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.

3/50

I have already done three of the things on my summer fun list! This is what I have done so far:

1. Read The Name of the Rose. (Spoiler-free review coming up!) I thought this book was fascinating, for sure. It was recommended to me by a dear friend who I have had many a philosophical and theological discussion with. The basic setup is a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery. The detective is a monk who is interested in the philosophy of Francis Bacon and reasons much like Sherlock Holmes. At times, the prose got very thick and I felt like I was wading rather than reading, but I did enjoy reading this book anyway. I don't think there are any characters I agreed with completely, but there are some very interesting threads of thought running through the book. The two threads I found most interesting were the questions about heresy and the question of whether books and knowledge should be restricted and/or censored.

9. Try gluten-free beer. I found gluten-free beer at the health food store across the street, so I thought I would try it. It wasn't amazing, but it wasn't terrible. I would say it tasted like a standard American beer. Or maybe the Americans I know don't drink the standard American beer. Anyway, it was not tooo expensive (1,19E for a bottle) and I will be keeping it in mind for things like cookouts where beer is far and away the most appropriate drink.

25. Go to the Augustiner Museum. This is an awesome museum if you like medieval local art. It had lots of stained-glass windows and statues that were taken out of the cathedral at some point.

I doubt I can keep this rate of completion up, but we will see! Every time I post one of these updates, I'll update the original list with the date I completed each thing.

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!

Cleared

I am officially healthy again, according to my doctor. I had three doctor's appointments in a week, and the three of them probably added up to half an hour with the doctor. German medicine is just so strange.

Speaking of medicine, I looked my medicine up on wikipedia, and my goodness! I am now convinced I had a terrible case of tonsillitis. The medicine I had has a black box warning in the US, and in the EU it's illegal for a doctor to prescribe it if he thinks a weaker drug will work. Since the US black box warning is that this drug causes tendonitis and potentially tendon tears, I am not doing *anything* active for a while. I have had enough tendon problems that I probably shouldn't have started it in the first place, but by the time I realized that, I was already halfway through and it didn't seem worth it to go get some other drug which would then cost me another 55E.

Well, anyway, I am now healthy and returning to normal life. I was super lucky in that I was basically out cold for a week, but I managed to time my antibiotic doses such that I only missed one class. (And quite frankly, that was a class that I basically have to do no work for, so I'm not terribly fussed.)

I have been experimenting more with gluten-free baking, and I am cautiously optimistic. I am going to try eating the fruits of my labors this afternoon, so we shall see how they taste!

7 quick takes

1. A priest alumnus of CUA just got awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously! Go here and scroll down to Rev. Emil Kapaun. He is also a Servant of God and up for beatification (although that link is from 2010 so it's kind of out of date). This is exciting. I hope I will live to see a CUA alumnus canonized! There's a Washington Post story about him here.

2. I went on a lovely hike with some friends from IES today. We tried to find some old ruins, but we took a wrong turn somewhere and by the time we figured out where we were, the ruins were very far away. We found a lovely cross on the mountainside as a monument to the first and second World Wars. It was what the Germans would call a "Mahnmal," which is a monument that also serves as a reminder not to do something again!

3. Kevin found me a recipe for gluten-free American-takeout-style sesame chicken. I have never been more excited for a recipe in my life. I am trying it on Sunday.

4. I am trying so hard to be open to this German apartment where I am living with complete strangers, but someone messed my French press all up. It is bent and stained and I seriously have no idea how someone damaged it that much in one morning. Also, someone who can't read the large sign that says to remove your shoes tracked dirt all over the bathroom, which, when combined with the water from her shower, led to mud on the bathroom floor. The real problem is that, since I don't know these people, I have a hard time confronting them. My poor French press is staying in my room from now on, and if I get a new one, that one is too.

5. My classes for this semester also got all confused and messed up. One of them got canceled, and one of them turns out to conflict with a bunch of mandatory excursions for another class. At this point, it looks like I will be taking four courses (not counting the German course I took earlier), but I am going to wait for a week or two to tell CUA this, just in case another problem arises.

6. The plus side of not being able to take my original schedule is that it increases the chances I can go to Greece, at least a little bit. Apparently it would be cheaper to leave Thursday night. Now granted I have a class Thursday night, but I think I could skip it once with no very bad effects, or possibly leave after it.

7. Even though these last few takes have been negative, I am having a good time. I can't wait to settle into a routine once all my classes start!

(Edit: I forgot to add the link to the rest of the quick takes! Duh! Here you go.)

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.