The Rice Bowl

Library Excursion and the Giant Courgettes - Zucchini and Ginger Bread

I went to the library today.  My favourite place in the world.  Well, almost.  Seriously, my library is cool.  If they'd let me, I'd camp there forever.  There's even a coffee shop at the library.  What isn't to love about it?  I went with the intent of picking up some books I placed on hold over the week.  I have some weird quirks.  One of them is that I'm a foreign historical and political junkie.  Historical politics are even better.  I can't stand my own country's politics and never could.  I'm infuriated by all sides.  So, I look to other countries and times to keep me occupied.  I'm also a Russian liturature junkie.  Of course, I have a freakish fascination with Soviet happenings.  Did I mention I also have a weird communist paranoia thing happening?  I blame my early life in China on that one.

I digress; I picked up a bunch of books about the Gulag.  A long time reader of many writings by Jewish political prisoners of the Soviet Union, my interest was sparked once again.  It's way easier to find things in the States than it is in China as a student starving for banned literature.  I can get whatever book I wish here and it's fantastic...until I go to check out and my librarian happens to be Russian and starts giving me funny looks.

While I was at the library, I figured, why not look through some of the cookbooks to try to learn more about my new diet.  There isn't much.  Shelves and shelves of books dedicated to Gluten-Free diets and Veganism and Whatever-New-Crash-Diet.  There were 15 books on Diabetes.  More than the book stores I've been to, but still depressing.  I flicked through most and was unimpressed, but found a lovely book full of pictures and....FOOD!  Real looking food!  Plus, the majority of the book was focused on food and not dessert, which I could care less about.

Rewind to last night... Mum was making Jam.  She also started complaining about the two giant zucchinis from the garden, which were taking up counter space.  We're the only two in the house that really like zucchini, so most options for their use aren't really in the cards.  Zucchini bread...that's about it.  Fast forward to the library... That lovely cookbook?  Totally has a zucchini bread recipe.  Score one for the team!  With a few tweaks, I made it friendly to my diet and tastes and boy is it good.

Little more savoury than your average zucchini breads but slather on some in season jam (blackberry is my recommendation) and you have yourself a delectable heavenly slice.  Again...phone picture, sorry!

Zucchini and Ginger Tea Bread

3 eggs
4 Tbsp sugar or 2 Tbsp Truvia
1/2 Cup canola oil
1/2 Cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Cup Zucchini, grated
2 inch piece fresh ginger root, grated
3 Cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
pinch Kosher salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 Tbsp cinnamon sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 325F.  Whisk eggs and sugar until creamy.  Slowly beat in the oil until a thin batter like consistency develops.  Whisk in milk, vanilla, zucchini, and ginger.  Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.  Add cinnamon to the dry ingredients and combine with the zucchini mixture.  Lightly grease a loaf pan and pour in mixture.  Sprinkle cinnamon sugar over the top, if using.  Bake for one hour, until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.  Leave cake to cool for 20 mins before turning out onto a wire rack.

12 servings.  220 Calories per serving.

Babysitting Means Pizza - Grilled Vegetable Pizza on Whole Wheat Crust

My blood sugar shot through the roof last night after we ate out, so back to the menu plan that mum and I devised on Sunday afternoon.  Plus, it's babysitting night!  Hanging out with the brother while the parents have dinner with some friends.  No parents = junk food.  Plain and simple.  If we don't order pizza, we have a frozen pizza.  If we don't do that we make the mose delectable thing we can find in a cookbook.  Pasta carbonara, macaroni and cheese, kedgeree.  You name it, my brother and I have probably made it while no one else is around.

But now I have diabetes.

So we work around that.  Pizza was actually on the menu for tonight anyway!  Sweet deal.  I made a 100% whole wheat crust since I've been ordered to stay away from anything white by my doctor.  I split the dough in half so that the brother didn't have to deal with all my vegetables.  But here it is... Grilled vegetable pizza with 100% whole wheat crust.

(Pardon the photography, all I had available was my phone.)

100% Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

2 Cups whole wheat flour
1 package or 2 1/4 teaspoons dry yeast
3/4 teaspoon Kosher salt
1 Cup warm water (more or less)
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 Tablespoon honey

In a large mixing bowl combine whole wheat flour, yeast, and salt.  Blend in water, oil, and honey by hand to bring together to make a dough.  When dough is in a ball, cover with a tea towel and let it rise for a few hours.

