How to Neglect a Blog, Part 3: Have your health fall apart

Not the best of news today -- which is why I'm blogging it. This blog is solely for me; no one else looks at it, and I do need something to jog my memory in time to come. My health is plummeting again. The doctor's appointment was made this morning, but the earliest time we could get was 13 days from now, and I actually doubt I'll make it that long. I rather think I'll be at the ER long before I get to that point. 

The problem is essentially identical to the drama in 2017, not long after Mom passed away, when I landed in hospital for two surgeries. I have the same pain I had when the gallstones were giving me a massively inflamed liver, which triggered pancreatitis. But since they took out the gallbladder, how is it possible to have the same trouble?! 

So I looked it up -- let Ma Google be your friend. And imagine my surprise.

It turns out that 15% -- yes, one in seven! -- people who have their gallbladder removed continue to get stones. The stones just form in the bile ducts instead, and find their way into the liver and into the ducts to the pancreas; and when they block those ducts -- well, this explains much. It certainly explains why I can't digest worth a damn; why I have pain right through the middle; and so on.

For the last week, I've been treating this thing as if it were gastritis (caused by Ibuprofen ... I don't drink, never did, but I've taken loads of Ibuprofen for 35 years. I wouldn't have been surprised to find out the stuff had given me gastritis, and the symptoms are the same). But it it were gastritis, it should have healed itself and settled down by now, right? 

No joy. If fact, the pain is worse than ever. So the phone call was made, and the rotten news is that "See your GP promptly" is a meaningless phrase. You can't get an appointment for almost two weeks. See a GP promptly --?? That might work, but there's very few I trust, and trusting strangers isn't in my nature. So I've decided to wait, and just not eat, and see the one I do trust, when I can. Hmmm.

Two weeks. Who knows? The situation might have calmed down, given that much longer of resting the whole system. I doubt it, but we can do this. I'm not going to fall dead for want of a few dozen meals! God knows, I might even lose a few pounds (though I doubt that, too: weight loss does not happen for me). So, what nutrition can we get, when we can't eat?

This is a puzzle, especially when you remember to strike off the list all the migraine triggers. I've just completed one of the biggest, nastiest migraines I've ever had, probably triggered by a small amount of orange juice (I though I could get away with it, and was wrong), and the wild, whackadoodle camera work of J.J. Abrams, which is -- for me -- sudden death. It was Mission Impossible 3, and even closing my eyes didn't help. Maybe I didn't get them closed in time? Whatever. The last movie that did this to me was another Tom Cruise film, Edge of Tomorrow, which is a fantastic movie and -- for me -- sudden death. So ... food???

Fruit juices, unsweetened almond milk, acai powder, vegetable greens powder, beetroot powder, turmeric; an occasional dry, plain cracker; a half-serve of rice bubbles with stevia; a spoonful of low-fat yogurt; lots of rooibos tea. And that's about it --

Needless to say, the next two weeks are looking like two years, and my brain will barely be functioning. Your brain needs feeding, it won't run without fuel any more than the rest of your body will run without fuel. But I'm going to have to find a way to run on next to nothing until I get a diagnosis, and see what I dare eat, without risking blowing up pancreas right up!

And before we get to any such diagnosis, it's going to mean a lot of tests. Blood work, for a start; ultrasound and/or CT scan? Okay. That should show the problem. 

If it's not more stones, what is it? And what's to be done about it?

These are different questions, and at this moment I'm not going to speculate. Suffice to say, I feel very weird, with my brain starving and my body trying to tumble into sleep for want of fuel. I'm also getting over one of the worst migraines in my personal history -- the full on deal, complete with hypothermia, shaking, tingling extremities, vomiting, and the skull tearing itself apart. And remember to add to this lumbago, hip bursitis, probable arthritis in my left ankle bone, scoliosis in the top of the spine. 

How to neglect a blog royally? Have your health fall apart. 

So, more and more, this is becoming a photo blog as this wretched year, 2020, wears away, and you wonder what else it can do! And it's "over and out" from me, for a while, unless something significant happens. Such as, a spontaneous recovery (ha!), or a diagnosis of something easy to fix, or a really good sale of a story to a terrific marketplace. One lives in hopes. 

Yuletide 2019 was like this...

