ROTR

I made it!

Yesterday, in just about 11 hours, I prepared six recipes to completion, started a seventh based on leftover ingredients, and left the kitchen cleaner than it was when I began the project.

Why?

Because my darling wife loves cooking from scratch, but doesn't want to get burnt out on it, and I haven't done a lot of intense food preparation for a spell. So I offered to spend an entire day cooking as many meals as I possibly could, so neither of us would have to think about it for a few days.

How?

The day before, we bought some ingredients, loosely based on some recipes in Dr. Joel Fuhrman's books, and including some other ingredients that we just like to have around.

The morning of, I transcribed the recipes to paper using the "tabular recipe notation" showcased at Cooking for Engineers. For example, the "Veggie 'Meat' Loaf" recipe:

I then created a rough schedule for the day across two sheets of paper, with recipes in columns and each row containing actions to be taken for each recipe. The rule of thumb: nothing within each row should contend with another thing. If two ovens are needed, defer one of the recipes to a later row where the oven is no longer in use by another recipe.

The schedule was key for keeping the flow going with so much resource contention -- there's only three burners that work well on our stove, and we only have one oven, yet three recipes used the stove and three used the oven.

Here's my schedule, complete with markups as I altered it:

What?

Ingredients available when I started: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, tomato paste, barley, quinoa, brown rice, yellow split peas, garbanzo beans, red kidney beans, blackeye peas, great northern beans, oatmeal, oat flour, whole wheat flour, pastry flour, dark rye flour, lemons, tomatoes, garlic, sweet onions, red onion, yellow bell pepper, red bell pepper, raw sunflower nuts, walnuts, raw almonds, dates, raisins, jalapeños, carrots, celery, green onions, romaine lettuce, cabbage, spinach, apples

Ingredients now available: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, barley, quinoa, brown rice, blackeye peas, great northern beans, oatmeal, oat flour, whole wheat flour, dark rye flour, lemons, tomatoes, garlic, jalapeños, romaine lettuce, spinach, apples

Ingredients untouched by this project: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, brown rice, jalapeños, romaine lettuce, spinach

Prepared dishes now available for us to choose from: tons of Cabbage Raisin Soup, 4 servings Quinoa in Color (already gone!), a Veggie "Meat" Loaf, several snackfuls of Apple Walnut Surprise, 12 Whole Wheat/Rye Burger Buns, 25 Bean Burgers (and some salad crumblings from the ones that fell apart).

On the way: Something with the leftover sunflower nuts and almonds (currently soaking) and walnuts; the leftover raisins and dates (currently soaking); and canned pumpkin. My wife wants to turn it into a pudding of sorts. :)

So?

Both parents needn't worry about preparing food for some time.

I want to do this again, with regularity, helpers, more ingredients, even more food in mind, and perhaps with extended family from time to time.

This time around, I did it alone (I didn't even ask for help from my wife until all the kids were in bed!) since I had never synchronized so many food preparation tasks at once, and thought that keeping the kitchen off-limits to everyone but myself for most of the day would help keep the flow smooth (it did).

It was tremendous fun. Next time I'll have even more fun!

Four times, in eight twirls of the Magic Bullet, for four people this morning:

• Add, then blend:
  • 1/4 C rice milk
  • 1 heaping TB fresh ground flaxseed
• Add, then blend:
  • 2" diameter wad of fresh spinach leaves
  • 1 banana
  • 1 heaping TB peanut butter
  • 1 heaping TB cocoa powder
  • drizzle of real maple syrup
  • 1/4 C water

I don't count every few days anymore, but I'm still counting.

My body has now been tobacco-free for 367 days!

That is to say, the only tobacco smoke that has entered my lungs during those 367 days has been second-hand smoke during brief encounters with smokers where it's wasn't convenient for me to move somewhere else.

Mike Adams at NewsTarget is saying what we're all thinking, or at least what I'm thinking.

I'm glad we managed to buck the trend this year. No candy-hunting parties for us! Whole wheat, low-sugar pumpkin cookies were our treat yesterday and today.

Next stop: Thanksgiving. I'm sure we'll figure out some ways to conquer that one!

This morning, I made an interesting batch of oatmeal. As is usual in recent times, I left any sort of sweetener out. The dish begged for a little bit of honey though. And of course, we wanted to get the benefits of raw flax and pumpkin seeds since we had some around.