Grilled Vegetable Pizza on Whole Wheat Crust

Eggplant, cut into slices
Zucchini or Summer Squash, cut into slices
Red Pepper, cut into slices
Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper
Pizza sauce
Mozzerella cheese, grated
Sliced olives
Feta Cheese, crumbled

Preheat oven to 425 F.  Brush the vegetables with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.  Grill the eggplant, zucchini, and red pepper until nice char marks are achieved and the veggies are fragrant and softened.  Remove from heat to a plate.  Flatten dough onto a pan that has been sprinkled with cornmeal.  Spread sauce over the surface and top with grated cheese. Begin layering the grilled vegetables, topping with sliced olives and feta crumbles.  Bake the Pizza for 15-20 minutes or until toppings and crust are a nice golden brown.

146 Calories one slice of plain crust.  400 Calories for a slice of pizza.

Medication

It's been a long time.  I say I'm going to write and I don't.  I've been lacking the direction and unexpectedly and forcefully it seems to have been thrust upon me.

Last week, I went in for my routine doctor visit and check up.  I hadn't been in a while and expected no change in anything much other than perhaps a referral to an Endocrinologist for my Graves' disease.  On Tuesday, I received a call from my doctor while I was at the movies with my brother.  Normally, I would have let it go to voicemail, but for some reason I answered.  The doctor informed me that my blood sugar was high and that she wanted me to come in to do a couple more tests and discuss the possibility of diabetes.

Hold the phone.  Diabetes?!  DIABETES!  I was in shock and I was saddened.  I phoned my mum and told her what had just transpired over the phone.  We were both very upset.  I had to dodge into the theatre bathroom and have a violent cry while I was on the phone.

The next day, I showed up to the doctor's office, fasted and hoping for the best news ever...that all this was a fluke.  It wasn't.  The test that morning showed my sugar levels to be high and the test for the last three months said that my sugar levels had been regularly high.  So there I was, sitting in the chair with a magazine on my lap thinking to myself that I'm twenty-two years old and my body is just deciding to quit on me.  After a few questions the doctor said that it was more than likely that this happened because of my ignored Thyroid disorder.  Then I was mad.  I've been carrying around the knowledge of having Graves' disease and seeing blood test after blood confirm this while having a doctor who put me on the wrong medication first and then told me to "wait and see".

We waited...and now we've seen.

With a referral being ordered that day to an Endocrinologist and a Nutritionist, I walked out of the office with orders to maintain a strict 1500 calorie diet and pamphlets on diabetes, meal planning, and my new Nutritionist.  The next day, I received a call from a nurse to come by and pick up some more things.  On Friday, I stopped by after an eye appointment and was handed an orange case filled with a One Touch Ultra, lances, blood strips, and a book to record my readings.

I don't do well with needles.  I don't faint or scream or cry or run away, but I can't look.  I cannot look.  Ever.  The last time I looked at a needle going into my arm I was fighting nausea for an hour.  I just don't look.  But now I was expected to poke myself in the finger...regularly!  After dinner, I sat and loaded a lance into the pen and set up my metre.  Then I sat there, screamed for my mum to come help me, and cried.  I can't poke holes in myself.  I can't hurt myself day after day.  I know, thousands of people live with diabetes and have it much worse than I do.  Poking myself in the finger isn't a big deal.  Except the whole reality of having this disease that I've avoided having and watched out for my entire life snuck up on me and slapped me in the face.  Hard.

I got over it and poked and it wasn't bad.  But for a few minutes, it was terrible, not because of the poking, but for everything.  The stress of all the information and confusion came to a head at the kitchen table with a lancing pen poised against my finger.

Now the weekend is over.  It's still stressful. Necessary family members were informed and a weight was lifted off my shoulders for the first time knowing that other people were worrying and praying over me.

So, here's a new direction.  Living with diabetes and trying to control it with diet, rather than drugs just yet.  Eating things that don't taste like sh*t, because my mother would never stand for it (neither would the rest of us), and keeping it all at 1500 calories.  It's new to all of us and we're learning and stressing together.  Expect some recipes and some progress reports because there are a staggeringly small amount of diabetic friendly food blogs or even cookbooks out there that don't make me want to gag.

