Cans - Another One Bites The Dust

Hello Friends:

It's been ages ... again ... since I posted.  This year has been a slow one for the blog, but that's okay.  Maybe I'll just put ten posts up in December.  :)  I've been away from the blog both because of good times and bad.  Usually the down times make me write, but for some reason this year I've been away no matter how I felt.  Weird.

Anyway, what I really wanted to write about today was a continuing triumph.  I have once again triumphed over can.  If you want the gory details about my OCD issues with cans, you can check up on two previous posts, "Cans are Scary" and "Triumph Over Can."  That's the starting point for me tackling yet another can.

Pumpkin seems to be the motivator.  It is pumpkin which calls to me so strongly that I just have to go to it.  I do not eat canned beans.  No, I will go through the trouble of buying them dry and soaking them overnight and then cooking them forever.  I do not eat canned tomatoes.  Again, I will buy them fresh and go through the process of removing the skins and saucing them myself.  Both of these endeavors are time consuming, and although they make for a good end product, they are a enough of a pain that I do not have either beans or tomato dishes nearly as much as I would like.  It really would be so much easier if I just could eat the canned versions.

But I can't.  Yet.  Big emphasis on yet.  There was a time I would have said never.  Absolutely never would I willingly open and eat from a can.  But once again, pumpkin has called to me, and another can has, as they say, bitten the dust.

It is pie that is doing it.  Why doesn't my grocery store consistently carry pumpkin pie?  Even this time of year you can't be certain there will be pumpkin pies in the bakery.  This is madness.  I love pumpkin pie, and will happily eat the stuff year round.  Now, I understand if it is unrealistic of me to want my bakery to produce pumpkin pies all year.  Fine.  But where is my pumpkin pie now?  It is practically Thanksgiving.  And I certainly will have pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.

So, yes, I bought cans of pumpkin.  I could have gone through the cooking-pumpkin-from-scratch process, but even I find that tedious.  Two cans of pumpkin.  And I even have a can opener from a previous need to crack into a can of pumpkin.  Took a while to find it.

It was all strangely easy.  It sort of had a dreamy feel to it.  I opened a can of pumpkin.  It looked fine.  I used it.  The pie smelled heavenly while it was cooking because I over-spice my pies with my entire spice cabinet.  Especially cloves, allspice, and ginger.  The place really smelled like Thanksgiving.  Wow.  Pie came out and cooled a bit.  And then I ate a piece.  Just like that.  I felt a twinge or two.  Ate it anyway.  Had a twinge or two when I was going to bed, but I always have trouble at bedtime, so I ignored it.

And here I am.  One day post pie.  Not quite.  I just had a tiny sliver with breakfast.  It is pretty @&$% good.  Have I mentioned how much I love pumpkin pie?  And now I can make my own, whenever I want.  Wow, I feel empowered - empowered to make pie, and empowered in another triumph over OCDs.  

Your Hostess With Neuroses
 
Image credit/info:  Picture taken by me of a pie that certainly won't last long.

A Ridiculous "Hello" from Halloween

Hello Friends:

So there I am, in my kitchen, trying to make something to eat.  No, this story is not about mice.  Much.  Other than to say you know how hard it is to cook in a kitchen that has recently been visited by varmits.  I still do not have them out with certainty, but it's been five days since they've been sighted.  Heard one in the walls last night, but it did not enter the actual house.  Traps are empty.

Okay, I said this wasn't about mice.  It's about me trying to make lunch.  I'm having a very down day, with a bit of bad news, feeling overwhelmed in general, and dealing with my mice-heightened kitchen OCD issues that are not fun at the best of times.  And I know I am supposed to eat lunch, if I don't, I feel much worse as my sugar drops.  I struggle with myself, and finally settle on something I think I can force down.

I usually eat lunch as quickly as possible, with as little fuss as possible.  I am just not a 'lunch' sort of person.  I don't like lunch food, like sandwiches.  So I end up making either dinner or breakfast for lunch.  I knew it would be more work that I was quite up for, but I chose to make some pasta with red sauce and a good dose of cheese for added protein.  I knew that would hold me through the rest of a busy day.

