Day 3: Hakuna Frittata

Day 3 and I even managed to get 3 full meals in! I’m really not feeling too hot and I’m desperately trying not to get full on sick. Sickness for me usually manifests into strep throat and that’s certainly what this is feeling like. I’m doing my best to rest and take it easy, I’ve succeeded in completing the challenge for today, but didn’t get much else done.

The only things that I really needed to do today was take Emmett to the vet for his second round of vaccinations and start the bread. I did both! Yesterday was my 3 week anniversary of getting him and we were able to get in a vet appointment the very next morning. He had fleas and worms when I got him and he weighed 12 pounds. Now he is flea free, they didn’t check for worms but I haven’t really seen any lately and this big boy is now 19.6 pounds!

I carried him into the office because I realized as I put the leash on him to go to the car that we haven’t done any leash training. I tried taking him for a walk once and it went absolutely horribly so I haven’t since. It only just occurred to me he has no idea what a leash is and it scared him. I had a name tag made for him when I picked him up but he was able to get his collar off and now I don’t know where it is, so the leash was important so I didn’t lose my baby!

The lady at the desk asked if I was gonna carry him in next visit too, I think she was trying to joke that he’s growing so much but I said probably. I’m sure I’ll be carrying him when he’s… 80 pounds. Oh boy. I better start training now.

Today was a weird day on the home front. Yesterday from the SECOND I opened his crate in the morning he had the zoomies all day. ALL. DAY. He was biting and scratching, it was just a lot yesterday. Today he started out a lot milder. I usually bring both the dogs out of the bedroom in the morning and close the door since I have things I get worried about Emmett chewing on in there. Today, they both seemed mellow and wanted to hang out under the bed so I picked everything up and started to make breakfast.

I was talking to my mom at one point and said “wait a second, they’re both in the bedroom and it’s completely quiet, something is wrong.” So I went to check on them and I saw this:

I said to my mom “well they both look guilty but I don’t see anything wrong.” I then realized Freya went potty in the bedroom, even though we had just gone out but that’s okay I cleaned it up and went back to making my breakfast frittata.

I subscribed to the NY Times Cooking section the other day, it’s $5 a month and you just get access to a bunch of recipes. I thought it was a good place to start, you can save recipes so it really helped me get organized. One of the recipes was a mushroom and spinach frittata. A traditional frittata is started on the stove top and then moved to the oven, but I don’t have a pan that can do both, so I just baked the whole thing instead.

It was super easy to do, whisk up the eggs, milk and seasonings while the mushrooms and spinach are sautéing. Then you just plop it in a pan and bake. My oven is a little slow to cook, so it ended up staying in for 37 minutes. While I was waiting on breakfast I thought I would go in for a quick cuddle and give some belly rubs to the team.

When I rounded the corner to my bedroom I was surprised and shooketh. It looked like they had torn apart a funfetti cake. My first thoughts were “oh no, my cake!” Then I realized I didn’t have a funfetti cake and I couldn’t figure out what all those crumbs were. I picked one up… it was foam. I looked at the pillows, still in tact. I looked under the bed – a gold mine of funfetti foam. Finally I realized that under the bed was Freya’s first dog bed, which she hated and never used.

She was my first dog ever, so obviously I spoiled her and bought a nice orthopedic foam bed, 3 times her size so she would feel at home. She never used it once. I just left it under the bed and figured maybe one day Emmett would use it. Well he broke through the seam at the bottom and chewed out about 1/3 of the foam.

I’m not sure if Freya helped, but they both hid from me. Finally I got them out from under the bed, so I could start to pick it all up, but with some quick maneuvering Emmett managed to get under my feet and I accidentally stepped on his tail. This must have sent a pretty strong message because he screamed and ran off to the front room and Freya hid under the bed, even while I vacuumed around her.

The rest of the day was just as quiet. I mean, they didn’t make a peep. Freya eventually made it up to the bed and made herself comfortable in a pile of pillows. Literally surrounded herself with four pillows, like the queen that she is and Emmett just laid on the floor all day, barely playing. Then we went to the vet and when we got home he was still just as content, or scared to move, that he just laid on the floor.

I took the quiet as a good time to start my bread! It’s a 2 day process as it calls for about 18 hours to rise. So I threw the dough together and felt extremely accomplished. Then I made a little lunch. I wasn’t hungry I just knew I needed to eat something. Yesterday I baked a “Santa Maria style Tri Tip” that I got from Trader Joe’s. I can’t tell you how excited I was to try this, Santa Maria is a small town in California and I happened to grow up about 2 towns up from there.

Tri tip is a staple on the central coast, generally on Fridays you look for a pile of smoke in a random parking lot and there you’ll find Tri Tip! The best days were when my dad would bring us home sandwiches. So delicious. It’s hard to explain what it is to foreigners, it’s just a certain cut of beef, but really what makes it is the seasoning. So instead of grilling this, I decided to bake it per the instructions on the package. It probably would have been better grilled, but it was 100 degrees yesterday and I just didn’t have the energy to grill outside under the sun.

So when it came out from the oven, I patiently let it sit. Finally I carved into it and womp womp. It just tasted like black pepper and mediocre meat to me. Anyway, I didn’t want to waste it so I cut it into strips and heated it up with the left over cheddar biscuits and had meat and carbs for lunch. It was a small portion, just to give myself some fuel.