The Wind-Up Bird

Where are you?  Did the wind-up bird forget to wind your spring?
          - Haruki Murakami

Where did I go?  Why was my spring abandoned?  I left it for work and writing.  I've abandoned this blog for too long and I felt an empty place in myself tonight as I realised what I had left alone.  I've come time and time again to stare at The Rice Bowl...with nothing.  Here I am.  I've found my track and finally feel balance in the world.  Why is it that when balance comes, the words won't?

Did I find a direction for this blog though?  I feel there are big changes ahead and people who may depend upon this as an outlet for contact.  I want to write about...writing.  The force that has driven me into my future and the thing that completely consumes me, now and forever.  I feel trapped with all these things caught in my head.  I absorb the words of others, but now I want to share.  I want to share the things that I encounter through my days.  The things that I love.  What I love are words...the ones from others and myself.

The abandoned bird is coming back.  My spring is wound...let's watch this fly.

I love Love.

"I lov'd Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quality of love,
Make up my sum."

I should stop talking of love.  But what else is there to talk of?  Lust?  Might as well be one and the same.  What is life without love and lust?  Boring, probably.  There would be less pain.  I guess that could be a plus.  Without pain there would be no growth.  The Plot of tragedy.  Like is but a tragedy.  Or a comedy.  A comic tragedy?  A tragic comedy?

Where was I?

Oh, yes, love.

Love.  The common thread, yet it is so difficult.  One would think the greatest commonality would be easy.  But, no.  Saying, 'I love you,' means more than one could possibly imagine.  It means the world...and it means nothing.  It is easily thrown away and easily thrown around.  Too much is attached and the one it is for does not believe.

A million songs were penned in the name of it, but are they true?  Were they broken?  A thousand hearts broken.

I hate love.

Yet, how can one live without it?  Impossible.  Is this why I put hope upon it?  It has given me little to hope for.  Yet, love seems beautiful even in tragedy.  There is always beauty in growth.

Oh, what broken hope!

But soft.  All is quiet.  Love is not here now.  Just rosemary for remembrance and pansies for thoughts.

No, there is no love here...just hope.

"There is a willow grows aslant a brook.
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come,
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious silver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.  He clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indu'd
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death."

A Response.

In Response to, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.  My apologies to Stephen Crane.

There was a softness in his noise.  She thought it was the softness she would hear forever, but she was wrong.  She shouldn't make herself believe such things, she would think to herself.  Nevertheless, they were there, those stupid thoughts of hope.  Raised on the believe in melodrama, even turning away from these things brings her back to the supposed right to a 'happy ending.'  Good girls get their happily ever after.  Oh, darling, it doesn't work that way.  Throw your dreams aside and head to the streets.  St. Peter cannot save you now.  But those stories... All the princes and hidden princesses.  False.  Your dreams collapse into mediocrity until there is no soul.  Until you contemplate the Hudson's attractive depths.  The grandiose nature of your death is your only shot at those theatrical dreams.

Lara, On Dancing

"You spun round and round, thinking of nothing.  While the music played, a whole eternity went by like life in a novel."
                  - Boris Pasternak

Sometimes, I wish silly things.  Silly girl things.  The things that make your insides fold into themselves.  That nervous feeling inside.  I miss that feeling once in a while.  It doesn't come around all the time.  It's supposed to be that way, I guess.

I listened to Limbeck this morning and I felt like I missed something I didn't know.  What the heck?  I suppose it makes life interesting or something to have confused thoughts and feelings.  I have a couple papers to write tonight.  I want to drive though.  It's funny that I want to drive now.  Maybe I just want to get away.  Far away.

I miss something.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

More matter with less art.

Its funny being at school sometimes.  No one in this place ever seems to be alone.  Is the solitude too much?

Me?  I love being in a room full of people, but alone.

The people that are alone here are waiting for someone...so that's not truly alone.  But here I am with my apple, my tea, my pen. and you, my darling journal.  I guess that doesn't count me as alone either.  At least in my head it doesn't.

The clock ticks anxiously toward a deadline.

Pyroclasm

Cigars, Cigarettes, Booze?

