Inconsequential Meanderings

 The other day, Husband showed me this cartoon. He couldn't stop laughing. He laughed for a solid ten minutes. Of course, the longer and harder he laughed, the more it made me laugh, too.

You know how it is when something just hits you right. 

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The other day, I was in the shower when I heard the bathroom door quietly open and close. A moment later, Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" started blaring through the room, and since the bluetooth speaker was all the way across the room (and I was soaking wet), I couldn't throw the speaker against the wall. There are a few songs I just can't stand, and Husband knows that is one of them. 

A few minutes later, Neil Diamond's "I Am, I Said" started up. I gave up shouting at Husband to shut it off and started singing along at the top of my lungs, lamenting with Neil that our furniture refuses to acknowledge our existence. Husband just giggled to himself from the bedroom. 

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My Italian friend, Marco, and his wife are visiting family in Italy at the moment. He sent me this pic from the white beaches south of Livorno to make me jealous. 

Jerk.

Wait, is he flexing his legs to show off the muscles he has from playing tennis? Probably. I would, too, if I had any muscles.

And this one.

He lives in Seattle. I guess I can't begrudge him a little sunshine. 

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I thought of a good plot for a story: a girl excels at a sport and gets recruited to professional competition teams only to discover that, at those levels, the entire system is rigged because there is entirely too much money to be made to let anything happen by chance--or even skill. Once she learns this, she faces a serious choice.

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My son, Gary, asked me today what my earliest memory is. It is when I was two years old. My dad brought me into my parents' room to see my newborn baby brother, whom my mother had given birth to at home (on purpose). I remember some mild curiosity but no attachment to the small thing lying next to my mother.

Don't worry, we got to be very good friends as we got older.

My next memory is when that brother was now two years old and I was four. We had a gerbera daisy in a vase, and the stem had split in two, and both ends had curled up in opposite directions. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, so I took the daisy and my little brother outside to show it to any of the dozens of kids who lived in my neighborhood. The first kids we encountered were a group of older boys (probably about seven or eight years old), and when I showed them the daisy, they grabbed it and stomped on it and laughed. I remember being a little sad about the daisy and curious as to why the boys had felt the need to destroy it, but I don't remember feeling fear that the boys would hurt me, too. 

Also from that time period: my parents owned a lot of 5-gallon buckets--probably for food storage, which they have always taken very seriously. I would stack the buckets in the living room and sit in the top one while watching cartoons (in the brief time that my parents actually owned a TV before I was a teenager). In my memory, I was so high up off the ground that it was like sitting in the top of a teetering tower, but I was probably only three or four buckets high at the most. 

This isn't an early memory, but I very clearly remember the satisfaction I used to get as a tween by arranging my mother's spice cabinet several times a month. Also taking all the ornaments off the Christmas tree and rehanging them in a different (more beautiful) way. I often wonder where that deep sense of satisfaction in organizing and arranging things went to. 

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I had to go to the high school today to get updated class rosters for each of our seminary periods. The counseling office was too busy, so I went and bothered one of the secretaries in the main office. They are all still struggling with the new system the school district is using, but she took some time to learn how to get me the information that I needed, which was very kind. On the way in and out, walking down the very long hallway to the exit closest to the seminary building, I encountered some seminary students and actually remembered their names. Small wins! There are plenty of times when I'm helping a student and know the student has been at seminary for a couple years, and I know their face, but I just can't remember their name, and I have to ask, and I watch them be just a little disappointed. 

Today I also enrolled Gary in seminary, even though he is still homeschooling. That means I have to run home and get him right before his class, but he enjoyed his class today. I put him in Kim's class. I wasn't playing favorites with the teachers. Kim's class had the lowest enrollment number at the time, so that's where I put Gary. 

Thanks. I'm done rambling.

And Just Like That, Summer Is Over

 Don't worry: I'm not going to regale you with lengthy tales of soybeans yet again, though I will say that the nut milk maker is awesome and worth every penny. I throw in a couple handfuls of raw soybeans, push a button, and thirty minutes later I have a liter of delicious hot soy milk before the thing starts cleaning itself. If I soak and boil a big batch of beans and store them in the fridge beforehand, I can have a liter of cold soy milk in three minutes (I just use the almond milk setting in that situation).

Did I mention it cleans itself? I made this video for my mom.

I have started taking both DHEA and 5-HTP, both of which help regulate female hormones, and I am happy to tell you that I have noticed a significant reduction in the frequency and intensity of hot flashes. I don't think the soy was having much of an effect on its own--delicious as it is--but maybe the combination of the DHEA and 5-HTP with the soy is what is making a big difference. I'm just happy to get some relief!