Cook pasta.  Stand around.  Stir pasta.  Turn on fan above stove because steam is all over the place.  Right.  Stand and stir.  Feel hungry and bummed out.  Pasta finally done.  Drain pasta and put in small serving bowl.  Return pot to burner and dump in sauce, onion, garlic, and pepper.  Feel less bummed out since sauce smells good.  (One pot is always the way to go ...)  Stir and simmer.  Starting to actually want to eat this stuff, and hunger is pretty bad.  Dump pasta back into pot with sauce.  Stir.  Get cheese from fridge.  Sprinkle pasta in pot with healthy dose of cheese.  Then ...

Yeah.  It's like a sitcom around here sometimes.

Then ... a SPIDER, a big hairy black SPIDER drops on a line from the oven hood, inches in front of my face, and nosedives it right into the pot!  I $hit you not.  I about peed myself.  And get this.  He doesn't immediately croak because he is a big cuss and happens to have landed right on a bunch of cheese that just came from the refrigerator.  I am gape mouthed, and just starting to yell, when he seems to realize he is in MY POT OF BOILING SAUCE and starts reeling himself back up out of the pot!

The story ends here for the spider, because I hate them.  I'd have killed him even if he wasn't just spotted in my LUNCH.

I return to my pot.  I shut off the heat.  I sort of stare at it a moment, feeling bad for myself because there is just no way in heck I can eat this now.  And then I start laughing.

Because I am about to die of an irony attack.  I've spent the last two days decorating for Halloween, which is a holiday I love.  I do up the house like a vampire's lair, with fake spiderwebs and the whole shebang.  In fact, I have a bag of over 100 spiders I can put in the webs and scatter over the tables.  They really creep me out, which is sort of what I want on Halloween.

So what am I supposed to do?  Get all pissed off with the universe for giving me a good scare?  Too hypocritical.

Doesn't mean I was able to eat lunch, but I did get a serious laugh out of it.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info: Spiders on Flikr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0

Varmint Warfare

Hello Friends:

I was far, far too optimistic to hope I had managed to rid my abode of mice.  A week after we returned from our trip, my spouse spotted yet another varmint.  This time in the LIVING ROOM and the little sucker ran into the KITCHEN and went into the cupboard where my COOKING PANS are.

Of course you know, this means war.

At this point, there is no food they can get to, at all.  Everything in my pantry is now in glass.  All bread is in the microwave.  Everything else is fridge or freezer.  There is nothing here to tempt them.  There never really was, given I didn't see any signs of chew marks on anything, ever.  But for some reason they have moved into my townhouse.  I have now heard them scratching at the walls between us and the neighbors.

And all I can really think is, now what?  Seems like those sonic repellers, of which I now have six in my home, do pretty much nothing.  Well, that was always a possibility.

The land lady has been notified.  No response yet.

MY PANS.

Where is my kitchen stuff possibly safe?  Do I have to find a way to pull everything out of the cupboards on the ground and only use the ones over the sink?  That's gonna put a dent into my dish holding capacity for certain.  Otherwise, I'm going to have to wash my pans all the time.  And I don't even like that idea because if the mice are ... are ON MY PANS then I don't think I even want to touch them.

Trap was empty this morning.

MY PANS.  Not to mention my KITCHEN and my LIVING ROOM.

Calm. Yes.  Calm.  We are eating out every meal today as I try to figure out how to deal with this.  Just not sure.  This is nuts.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info:  Promo photo for the Movie Caddyshack.  Character Carl Spackler plans his attack on the gopher that has been tearing up the golf course.

Bitch Slapped by the Universe, Again - Part I

Hello Friends:

You know how it feels when you are cruising along, and things seem ok (or at least meta-stable) and you think you are handling it ... and then suddenly from out of nowhere ... POW - bitch slap.  You are on the ropes, hoping you don't pass out and end up TKO'd.  You don't just get a jolt, or any kind of new manageable challenge.  Instead, you get handed something about three orders of magnitude above whatever it was you were just coping with.