Christmas Eve lunch: sushi, potato salad, coleslaw, prawn chips

Christmas Day lunch: reset the table for dessert

Christmas Day Brekkie, while we opened pressies

It's not all about food, honestly ... but sometimes you'd think it might be! We didn't actually get to Christmas Day lunch. Dave made himself a platter, but Mike and I were satiated after breakfast and decided to just slide on into the afternoon! The Christmas tree was pillaged...

...and Zolie had a fine time "helping" to open presents. DVDs, Blu-Rays and books, tropical shirts and cycling apparel, plus bike bits for Dave; cosmetics and a harddrive for self; a harddrive and a Tomcat model kit for Mike ... and of course a day playing with the real gift this season, which has been in place and playing for a few weeks now. We got a 65" 4K TV with Dolby Atmos. And I am sooo impressed. We spent lunchtime watching the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Eve Concert from last year, streamed in HD. Wow. The picture is so amazing, I couldn't resist grabbing a shot with the phone to see what was doable --

This, from a streaming wildlife wallpaper video:

Having such a nice time in this part of the globe right now, one is almost guilty. There's so much pain and suffering, with the on-going fires, that the crisis is never far from your mind, even when the sky is bright (as it is today) rather than brown with smoke, as it was for days.

On December 18th I was inspired to post to facebook, a message to family and friends, to not be concerned for us specifically, because we weren't in the danger zone, and then just a few days later I had to amend that post with another major message -- because we had our own local crisis in this area! Dang...



...there really is no answer to that, so we won't even try to find one. The mercury is heading due north again, we'll be back to 105 F in a few days. *Sigh* so...

If I had to describe my mind-space to you right now, it would be this:

If I had one wish, it would be for summer 2019-2020 to be cool and wet, and for the fire danger to be over already. Alas, there's about 14 - 16 weeks of danger left, minimum. We can only hope.

To friends and family everywhere, Merry Christmas! 

Happy Birthday Dave, 2019!

Happy Birthday Dave, 2019!!

The bad news is, the new bike won't be delivered for another three weeks. 😭

The good news is, it's a fantastic bike and it WILL be delivered in three weeks. 😁

So ... it was all about a drive down to Clayton, via Strathalbyn, dodging showers ...

... eating fish and chips, heading home to an ENORMOUS birthday cake --

... and Captain Marvell on dvd. Finish the day out with today's stage of the Vuelta a Espana, and that's a pretty good way to spend a birthday!

Happy Birthday to my One and Only, 2019! 💕💘😎

Happy Valentine's, 2019!

Terre, in Willunga, for Vantine's Day lunch. 

Actually, one of our favorite places...

Great food and coffee as always at Terre, in Willunga

Happy Valentine's, Dave Downes ... Twenty Years and counting! 

Self. The guy who invented selfies should be shot at dawn. Urk. It's not the years, it's the mileage...

The captions to the pictures tell all: Happy Valentine's Day to my husband of twenty years, Dave Downes! Looking forward to celebrating the anniversary itself in just five weeks. Where have twenty years gone?!

If Hades wanted trifle for dessert, this would be it!

Trifle: an angelic concoction of sponge cake, sherry, jelly, sliced peaches, custard and topped with whipped cream, right? Fit for seraphim and cherubim ... the heavenly host probably slurp trifle for lunch. This is probably what the Greeks recognized as "manna from heaven" --

Left: Jim Cherub. Right: Bob Cherub. Cherubim, in plural.
Jim: "What the blitherin' heck is she rabbiting on about?
Bob: "Search me, mate. I wish she'd just shaddap and get to the dessert!" 

But, do angels get all the fun? Don't the other mob, from waaay due south of heaven, need trifle too? What's a self-respecting demon to do without a dish of something sinfully delightful on a special occasion? Luckily, there's something just as delightful as trifle ... on the Dark Side. Sensually sweet without all that goody-goody vanilla and the cloudy, frothy, innocence of pure whipped cream --

Okay: 

Devil's Trifle. We make it for New Year almost every year, and it's time I stopped waxing rhapsodic and gave you the recipe! It's dead simple and you may not believe how good this is (or how nobody came up with it before Jen did, about twelve years ago).

You will need:

A large jar of Morello Cherries (You can use an equivalent amount of fresh cherries, plus a cup of any dark fruit juice. Jarred cherries work just as well and are available year-round. They're also a hulluva lot cheaper.)

