We have completed our second week of treatment! I know that that there are those who look at me askance when I talk about we two being in treatment together for cancer, I don't really care that people have feelings that are less than supportive of the notion that I am as involved in the process as Doug is, my only words to them is don't pass judgment until you have been in the same situation and for God's sake don't share your thoughts out loud. Anyone who has had a loved one engaged in the struggle knows that it is not just "Doug's cancer" it is an emotional burden shared and a learning opportunity for everyone who chooses to be involved.
I must be having some residual feelings of anger left over from "helpful" and sarcastic comments from friends and family in the recent past, because this is not at all what I was planning on writing about.
Soooo, I was planning on writing about the refuge of the weekend for me while going through this process. There are no choices about where we are going to be for the week, and no guarantees that we won't be engaged in the treatment process for many more hours than we planned on. But today is blissfully unplanned as is tomorrow, with room for everything and nothing. I have loose plans to make a dent in the kitchen and pantry to have it set up so that it is much more amenable to raw food preparation and both of us would like to take in a movie (for the life of me I don't know why we would torture ourselves with the smell of movie popcorn, green juice has no remote chance of quelling those cravings!) but the world will not end nor will I have an anxiety attack if neither thing happens this weekend.
I heard a couple of things this week that I loved hearing from the doc and that I wanted to share. Here goes, "Cancer is a word not a sentence." Pesticide, herbicide and fungicide rhyme with suicide, homicide and genocide, which side do you want to be on?" "Order is the consequence of Intelligence" Another little tidbit, Undertakers are using 30-40% less embalming fluid than they were 20 years ago!
Enough with these gems of education that I am taking in through the journey, we had a no cooking class yesterday! The fact that I am fasting and unable to taste anything but green juice, green tea and coconut water, and still enjoyed the class is a testimony to the feast/fast and to the fun and interest of learning this new skill set of preparing awesome food with out cooking it. We had demonstrations on the prep of creamy almond mylk (not my clever delineation moniker separating the nutty fluid from the udder one) I can't speak to the taste yet but the color, texture and smell have it hands down over the crap that one gets in the irradiated boxes. Also on the menu were Not Tuna pate', made with almonds, sunflower seeds, lemon, celery, onion, parsley and a couple of other things, again I didn't have the benefit of taste, but the stuff sure look like tuna salad, and my class mates raved about the stuff, apparently you can add grated carrots and make Not Salmon pate', hey don't laugh or roll your eyes until you have tried it, or at least until I have tried it. There was also a creamy zucchini soup, I have my doubts but I will be making it to try and worst case I will give it all to Doug, he's like Mikey, he'll eat anything.
Next on the menu, we were shown how to chiffonade kale in order to make Mediterranean Kale salad, apparently by using salt, lemon juice and massage you can "cook" the kale so that it is tender and tasty. For the uninformed, you must massage the salt and the lemon into the kale, unfortunately the process does not involved you getting a massage while preparing the dish. Again I didn't get a taste, but the farmer from Minnesota whose wife is in treatment there and who just doesn't like kale, scarfed it down and said it was not bad. The last dish that we didn't cook was Zucchini pasta with spicy Marinara sauce. This is what I had been waiting for!!! I wanted to see first hand how a Spirooli was used. A spirooli is a spiral cutting machine that turns vegetables into noodle shapes and curly fries. I am probably heading for a fall here but I have been dreaming about making this pasta for awhile. Everyone there gave the dish rave reviews. I am hoping that the actual experience of eating it after lusting after it for this long is not going to be like eating carob rice dream and saying "Oh it tastes just like Cold stone creamery's Ghiardelli dark chocolate ice cream." after months of no ice cream what so ever. Who are we kidding?? It does not!! Anyway, it looked like the real thing and smelled like it too, my hopes are high.
We have watched many DVD's with testimonies from people who state that they have healed themselves for a host of ills by changing their diet lifestyles to raw vegan, it makes sense, I was buying up raw food books a year and a half ago because I was intrigued with the concept, but how do you tell yourself that you are never going to eat cooked food again? Especially when your Mom showed you how much she really loved you by serving hot deep fried corn fritters floating in oleo and log cabin syrup with a side of bacon for dinner once or twice a month?? Not to mention fired salt pork and milk gravy (the secret in the gravy is using the left over fat from the salt pork frying for stock) and boiled potatoes. Dehydrated Vidalia onion bread with walnut meat pate is a far cry from government issued pink meat and pickle relish salad sandwiches made with wonder bread.
So the adventure continues, we have 8 more days of juicing and a couple of days of transition from liquids to solids and then the Brenner kitchen of Raw food prep is open and ready for business, did I mention the awesome chili rellanos that I got taught how to make this week??
I wonder if I'm hungry?
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