’t use chicken broth base in his.  I think it adds a great depth of flavor to the recipe and obvs I’m not vegan so I’ll keep on using it. He also uses both almonds and cashews. I did not and will not. This was awesome sauce and I’m not messing with more ingredients than necessary for my taste buds.  The fam gave this thumbs up too and they pretty much don’t like anything I eat these days.

About those ‘chips’ I’m dippin’ up the queso with.

Siete almond flour and cassava coconut tortillas.

Texas made by a Texas fam so of course they’re excellent.  🙂

The cassava coconut version is a little bit grainy because of the cassava but they’re so close to real tortillas. They make the best chips. The almond flour version makes good chips too but they’re thicker.  They have less carbs so I do use them when I don’t have the numbers for the cassava. Neither mess with my blood sugar at all.

To make the chips I take one tortilla, spread ghee on both sides, plop on a piece of parchment and into the micro for up to a minute on each side. Then I break it up into pieces. Easy and perfect portion control.  They also sell actual chips now (only in Whole Foods til mid-march) but the carb count on them is way too much for me right now.

😉

Annual family New year’s day meal. Almond flour coated pork chop, black eyed peas, cashew cream / follow your heart cheese-y green bean cass, mashed potatoes with cashew cream gravy. (This was just my meal. Everyone else had the regular version of all of that.) With this meal I learned that I don’t need to try to recreate everything to mimic the original version. I would have been perfectly happy with a non crusted pork chop.  It was way too much work and mess for one person’s food.  Isn’t that plate pretty? It’s from the motherland…Czechoslovakia. 🙂

I sobbed watching the President’s final address tonight. It’s so sad to know this amazing man, his beautiful wife and just overall classy family is being replaced with such deplorable human garbage. You can’t say it, Hill so we’ll say it for you.  🙂

Speaking of…I’ll be proudly rocking this beaut on inauguration day.  You can get yours here.

No shame, y’all.

Remember…

If you look the other way and stay silent in the face of hate and all the horrible-ness that’s fixin’ to be fully unleashed in about 10 days…you’re just as bad as they are.

 🙂

A quick before current:

This is one of my favorite shirts.  I tried it on today.  I’m sitting in the car for both top pics.  In the left pic (sometime in 2016) the shirt is stretched to the limit. You can see how it’s pulling across the chest. My whole body wouldn’t  fit in the frame.  On the right I have about 5 inches of material gathered in the back (just for the pic I didn’t walk around town like that).  I have on shorts they just perfectly match the blue in the top.

That’s the best I can do today.  I really don’t run around taking endless pics of myself and I haven’t been out much at all since the last time I posted pics.  I’ll definitely keep posting comparisons when I have them though.

Ok that’s all for today.  Stay safe and warm and I’ll see y’all soon.  🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lesson Learned + Cherry Christmas Cake

Hey, y’all. 🙂

Did you have an awesome Christmas / holiday?

Things were kinda blah here.

First, the week leading up to Christmas I had to take Mama B to the ER late one night. It was all kinds of drama that led to us having to leave before she could be seen because the ER Dr at our Podunk hospital wasn’t covered under her insurance. If you know me in real life and live in our town…don’t go to the local hospital unless you’re like 110% sure you’re dying. Drive to SL or V and see some decent nurses / doctors.  There was this one nurse there that must be the sister of Satan (and that’s being nice). And believe me…she’s already been reported.  So anyway thankfully the urgent care at her regular Dr’s office was open super early the next morning. She got seen 1st thing and her temp was 104. The Dr. said if she’d waited any longer it would have been really bad.

So she was sick and then Sister B got sick and wasn’t able to come home. We ended up meeting her for lunch on Christmas Monday but she’s still not feeling all that great.  Feel better soon, SB.  🙂

We still celebrated Christmas.  It just wasn’t the same as if everyone had been healthy.

Made the real kolaches and pigs for the rest of the fam.

Used the roll dough I wrote about in this post to make me some celiac / paleo safe pigs and prune kolaches. These actually turned out really well. And they held up in the icebox too. I’m so impressed with this recipe.

Usual Christmas Tex-Mex meal. (Tamales / Enchiladas / cheese rice / beans).

