use real butter

I’m not cooking or baking as much as I’d like and that’s mostly because I’m dealing with unpleasant physical issues related to my least favorite of my chemo drugs. [I know that the last infusion was almost 6 weeks ago, but please tell that to the drugs…] I met with my oncologist this morning and he hasn’t seen it before in his many years of poisoning cancer patients. Great! I’m exceptional in every frakking way… Meanwhile, it would seem that all of my medical appointments have piled together lately such that I fell asleep on the table last night during my heart scan. Well, I’d rather sleep through Journey wailing over the speakers than listen to it while isotopes go racing through my heart.

[While waiting for my radiation appointment this afternoon, I’m killing time by blogging from a bakery in Boulder. Dude half my age just walked past and winked at me. WTF?]

Yesterday evening as Jeremy drove me to my heart scan down on the flats, I spied some mammata forming in the distance. Mammata clouds are typical precursors to tornadoes. In very simple terms, they indicate instability in the atmosphere. We see a lot of them in the summer around these parts.

mammata: look like giant grapes or… boobies

The breast-like shape of the clouds is where the name comes from, but a few years ago I was hiking with 5 female atmospheric scientists in the Rockies when we spied mammata forming in the sky. They insisted on referring to them as testicular clouds. So there you have it. I just think they’re very cool (both the clouds and the female atmospheric scientists).

We had a wonderful, albeit short visit with my aunt and her family over the weekend. Everyone enjoyed the time spent together, particularly Kaweah because she received 150% more attention and love than usual. She also found a nice big stick to drag around the lake.

our guests

the happiest pup

going home so soon?

The weather has been getting warm as summer fast approaches our corner of the globe. Although it is usually cool enough where we live that baking in the oven doesn’t make me homicidal, there is nothing quite like serving up homemade ice cream to cool off in the afternoon heat. While Jeremy’s requests usually center on one of three caffeinated flavors (chocolate, coffee, or matcha green tea), I had summer on the brain.

blackberries

I am so enamored with David Lebovitz’s custard-based ice cream recipes from The Perfect Scoop that I had no choice (no choice!!) but to try his recipe for raspberry ice cream - except I subbed blackberries for the raspberries so I could make the stains on my t-shirt even more permanent.

make a purée

David suggests 6 cups of fresh raspberries to yield 1 1/2 cups of raspberry purée. I used 6 cups of blackberries and I can assure you that you only need 4 cups, tops. I also realized that what has been missing in my life is a food mill.

strain out the seeds

Pressing the purée through the sieve is just an exercise in incessant swearing and several extra stains on your clothes (well, several on my clothes anyway). I complained about this on my personal blog and my buddy Rob is now sending me a food mill! What a sweetheart. Or maybe he just wants me to shut up about it already? *snort*

sugar and half-and-half

straining the custard into the cream

This batch of blackberries is, me thinks, early for the season. The flavor is nice, but it isn’t out-of-this-world bursting with sun-ripened goodness. Oh well. And ever since my girl, Peabody, wrote about how the first time she saw a man picking blackberries on the roadside, she thought he was taking a leak… That image is now permanently lodged in my brain. Thanks lady ;)

stirring in the purée

I served the ice cream to our guests over the weekend and heard a lot of mmm mmm mmming. It’s a smooth and rich treat to be sure. The quality is entirely dependent on your ingredients, specifically the berries. So be sure to procure some damn tasty berries to make it worth the effort. It’s a gorgeous color, no?

purple love

Blackberry Ice Cream
adapted from Raspberry Ice Cream in The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz

1 1/2 cups half-and-half
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
4 large egg yolks
1 1/2 cups strained blackberry purée (from 4 cups whole blackberries)
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Warm half-and-half and sugar in medium saucepan. Pour cream into large bowl and set mesh strainer over top. In separate medium bowl, whisk together egg yolks. Slowly pour warm milk into the egg yolks, whisking constantly, then scrape the warmed egg yolks back into saucepan. Stir mixture constantly over med heat with heatproof spatula, scraping bottom as you stir until mixture thickens and coats spatula. Pour custard through the strainer and stir into cream. Mix in purée and lemon juice then stir until cool over ice bath. Chill thoroughly in fridge and churn ice cream according to ice cream maker’s instructions within 4 hours after making mixture (to preserve the fresh berry taste). Makes 1 liter.

