I do hope I can get into my driveway when I get home today. No peace for the wicked - or for those who work in the emergency business.
It is supposed to snow all weekend so I have decided to take a positive approach. I will be home and pretty much curled up with the cat for both days. Although I usually enjoy breakfast out on Saturday morning, that won't be possible tomorrow as I am now on a low iodine diet pending my treatment.
If you have never been on a low iodine diet, it's a trip. No dairy, no canned goods, no soy products other than soy lecithin, nothing from the sea including sea salt, restricted meat intake, restricted grain intake, nothing with red dye #3, no commercially baked goods, no restaurant food, no pre-packaged food, and so on. You really have to read labels. Basically, you have to cook everything from scratch, and I do mean everything.
That's not a bad thing, though. Some serious shopping and a little time on one's hands can put a dent in this. I already have a freezer full of low iodine food and will spend most of this weekend putting more of it together. I will bake bread, prepare chili and corn bread, make chicken soup (I made the stock over the last two days) and probably produce another batch of pasta sauce in the slow cooker my sister bought me for Christmas.
That ought to make the house smell like someplace I'd like to be.
Other than bread, baked goods are something of a challenge. Egg yolks are off limits, so making a muffin that is not rubbery can be difficult. Most egg substitutes are off limits because they contain either salt, soy or whey proteins. For cookies, the only shortening that can be used is Spectrum (available at John Edwards), which is a palm oil shortening - and costs about $7 a tub. I guess that's one way to keep to the lower calorie side of things. Also, I am learning to substitute Splenda for sugar in baking - a fraught process for certain.
You learn a lot about the foods you eat when you have to be this careful and I'm glad this diet will only be necessary for a few weeks each year. It will be needed in preparation for annual iodine uptake scans for the next few years as we watch to make certain that the cancer does not start up again. You learn where to find the things that you thought were common (like tortillas that are actually made from corn flour) but turn out not to be, really. You learn how much salt the average breakfast cereal contains (any salt puts a cereal in the 'no eat' zone). You find out exactly which brands of granola (yes, I eat that) are ok in this situation and which are best left alone. And it doesn't hurt to have a little - ok, a lot - of help from the low iodine cookbook that I got for free online. It's times like this, though, when I wish my kitchen wasn't quite so small.
Still, I shall prevail, and it will be fun.
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