So are y’all starting to practice y’all’s Russian. 😉

About that cherry rum cake.

Unreal.

I made my regular rum cake recipe using gf Jules of course (you can use any rum cake recipe) and for all of the water (just the water) in the cake and drizzling sauce I subbed cherry juice from a jar of maraschino cherries.  I drained the cherries really well and pulsed them in the food processor then dried them even more on paper towels and added them to the mix. I left everything else the same.  Mama B said this was the best cake I’ve ever made. 🙂

Amen.

My fav Christmas presents (so far)…a Rubik’s cube and a Salt Life sign / decoration for the back fence (it needs to be dropped down a little bit).  We’re starting to decorate the back fence with old vintage and cute signs.  When Rubik’s cubes were first a thing I got one for Christmas and played with it for hours on end. They had all those retro toys out for Christmas this year and it was one of them.  My other fav won’t come until sometime next week.  I’ll share when it gets here.  🙂

 🙂

A progress pic. Left pic was Christmas 2004 (in the middle of a 4 year lupus flare) and right pic was the day after Christmas this year. White bar across chest = no bra. Also…while my stomach is in no way flat that is not a bulge it’s the way the white shirt bunched up.

So…about the title of this post.  I took 4 days off plan for the holidays and while it was worth it in some ways it was horrible in others. In about 48 hours my pain level went from around a 4 to a 24.  My face bloated up.  I was itching like crazy.  It was awful. I had planned to stay off plan thru Monday (because we were meeting SB for lunch that day and it was a road trip) but I went right back on plan after Christmas day lunch.  It took a good full 3 days for my pain level to get back to somewhat manageable.

Lesson learned.  I just cannot jump on and off from no sugar / grains (even with celiac safe ones).  I have to find ways to make this livable.  And that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to figure out ways to make things I like so maybe I won’t miss them as much.  I did it when I had to go gluten – free.  I’ll do it with this too.  And of course I’ll share along the way. 🙂

Had to go out for lunch on Tuesday.  Saltgrass.  Caesar and Prime Rib. Forgot to take a pic of the steak but I cleaned the plate so you know it was delish.  This was a perfect back on plan meal. 🙂

Normally I wouldn’t post something with that many curse words in two sentences but I saw this and it is just so fitting right now.

Ok. That’s all for now. Y’all have a great / safe New Year’s Eve / Day weekend and I’ll see you soon.  🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to those of you who celebrate…and happy Sunday to those of you who don’t.  🙂

Sending y’all lots of good wishes for peace and love from this Texas girl. 🙂

Hope y’all are having an awesome holiday weekend with those you love the most.

See you in a few days with a Christmas wrap-up.

 

 

Orange Cake 100 days and Birthday Wishes

Hey, y’all. 🙂

First…Happy Birthday to Sister B. The best sister a girl could wish for.  I hope you have an awesome day.  🙂

So…

I did it, y’all. 🙂

100 days.

No grains or sugar for 100 days and no dairy for 50 days. 🙂

I’m pretty proud of myself. It’s been rough in some ways but super zen in others.  It was the weirdest thing.  I didn’t have any inner debate with myself over trying this.  In late August I really did just wake up one day and say to myself “enjoy Labor Day and then you’re doing this grain free  / sugar free thing for a while”.  There was no way I could have given up the dairy right from the start.  It’s what got me thru that first month.  But I’m so glad I eventually tried getting rid of it too.

The whole point of trying this was to try to help my autoimmune inflammation. It’s helped a lot but I’ve just got so much of it raging in my body that it’s going to take a lot longer.

I’m planning to stick with this for as long as I can.  Hopefully this is now a lifestyle change but I learned a long time ago to never say forever.  It’s a one day at a time kind of thing and today…I am still all in.  🙂

Before / current. Before was August and current was this weekend.

Logo from the shirt in the current pic.  You can never have too many y’all Christmas shirts.  😉

Remember that caramel I wrote about last week? That’s what it looked like in action.

I read about this orange cake where you boil 2 oranges for 2 hours then..

Throw the whole oranges peel and all (chopped into chucks) into the food processor and process to mushy.