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Summer is over. I've been back at work for a couple weeks, and the students recently started their new school year. I have the best job. When kids yell, "Sister Aurora! I missed you so much!" it makes me smile. I spend all day having positive interactions with students and faculty. 

One of the students (a lovely young woman) left me this note yesterday:

How does it get better than that? I really didn't do anything special except be excited to see her and invite her into my office for chats because I knew she was going through some rough times. People just want to be seen and heard and loved for who they are. 

The former sophomore boys who decided I was their seminary mom last year all turned into high school juniors, sprouted a foot or two over the summer, are quietly proud of their (slightly) thickening facial hair, and are even more supremely confident that they are always welcome in my office--even at the most inconvenient of times. Well, they are always welcome as long as they refrain from turning all my paper clips into chains or using my office as a place to hide from classes they should be attending. As crazy busy as the first few days of school have been, I've managed to have some great talks with quite a few of them.

Working with the new faculty is turning out well. It's a different vibe, but everyone is learning to mesh. Griff is a strong leader, even if he is suddenly the youngest faculty member, and he has a knack for getting different personalities to work together without anyone feeling slighted. I have known Denise, one of the new teachers, for over a decade now, and I'm happy to say that we also work well together. As a former administrative assistant herself until three years ago, she has been a source of some really good tips and tricks for doing my job, though she is careful not to try to do my job for me and I am careful not to go to her with most of my questions. Griff is soft-training the other new teacher to our building, Josh, on the ins and outs of administration as a principal, so I try to include Josh as much as possible in the questions and conversations I have with Griff about day-to-day operations. Ryan, who ran a one-man-show in a Wyoming seminary for three decades before moving here for the 2021-22 school year, has now established himself as a trusted, loved, and respected teacher at this seminary and trusted assistant track coach at the high school. He only has four years until retirement, and he is happy to just be a teacher again. He is so good at building up the students he teaches and coaches, and many students love him. Kim still laughs at my jokes and still has an almost cult-like following amongst some of the students. Some of them will only talk to Kim about their troubles.

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Recently, our leather couch broke in a way that couldn't be repaired. There was no way I was going to put all that lovely leather out on the curb for trash day, so Husband helped me dismantle the couch for parts. 

We saved all the leather and the stretchy bands, to be used in future small upholstery projects. The dissected mess that ended up on the curb prompted some humorous comments from the neighbors about what must be going on in our house.

With some of the leather, I decided to make a traveler's notebook. I found a nicely-sized scrap and measured it out against some inexpensive composition books I bought from Walmart.

I ordered some eyelets and some elastic cording from Amazon, but because the cording will take a while to arrive, I bought some elastic cording from Walmart in the interim. The jewelry cording, the only kind I could find, is too thin, and the eyelets I ordered are too large, but it worked for now.

This is a blurry photo. Sorry! But you can see the eyelets I inserted in the spine in order to thread the elastic cording to the inside of the traveler's notebook. The cording provides four places for the composition books to be inserted by opening each of them to the middle and sliding one of the elastic cords into the spine. In the middle of the notebook's leather spine, I threaded another long piece of leather that wraps around and closes the notebook. 

I don't have a lot of leather tools, so I just rounded the square edges of the leather with scissors. I must say that the finished traveler's notebook feels very good in my hands. The leather is already soft and pliable after being on a couch for years and years, and it has a great patina. 

Aside from using smaller eyelets and thicker elastic cording in the future, I will also make a few handmade paper inserts and use the heavier composition books for something else. This will make the traveler's notebook a little lighter, and I can also include pockets for ephemera like receipts or other pieces of paper.

Now I guess I need to break it in by traveling somewhere. I currently have it in the purse that goes to work with me, but I believe it wants a much more ambitious adventure. 

My son, Gary, and his friend, JJ, saw my traveler's notebook and fell instantly in love. They both adore that kind of thing. I figured making a couple more would give me some more experience, so I found some pieces of leather large enough and crafted each of them their own traveler's notebook. They are both very happy with them, but, as fifteen-year-old boys, they will probably forget about them as soon as the immediate rush wears off, and the notebooks will gather dust under their beds or on a shelf somewhere. 

I am going to use more of the leather to make some bags, maybe as a gift for my MIL, who loves bags. The leather is thin enough for me to sew on my sewing machine with a special leather needle and heavy-duty thread. 

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Can you tell I'm going through the camera roll on my phone?

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Earlier this summer, Husband and I took Gary and his friend, Molly (with whom he has been besties since they were seven years old), on an impromptu trip to Crystal Hot Springs in Honeyville, Utah. Whenever we pass through Layton, Utah, we make a point of stopping at A Little Taste of Britain to get some fish and chips. 

Of all the pictures I took of these two, this one was, surprisingly, the least goofy. 

