7 quick and late takes, vol 7

1. Sneaking in just before the deadline here! I have been very busy, and when I haven't been busy I have been busy being unproductive relaxing.

2. On Thursday was Corpus Christi, which will get a post of its own because there are a lot of pictures. I went and had lunch at the Seepark after the procession, thereby checking another thing off the Summer Fun List.

3. On Friday, we had an all-day outing for the Medieval Mindset class. That is probably worth a post of its own too, so I won't say any more about that, except that I met a member of the German minor nobility--a count. And our entire class accidentally crashed a funeral. So that was an interesting day.

4. Saturday, we rode the Oldtimerlinie, which, again, will be in its own post. Then my drama class went to the opera. We were ridiculously high up--I wished I had brought my binoculars! There were no higher seats anywhere.

This is the Stuttgart opera house. It looked so nice. Unfortunately, I was way underdressed. Oh well.

5. Today, Sunday, there was the universal hour of Eucharistic Adoration with the pope. Apparently it was mostly being done in the cathedrals, but the cathedral here was being used for a concert, so it was in St. Martin's across the street. I prayed all four decades of the rosary. At one point, I felt like I was in a Tridentine Mass, because Pater Markus was praying something in Latin. Since I didn't understand it, I just kept praying my rosary!

6. Being gluten-free makes me feel so much better, but recently I have noticed another benefit: I can tolerate way more lactose than I used to be able to! Processed dairy products, like yogurt and cheese and ice cream don't bother me at all in small quantities. I hate not eating gluten products, but it does improve my life so much.

7. I have been practicing taking better photos using the manual setting on my camera. It's surprisingly easy to get better photos than the auto setting will get me, especially in poor or bright light.

7 quick takes, volume 6

~1~

I think I am doing the numbers right. Based on the fact that every blog I read is on a different volume number, I'm assuming that the volume number is based on how many times I have participated. Which would be 6 now.

~2~

Today is one of those days where I realize how out of touch I am with the US. Basically all the blogs I read are American, and almost everybody has said something about military people and families in the last few days. There was also apparently a military-themed Google doodle (which of course I didn't see because stupid Chrome insists on redirecting me to Google.de, and then offering to translate the page into English). What a coincidence, I thought. Or maybe a soldier died overseas and I just missed it.

~3~

I finally figured it out, though. Where I am (historically Catholic state), Pentecost vacation is coming to an end. Where everyone else is (in heathen Protestant America), Memorial Day Weekend is starting. Hence the focus on the military.

~4~

I could never be an expat. And I'm just kidding about the heathen Protestant thing.

~5~

Theoretically I am writing a paper right now. I'm roughly halfway done with it. Luckily it's a first draft, because I am starting to get the feeling it's turning into a combination of three things: structural hot mess, grammatical nightmare, and a bunch of BS where content is concerned. I feel bad for the poor teacher who has to grade these papers.

~6~

The closer I get to time to go home, the more I worry about packing. I think I have accumulated a lot of stuff here that I want to bring home as souvenirs. On the other hand, since I brought so few clothes, the ones I brought are beginning to look rather the worse for wear, so maybe I can just throw a lot of them out before I go, freeing up some space for souvenirs. We shall see. I am open to the possibility that I will have to pay for an extra bag on the way back, although I am hoping to avoid it.

~7~

As these takes get more and more scattered, I can feel my blood sugar dropping. Forget about my lack of coherence in this post, and go read the other takes while I go eat some breakfast. Thanks!

7 quick gluten-free takes

1. Here are seven tips for starting a trial to see if you are gluten intolerant. I wrote them for my sister, and thought I would share them publicly as well. Note that I wrote them with her in mind--so this is a list for people who suspect a gluten intolerance and want to run a test to see if they have one. I'm sure the process is different for people who start out with a diagnosis of celiac. I don't know how long the test process takes. I noticed results immediately and it was clear to me within two weeks that I wasn't going back.

2. For the first few weeks, the test weeks, stick entirely to things that are normally gluten-free and also normal foods. Don't buy gluten free bread, and don't buy xantham gum. Eat potatoes, rice, vegetables, nuts, and meat/dairy if you do those. Keep it simple or you will get overwhelmed. I promise you will spend those weeks noticing other people's food and realizing that if this fixes your problems you will never have X again. That is more than enough to worry about without mixing tapioca starch with rice flour in a special ratio.

