A Meal for My Muses

Today in the world of BlabbeeCare I had my two staple kids: Doc and Roxy. Roxy is my sister’s two-year-old daughter who is so sly and feisty she needed a feisty nickname to match. Doc is Roxy’s three-year-old cousin on her daddy’s side. For a couple of weeks, he came in multiple different costumes, including Iron Man, Spiderman, Batman, a surgeon, and a fireman. The day he came as a surgeon, he wore a surgical mask. He came up to me and complained about his mask, asking me to do something with it. Assuming it was annoying, I started taking it off. “No!” he said. “I want you to fix it!” Apparently it had been falling down. So I pulled it over his face again and tightened it. “Thanks!” he said through the mask, and ran away to play with some toys. He wore that mask the ENTIRE day except for eating, and I had to tighten it for him frequently. Thus, the name Doc.

When it comes to eating, Roxy will put almost anything into her mouth, sometimes too easily as everything inside and outside is fair game. Dog food is a particular favorite. Doc, on the other hand, is a bit more hesitant, and a bit more typical I would say. But as the time has gone by I have discovered some secrets on how to prepare food to make it Doc-friendly. Today’s lunch exemplified a typical BlabbeeCare meal.

First, I started by cutting up a tender piece of steak into very small pieces, almost pea-size. Then I put a wad of coconut oil in a pan and turned it on medium heat. I minced some garlic, scraped it into the pan for about thirty seconds, and then threw in the steak. I stir fried the steak just until it turned brown and then added about a half-cup of coconut milk. Then, I made a mistake. I wanted to put in a touch of lime juice, but when I poured it, it was more like a punch of lime. Sure enough, I tasted it and my sour alarms went off. So, I put in more coconut milk and added some green curry paste and the lime factor decreased substantially, but was it enough for the kids? To finish the meal I finely chopped some spinach, let it cook down, and then cool off.

Finally I was able to dish up some of my steak curry concoction for the kids. Roxy dove right in taking two big bites and then pushed it away saying, “I don’t want it.” I wanted to be disappointed, but instead I said “my bad” under my breath.

Doc, following Roxy's lead, said, “I don’t want it either!”

“You have to at least try it,” I said, but still assumed that he would do the same. I then started heating up some beans that I had on hand for a side dish. Once the beans were ready, I turned to dish them up. Doc, surprisingly, was eating up the steak curry, and then dove into the beans. Although he doesn’t typically eat anything green, he was also eating the spinach that was mixed into the curry.

Coincidentally, today as I was researching some recipes online I came across tips for feeding kids. One of them was to dish up the food, and then talk about everything BUT the food. When you focus on the food the kids do to. When I told Doc to try the curry and then got busy doing something else (as opposed to hovering over him telling him to eat it) it seemed to be a good trick. Well, at any rate, it did the trick.

Roxy also pushed away the beans. She was feeling especially feisty. However, she usually is such a good eater I don’t tend to get upset when she doesn’t want to eat something. So, I started thinking of snacks to give her when she beat me to it. “I want spinach,” she demanded. I was a bit confused until I noticed the spinach on the table that I had cut up to put in the curry. So I put some in front of her and she started chowing down on the spinach. And this is why I don’t tend to get mad at her.

As the lunch went on Doc continued to eat his beans and curry and Roxy ate raw spinach, almond butter, blueberries, and cashews, and I saw the strategy I had developed for feeding these two emerge.

1. Try it

First, they have to try what I give them. If they don’t want it, they must politely say they don’t want any or “no thanks.” If I hear the word “yucky” at the table the dark side of Blabbee emerges. I had a nephew say “yucky” once the second I took lettuce out of the fridge. Something came over me, it was like Kalie was the calm, introverted Dr. Jekyll and Blabbee had become my crazed alter-ego, Mr. Hyde.

I leaned over the counter, put on the best mom eyes a non-mom can feign, and said, stearnly, “You do not say that word in this kitchen. If I hear the word yucky again you will not get any treats that the other kids get for the entire day.” I didn’t have treats, but the grandma and great-grandma who made frequent appearances at BlabbeeCare did. He new the stakes were high.

With me, the kids can track mud all over the kitchen, throw toys down the stairs, rough house on my guitar case (or with my guitar for that matter), or make a crazy mess on the counter when they “help” me cook, and I won't say so much as a peep. But they have quickly learned that Blabbee has a zero tolerance when it comes to “yucky.” Not surprisingly, I haven’t heard it in quite some time.

