Can I Ask A Favour?

“I don’t mean to be nosey, but I’ve been thinking that you’ve lost a lot of weight.” - Random Colleague

“No offence, but that outfit really doesn’t fit you anymore.” - Random Friend

“Geez, there’s hardly anything left of you!” - Random Colleague

“Wow! You’ve lost so much weight! You look great!” - Random woman I occasionally see at the hairdresser

“I was just saying to my husband that you haven’t looked well, you look like you’ve been wasting away.” - Random Neighbour

Just a few of the comments I have had over the past few months and in my head all I can think is “I KNOW!” and “FOR FUCK’S SAKE, WILL YOU STOP REMINDING ME?!!!”

The one topic that I have struggled to write about most in this blog has been issues with body image. I can talk more openly about the ongoing difficulties Crohn’s has contributed to with my mental health than I can about what Crohn’s has done to my body image. As a woman who has generally prided herself on not obsessing about her weight and body image (unlike many women who are socialised in the Western world), I have found this part of the Crohn’s journey very difficult. A big part of is because the hospital have made such a big deal about it as I outlined in an earlier post - http://foodlovingcrohnie.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-great-weight-debate.html  But the other sad reality is that I lost the best part of 3 stone (about 40lbs for you non-Brits) very quickly at end of last year and the fact is that all of the above statements were just stating the hurtful truth (except for that woman at the hair dresser, more about her later).

But I seriously could do without the constant reminders.

When I was at my lowest weight, I couldn’t stand to look at myself. I was completely and utterly ashamed of my body. I mean really, truly ashamed. You could easily see my ribs, my spine and some of my wrist bones. I actually removed the mirror from the bathroom for a couple of months so that I didn’t have to look at my emaciated self. It was horrible, not only because I was ashamed of what I looked like but also because I was ashamed that I felt that way about myself. I’ve had to do a lot of work on these feelings, and I do mean A LOT of work, but one of the worst things about “shame based emotions” is having them constantly re-enforced by those around you.

And I get enough re-enforcement every time I open my wardrobe and I'm faced with a pile of clothes that don’t fit anymore.

To give a demonstration of just how much weight I’ve lost, here’s me today wearing a pair of jeans that fit 15 months ago.

To give a context as to how big these jeans really are now, I was able to stuff a pudgy teddy down them.

And for fun and giggles, I discovered that I can actually stuff 5 teddies down them.

Of course, the irony of this demonstration is that I’ve actually gained back just short of half of the weight I lost at the end of last year. I could probably have fit ten teddies down those jeans back in January.

Despite the media implying that women somehow gain weight just by looking at something “fattening” (and I could really rant about the media and women’s body image, but I’ll leave that for another time), gaining weight is actually harder than you think. You need to consume an awful lot of calories over and above what your ideal daily intake should be over a significant period for it to actually result in sustainable weight gain. And that’s assuming that you spend a lot of time on the sofa, which I don’t.

I was on holiday last week, which involved lots of visits to various National Trust sites in the West Country and that involved consuming vast quantities of really yummy cake. And I didn't gain a thing. Some people might relish the idea of eating indulgent cake and not gaining weight, but when you have IBD, it’s not really that simple. One of the main hallmarks of Crohn's is "malabsorption" where your body doesn't absorb much from the food you eat when you are in a flare. The hospital prescribed low-residue-low-fibre-fat-restricted-diet the hospital prescribed doesn’t help (I’ve given up the fat-restricted part now). And despite weight gain being one of the main side effects of Prednisolone, there is a small minority of us who have the exact opposite reaction to it. Gaining weight can be a bit of an uphill battle for some of us Crohnies.

So what I am asking is this. If you haven’t seen me in a while and want to comment about my weight, I am kindly asking you to keep your thoughts to yourself in my presence. Feel free to gossip behind my back about it, but I really don’t want to hear it.

And to that woman at the hair dresser? Seriously sweetie, I really don’t recommend Crohn’s Disease as a weight loss plan. If you want my Crohn's, please take it from me. I'll even give it away for free.

Lamb Stew

I don’t want to say that it’s gone cold here. It’s not really “cold”, it’s just really cooled down very quickly. And it’s bloody damp. I will admit that I broke down on Friday and turned on the heating for an hour just to get the damp out of the house.

So in light of that, I figured it was time to get back to making soup and stews. I have been only gradually re-introducing lamb into my diet this summer. I love lamb, and the constant availability of fresh lamb is one of the many things I love about living in the UK. In Canada, most of the lamb comes from New Zealand, meaning it’s frozen, and very expensive. In the UK, I drive across country roads where sheep roam and think about what tasty things I would do with one who is stupid enough not to move when my car is approaching.