Then I took a nap. Usually when I try to nap that’s when the pup gets the most hyper, pulling the blanket off, nipping at whatever hangs off the couch, but he didn’t today. He just stayed where he was. At some point I woke up because I was freezing. The AC was set to 74 and I was shivering. I got up to adjust it and was so light headed and just had to get back to the couch ASAP. He was at the foot of the couch waiting for me and I pulled him up and he cuddled into me, no nipping, no horseplay. I think he could tell I wasn’t feeling well and maybe having a a shot and some medicine today knocked him down a bit too.

I woke up around 8pm. I wasn’t feeling great, but I felt a lot better than I did around 6. I have a small fear that I’m allergic to Emmett because when I was in bed last night it felt like allergies, but then today I realized I haven’t been getting out much because I’ve been on puppy duty and maybe it’s just a sinus infection or something because the AC has been on since May. (Hashtag Texas am I right?) So I sent the dogs out to go potty and I went and did a Neti Pot treatment. There was definitely some blockage so I’m hoping that helped.

I also was hungry and decided to make pasta. I made a quick handful of pasta (surprise, surprise it was too much) and then last minute decided to make garlic broccoli to go with it. I just used olive oil and butter for the sauce, because I couldn’t be bothered for any more effort and then sprinkled it with parmesan. Garlic and ginger literally cure everything, usually. If you’re really sick you should just eat them raw or make a tea with them together. I always try the ginger tea first because obviously drinking garlic is less enjoyable than drinking ginger.

I reached for a paper plate to serve myself dinner and said nah, let’s use a real one. So I grabbed a real one a fork and a paper towel and sat and ate my cute little dinner. I stared at the large quantity of pasta and had to take a moment to tell myself that it was okay to eat it, and to enjoy it.

The biggest part of this challenge, that I haven’t touched on too much yet in the blog is that I’m using this challenge to reestablish my relationship with food. My relationship with food came up in therapy last week, not for the first time, I’ve brought it up before but my therapist, although an angel is not a miracle worker. She can’t just snap her fingers and fix me. Now that I think about it, I actually never asked her. I’ll check with her tomorrow and see if there’s a menu option for that.

I always thought I got my weird food shit from my dad, who was also almost always overweight as an adult and was not what one would call an exemplary eater. Towards the end of his life I’d call to chat and would casually ask “dad, what did you have for dinner?” He would pause and say “well, I had a pudding and some cheese and crackers.”

When we were younger though he definitely made an effort to cook. It wasn’t always the healthiest, I think our favorite was when he would make deep friend taco shells. Taco night was definitely my favorite. He was a pretty bland cook, always buying the disposable salt and pepper shakers and immediately upon returning home toss the pepper in the trash. Honestly, I’m not even a big fan of pepper, but a little garlic powder wouldn’t have killed you dad.

So in therapy last week we actually talked about my mom’s influence on me in regards to food. Now, since my mom is still alive and one of my most loyal readers obviously I’m not gonna talk shit about her. I am gonna yada yada over it, because my mom did an excellent job raising me the best she could and I love her dearly. But I had the epiphany that I have a way more fucked up relationship with food than I ever even noticed.

I am an emotional eater and I used to be a binge eater. For the most part I don’t binge eat anymore, and if I do, thank God it’s not the amount that I used to. I used to make myself so physically sick from food that I would be sick for days because of it.

But tonight, as I sat there looking at the pasta all I could think was this is unhealthy.

I then took control of my brain and said this is a meal that will nourish me and make me feel better. Then I ate it. It was dry lol. But I wanted it that way because my throat hurt and I really just wanted to eat something. The broccoli was really delicious. It was fresh broccoli sautéed with olive oil and garlic. It was still crunchy. I normally buy frozen veg since it’s cheaper and then there’s not the walk of shame from the crisper to the garbage 10 days later. The problem with frozen broccoli is it never gets as crisp as fresh broccoli, so this really did hit the spot.

Same with bread, bread in my head is unhealthy and a no no. It’s so dumb because I eat bread all the time – out, I just rarely ever buy it. The theme of last weeks therapy session was confusion. I have a lot of confusion around food in my head and ultimately that session, mixed with binge watching the Great British Bake Off that night led to this challenge 4 days later.

I’m really excited about the month ahead. I’m bummed I’m fighting whatever my body is fighting right now because I just don’t have much energy and hope I’m not coming off dull or depressing. My bread loaf goes in the oven tomorrow and it’s the most exciting thing ever.

I grew up baking cakes but it’s hard work, so I never spent a lot of time expanding my skills. So this is just such a refreshing challenge where I get to learn new things, try new things and hopefully heal a little at the same time. Normally a challenge is about removing things since I normally do food challenges where I remove sugar, dairy and carbs. It’s nice to just sort of unhinge that part of the brain that pretends it’s not counting calories but secretly is or even remembering points value from weight watchers decades ago.

The unofficial theme of this week is “American week cooking and Bread Week for baking.” I don’t know why I put that in quotes. I don’t know if I should spoil the mystery and share the menu for the rest of the week, but I guess I’ll let you know that my next bread attempt (maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday) will be burger buns! I never thought to make them but I was watching some some and they made them and I thought hey, what an idea!

I’m going to spice up my burgers a lot, no, not with pepper but with onions. Oklahoma is Texas’ hat and they have a special burger called an onion burger. I’ve never had it and I’m guessing it’s just a bunch of chopped onions in a burger, but I thought I would try that this week. I also bought some grits (which I’ve never made before) and some cornbread (just the mix).

American week was inpsired by the fact that I had the tri tip already and the burger meat is in the freezer. Also, Sunday is opening day for the NFL and nothing says American more than football. Except maybe inequality and crippling debt. Wait, what?