2. Give healthy alternatives

If they try it and don’t like it, I give them alternative options that are equally healthy. Many times if I don’t think they’ve eaten enough or they’ve turned up their nose at food (politely of course) I get out bananas and apples and put almond or natural peanut butter on them, or I will have lunch meat, baked chicken, nuts, chopped veggies, and dried fruits on hand and we will have somewhat of a snackfest lunch. For me I am less worried about the amounts they eat of any particular food, but moreso I try to expose them to a wide variety of wholesome food.

3. Exposure

Really, exposure should come first in the list, as it pertains to the meal planning, grocery shopping, etc. I try to give Doc and Roxy a wide variety of foods and I try hard not to assume they won’t like something, like spicy foods. For a while I cooked meats and vegetables almost entirely bland, thinking that any spice wouldn’t do well with the kids. Then I learned Doc, especially, loved spice. I started giving him spicy taco meat, spicy curried chicken, and salsas. He went from poking at his meat to not eating it fast enough. Quite the discovery.

Also, I have to try hard not to worry too much about waste. For example, for the first week Doc didn’t eat carrots. If I put them on his plate he would chew on them and spit them out, but he still seemed to like to chew on them. I thought this was a problem, until the next week his mom told me Doc had been requesting carrots all weekend. I grinned ear to ear. To me, even getting kids to talk about food, identify it, and take the tiniest taste is a huge accomplishment. A request for something healthy? Now that’s just out of the ballpark.

4. Eat and cook with them!

This last one is a huge huge huge huge huge piece to BlabbeeCare, and was a gigantic reason I wanted to take care of kids in the first place. They watch me cook, and many times want to be involved and other times are less interested. When they are interested, I make sure to involve them.

The set up is the kids sit at one side of the counter, and I cook on the other side. If they are hungry before lunch is ready, I give them little cutting boards, plastic knives, and some veggies so they can feel involved and munch on veggies at the same time. Many times the food isn’t ready at the same time, so I give it to them in courses. The first course is always the one I think they will like the least, or the one I want them to eat the most of (meat, veggies, etc.). The second is often the one they will like but has less nutritional value (noodles, bread, etc.). The last is the sweetest, most often fruit. In the end they will have a variety on their plate and they can choose from that variety, but very rarely do I give them all their food at once, a habit that just formed on its own.

Also, I eat what I cook in front of them. This is the kicker. When they are hungry and see me eating something – be it spinach, kale, salmon, beans, or whatever – they want to have it (I once had a nephew beg for kale before going to bed because I was up late processing it to freeze). This is the benefit of cooking while they are at the counter and eating in rounds. They see me cooking and tasting and smelling and they want to mimic me.

One of our favorite activities is smelling spices. Every time I get a spice out of the cupboard when Roxy is around she yells, “Smell it!” Often it surprises me because I'm in such a cooking zone, but once I realize what her request is I break from my hustle and we all stop to smell the spices. Today we smelled cumin, paprika, and cinnamon.

Finding Inspiration

I have definitely had times in my life when I have felt uninspired. Jaded by high-pressured food industry jobs, jaded by the expectation to put career above all else no matter the sacrifices, and jaded by a world heavy with question marks, I’ve often felt more confused than confident. Now is not one of those moments.

With every new idea about how to incorporate wholesome, nourishing food into these smiling faces that either like to stuff their face with dog food at any chance they get or wear an Iron Man costume for a week straight, I find myself perpetually inspired. Life without my muses? Don’t see that happening for a long time.

Fargo and the Lawn

I went to Fargo last weekend. Many people who read that may assume that “going to Fargo last weekend” was a forced occurrence, some situation where I drew the short string, but quite the contrary. I was elated. Fargo meant restaurants, Fargo meant seeing Fargo family, and Fargo meant something else. I hadn’t been anywhere else since October. I planned to go to Fargo once but ended up having a serious panic attack about food. What would I eat? How could I go on a road trip without eating wheat, corn, eggs, or anything processed? Usually, being unprepared for a road trip meant I felt awful when I came home, and with the Bell’s palsy burned in my brain, I backed out without much regret.

So, to ensure my departure for this trip, I self-motivated by repeating the phrase “I’m going to Fargo dammit!” and spent an entire day preparing salads and chopped veggies and precooked meals and a smoothie kit to last me the entire four-day weekend. I had two huge tote bags full of allergy-free concoctions, and I teetered between feeling like a delicate pansy and a junk-food warrior when my food nearly filled the backseat. Cans of coconut milk clanked, the smell of garlic permeated the tiny car, and I had enough Tupperware to preserve a horse. But not one chicken nugget nudged its tempting mystery meatiness through my good food fortress. For one road trip, at least, I conquered the beast.