It feels like midnight to me. I've been awake forever today and I don't think I have ever walked in so many circles. As much as I dream of going back to the house to collapse upon my bed for 12 hours, I can't quite bring myself to going back to that place. I need to be alone for a little while longer.

I stop on the corner and dig through my purse. I back up slowly toward the wall of the building until my back faintly feels the freezing brick through my sweater.

“Shit. Where the fuck is my fucking cutter?” I say to myself, which warrants a look from a middle aged couple walking to the Schnitz. The symphony is playing tonight.

I gave up on the cutter. I bit off the tip of the small cigar and spat the dried tobacco leaves to the ground. With my lips grasping the end of the petite corona, I light a match and cup it against the wind and slowly suck the flame into my stogie, expelling smoke as I light. The flame runs toward my icy fingers and burns them lightly. “Shit,” I whisper as I fan the flame out and throw the charred match against the brick of the building. I lean against that icy wall and slowly draw on my smoke; a draw I wish could last forever. I let the heady flavour brandish my tongue and slowly feel that tobacco buzz come over me. I watch as my shaky hands slow themselves to a halt again.

I know it's a bad habit, but so is biting my fingernails. Sure, it's probably the most manly thing I could do too, but Jesus, the fact that I have to drive to a designated liquor store is fucked, so who gives a shit how I decide to get my high? I figure if I'm killing myself off with tobacco, it's better than killing off the planet by driving my car to the liquor store. Besides, I'm probably more likely to take someone else down while driving a car. Who the fuck decided to allow people to operate moving 2 tonne pieces of machinery? That was really smart. Yet I have to freeze my ass off to have a smoke? Good job, kids.

That's beside the point, I guess. This is what they call externalising your problems, isn't it? Some Freudian crap like that. Freud was a real pervy dude.

There I go again.

My leg kicks behind me, against the wall, and I throw myself back onto the pavement. I walk down the street and watch the lights as I walk toward the water.

I hate this city. There aren't enough lights. But I guess I like it too. I come down here to stare at the architecture sometimes. I sit and watch the buildings. Somehow, the way they were but together brings them to life. I wish they had more to say than just the boring humdrum of Portland life. The self importance of this town always infuriates me.

Why do I keep doing this? I get cynical when things bother me. I start lashing out at everything...even the fucking buildings.

The real problem is...Jesus, if only I could tell you what the real issue was. I'm angry at a friend for getting herself engaged. I'm angry that I'm so socially inept. I'm mad because boys are stupid and girls are possibly worse. I'm pissed that I can't just come out and say, “hey, I like you,” to a friend who obviously likes me back. I'm just mad...mostly at myself.

I cross the streets, paying more attention to the street lights than the 'walk' signals. I wish I could smell the river, like I can back home. Not that disgusting smell of dead fish, but the smell of the water. I guess it's kind of like what the wilderness would smell like; untamed in all of it's raw glory. Is the water here too tame? Is that the problem? Does this city capture that wilderness and treat it until its no longer a smelly issue? I don't like masking reality. Rivers are supposed to smell, at least like water. This one, doesn't.

But, that's what I'm trying to do, isn't it? Masking my problems. I'm out here, in the dark, smoking, and trying to blame everything else in the world for my short-comings. I would ask that stupid question, but I know it won't help. “Why can't I be like other girls?” The truth is, I've never wanted to be like them, but I guess I kind of am. I have a heart, it breaks, it needs fixed, and it's confused. So what gives? I've been in this place forever it seems. I hit puberty and I've been in the same place since then. It's weird. Am I ever going to grow out of this? A thousand questions that I wish I could get answers to.

Instead, I sit on the bench and watch traffic on the bridges rush past in a blur.

Philosophical questions shouldn't be asked without a bottle of single malt poised by your side. I've only had a beer tonight.

I push off the bench in a confused rage. I don't think any of this will ever make sense to me, and if it ever does, I'm not so sure it will matter by then. The roll of Honduran tobacco leaves has been smoked to a nub and it burns my lips as I try to draw every last spicy note out of it. I start to cross the street and make my way back to the house. I throw the smouldering nub in front of me and watch as it rolls back toward my feet, down the hill. I walk on top of it to stamp the remaining cinders out and leave the flattened leaves to smoke themselves out of life in the middle of this concrete nightmare.