Silly beast, don't you know that you'll end up on my plate if you wander that close to the road?

When I was last at my lovely butchers, I got some diced lamb shoulder that has been waiting in my freezer, so with the change in weather, I thought it was time to thaw it out and stew it.

I prefer to make stews and casseroles in my slow cooker, but due to a particularly bad week for mental health and insomnia, getting my act together to get everything into the slow cooker in the morning just wasn’t happening. I also only had a very small amount of lamb, and a slow cooker really needs to be at least half full to work properly, and the amount I was working with wasn’t going to cut it.

So this is what I did for a tasty stew for one or two -

I used ½ lb of diced lamb shoulder (with most of the fat trimmed off) and tossed it in 1 tbsp of flour (gluten-free flour works fine) and some salt and pepper.

I heated about 1 tbsp of olive oil in a big pot, then added the lamb and browned it on all sides.

Meanwhile, I peeled and chopped a carrot and a potato into small pieces. I added these to the pot and let it cook off for a few minutes, stirring so that it doesn’t stick.

I peeled 2 shallots and 2 cloves of garlic, and put these into the nifty little cooking basket I found a few weeks ago, and hung that on the side of the pan.

I added ½ of dried thyme and 1/4 of dried rosemary. I made 2 cups of beef broth (I used Knorr Stock Pots). I put the heat under the pan up to high, and added about ½ cup of the broth and scrapped all of the bits off the bottom of the pan. Then I added the rest of the broth. I brought it to a boil, then popped the lid on and turned the heat down to a simmer and left it for 35 minutes.

Mmmm . . . tasty stewed beast!

New Kitchen Bits and Such

I know full well that I don’t NEED anymore kitchen porn gadgets, but I really couldn’t resist this one. The last time I saw the dietician, she suggested that rather than sticking with the onion and garlic powder that I could throw an onion or clove of garlic whole into my cooking pot and then could fish it out before eating, therefore infusing the flavour without the stringy residue bits. I tried this a few times, and while the taste sure beats the hell out of the powdered stuff, as I don’t tend to use a whole onion (even if the recipe calls for it, I like the taste of onions, but I don’t like it to overpower things), it usually just fell apart on it’s own, making it rather a pain to fish it out again.

But in the most recent Lakeland porn catalogue, I spotted this -

It’s listed as a pasta basket, and I’ve seen them used in restaurants for pasta before, but I thought, hey, that might work for adding onions and garlic without adding onions and garlic! And I was going to Lakeland anyway, so . . .

I wasn’t sure when I bought it whether or not it was going to work, particularly as I wasn’t sure if it would properly fit my pot. Fortunately, it did, so I gave it a go in both a soup and in a chicken casserole.

Verdict? It’s great! Keeps everything together, but definitely lets the flavour in. And it washes up well in the dishwasher to boot!

In other news, I was very glad to clean this out of my handbag this weekend -

Anyone on steroids like Prednisolone for any length of time needs to carry one of these bright blue cards with them at all times. If you have an accident, your body may not be able to produce enough of the right hormones to keep you alive if you’re on steroids, so this needs to come with you in case you need to show it to emergency personal. Not only do you need to carry it while you’re on them, but you also need to carry it afterwards for months, a time pretty much equal to the amount of time you were on them. Well, I’ve been off the steroids now for 4 ½ months after being on them for 4 months, so I happily tossed it out this weekend!

The Trouble with Multi-Tasking

The Co-operative’s Food Magazine can be a source for the odd good recipe. I say odd, because either what they have doesn’t work with the whole low-residue thing, or is just not of interest. But’s it’s free, so I’m not complaining!

The most recent edition featured a lemon loaf recipe that I thought looked pretty good. So seeing as the weather is completely foul out today as Britain is hit with the tail-end of Hurricane Bertha, what else is a Crohnie girl going to do but stay in and bake (amongst other things).

So the recipe goes like this -

175g of sugar
110g of butter or margarine
2 eggs
4tbsp of milk
175g of self-raising flour
Zest of one or two lemons

The British like to cook by weight, Canadians by volume, so I’m always a little thrown by measuring weight. So I put the bowl on the scale, zeroed it off and started adding margarine. At first I thought it was asking for a lot, because I was pretty sure 110g of margarine was about ½ cup (ish) and it seemed like more. And then I realised it was set to ounces, not grams.

Thankfully, I hadn’t added anything yet, so I just scooped it back into the container and started again. Then I added the sugar, and beat it until fluffy.

Then I added the eggs one at a time. The first one turned out to a be a double-yolk egg. I’ve never sure what to do when that happens, but figured I would just work with it, and added the second egg once I had mixed it up. As I was making this a dairy-free recipe, I used 4tbsp of rice milk instead of milk and stirred it in.