My cousin, Laura Jeanie, accompanied me on the seven hour trek. Laura’s role in my life can best be summed up in three words: partner-in-crime. She was living in Washington D.C. last year when I was living in Missoula, Montana, and after a couple phone calls we both realized we had the same, uncharacteristic inclination…to move home. So we did, together, and now we both live a short dirt road away from each other in our respective parents’ basements. 

In any normal universe, I would be embarrassed to admit the living-with-parents thing, but because of the crazy oil boom out here everybody and their dog is living in their parents’ basements or finding some kind of living quarters to put on their parents’ land (my sister and her husband have a double-wide on the front lawn). The small town infrastructure of Western North Dakota hasn’t quite caught up with the pace of big oil, and a housing shortage may be a reality for quite some time.

Between Laura and I, we have covered the globe from Paris to Istanbul, Peru to Azerbaijan…but I wonder if either of us had ever been more excited than when we went to Fargo. On the way we blasted Dwight Yoakam acoustic, talked about all the possibilities in Fargo, and succumbed to a school-girl giddiness when we realized we were out of town. That’s when it hit us: we were reverting back to our childhood. Back to the days of isolation, where a two hour drive to the nearest mall rocked our world. To the days of idiotic self-entertainment, when no iGadget could touch our imaginary worlds. And to the days when the world was small, and Fargo had no Paris to be compared to.

I don’t mind reverting, although it does concern Laura. She says that the episodes of reversion are happening closer together now, and have become more intense. Probably so, but the garden can’t be reverted out of me. For now, that’s my primary concern.

When we got to Fargo, Laura and I decided we were not going to succumb to the city trips of our youth when we only hit up the big box stores and ate at generic restaurants. We were going to get to know Fargo. High hopes. Sure enough, we found ourselves distracted by the generic, and all we made time for was a stroll downtown, where Laura took a picture next to a painted buffalo. Not quite the culture we were looking for. We concluded that such a lofty goal required baby steps...and multiple trips. 

On the way home the giddy factor had been tamed substantially, but I was quite content to be returning to my muses, the kids and the garden. Laura dropped me off at my parents' house then drove on up to her parents' house and we unloaded our Fargo gains (and losses). I was busy cleaning empty Tupperwares when Mom asked me if I had checked out the back lawn yet. “Nooooo,” I said, curiously and excitingly, thinking Dad must have tilled up the garden space that I begged for.

She didn’t respond, she just gave me a look that said “I can’t believe you got your dad to do that” so I raced to the lawn and sure enough, a HUGE chunk had been converted to tilled up sod. If I had any concept for measurements, I would spew some numbers about the actual size of the new garden, but the best I’ve got is it was much HUGE-r than expected. The area had quite a bit of shade, and immediately I started picturing the layout of my cool-season plants. Spinach, collards, and kale, oh my!

Later Dad mentioned how I had to shovel all the sod chunks off before planting. Seemed easy enough. I took a shovel out there to play with it one day and “easy enough” soon turned into “this is going to take me weeks.” I started making plans in my head to do an hour a day, and if I didn’t get the plants in on time that’s just what happens this year. Next year will be better. A part of me genuinely believed, however, that it would be a lifer on my to-do list. 

One evening I stepped up to the sod again. I picked up a shovel just to see if perhaps the ground had been more wet the last time. Nope. It was the same old sod. Then, as I was standing there poking at the chunks like a kid who doesn’t want to eat her broccoli, I heard a voice. “Kind of a big project Kal,” Dad said. But before I could say “I know” he was digging in…with gusto. I watched as he tore through the sod like any seasoned farmer would and the garden bed began to emerge, as did my visions of the future. Spinach, collards, and kale…spinach, collards, and kale. I quickly started shoveling right along with him and wouldn’t you know it, Dad and I got all that sod off in just over an hour. As to be expected, an overwhelming task suddenly undaunted upon the arrival of company. 

Ironically, Dad ended up being my knight in lawn-destroying armor; however, he may have done himself a disservice. Good chance he'll get roped into more projects before this summer is all said and done with. Plus, I'll be needing a back-up gardener when I decide to head east for more get-to-know research on my new favorite destination, if I can squeeze more into my summer.

So much Fargo, so little time.

Making Sense

Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m back in North Dakota. Most of the time, actually. Dakota is where I’m from, not where I’ve gone. But those badland-esque hills lining the horizon don’t lie, and neither does the record-breaking blizzard that just hit one day shy of May. This is, indeed, Dakota Territory.