A large chocolate sponge roll, or an equivalent amount of any spongy chocolate cake

A port wine flavored jelly mix (Americans, you'll be calling it jello; don't worry, it's the same thing. You can use black grape, or even blackberry flavor ... port wine is best)

A glass of sweet sherry (or brandy, Drambuie, Bailey's etc., etc.  ... booze is entirely optional)

50-100g (2-3oz) of good quality milk chocolate (you can use dark chocolate, if you like the tang and zest of something a little bitter amid all the sweetness. Also, you can use orange or peppermint chocolate for an added zing.)

A cup-and-a half of whipping cream

Custard powder mix -- you'll need about 4 tablespoons

Drinking chocolate powder (not baking chocolate., ie. cocoa powder)

Chocolate sprinkles (optional -- see below)

500mls /about a pint of milk (fat free milk, if you prefer: makes nooo difference, and will cut some of the calories out of this "energy bomb." Be warned: this dish is so easy to eat, you could inhale the whole thing in a single-handed act of self-indulgence, and look around for more.)

Not Jen's granny's trifle dish ... but similar.

...and a big dish or bowl, or even a glass baking dish, to set the whole trifle in. An actual trifle dish is ideal, but they're not so common in this age of frozen, prepackaged desserts. If you don't have one, improvise; just be sure to use something where you can easily get the trifle out of it!

(In fact, we do have a trifle dish, but since it's about 100 years old now (no joke), we don't use it. We actually use a pyrex glass casserole, because it's handy, the right size, and sturdy. The original -- antique, by now -- trifle dish comes down to us as an heirloom from a great-grandmother. It can be traced back in living memory to 1935, but by all accounts was old by then. There's also a damask tablecloth going back to the same era, and we believe both came from Ireland, c. 1900, with a young lass called Mary Armstrong, who was fleeing "the troubles" with her two children, and is Jen's "Irish granny." (Actually, great-grandmother.) Okay, that's enough soap opera, let's get back to the food!

Slice the cake into centimeter / half inch wedges and lay it down all over the bottom of your dish, bowl or casserole. Cut out shapes to fill the empty spaces and pack it down, so there's a good, solid layer of cake in there. When you're happy with the cake, take the optional booze and sprinkle it over, so the cake takes it up. Technically, you can use as much as you like, but don't over-saturate the cake, or you'll wind up with sludge in the bottom of the dish. Delicious sludge, but it can look rather ... gross ... as you ladle it out.

Drain the cherries well -- keep the liquid. Don't quaff it for the pleasure of drinking sweet cherry juice, because you're going to need it. If you're using fresh cherries, organize a cup of dark fruit juice right now. Lay the cherries out evenly, all over the cake.

Break up the bar of chocolate into small bite size pieces and add these in among the cherries. Keep back a small wedge of the chocolate for grating over the top at the end of the construction.

Make up the jelly mixture with just enough boiling water to get the crystals to dissolve properly -- then top it off with the cold liquid from the jar of cherries (see?). Add cold water to get to something like 500mls / ~17oz, or as the jelly mix indicates. Taste it. Sweet enough?? Depending on the tartness of the liquid from the cherries, or other fruit juice, you might need to add a dab of sugar (or stevia, monk's fruit, whatever you use to save on calories). The jelly should be quite cool -- doesn't have to be cold, cool is fine...

Carefully ladle the jelly mixture over the cake and fruit, so everything is covered.  Put the whole shebang in the fridge for a few hours to set the jelly.

When you're happy with the set of the jelly ... let's put the rest of this baby together!

Make up about two cups of custard, using DOUBLE the given instructions as per powder, plus the milk, and adding plenty of drinking chocolate (not unsweetened cocoa powder! If baking chocolate is all you have ... add sweetener, or your chocolate custard will double as poison) to turn boring, boring vanilla custard into chocolate custard. Check the sweetness of the custard at this point. Many custard powders give instructions which make custard that ain't "commercially" sweet. You might like to adjust this. When you double the amount of powder to a given volume of milk, you won't get custard: you will get "chocolate concrete." This is fine, it's supposed to happen...

Let the chocolate concrete cool, dump it into a mixing bowl, add about four tablespoons of whipping cream, and hit this with a stick-mixer (or else put the whole "custard disaster" into the blender and mix till smooth). The result is an amazing, "stand up for itself" custard that, chilled, can be carved. (Yep, you can use the vanilla version of this to make vanilla slices. Or this, to make chocolate custard slices...)