I shredded the outside of a lemon on my cheese grater for the zest, and added that to the mix. Then I measured and folded in the flour.

I poured it into a greased 1lb loaf tin and baked it on 180C/350F for 45 minutes until my cake tester came out clean.

For the icing it said -

Juice of one or two lemons
3 tbsp of icing sugar.

I finally got around to buying a little juicer and used that to squeeze the above said lemon.

Isn't it cute?!

 Then I mixed in the icing sugar. It seemed very thin, so I added another tbsp of icing sugar.

It then said to poke holes in the loaf and then pour the glaze over top. So I used the back of a kebab skewer and poked holes and poured it over.

The icing seemed really really runny, and hadn’t mixed as well as I thought so there were sugar lumps in it.

While finishing with de-frosting the freezer (which I was doing at the same time, multi-tasking, you know!) I had the thought that if I let that glaze harden in the pan, I would never get the loaf out. So I wedged it out onto a wire rack.

Something didn’t look right. I used the right sized tin, why is it so flat?

Something's not right here

And then when checking something on my tablet, I noticed the web page that was open on converting 175g of self-raising flour to plain flour. What did I forget? Baking powder.

Crap. This is what I get for multi-tasking.

‘Tis, um, rather dense. And although nice and lemony, a bit too sweet with that glaze. I suspect this one isn’t coming on my camping trip later this week . . ..

Pierogies, aka Perogies, aka Pyrogys, etc

You can tell I’m Canadian because I’m doing a blog post on pieorgies. That may surprise you because pierogies are a staple dish of eastern Europe, but believe me when I say that Canadians are absolutely obsessed with pieorgies.

In countries like Poland and Ukraine, pieorgies were a side dish equivalent to the British and Irish use of potatoes and the Italian use of pasta. It went with everything. It’s filling, full of carbs and cheap. Time consuming to make, but cheap. Really cheap. I remember a friend’s Ukrainian-Canadian grandmother disparagingly looking at us discussing the pieorgies we had had at the Butler’s Pantry Café in Roncesvalles (once known as Toronto’s Polish ghetto, now a super-gentrified neighbourhood out of most people’s price range) and telling us that pierogies are “nothing but peasant food”. Yep, it is. And they’re bloody tasty!!

There are two reasons why Canadians are obsessed with pieorgies. One is that there have been huge waves of Czech, Slovak, Polish, Russian and especially Ukrainian immigration to Canada over the decades (hence, the variety of spellings in the title). Huge parts of the Canadian prairies were settled by Ukrainians at the during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

World's Largest Pyrogy in Glendon, Alberta. Seriously, the town symbol is a pyrogy.

And there was a lot of immigration from all over Eastern Europe to Toronto just after WWII as a huge number of "DP's" or “displaced persons” were granted asylum in Canada and many settled in and around the old factory workers housing in the western part of the city. So effectively, if you didn’t have a Polish or Ukranian grandmother raising you on pierogies, you had a friend who had a grandmother who would happily serve them to you. The other reason Canadians love pieorgies isn’t so sentimental. It’s because they’re cheap. When I was at uni, you could buy a huge bag of frozen ones at the supermarket for $5. If you were careful with them, they’d last weeks. Cheaper than the other Canadian student obsession of Kraft Dinner. And they tasted better and actually contained cheese.

What’s funny about living in the UK is how despite huge amounts of Polish immigration over the past 10 years, pieorgies have just not caught on. I lived in a town with a huge Polish population, and lived in a block of flats that was almost entirely Slovak, and it took my local Sainsbury’s five years to catch on that having a Polish food section might be a profitable idea. Meanwhile, the little Polish shop up in town was making a killing. They stock pierogies, but they were a Russian brand which I found unbearably salty. So after having an online discussion with my trusty group of Canadian ex-pats (our conversations always end up being about food), I learned to make my own thanks to someone’s Ukranian grandmother’s recipe.

What does this have to do with Crohn’s you ask? Onions aside, pierogies are low-fibre and low-residue. And full of carbs, which is what you need when you are trying to regain the weight you lost during a flare-up.

There are many ways to make pierogies, but my personal favourite is the good ol’ potato and cheese kind. Pierogies are one of the reasons why I am so glad that the whole not-being-able-to-get-dairy-down thing has ended. Plain potato ones are just, well, plain.

Pierogie making is kind of a whole day affair, so it’s the kind of think you do when the weather out is awful and you have all day. They freeze well, so you can make a huge batch and put them in the freezer for later.

To make the dough, use -
3 ½ cups of plain flour
½ tsp of salt
1 egg - beaten
2 tbsp of vegetable oil (I use sunflower oil)
3/4 cup of warm water.