Admittedly, I haven’t been cooking much lately. I’ve been having a few issues with my left arm as well as a few other annoying and lingering side effects, thanks to chemo - the gift that keeps on giving… or not. I’m doing my best to ride it out and be patient (ha!) because getting my panties in a wad over it isn’t going to make anything better. On Saturday, our pal drove up to our place and we all went for a nice hike with the crazy (Kaweah) in tow - or rather towing Jeremy along at the end of the leash. The spring runoff is the highest we’ve seen it in our three years here. We’re having a late thaw and we also had some nice late season dumps in the high country.

runoff was high

but that didn’t stop miss crazy from gettin’ her swim in

my chica is a polar engineer

the continental divide from the lake shore

globe flowers love the boggy streamsides

kaweah had the most fun

I am definitely improving in my strength, but it’s merely a fraction of what it used to be. That’s okay though, I at least know how strong I was and I’ve made it my goal to work back up to it and beyond this summer no matter how painful, how long, or how difficult. Besides, getting back in shape is pretty nice when you’ve got so much eye candy around you.

Today I managed some cooking, although it’s all stuff you’ve seen before (and if not, it’s in the archives). I do have some recipes squirreled away for just those times when I’m feeling culinarily uninspired or more accurately: physically hosed. I was first introduced to edamame in a sushi bar. Soybeans in their fuzzy pods are such a treat at the start of a sushi gorging. Only years later did I run across shelled soybeans in bags in the frozen section of various Asian grocery stores. Huh, what’s the fun of that? You don’t get to squeeze the beans out of the pods with all of the lovely salt crystals exploding on your lips. I ignored the bags of shelled soybeans.

bags like this

One day I took my good pal to the Asian grocery store in Ithaca, New York. She’s white and she’s a foodie. Claire was dying to check out the grocery store, but she didn’t want to go by herself (this is a phenomenon that happened with my white friends in So Cal who wanted to go to dim sum - they didn’t want to go without me - I got a little sick of dim sum after a while). She loaded her cart full of groceries after interrogating me about each one. By the end, she didn’t even ask me to identify anything and just chucked in anything that looked remotely interesting. During checkout, the proprietor of the store held up a bag of the frozen shelled soybeans and shouted (all of the Asian women store owners seem to have one volume of speech: shouting), “Dis is guuuuud! You know how to cook!? Stir fry with pork, chicken, beef, or shrimp - it’s all guuuud!”

pork, green onions, garlic

add cornstarch, sesame oil, and soy sauce to the pork

The funny thing about shouting lady was that she always shouted, but happily, at customers. She also shouted at her husband - a quiet and tired looking little Chinese man. I understood what she was saying, and it didn’t even remotely qualify as happy shouting. So, I don’t know if Claire ever went home and tried that combination, I mean - she practically purchased the contents of the entire store that day… But on my weekly shopping trip, I did grab a bag and I did try the shouting lady’s suggestion. Fantastic and so simple to make.

first sauté the pork

then add the soybeans

You can play with this recipe ad nauseum. Add shredded bamboo shoots or pickled mustard greens for more texture and punch to the flavor. I like to serve it with steamed rice, but it is also terrific in a hot bowl of noodles and broth. This is more pedestrian than the stir-fried flank steak, but it is incredibly satisfying.

stir-fried pork and soybeans

Stir-Fried Pork and Soybeans

1/2 lb. pork meat, cut into strips (I prefer dark meat)
1 lb. shelled soybeans (edamame), thawed
3 stalks green onions, cut into 1-inch strips
3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
3 tbsps soy sauce
2 tbsps sesame oil
1 tbsp cornstarch
2 tbsps vegetable oil

Mix the pork meat with the cornstarch, soy sauce, and sesame oil until the pork is evenly coated. Heat vegetable oil over high heat in a large sauté pan (frying pan, wok, whatever). When oil is hot, add garlic and green onions and sauté until fragrant. Add the pork to the pan and stir-fry until pork is nearly cooked. Add the soybeans and sauté for another 2-3 minutes. Serve hot.

I need a favor here, folks.

I’m a pretty independent chick, ask anyone who knows me. It’s a fairly small circle of people that I allow myself to rely upon - that I allow myself to feel safe enough around when I’m vulnerable or in need. It is just my way. This was especially true during chemo. I made mention of how chemo kinda sucked and made a mess of my ski season and my food blogging but… I never talked about the other stuff like desperately holding back tears and an unexpected wave of shock when I left the hairdresser’s after getting my head shaved despite not caring about the hair itself. Or trying to get sick as quietly as possible in the middle of the night hour after hour, night after night so I wouldn’t wake Jeremy because he was exhausted from taking care of me and working 80+ hours a week on his own demanding job. Or feeling so hungry from not being able to digest solid food for 5 days that when I dared to nibble on soft bread it felt like razors going down my throat and racked my insides for hours. Or lying in so much pain at home alone that I couldn’t get up to take my meds and I actually cried to the dog to fetch the bottle (it didn’t work - she just kept pawing at me to be let up on the bed to snuggle).

But the worst was the mental and emotional isolation. Even though Jeremy tried to always be there for me, I could see he was giving more energy than he had. Did I mention that his sideburns have started to turn grey since I began chemo? Yeah, I’ve given my beautiful husband premature grey. I couldn’t bring myself to ask more of him, to ask him to talk to me about my fears, my sadness - only to stress him out and force him to pile more on his plate - because he would do that for me. So I let those thoughts fester in my mind for a long time, alone.