3. Don't cheat at all, so you can be sure that you are getting accurate results. I don't worry right now about eating moderate amounts of things that "may contain traces of gluten" or of taking the occasional bite of a glutenous thing, but during my trial I definitely did. (If I do turn out to have celiac, I guess I will have to start worrying again.)

4. Google is your friend. If you can't (or don't want to) read all the ingredients of something you already have, google "is X gluten free." I have never failed to get an answer about a product that is sold in the US this way. (Off-brands from German Aldi often remain mysterious.)

5. Keep track of your calories. I lost six pounds in six weeks by accident. I did track calories for a while, but when I came up continually short, I assumed that I just needed fewer calories. I traveled all the way across town to access the only scale I know the location of after I noticed all my clothes were too big and I had lost over an inch from my waist.

6. With that said, don't let the calorie website bully you. I assume that when eating gluten-free, I will be eating fewer carbs and more fat. I don't worry about that, because most of the fat is from healthy things like nuts and olive oil. However, the website I use wants me to eat what I consider a ridiculously low amount of sugar. I can't eat fruit and stay under the sugar goal. One banana and one apple put me way over. I think this is crazy. I only use the calorie part to check that I am eating enough.

7. Expect that your friends will continually offer you food you can't eat and will constantly forget that you don't eat gluten or what things have gluten in them. Recently, a friend invited me over for pasta, followed by fried dough! (This is a situation where it might be good to buy something like pre-made gluten free noodles, because then you can just cook them in a different pot and share the same sauce.)


(Bonus 8th take: I have some good gluten free recipes, if people besides Teresa are interested I can put their links in a post instead of an email.)

Head over to Conversion Diary to see other quick takes!

7 quick takes Friday

1. Happy Easter to all! I had a great Easter with four good friends. We had a lovely afternoon cooking, chatting, and hearing about the trip to Turkey that three of them had just taken.

2. In the spirit of Easter, or in a fit of madness, I have committed to spending one hour in a church every day until Pentecost. Usually I go to the cathedral, because it's always open, and spend some time just sitting in a pew and reading Jesus of Nazareth. It is a great book, and I am really enjoying it. If I go to the cathedral late enough, they close it to tourists and have Eucharistic Adoration, which is always wonderful. I haven't made it to a daily Mass yet, because they are all either much earlier than I feel like getting up, or right in the middle of dinner time.

3. There are almost exactly two days left until the start of the Freiburg Half Marathon. I am super excited, as well as a little bit freaked out. I am quite sure I can do it, since I ran 11 miles two weeks ago, but I am a competitive enough person that I am worried about my time, especially since I paid to have it engraved on the back of my medal!

4. Classes started on Tuesday. I have had two sessions of my German theater class. My medieval art class is once a week on Mondays, so the first meeting of that is on Monday. My other three classes are through the university and don't start until the 15th. I like my drama teacher a lot. Yesterday we picked our topics for our two presentations. I will be giving a presentation on costumes and one on the play Daniel Stein (which is based on the book by the same name) which is about a Jewish translator for the Gestapo who saves many Jews and then becomes a Catholic priest. I'm looking forward to reading it!

5. I finished my 1000 piece puzzle of Tuscany. However, it's missing a piece! This is probably a metaphor for something.

6. Since I share a kitchen with relative strangers, I wasn't sure how I felt about the prospect of dying Easter eggs with vinegar and food coloring the way I usually do. So I improvised! Behold Sharpie-decorated eggs! I think they came out quite well:

I made the first, third, and fifth ones (counting from the left). Kevin made the other three. Clearly, he has more artistic talent than I do. Between the six eggs, we have three different languages going on! The tricky part of decorating German eggs is that every egg has the region where it comes from stamped on it, which is not attractive, but can be tricky to cover.

7. Speaking of eggs, we got a box of free-range eggs from the open-air market a few weeks ago, and my goodness you can tell the difference! Keeping chickens in the cages PETA likes to complain about is illegal in Germany, but even so the yolks of the free-range are much more orange and the eggs have more flavor.