Maybe the confusion lies in my lens. Everything looks different. Like when I was trying to convince my dad to create more garden space in our generously-sized lawn. After days of pleading, I finally said, “Dad, what you see is lawn. What I see is me potentially getting healthy again without going broke.” Two days later he casually mentioned how the blizzard ruined his plans of tilling up some lawn for more garden space.

I, too, used to see just lawn, and I had no problem with it. In fact, mowing endless greens of homestead-sized lawns was my job of preference while growing up. But since those days of seeing lawn ten years ago, I have tripped and stumbled and straight-up fallen on my face onto paths that have lead me to seeing garden. From the moment I saw kids in that garden, nothing else has made more sense, and I’ve had a serious craving for something that makes sense. And not just “enough” sense or a “protect-the-bottom-line” sense or a “if-you-look-at-it-this-way” sense. Complete, undeniable sense.

Mix in a little grass-fed beef raising, whole food common-sensical cooking, and good old-fashioned healing, and potentially there is enough sense in the pot to satisfy my whole appetite. Potentially.

Feel free to grab a taste of Dakota Grub as it simmers through the summer and into fall, but be warned…the exact flavor is still a mystery to me. It might bite like a mustard green. All I know is I can’t go much further without talking about its roots: when I decided to become a stay-at-home Blabbee (and “Blabbee” doesn’t mean what you think).

BlabbeeCare

NOTE: the names of the little ones in my life have been changed to protect the innocent, and for my own personal entertainment. “Blue” got his name because of his blue, imaginative eyes.

Blue stood on top of the table circling, carefully eyeing his captive audience. The light above him made it look like the six of us surrounding the table were interrogating him, but it was the toddler, Blue, with all the control...of course. We grown-ups are always looking for an out on being grown-up. Suddenly, he stopped, pointed at me and, with certitude, declared, "Blabbee!" Blue, barely walking, wasn't saying much of anything with much accuracy so we laughed and shrugged it off. Although, "Blabbee" did sound alot like my name, "Kalie," said with a short "a" like California. Hmm.

"Hey Blue," my mom asked, after he had been adequately distracted, "who's that over there?" She pointed at me, his auntie. Blue turned around, stood solid, threw his arm out, pointed his finger in my face and announced my destiny. 

"Blabbee!" he said, this time without question. Everyone laughed in appreciation of his entirely un-grown-up pronunciation and awed over his entirely grown-up replication. That boy knew his Blabbee.

Six nieces and nephews, two degrees, and three states later I'm sitting at that table where I was declared Blabbee. The kids all call me Blabbee still because, of course, all the toddler-wannabe grown-ups call me Blabbee around them so they had no chance.

My current "job", not even a year out on finishing my Master's degree, mind you, is taking care of my sister's two kids and her nephew on her husband's side. This nannying or daycaring or whatever it is has been dubbed "BlabbeeCare" by my sister. I didn’t argue. I knew the name had already stuck.

The idea of BlabbeeCare started in mid-December when my sister was looking for daycare at the exact moment my seasonal farm job was ending. I decided to help out by watching her kids for a couple of months until she found daycare. A couple of months turned into a couple of more months, and now I’ve guaranteed them through the summer.

My mom asked me once how long I was going to do BlabbeeCare and I said, “Probably as long as I’m home. I can’t see myself doing anything else.” She just laughed and shook her head. I’m sure I know what she was thinking, what everybody else thinks. A dietitian who just got her Master’s degree doing daycare of all things? But I don’t care. I once read a statistic in a nutrition publication that said that for the first time in recorded history the current generation of babies have a life expectancy shorter than the generation prior, and that one of every three kids are expected to have adult-onset diabetes…a completely preventable disease. So what better place for a dietitian than running a daycare?

Right now, the table that acted as Blue's stage is covered in garden starts. In them I don't see seeds that will become plants that will become food. I see the official start of a dietitian who will be away from any hospital, clinic, office, gym, or campus, and right in the middle of where she will learn and teach the most: with kids in a garden.

With any luck, the kids might eat something green, and I might finally find the time and the nutrients to heal my own immunocompromised self.

The Immune System

Nothing like waking up with half your face not working to make you wonder if your body is running at full tilt. This was my morning about two months ago. I didn’t notice it right away, I just noticed my eyes were bothering me so I went and looked in the mirror. Everything looked fine until I blinked and my reflection only winked. My left eye was stuck open.