I've been doing a lot of travel.  A lot.  When possible, I've been posting some of my so called insights here to share with y'all.  It's been rough, but I've been having some good times, and am grateful for the chance to have these experiences.  But we are running ragged around here, not even bothering to put suitcases away before the next trip.  They just sit out on the floor and clothes cycle through them as we come and go.

So two days before having to get on a plane for an international flight ... I'm in the kitchen at 3:00am, 'cause of course I can't sleep, and figure I might as well try to get something useful accomplished.  I stop a moment, standing by the trash, and gaze out the dark, foggy window.  It is in fact trash day, which is why the bag is there, so it can be taken out in the morning.

It seems it did not get taken out quite quickly enough.

Rustle.  Crinkle.  Munch.  Scratch.

I back up and stare at the bag, my mind simply refusing to process this.  We've lived in this townhouse for six years, and although the centipedes are big enough to cart off small children, we've never had to deal with uninvited mammals.  Yet somehow the rustling is unmistakable.  I grew up in an old colonial house that was often visited by small grey mice.  The cats (and the dog, actually) kept the population at bay.  I didn't like them, but was used to the fact that they would occasionally pop up.

That was before my contamination OCD's hit, of course.

Anyway, I knew immediately what it had to be in that bag, there.  I stood for a moment, trying to talk myself out of it, when the perpetrator suddenly emerged and scampered at high speed to disappear under my sink.

I squealed in an octave I didn't know I could reach.  Probably would have jumped on a chair if there had been one handy.  Instead I tore up the stairs and woke my poor spouse, who was trying to get some much needed sleep.

It took a while to get the story out, since he was groggy and I was panicking.  A mouse (or a small rat, possibly, for God's sake) was in our house.  The KITCHEN.  As if the kitchen wasn't hard enough, fraught as it is with all my food OCD issues.  Now there's a mouse.  In the kitchen.  Holy f*#k.  I had no idea what to do, what with it being 3am and all that.  All I could think about was plague and rabies and fleas and worms and ticks and all sorts of things that somehow I never worried about as a kid.  This ... this furry thing ... was in my kitchen and spreading its whatever all over whatever.

And the floor had just been mopped, too.

Spouse got up and took the trash out, of course, and we resigned ourselves to just dealing with the fact that it was down there until morning, when we could actually be proactive in getting rid of the sucker.  I couldn't sleep.  (What a shock.)  I was still up at 6am, and went down to make tea.

And heard ... heard ... munch.  Chew.  Rustle.

From MY PANTRY.

OMFG.  My pantry.  All the FOOD IS IN THERE.

This was finally a bit too much for me, and I sort of looned.  I didn't have a panic attack, and I didn't run around screaming, but I decided that all the food that was not in the fridge, freezer, or in metal/glass containers was no longer viable.  All of it.

Poor, poor spouse.  I woke him up and said, basically, that he had to empty the pantry.  All of it.  And haul it out with the rest of the trash.  Fortunately for us, all this travel meant we didn't have too much food on hand.  Still, the guy dragged himself downstairs, tore out everything, bagged it, and took it all away.  There was no sign of the mouse, and so I was wondering if my spouse thought I'd imagined all of this.  But I certainly had not.

I spent most of the time he was doing this trying to hide the fact that I was crying.  What had me most upset was that I had to get him to help me.  I knew he was beat, that he had to have some sleep, but I couldn't do this myself.  It was all contaminated beyond reprieve, and beyond the point I could even touch it.  I sat on the stairs, and watched him a while, wondering how, HOW, my kitchen would ever be a place I could eat again.

And I'm sorry to leave the story there (cliff hangers suck), but I am so tired, I just gotta go to bed.  To be continued!