And one night while I sat around waiting to get sick after my fifth round, I read on Married with Dinner that Bri’s cancer had come back - this time in her bones, in her lungs… I don’t know how dread affects you… I’ve experienced genuine dread a couple of times in my life and it’s a sucking feeling in my gut that quietly, but instantly empties my body of breath. I had, until then, kept fears of recurrence and doubt of my own treatment under wraps - stuffing it down into the furthest corners of my brain - for my own mental well-being. I try to avoid histrionics and self-induced hysteria because I’ve seen it in others and it’s really ugly, really destructive. I don’t live that way. But I sat in the dark, in disbelief, tears rolling off my face - for Bri, for myself, for the bullshit that is cancer and the ridiculous treatment that isn’t really a treatment but more like a blunt instrument where a precision tool is required. On Bri’s blog she said, “I’ve been to a couple doctors, and one of my greatest fears has been pretty well confirmed.”

I had asked my oncologist earlier what he would do if my cancer came back. He said it wouldn’t. I was persistent and when I asked if I would have to do the chemo again, my voice broke. His jolly demeanor saddened and he softly told me I wouldn’t do this chemo again, that there would be better treatments down the road. I thought it was a non-answer, but cancer treatment is a non-answer in my opinion. I went into round 6 with a positive smile and cake for my nurses. I joked with my dear oncologist and handed him a few thank you gifts: a photo of a lovely Colorado stream, some fishing flies, a book on cosmology that Jeremy had selected for him, and a card. In that card I told him I don’t fear death so much as not being able to live a quality life. Yes, I know Bri’s fear.

When my surgeon recently removed my port, I mentioned that I had felt a tiny lump in my left breast and I wasn’t sure what it was. As I spoke, I couldn’t keep that fear in check and it tumbled out into my words, into my tears. Luckily, the ultrasound was clean and I can get on with my radiation treatment and stop freaking myself out for a while. I know each person is different as is each case, but I can’t help but feel a pang in my heart when I think of Bri and it is not sympathy, but empathy.

Bri was first diagnosed with breast cancer at age 28, two and a half years ago. I was diagnosed at 36 last year. [If I had been diagnosed at 28, the first thing I would have done was quit my PhD program and tell a certain faculty member where he could stick the dissertation and all of Northern Chile.] Bri had a full mastectomy of her right breast. For those who aren’t in the know, a full mastectomy means no more right boobie, understand? This is almost guaranteed to throw any woman for a loop. And you thought hairloss was a big deal for a chick… So after this crude and barbaric surgery (I’m sure my surgeon would disagree with this characterization, but then again, he doesn’t have boobies to lose) she underwent the suckiest chemo possible because she’s young and they always come *this close* to killing you when you’re “young and healthy”. She was theoretically clean for 2 years and now it’s back and the cancer is Stage IV. Again, for anyone who isn’t up on the cancer lingo, there is no Stage V - Stage IV is teh suck. Bri has begun a different form of chemo, but it is still chemo and it still blows. In addition to the conventional methods of treatment, Bri is also attempting other alternative forms of treatment which her insurance company won’t cover (big surprise!). I won’t open up a tirade on health care in this country right now because I’d like to finish this post before summer begins…

This all leads to why I went rattling on and on for several paragraphs. Bee and Jai of Jugalbandi and many other wonderful food bloggers decided to help raise money to aid in Bri’s medical costs. Jugalbandi has turned the monthly CLICK! event into a special fundraiser for Bri. The deadline for CLICK! is June 30, 2008. Part of the fundraiser is a raffle with prizes and I am contributing a matted photo to that bounty. You may recall from Menu for Hope that I offered this photo which had been featured on the NPR website:

the owl creek pass aspen stand

I’m offering this photo again because it goes so well with the yellow theme of CLICK! and LiveSTRONG. One raffle ticket costs $25 and this puppy will ship anywhere in the world. It is an original photo by yours truly at 12×18 inches matted to 18×24 inches with your choice (if you are the winner) of a black matboard with white core or white matboard with black core. I’ll plant my l’il ole siggy on it too. All materials are archival. Really, you should go and peruse all of the raffle prize offerings. You have until July 15, 2008 to bid.

Seriously though, I could care less if you bid on my photo or not. What I really want is for you to consider making a donation either by buying a raffle ticket or just donating outright for Bri (but if you’re going to donate $25, you may as well get the ticket unless we all agree that it’s Christine’s turn to win the photo!). It’s obvious that I feel a connection to what Bri has gone through and is dealing with now. I want to help her. I guess I am hoping that we will all help her in some small way. Thanks for staying on the line this far.