Combine the flour and salt first. Combine the egg, oil and water in another bowl.

 

Make a well in the flour and pour in the liquid.

Mix well. You’ll eventually just have to use your hands. Once it’s more or less mixed, turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead well, about 5 minutes or so, until the dough is elastic. It should be neither too wet or dry. If it’s too wet, add an extra tablespoon or so of flour. If it’s too dry, wet your hands with some water while kneading (it usually doesn’t require much water to get it right, so I find this works better than pouring some in). Roll into a ball, and cover with cling film and leave to rest in a warm spot.

Meanwhile, peel and chop a big, fluffy potato (the kind used for jackets is best) and boil until cooked. Strain the water, then mash the potato, but don’t use butter or milk like you normally would for mashed potatoes. Add sea salt and freshly ground pepper, and mix. If you’re doing low-residue, add about 1tbsp of onion powder. If not, finely chop and fry some onion separately, then add it to the mixture.

This one done with onion powder

Once mashed, add a bunch of shredded cheese. A huge double handful should do it (less if you want it less cheesy). 

I like a combination of Mature Cheddar and Double Gloucester, but you can use what ever kind of cheese you like (cottage cheese is popular, but I don’t recommend it with potato, it’s too wet).  Leave to cool.

Boil a big pot of salted water. Keep it boiling on the stove while you make the pierogies.

After the dough has rested, roll it out with a rolling pin until it’s 1/4" thick. Then cut the dough into circles. Some people use fancy Pierogies cutters, I’m fond of using a Bailey’s glass.

The Bailey's glass has seen more pierogie dough than Bailey's in its time

Use a teaspoon to scoop the cheese and potato mixture into the dough, then using slightly damp fingers, crimp the edges of the dough closed. It’s really important that there is a good seal on the dough, or else the contents will explode when you boil them.

Then add them to a pot of boiling water, typically for about five minutes. The nice thing about pierogies is that your know they are cooked when they float to the top! If they stick together or stick to the bottom of the pan, add a bit of oil to the pot. Lift the pierogies out with a slotted spoon to drain.

If you are going to freeze them, parboil the pierogies for about 1 minute, then remove and drain. Once cooled, freeze initially in a single layer on a cookie sheet on some freezer paper so they don’t stick together, then transfer them to a re-sealable bag. When you want to cook them, boil a pot and throw the frozen pierogies in the pot one at a time and cook until they float.

Some people like to eat them right away, but I’m partial to the artery-hardening traditional practice of frying them before eating them. My personal preference is to fry them in butter, but margarine or olive oil work just as well. Heat the frying pan until hot, then add about a tbsp of fat. Once it’s melted, add the pierogies and fry until browned. About five minutes on each side.

And to add to the artery-hardening traditional practice? Serve with bacon!!! If you don’t do pork (for low-residue reasons or otherwise), turkey bacon is a reasonable substitute, but I’ll admit, not as nice as the piggy kind.

Truly wonderful, stick to your ribs comfort food!

Catharthis

One of the most unpleasant parts of this whole Crohn’s thing is the bloody nutritional supplements. It’s not the run of the mill ones of multivitamins and calcium supplements, which I will be on for the foreseeable future, it was the bloody Fortijuce.

This stuff is apparently good for you, or at least my dietitian said so. I still don’t believe her. Never mind that the taste is foul, it’s really just sugar-laden water filled with vitamin supplements. Truthfully, I would have preferred to have just added my vitamin drops to ½ cup of maple syrup every day. It would have had the same calorie count and would have at least tasted good. And it wouldn’t have given me the horrendous trapped wind that the supposedly good for you stuff does.

First five ingredients - water, glucose syrup, maltodextririn, milk powder, sucrose

I have a lot to say about this stuff, never mind the seeming monopoly their manufacturers seem to have on the procurement side of the NHS, but I’ll leave that for another time.

I stopped using the stuff a few months ago, with a cautious agreement from the locum dietitian, who told me that if my weight dropped again, I would be on the stuff once more. I had about half a carton left, which has been gathering dust and cobwebs in my kitchen since April.

As Friday’s weigh in at the hospital showed that my weight is almost back to what it was when I first started going to the clinic (still 1 ½ stone less than when this whole thing started, but so be it), I decided it was time to get rid of the stuff.

Yes, I know I need to clean my sink. I cleaned it afterwards.

I can’t tell you how good it felt to pour this shit down the drain! Good-bye sickly-sweet-gas-inducing-disgusting-tasting-Fortijuce! May you never grace my kitchen or my body every again!

The remaining bottles are now in their new fitting home of my recycling bin, which will be taken away Tuesday morning.

Good riddance!