I shove my hands in my pockets and shrink into my sweater and scarf. I've given up on tonight. You know those moments when you realise you can't do anything to ease your mind? There are two sides inside of you fighting, tearing at each other, committing acts of war. God only knows what the battle is about, but you have to give up on being the peace maker. The primal part of you takes over and you wait. You just wait. Wait for one side to win or one side to lose.

You wait.

The Runaways

The rebellion of a not so rebellious girl.

I waited until the last light in the house was extinguished, until the inhabitants were drifting into that deep slumber that would never be disturbed. When I was sure that nothing in the world could awaken the bodies in the next rooms, I moved from my own bed to the wall length wardrobe, where I slowly opened its drawers. Beads of perspiration forming at my hairline as I struggle to move in silence. Suddenly the quiet act of removing a pair of blue jeans from their drawer requires the strategical hands of an open heart surgeon. Every movement creates a sound so horrendous, it could wake the corpses in the room across the hall. One leg in the jeans means a pause to listen for footsteps, voices, anything that would signal I had been caught. Another leg in, and the terrific crescendo of a zipper being pulled into place. The simple act of pulling on a pair of trousers took decades in minutes. With a heart pounding within a chest liable to explode from its confines and a lead weight placed at the bottom of a stomach, keys were knocked from their place to the floor in a moment of clumsy fumbling toward them. I leapt to the floor on top of them and waited once more for a living sound that never came. I slowly wrapped my fingers around those metal daggers to silence their jingling, carefully sliding them into my pocket as if they were ticking down to the moment they would erupt again. A hand on the door slowly opens it and a keen memory of the floor boards begin the movement of my shadow down the stairs and to the door, which had been silently opened and quickly exited as years of practice could only bring.

Freedom had been established.

I hopped down the street, pulling my shoes on, not even stopping to secure them. These moments are everything to me. Moments filled with the hot sticky air of the mid-autumn evenings as September trickles into October. The air that envelopes me in its sweaty presence is more of a home than anything I have ever known. The night isn't cold, but I shiver from the sheer delight of the knowledge that this hour I have out here is mine. Alone.

I walk down the street that I had memorised by heart, past the places that I had fallen from trees and fences, climbing them because it was more sensible to me than walking. I walk by the places of lemonade stands and countless entrepreneurial enterprises conceived to buy an ice cream at the shop because a mother had denied her daughter the currency to obtain her goal. Past the place where a first kiss was had with a boy, oh a boy, a boy that has never faded from her heart. A restless heart. A heart that needs to watch the stars in the middle of the night while the world sleeps within.

My possessed feet carry me past the places that hold everything so dear to my being, to the one place my head and heart find solace; a place to revert to childhood fancy. My heart pounds against the cage its held within, as I catch glimpse of a street-light illuminated place. As if to appease the pleas of my heart, my legs break into an impatient run off the concrete of the street and up the sloping grass hill toward the place I seek. I reach it and grab hold of the chain flinging myself into the seat and kicking my being into the safety of the structure, into the safety of the wind that tousles my hair, into the safety of flight. I close my eyes against the rush of the backward and forward movement as I begin to fly closer and closer to the stars. Sitting on my pendulum, testing the physics of momentum, I close my eyes and fall back as far as my arms will allow without failure, and test the aerodynamics of a body floating through the air.

My lashes flutter open and I watch the stars above my head. This is where I am meant to be. No matter what happens, this place is mine. I pull upon the chains that my fingers have held for so many years without notice. I pull myself to rights again and watch as my feet move in and out of hiding. With a final sigh I let my body slip from its carrier and land on the firm ground as I had done since...I can't even remember. Time becomes one big expanse when you're young; a week becomes a month, a month a year, and a year an eternity. To me, the sixteen years had been nothing less than forever. Lying upon the ground on the spot where I jumped I wonder at something. Something is out of place. The landing was harder than the ones of my youth. At seven the same jump was achieved without a sound, now it cannot be escaped without a dull thump. Does one ever have moments when they forget that they are no longer 4 feet tall, but 5'7” now? It puzzles. I sit up and watch the quiet neighbourhood in front of me. No one knows that I am here. Alone.

I lie back down upon the grass that tickles through the thin cotton that separates my skin from its surface. I watch those constant stars and play with my wind tousled hair.

This is what the night was meant for.