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Image credit/info:  Mindy Mouse by Wednesday Elf - Mountainside Crochet, on flikr via Creative Commons, CC 2.0

Cans - Part Two of Two - Triumph over Can

Hello Friends:

In my post Cans - Part One - Cans are Scary, I mentioned why it is I seem to have this problem with cans; associating cans with Botulism at a ratio of one to one.  I also talked about how I hadn't opened a can and eaten the contents (without any help) in 17 years.  And even with help, I still haven't opened more than a handful of cans in all that time.  Well, on Friday, one can met its end.  Your Hostess - 1.  Can of pumpkin - 0.  Triumph.  Small, but telling.

Here's how it went.

I woke up with this very strange and unshakable desire for pumpkin pancakes.  I have never made pumpkin pancakes.  I make pancakes all the time, but if you are me then  adding pumpkin means getting an actual pumpkin, chopping off the top of its head, pulling out the stringy insides, and roasting it.  Then removing the skin, chopping it up, and running it through a food processor.  This is needlessly complex.  Roasting your own pumpkin makes for very good pumpkin, but it is an incredible time sink.

So, no pumpkin pancakes for me.

Except ... there was this can.  See, last year at Thanksgiving I did buy two cans of pumpkin so I could make pumpkin pie for my sister that was vegetarian, as well as soy-free, egg-yolk-free, and malt/barley-free.  I actually bought a can opener to do it, since I most certainly didn't own one.  I made the pie( after getting lots of approval on the contents of said can) and then did not eat any for two days.  Then I managed to eat a piece, although I worried for the whole day, and spent the whole time checking for illness and any strange symptoms of 'I'm just not feeling right.'  Which is fricken always.

Well, the pie only took one can of pumpkin to make.  And the other can got shoved into the back of the pantry.  So when I wandered down on Friday, thinking about pancakes and pulling the baking powder down, it caught my eye.  Usually when I see a can I get a vague nauseous feeling and look away.  This time, I got the sick feeling, but didn't turn.  It was ... tempting.  I had a can of pumpkin.  Hmmm.

Just to test the water I picked it up and checked the date.  Another two years left.  I inspected the can thoroughly.  Dents?  Strange sticky spots?  Bulges?  Ripped label?  No.  Nothing.  It was pristine and perfect.  So I figured, well, might as well open it and just see ...

Took me five minutes to find the can opener.  Another three to remember how to use it.  Then I crimped it onto the can and cranked it around.  The inside smelled very pumpkiny.  Smelled good, actually.  No weird scent or strange colors.  I sniffed it several times and held it under the light.  Still I was unable to find a reason to dismiss the contents.

I set it aside, and went to work putting together my usual pancake recipe.  But before I added any of the liquids, I looked back at the can.  What the hell.  I dumped it into my mix and then simply adjusted the amount of liquid until I had something that resembled batter.  I've never found pancakes to be particularly tricky.

And from that point, it was surprisingly easy.  I put in a lot of spices; cloves, two kinds of cinnamon, allspice, ginger, Chinese five spice powder, nutmeg and a few other things I can't remember.  Then I cooked them up.  They smelled GOOD.  And I really, really wanted to eat them.

And I did.  Now, I can't say that I haven't had a twinge since then.  In fact, every time my tummy has been the slightest bit off, I've thought about those pancakes.  But I have not had a panic attack, haven't needed to call the CDC, and haven't lost any sleep over it.

What I've been left with is this desire to really know WHY.  Why is it that I had this success?  Why have things changed enough to allow this to happen?  Lower stress levels, or meditation, or good therapy, or proper dose on the meds, or better diet, or doing lots of writing ... etc?  I've done all of that, made all of those changes.  So there is no way to know.  It probably isn't a single cause, anyway.  If it were that easy, I'd make a mint selling the secret.

Whatever it was.  I am still smiling about it.

Your Hostess with Neuroses

Image is the actual can in question, crushed in defeat.

