Taking Space--Fixing Foods For Others' Palates--Rice Yogurt

We decided not to go to Denali: we sent Phil's nephew and his girlfriend up there by themselves and drove to Anchorage and back in a single day yesterday to see Phil's granddaughter on to a plane home. It feels so good to take a little space, to preen those ruffled feathers and prune those barnacles...

As it turns out, I have some extremely important paperwork to do, getting close to the deadline, which cannot be missed, and it will take a little more doing than I had suspected, so it's a mercy that we took this space.

I'm feeling like a recalibration is in order. I've gone somewhat off track and need to get back to my center. So often, I get into a great groove and flow, only to find myself a few months later, ruffled and barnacled, longing to return to what makes me feel good. I plan to use the accountability inherent in having a blog to help me with this: hopefully it'll be a fun ride for everyone! Stay tuned for more on this in the next couple days. Part of the recalibration pertains to my perennial dietary monkeying around, so I'll postpone the "Naturopath poisoning" story for a health update in the next post too.

One of the odd effects of having had so many guests for a few weeks (and fixing food for them) is that it rubs my face in the fact of my aberrant eating. At this point, I've pretty much given up trying to make "Ela-friendly" versions of things that everyone will eat. I have boundless admiration for the vegans and raw-foodists who can produce food which is on their program that captivates all the omnivores in their lives: I simply haven't been able to do this. Perhaps this is because I don't think it's my place: they are going to make their own choices, they're not interested in changing their diets, and while they're visiting up here for a short time, usually engaged in strenuous activity, I'd better make food they're prepared to eat! (And that goes for my husband, too.)

And so, I (wore my dust-mask a lot and) made a lot of things like this...

...And when I produced chocolate-covered peppermint patties and peanut butter cups as a surprise treat for the wedding...

Ice-cube trays I snagged at IKEA last month for this wedding surprise

 ...I used confectioner's sugar and store-bought dark chocolate chips: no attempts at "healthifying" or "high-grading" whatsoever. And these confectioner's sugar-and-store-bought-chocolate-based goodies earned epithets like "divine"--blew my mind.

(Unfortunately, I didn't manage to photograph them with their chocolate party gowns, and didn't photograph the peanut butter cups either.)

I have to say, although I don't blog about my gluten-and-dairy/refined sugar-containing offerings, let alone the meat and fish that I fix for people, because these are not the locus of my creativity, I have definitely basked in appreciation I've received from the people who ate the food! I really intend to prepare food with love, no matter what the food is.

It doesn't bother me at all not to eat any of it: I'm quite happy with my transmogrified leftovers...

 (Leftover fruity kelp noodles that I posted about last week, with a bit of avocado and a bunch of lettuce)...and my staple smoothies.

(I'll share the recipe tomorrow).

Perhaps because my tastebuds, acutely sensitive as they are, so often play second fiddle to my brain's extremely forthright opinions about whether something belongs in my mouth or not, as well as because I'm allergic to most of the ingredients in so many standard foods, I am extremely unattached to 'standard' tastes or how something's 'supposed' to taste. Since Phil and others around me have a very strong sense of how something 'should' taste, my fantasiacal creations tend not to be as well-received as my attempts at 'old standards'--a whole different kind of creativity for me that I've been embracing, but that tends to omit attention to my own food needs.

One recent grocery store find really brought home to me this odd freedom that I have from 'supposed to be's around food. This is rice yogurt. I was curious.

 It's basically rice milk with a little sweetener (there are blueberry and peach versions too: I tried vanilla), several different kinds of gums (locust bean, xanthan, guar) and some live cultures. Given the ingredient list, I wasn't surprised when I popped the lid and thought, "That isn't yogurt!"

 And it really wasn't yogurt in any sense of the word. It's the wrong color (beigy-gray), the wrong texture (more like pudding), the wrong flavor (sweet, with no sour tang). And yet, I ate it gradually, and concluded that I liked it! I really didn't care about how it looked and felt and didn't look nor feel like yogurt.

Do you derive pleasure from fixing food for others that you don't/can't eat yourself?
How do you avoid leaving important paperwork till the last minute?