The eggshells are also much harder to break. I'm not sure why that is, but it's rather annoying. This week I bought the regular eggs from Aldi instead of the free-range eggs. The free-range ones from the market are more than twice the price of the ones from Aldi, which is a little hard to pay given how many eggs I eat. I will probably switch back and forth--it is more fun to buy local food!

Holy Week Food: Wednesday to Saturday

So, the last few days of food have not been terribly exciting or picture worthy.

On Wednesday, we had leftover Shepherd's pie, so no picture of that. It was delicious, of course, but looked exactly the same as the other one.

On Thursday, we had beans and rice. We also had a green vegetable which the internet tells me is called Lamb's Lettuce. This was not terribly exciting, but I am firmly of the opinion that Holy Week food should be a little boring, since then Easter food will be more delicious.

I also experimented with making shortbread. I used Cam's recipe for gluten free shortbread. I decided to go with regular shortbread, though, because I didn't feel like messing around with the chocolate part. It didn't work at all, but I think that's my fault. I think my butter should have been softer. After it became clear to me that it wasn't going to stick together, I tried adding Nutella. That didn't work either. So now there is a large amount of really really crumbly shortbread sitting on my shelf in a tupperware waiting for Easter. I am sure it will taste delicious, but appearance-wise it is a little non-ideal!

On Friday, we had a soup made out of lentils and carrots. It looked very weird and not-tasty, so I didn't take a picture. I thought it was okay, but I'm not a soup person. Kevin thought it was good, not great, but certainly filling.

Tonight we are having a stir-fry of cashews and peas with rice. Then tomorrow we are feasting!

Holy Week Food: Tuesday

Tuesday was a really mixed bag. I didn't feel very good and was exhausted a lot of the day, but I still got a lot done. I cleaned my room, for one thing, which makes me feel so much better!

I also cooked two dishes: chili and gluten-free cornbread.

I made up my own chili recipe, which is extremely straightforward: canned tomatoes, beans, onions, garlic, basil, pepper, salt. It was delicious.

Oops. I bought whole tomatoes.

The cornbread was not quite as much of a success. I used this recipe with two minor alterations. I used lactose-free milk, and since it's sweeter, I left out a tablespoon of brown sugar. If I were to make it again, I would leave in all the brown sugar.

The main problem was just that the raw ingredients are different here. I think my corn meal was of a much finer grain than American corn meal.

 The batter looked more like dough to me than I think of it as looking. Then again, the cornbread baked faster than our cornbread at home. Maybe the two are related?

It turned out ok. The flavor was good, but it was much denser than I think of cornbread as being. Either I mixed it too much, or the fineness of the cornmeal screwed it up. Or both. Anyway, it was perfectly edible, and I will keep experimenting.

The cornbread went extremely well with the chili, and I would call it a very successful dinner!

Holy Week Food, Monday

I am on vacation this whole week. I mean, I was on vacation last week, but it wasn't the relaxing kind of vacation. This week is. I have left my house to go shopping, go to Church, and...that's about it really. I ran a few errands on with gritted teeth.

Anyway, the point is that I have been cooking. I have quite the plan worked up for the Triduum, but even the beginning of Holy Week has been filled with things I have never cooked before. So here's a few posts about them. I will split this up into as many posts as I feel the need to, because I love taking pictures of food and so there are a lot of pictures!

To start off, though, let me clarify where I am starting from with cooking. I can follow recipes well, but I am not an innovative cooker. If told to make dinner, I will almost always cook spaghetti. My main gap in cooking skills is normal meals that take a reasonable amount of time to make. I can do stupid-easy, and I can do long recipes. I have trouble innovating in the middle.

So anyway, here we go!

On Monday, we had shepherd's pie. Easy and relatively cheap, especially if you do what we did and buy the mixed ground meat instead of pure ground beef. (Is there a downside to doing that?)

I also made Hot Cross Buns, using the recipe from A Continual Feast. Of course, I can't eat them, and I forgot to halve the recipe, so Kevin has an awful lot of hot cross buns to eat! From what I hear, though, he's making good progress on the pile.