Add 2 cups almond flour, 4 eggs, 1 – 2 cups sugar (I used xylitol), 1 heaping tsp baking powder and process til well blended.

Bake at 350* for about 45 minutes.  I glazed it with a ghee / xylitol reduction.

It’s kind of pound cake-esque. I loved the flavor and the texture was good but I did have a reaction to the acidic oranges.  If not for that I’d totally make this again sometime.

In that caramel post I wrote about using Ideal brand xylitol / splenda sweetener.  I switched over to this for the cake along with some added liquid splenda and that’s going to be my new mix.

Quick side note…a reader reached out and wanted to know how I can claim to be staying below 25g carbs / day when using xylitol. The answer to that is that I don’t count sugar alcohols at all. I’ve tested my blood sugar after eating them and they have zero effect on me. For example an hour after a piece of that orange cake my blood tested at 80.  Two hours after it tested at 78.  (I’m not diabetic but someone in my house is so I just used their testing machine to test it out. I also did it when I decided to allow the occasional potato.)  Anyway…that’s just how my body works.  You have to know your own body before you decide not to count sugar alcohols.  As I’ve said many times though…you do you and don’t worry about me.  🙂

Ok that’s all for today. Hope y’all are having a great week. 🙂

 

 

 

 

The Normalizing of White Supremacists

Alt-Right?  I don’t think so.

I’m going to use this space to rant tonight but first a story…

Like many of you reading this right now both of my grandfathers served in World War 2. Pappy, my grandpa on Papa B’s side of the fam served in the South Pacific and lost partial hearing in one ear. Mama B’s daddy passed away when she was in high school so I never knew him but he was a POW in the thick of the fighting in Europe. (He didn’t die in the war).

Like so many others…I was at one time guilty of throwing around the phrase ‘nazi’ to describe silly stuff. Being so far generationally removed from that war it never hit me in a meaningful way.

Until…

One day (well into adulthood) I was in the kitchen unloading groceries and one of the bags busted sending a pickle jar crashing to the floor and busting all over the place. Glass and pickle juice everywhere.

There’s this lady supervisor at our grocery store and to this day she guards the plastic bags like they’re gold.

That particular day I’d wanted the bag of pickles doubled bagged to prevent exactly what happened but she wouldn’t let me.

So as I’m cleaning up pickle juice…I say what started out as “That damn bag nazi…”.

Pappy was sitting at the bar and said something like “you know…I lost my hearing fighting the nazi’s…cleaning up pickle juice is nothing”.   Yes I know The South Pacific wasn’t Germany / France / Russia…but he did his part and was way more than entitled to classify it as fighting the nazi’s. 🙂

Y’all know enough about me to know I’m a proud card-carrying bleeding heart liberal / do-gooder. I couldn’t believe something so insensitive came out of my mouth.

From that day on I’ve always tried to never use that phrase when describing something silly. I’m sure it’s slipped out from time to time but I do make a conscious effort not to do it.

Awesome story, Texas Girl…what’s the point? You’re probably wondering right about now. 🙂

Y’all know we’re a proud Texas Aggie family.

But tonight I am a sad member of an Aggie family. 🙁

I’m mad beyond words that a place we hold so dear allowed a white supremacist to speak on campus.

Super mad.

But more than mad I am SAD that he was allowed to speak in The Memorial Student Center.

IN The Memorial Student Center.

A memorial to all the Aggies who lost their lives serving this country.

As a sign of respect you can’t even walk on the GRASS around the building.

As a sign of respect you can’t wear a hat / cap inside the building.

But now…apparently you CAN spew garbage supporting ethnic cleansing inside the building. 🙁

Ethnic cleansing, y’all.  In 2016.  At the 5th largest university in the country. 🙁

Right there in the middle of a building that originally opened in 1951 as a memorial to those former students lost in WW2.  Lost fighting…you know…the HORRIFIC CLEANSING of a group of people.

I’m just so very sad tonight. 🙁

And so disgusted at those of you who support this garbage. Those of you who walked it straight into the highest office in the country. Those of you who are NORMALIZING words and behavior our grandfathers gave their unimaginable suffering to stop.

Will we ever learn from the past?

Apparently not.