Cans - Part One of Two - Cans are Scary

Hello Friends:

Cans are scary because in my mangled mental state I believe that 'all cans have botulism'.  As with my issue about rabies (i.e. all bats have rabies, all squirrels have rabies) and tetanus (all pins, needles, and nails can give you tetanus) I am not quite rational in my fear of botulism.  I had an interesting encounter with a can recently, which prompted me to go ahead and create this post about one of the "Big Three" fears of my psyche.  I posted the Big Three post to introduce the topic, and then I dealt with my rabies fear in my second post about bats, Bats are Scary.

So let's talk about botulism.  Wheeee!

Okay, my fear started in high school, when I read a caption to a figure in my science textbook.  It said something bizarre, like only 2000 'molecules' of botulism are necessary to kill someone, and it implied that the only result of being infected was death, or very rarely, if you survived, total paralysis.  All this stuff isn't true, by the way, but I didn't know that then.  So when I read that caption, the information settled down somewhere into the irrational part of my brain that keeps facts ready for my later torture.  When my OCDs and panic burst forth fully formed in my early twenties, they tapped into this reservoir of ready-made fears, and botulism came up as one of the top three, beleaguering me for the seventeen years or so since.

The practical result is that since the age of 24 I have been unable to open a can and then eat the contents.  Very rarely, and by that I mean a handful of times in the last seventeen years, I have been able to open a can and use the contents if someone else pronounced it 'good' and then ate the contents first - and then if they didn't die for a day after eating it.  I have literally opened only six cans in seventeen years.

Interestingly, this fear has centered almost completely on metal cans.  For whatever reason, they have bothered me much more than jars.  Although I went many years unable to open a jar, even a glass jar of bottled juice, I have at least been able to use jars with some regularity in the last five to seven years.  Metal cans, though, no go.  (Additionally, for almost two years I couldn't eat frozen food, either, as it somehow became guilty by association.)

Of course, everyone but me uses cans in cooking.  And I can eat at someone's house and at restaurants just fine, as long as I don't see the can.  If I see an open can on a counter, that's it.  I can't eat the food.  This has meant a lot of very embarrassing incidents, and even perceived offenses, where people think I 'don't trust them' because I can't eat the food.  That has played directly into my social anxiety, exacerbating that already chronically bad condition.  Eating dinner at someone's house can be potential nightmare, so I've often avoided it.

Anyway, so that sets the stage for a new look at the big 'B'.

So let's see some facts for a change.  The bacteria that cause botulism are naturally occurring in soil.  They tend to thrive in low-oxygen environments (anaerobic).  This means they colonize generally when contained, as in sealed cans and jars, but also occasionally inside wounds or someone's intestines.  The latter usually only happens to infants.  I always knew of the anaerobic nature of this bacteria, and so have been nervous in any situation that has a container that has been closed for a long time - for example, having to clean out a cooler that was used on a camping trip after it had sat closed with water in the bottom for many months.  The chance there was danger of botulism in that scenario?  About zero.  But as I've noted in the past, if it were a rational fear I wouldn't be on meds.

Botulism is super rare.  The CDC says (emphasis mine), "In the United States, an average of 145 cases are reported each year.  Of these, approximately 15% are foodborne, 65% are infant botulism, and 20% are wound.  Adult intestinal colonization and iatrogenic botulism also occur, but rarely. Outbreaks of foodborne botulism involving two or more persons occur most years and usually caused by eating contaminated home-canned foods. The number of cases of foodborne and infant botulism has changed little in recent years, but wound botulism has increased because of the use of black-tar heroin, especially in California"

WebMD says the following, "Any case of foodborne or unexplained botulism is considered to be a public health emergency because of the potential for toxin-containing foods to injure others who eat them and because of the potential misuse of botulinum toxin as a biological weapon. State and local public health officials by law must be informed immediately whenever botulism is suspected in a human patient."  This is another point underscoring the rarity, since I don't have a lot of memories of 'botulism' emergencies - certainly not like the E. coli. emergencies that seem to happen all the time.