As you can see, this was slightly a mixed success. The ones I baked in muffin tins were a little overcooked, although once you get past the shell they are fine inside. I blame the oven for this--I heated it to the right amount, but the buns just cooked too fast. I will admit I was worried about these buns, because using an American recipe with German ingredients and measuring implements is always hard. I had a pyrex container with pints marked on it, and so I used that to estimate all variations of a cup. I used a regular teaspoon for teaspoon measures. It seems to have turned out ok! (Note to self--next time you move to Germany bring a complete set of American measuring implements.)

The more I cook, the more I enjoy it. I am starting to collect recipes I like in a recipe book, and I am excited to find more as I go on!

Food fail

So, the other day, I was thinking about how I was so hungry and had been eating all day and was still hungry. My first inclination was to tell myself to be quiet, because I figured it was some sort of withdrawal something. Then I thought that maybe I actually was hungry. So I logged into My Fitness Pal and plugged in everything I had eaten.

Too few calories, but too much sugar. Hmmph. Will have to work on that. The next day, I found myself out in the city without lunch. So I ran over to Aldi and bought a small can of peanuts. Well, turns out that a small amount of nuts has a large amount of calories!

That wasn't really what I was going for either! This is a bit of a balancing game, I think. I have been tracking my food ever since then, and I am coming up with consistent results--about 300 or 400 calories short, but with too much sugar. Days when I have nutella are shot (that has a TON of sugar), but there's also not much you can put in a sandwich when meat is out because it's Friday, cheese is out because it's a dairy product, and peanut butter is out because you live in Germany!

This is going to be tricky. I have several friends who are gluten free who reassure me that it does get easier, and I'm glad to hear that. Once I get back from Prague (yes, I am attempting to go traveling to a country whose language I do not speak and stay glutenfree throughout the trip) I think I can spend Easter break trying to figure out how to make more nutritionally balanced yet packable lunches.

And on the last glutenfree note of the day, I am going to do a test tomorrow, and deliberately eat a substantial (although not ridiculous) amount of gluten tomorrow to test that it was, in fact, causing my stomach aches. Wish me luck...

Memento Mori

(Edited to add this picture I took last weekend: the clock on the side of the Dominican church in Alsace.)

 One of my boyfriend's favorite bloggers likes to post and remind people that they could die at any time, or the end of the world could come, and to tell them to go to confession just in case. Such posts make me squirm a little bit (because I am usually overdue for confession anyway) and then rely on statistics. If the end of the world hasn't happened yet, chances it will happen in the next 60 or 70 years are quite slim, and chances it will come in the next few weeks are almost null.


Then something changed in my life, which made me stop and think twice. I stopped eating gluten. This had been some time coming, as I have been having many medical problems which can be caused by a gluten intolerance, but the actual decision was pretty much a spur of the moment thing. I had had what should have been a lovely evening--chips, a movie, and a bottle of beer with Kevin. But it wasn't a lovely evening, because I somehow acquired a terrible stomachache, which stuck around for the next 36 hours. I felt perfectly fine, until I had the chips (which had claimed to be healthy, because they were made of, yes, wheat) and the beer (which of course is also made from wheat). To me, that was enough for me to give going gluten-free a shot. And so, just like that, with no warning, I stopped eating gluten.

While it's too early to tell for sure, I think it has been helping. I have not had a stomachache since then. I will be testing in a week or two by deliberately eating some gluten and seeing what happens, but I suspect that I will be sticking with this gluten-free diet. No more pasta. No more donuts, or bread, or pastries. No more granola bars, or flavored chips, or beer. No more pretzels, or muesli yogurt, or soy sauce. I won't miss all of these things equally, of course. Soy sauce, pasta, beer, pretzels, and paprika chips will be the things I miss most, I think. It may be possible to find substitutes for some of them.

In retrospect, though, this does give me pause. Every day I think of one more kind of food that I like and will probably never eat again. I didn't know, when eating these things for the last time, that it was the last time. I had no idea. If I had known, I would have done things differently. I would have savored them more, and said my goodbyes to them. But I didn't know, and I didn't prepare, and I wasn't ready to leave. But I had to leave anyway, and so I left unprepared.