I didn’t know what to think, and tried not to consider the possible causes. I walked to the living room where my sister was sitting and said, dryly, “My left eye won’t blink.”

She looked at me quite confused, witnessed the buggy-eyed wink, and said with concern, “Yyyyeah, you should probably get that checked out.” So I did.

What came up was Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of one side of the face. It’s when the facial nerve is being inflamed by a virus and shuts down its function anywhere from two weeks to two months, and maybe longer. I lucked out. From start to finish I only had symptoms for three weeks. After the eye shut down, my mouth did soon after. I slurred my speech, laughed with my mouth covered, and ate with caution…but I never drooled. One of our dogs had bell’s palsy once and drooled all the time, therefore a common question I was asked was, “Are you drooling?” I answered with a defensive No!, but I did have to tape my eye shut every night.

Bell’s palsy is not common in the average person, but more often than not shows up in those with weak immune systems. This was the kicker. I thought I was getting better. I thought maybe I had been doing something right over the past two years. But then I wake up with Bell’s palsy and feel like I’m not heading for better at all, but snowballing into worseness. No more excuses, I decided. I had to hunker down and follow through with all of the instincts I often pushed to the back of my head. For reals this time.

Those three weeks of taping, slurring, and slurping, I researched immune-building recipes, created meal plans, and saw an official alternative medicine guy who put me on whole food supplements and digestive helpers. He reinforced a fact I knew full well but never fully admitted to myself: I’m crawling with food sensitivities. I wanted to tell him, “No shit Sherlock,” but since I never did much about most of them – corn, wheat, and eggs – I kept my mouth shut. Instead I agreed not to eat them for at least three months to give my stomach time to heal, my fickle, fickle stomach.

The short answer to why my immune system is often MIA is: antibiotics. The somewhat longer story starts when I tore my ACL over two years ago and got it repaired with surgery. You know when they talk about those unfortunate few of the tiniest percentages who get the rarest of rare infection with surgery? Well, I made the cut. I was in the hospital for eight days, got two emergency surgeries, downed drug concoctions that would put Charlie Sheen to shame, and chalked up a couple blood transfusions to boot.

The worst part was, they were never able to culture the infection. They kept taking samples of my knee during the surgeries (what “sample” meant I never really cared to know) and tried to grow whatever bacteria that had seemingly taken control of my knee. Nothing grew. At the time I hated this reality because I thought it meant I was crazy. Was it all in my head? Now I realize that I should have been more concerned for my gut than my head.

Since they didn’t know what strain of bacteria it was, they treated me for a variety of strains to cover all the bases. Meaning I was on at least two of some of the strongest antibiotics on the market at the hospital, and I took one intravenously for four weeks just for good measure. I wore around a fanny pack where I loaded my self-deflating balls of antibiotic filled with what looked like a pee-yellow toxin. Once I hooked them up to my PICC line, they started deflating and I watched them drip, drip, drip into my body. Over sixty of those balls drip, drip, dripped into my body.

In the end, I believe those nasty antibiotic fluids saved my life. I’m pretty sure my white blood cells weren’t going to single-handedly stop the red rash racing up my leg, aiming for the arteries that count. But I paid for it with my immune system. The antibiotics killed not only the naughty bacteria, but also the beneficial bacteria spanning my whole body, tipping a balance that is tough to restore, let me tell ya. And that balance, I have learned, is the foundation for an immune system that won’t poop out on you when a virus thinks your facial nerve looks like a good place to settle down.

Someday virus, you and your buddies will meet your match in this here body. That’s the plan, anyway.

The Plan

After doing BlabbeeCare for four months now, the idea of a life I’ve always wanted but seemed entirely out of reach is kinda sorta coming together. I want to be able to cook all day every day, not just squeeze it in in the evenings. I want to be able to grow, raise, or barter the majority of the food I eat (including the grass-fed beef raised by my brother). I want to always have the time to heal myself and my family, no excuses. I want to raise awareness of what we’re feeding our kids and ourselves for that matter. Finally, I want to do all of this without the current drainage of my bank account.

One day I realized that what I had defined as my ideal lifestyle was very close to that of a stay-at-home mom, so I figured since I didn’t have any kids of my own, I had to borrow them. Thus, I became a stay-at-home Blabbee.

I created the blog because I figured it might help me follow through on tending the garden, cooking healthy meals for the kids, and putting forth the vast amount of work and planning it takes to actually heal a body, and not just erase the symptoms.  We’ll see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, something that resembles “making sense” will muster before it’s all said and done with. Can't blame a girl for tryin'.