It's usually a chore to get our six-year-old to eat a lot of ground flax or even more than a few pumpkin seeds. Here was my solution for getting around that:

• Put some flax seeds and pumpkin seeds in a blender or Magic Bullet container.
• Soak them for at least 30 minutes; even better if you soak them overnight.
• Drain water off. Quickly rinse if you've soaked overnight.
• Add some honey, to taste. This is the key to getting kids to eat it. The more nuts that they put on their oatmeal, the more honey they get.
• Add a dash of soy or rice milk, to thin it out and promote whipping.
• Blend everything for about a minute, preferably with a blade designed for whipping.

It turned out very fluffy, only lightly sweet, and very delicious.

Instead of "Do I have to eat pumpkin seeds?" or "Only a little bit of flax, please", our son told us instead to put five spoonfuls of the nut butter on his oatmeal!

If you were curious about the oatmeal, here it is:

• Cast-iron skillet to medium high. Don't worry about preheating.
• Add lots of oats, some 7-grain cereal, and a little bit of Basmati rice.
• Add cinnamon, allspice, and pumpkin pie seasoning.
• Toast it for a while.
• Cut some apples into small pieces.
• Add apples to the dry ingredients and continue cooking/toasting.
• Boil some water in a separate pan while toasting.
• As water gets to boiling, pour a little bit at a time into the skillet and stir it in.
• Eventually, add enough water for everything to soak in for a bit.
• Turn skillet down to low and cover to simmer and keep warm while preparing nut butter.
• Serve hot over frozen blueberries. Add generous portions of nut butter.

Well, that didn't take long. I feel kind of lame for breaking it so early, but there are just too many things that I'm worrying about, not the least of which is the fact that I was able to get some work done yesterday and today, but my energy level and ability to concentrate has dropped enough that I don't want to sacrifice that at the moment.

My wife and I discussed it a bit though, and now that we've both had solo "intro to fasting" sessions, we think that next time we fast it will be during the winter holidays, when people expect you to relax, take a break from work, and so on.

We are definitely going to keep trying every so often though. We've read too much about the benefits of fasting to totally give it up. I've also heard wide-eyed enthusiastic anecdotes straight from the mouth of someone who, for the last twenty years, has been going on a week-long fast every year during the holidays.

So, this time it's not going to last for me. Oh well! But this is definitely not the last time I attempt a medical fast. Living as healthfully as we can means we can expect to have many more years to attempt a fast every six months or so, and work our way up to a nice, ultra-cleansing 20-to-30 day fast.

Now to find something small and light to eat... :-)

Today, I can definitely feel my energy level dwindling. Doing some Schevo coding is still feasible and doesn't feel draining at all, I am keeping myself away from stress, and my wife is keeping stress away from me -- but nevertheless I am ready to lay down again for another nap. :-)

When I see food, see people eating food, think about food, or talk about food, I look forward to the moment that I reintroduce it. I've decided that I will do so on Saturday morning with a very light breakfast.

Until then, I am still looking forward to the whole experience, and looking forward to the end not just because I want to eat again, but because I want to see how my body feels after fasting.

I've waited too long since the last time I posted here, so I might as well write something about the week ahead of me.

As of about 25 hours ago, I started a water-only fast, using the same techniques that my wife used earlier this year. (For those who read that link -- yes, we're married now. That's how much I've been neglecting my blog!)

The primary reason for doing this fast is to attempt to slow down some annoying tooth decay that I simply do not have money to have a professional deal with. Too many years of drinking Mountain Dew and smoking cigarettes has taken its toll, and even though I've corrected my ways, my teeth are sadly in a state of slow decline.

The secondary reason (a very close second) is that I've wanted to do this for a while now for general health improvement and supercharging, and since I had complained about my teeth recently, my wife asked, "Why don't you try fasting?", to which I responded, "Well, why the heck not, I suppose!"

Now, here I am, 25 hours after my last meal. Over approximately the last year, my eating philosophy has been "whole-foods, plant-based" and my diet has followed that not quite strictly, but very closely. On top of that, over the last two weeks I've been ingesting berries, EFA-containing foods, and green leafy vegetables in even larger amounts to stockpile essential nutrients within my body.

So far, I'm managing pretty well to not get jealous of the rest of the family as they continue eating. I'm drinking a lot of water, and when you drink a lot of water, your body needs to rid itself of a lot of water. :-)

As my body still hasn't turned off its digestive system and switched its metabolism from eating-mode to fasting-mode, I'm feeling as well as a generally healthy individual could expect to feel after not eating for an entire day.

The next several days should be interesting indeed. Now, time for me to lay down with a good book and rest some more...

When preparing homemade maki-zushi for the first time ever, don't be too liberal with eating the slices that don't end up quite the way you wanted them to appear. Otherwise, you'll do what I did tonight, and enjoy so many without thinking about the fact that you might be eating too much, and you'll end up with a mild stomacheache later on. :)