On top of the rarity of the disease, my idea that it was instantly fatal was not quite true, either.  It is true that a survivor can face weeks, months or even years of rehabilitation from the paralysis.  But it is possible, and more likely than ever.  Again, the CDC says, "Botulism can result in death due to respiratory failure. However, in the past 50 years the proportion of patients with botulism who die has fallen from about 50% to 3-5%."

The CDC article goes on to indicate the specific ways one can drop their risk of botulism to near zero.  Don't give infants honey - the bacteria can exist in honey, and infants are at risk in a way adults are not.  Don't use drugs.  Duh.  Be exceptionally careful with home-canned food, and "Because the botulism toxin is destroyed by high temperatures, persons who eat home-canned foods should consider boiling the food for 10 minutes before eating it to ensure safety."

And there it is.  The fear and the facts.  As usual, the facts are not of terribly good use in fighting the fear, but they are useful.  I am now able to use jars, like those above, on an occasional basis (although if they are 'home canned' instead of 'factory canned' I still can't touch them.)  The longer I live, the less I fear dying in general.  After all, I've managed to get the first forty years down, and I can now imagine that if I kept doing what I have been, I figure I should have a pretty good shot at another forty.  And if not, I have this idea that botulism isn't going to end up being the problem.

Your Hostess With Neuroses

Eggs - Never Over, Never Easy

Hello Friends:

The whole 'buying tickets' thing this morning was tough, not to mention the generally very stressful last weeks, so we gave ourselves a treat of champagne brunch at a swank new joint. And now that I deal better with some of my food contamination issues, there are several items that have made it back onto my personal menu. Like crab and hollandaise sauce. Two big fat no-no's up until just about 18 months ago. But now I'm eating them on an occasional basis.

And so you'd think that Crab Eggs Benedict would be an amazing feast - yes, but in spite of the other ingredients being AOK, runny egg yolks are not. I still can't do that and I don't think I need to. Not just gross but gross tasting. But one does not have to have the eggs poached, of course, one can order them over-hard. Which is what I did.

The yummies show up to the table, and it is obvious my eggs are poached. I cut into one to be sure, and immediately tell the wide-eyed and very young server that I can't eat these eggs, they were ordered over-hard. He is apologetic and takes the plate away.

There was a time that would have been completely impossible for me. I used to experience so much anxiety about my food issues that I wouldn't bother trying to go out to eat. I knew something in the food or the environment would be too threatening, and I'd be spending the time terrified and trying to hide it, of course. But I've finally realized that I really do deserve to get what I ordered. And that restaurants *want* to bring you what you ordered. One plate of food makes no difference to them, and avoiding panic attacks all day from having eaten goopy eggs means everything to me. Took years to make the progress on these self esteem issues - the ones where you have to express your needs and respect your own boundaries, but I can finally send a plate back to the kitchen.

And then things get funny.

Because a new plate is brought. And the eggs are poached. Again. Now this, this is a challenge. The server is aghast as I tell him the eggs are not over-hard, and that I can't eat them this way. I repeat the performance of cutting into the egg. It was a good show last time, so why not? It's difficult and takes some real guts, but I request another new plate with COOKED eggs. And like in any good restaurant, the plate is taken away with yet more apologies and they commence with try number three.

But it is really driving me nuts at this point, without that nice glass of brunch champagne in my system, I probably would have been pretty bent. Not with them, because people make mistakes and they are trying to fix it, but because this is all a result of my not being able to take the chance of eating runny egg yolks when I'm already stressed out. Nothing is worth suddenly thinking you've poisoned yourself and having attacks all day long. This is one of the reasons restaurants are such a freaking challenge. And I'm now more worked up, but repeating to myself that this is no big deal, I have a right to do this, and I'm not going to hyperventilate over it.

And the third try is finally the charm. And free, since this is in fact a good place to eat and they realize they are really blowing it here. So I use this as an excuse for another glass of champagne. :)

And the luxury of patting myself on the back for actually doing something so mind-bogglingly difficult as think I am a person worthy of getting what I ordered.

Your Hostess With Neuroses