Lay the custard on top of the cherries in huge blobs, and work it gently into the corners. Fill the whole space evenly and level it off. You can add chocolate sprinkles to this layer -- if the trifle is to be dished up immediately, they'll keep their "crunch," and give an extra "wow" to the dish. If the trifle is to be kept till later, leave out the sprinkles, since they almost dissolve in a couple of hours.

While the custard was cooling, you cunningly used the time to whip about a cup-and-a-half of cream, with "drinking chocolate powder to taste." (Repeating, don't use "cocoa powder," which is baking chocolate (bitter) ... or if you must use baking chocolate, add a healthy amount of sweetener.  You can have it medium chocolaty, or incredibly chocolaty. Your call. Start with two tablespoons of the drinking chocolate, and go from there. Get the cream good and stiff: it has to stand up for itself... Spoon the cream on top of the custard and work it into a nice, level layer, even throughout. Grate the last wedge of chocolate over the top...

...and you're done. It should serve 8 - 12, though Dave -- with the marathon cyclist's appetite -- has been known to inhale a quarter of it in one sitting  and say, "Delicious!" It also keeps perfectly in the fridge for up to three days.

Devil's Trifle! Enjoy!

Merry Christmas (and Happy Holidays) everyone!

"Compliments of the season" to friends and family 

in the US, UK, Australia 

... and in many other places, though the pages of facebook! 

It's Christmas Eve as I write this, and we're settling in for the holidays. It's hot, as you'd expect of South Australia, with the forecast for Christmas Day being 40, or about 106 in "the old money." Summer arrived at last, and came in with a bang.

I'm blogging this in a break during putting together an old-fashioned trifle. But rather than doing full-on Christmas-style catering, which would need the oven to be on for hours, we're doing a sushi and cold-cuts buffet for tonight ... and for tomorrow and Boxing Day we were smart enough to roast the poultry a few days ago, when it was cool. Chicken and duck are done and in the freezer. And for New Year, a certain turkey is still in the freezer, most likely at Aldi, where -- gotta give credit where it's due -- the prices are too good to go past.

So, Christmas Eve in the garden looks something like this: (Top: Bindabella Golden Tiger is blooming right on cue! Middle: Asian Lilies are going absolutely gangbusters this year -- more than 20 blooms, over the space of weeks. Bottom: Zolie on roof patrol, not long before sunrise ... "cat on a cool shingle roof" ...)

And meanwhile, in the house it's all about Christmas trees and what Calvin would call "loot," and lots of good things to eat, and Christmas music and movies ...

...and of course out the hills have burned out to golden brown, the beach is sizzling, and if Santa is wearing that red suit of his, he'll be in the ER before he gets done with Sydney in the wee small hours of tomorrow morning, out time.

I'll borrow a couple of shots from Dave's facebook right here. These were taken with his new phone (or, his new camera that makes calls...), an itsy-bitsy little device in the palm of his hand, that does amazing things at the same time as being shockproof and waterproof! I've just done a couple of tweaks on the color, since the camera favors reds -- obviously, it's geared around selfies, where you want warm skintones...

So there you have it: The Colors of Christmas Eve, South Aussie style.

And from Dave, Mike and myself ... Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, however you like to say it!  Here's hoping 2017 will be a better year for us all.

If life gives you lemons --

Lemon butter, to an old family recipe off the interwebs...

1 cup of lemon juice

1 cup of raw sugar

2 large free range eggs, plus

2 extra yolks (keep the whites for meringue)

100g of unsalted butter (err on the side of generosity)

Cut the butter into cubes and microwave for 3 seconds in a ramekin, to melt it. Add it to the sugar, in a big mixing bowl, and beat the mix with electric beaters for about a minute. Add the eggs and yolks, and beat for for another minute. Add in the lemon juice and stir through the mixture -- at this point, it'll look "curdled," as the cold lemon juice actually solidifies the butter. Don't worry; it'll melt back in when it's on the heat.

Add the mixture to a saucepan on a low heat and stir constantly, juuuust till you see the first bubbles. Pour the lemon butter into sterilized mason jars and refrigerate.

Serve with cookies, on toast or crumpets, add to waffles and pancakes. Make pastry shells, fill them with the lemon butter and top with meringues. Yum!

A kilo of lemon butter and a dozen tarts. Nice!