Husband dug into beef-and-onion pie and chips doused with malt vinegar and smothered with curry sauce. I chose fish and chips--also heavily doused in malt vinegar--and they were delicious. 

After lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon simmering gently in the mineral hot springs. It was really hot outside, but it was still incredibly relaxing to be there. I just floated in the huge Olympic-sized pool that is kept at 85 deg. F between trips to the much warmer pools. Husband and the kids bought passes for the two water slides, but I had no interest in all of that and stuck with lazy floating and transdermal mineral absorption.

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In order to celebrate all the August birthdays, we got together as a family at a bowling alley. 

(I realize that, in all of the pics I have of Husband, he's wearing a dark gray t-shirt. The pics were taken weeks apart, at times, but he does own a lot of gray shirts. I promise he does not wear the same thing every day. Also, I do laundry regularly.)

Husband holding Nicholas next to our daughter, Sian, Nicholas's beautiful mommy.

Tyler and his daddy rode the roller coaster ride. Tyler did his very best to enjoy it, but he didn't really appreciate all the shaking.

Tyler loved bowling for the first time. He was so happy when he knocked down even one pin, and he cheered for everyone else's successes, as well. My daughter, Elannah, took particular pleasure in treating him to arcade games and winning him tickets for prizes. 

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I don't have pictures of this, but Husband recently turned 50 years old. I'm the best wife because I did not throw him a surprise party, which would have been his idea of the worst possible turn of events. Instead, I made him homemade beef-and-onion pies and roasted potatoes for his birthday dinner, and we spent a quiet evening at home with the boys. 

Speaking of roasted potatoes, my roasted potatoes came up spontaneously in conversation again last week at work. Griff occasionally talks about them with longing, reminiscing about the times I made them for the faculty, describing their crunchy, crispy exteriors and tender interiors to the new faculty members. I think he's hinting at something...

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I didn't accomplish all the things I planned to accomplish over the summer, but I really enjoyed it despite that. My older son, Joseph, made some great strides with coping with his anxiety/depression by finding a great therapist and working on positive coping methods. Husband managed to nearly finish the rough draft of his third book in his middle-grades series about a boy trying to prevent Ragnarok. My daughters each accomplished some of their own goals. 

I am content.

Flirtations with Soybeans, Part 2

 It is now established that I both need and enjoy soy milk. The problem is that making it by hand is such a long process. While I have the time right now before school starts again to spend an hour or so every other day boiling, blending, and squeezing the milk from the beans, there is a much more efficient method of doing all of that: buy a soy milk machine.

The only reason I didn't buy one right away was because I wanted to make sure that my initial passion remained burning. I so often get excited about something, and then, once the honeymoon phase wears off (usually when I get frustrated with how consistently terrible my initial attempts turn out to be), I set it aside for a while. I don't love that about myself, so I'm trying to make myself finish projects and be less of a perfectionist (after all, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing poorly until you get better at it). In this case, however, making soy milk might be time-consuming, but it's very simple, so I haven't managed to mess it up. I absolutely love the resulting milk mixed with a dash of salt, a tiny bit of sugar-free sweetener, and a dab of vanilla extract. I crave it. I actually had a dream the other night that featured people made out of various concentrations of soy milk. I won't try to go into detail on that dream because it was really weird and I cannot make any sense of it; but that's how much I've been thinking about soy milk. 

I started looking for soy milk machines, focusing on the sweet spot between milk-making capacity and price. I was thinking something in the range of about $140 would be acceptable. Even if I had to clean the machine every time I used it, it would still save me a lot of time overall. Then, Husband, noting the toll the hot flashes are taking on me, and anxious to help me stop spending my days going slowly mad by having a mini sun burst to life in my chest and causing me to sweat copiously at least once every hour, got involved in the search. When Husband gets involved, things happen--and usually for less than retail!

Long story short, this miracle is arriving to our porch on Monday:

This cost way more than my original $140 budget, but, of course, Husband found it on sale, and we decided it's a good investment because I will use it every day. We were also lucky to snag the last available machine on Amazon (sorry, everyone else!). 

This sucker has ten functions (including making various types of vegan milks, smoothies, and soup), but the most important functions to me are these: 1) it makes soy milk from dried beans; and 2) IT CLEANS AND STERILIZES ITSELF! I spend at least fifteen minutes cleaning up the pot, colander, bowls, blender, other utensils, and the countertop after making the milk. I soak a lot of beans at once so I have enough milk to last a couple days, but with his machine, I can choose to make a liter of soy milk or just one cup at a time--and, like a coffee machine, I can program it to start at a certain time. 

I tried making tofu for the first time yesterday, but the milk just would not coagulate into curds despite all my efforts. I wasted three liters of milk! I'll try again with a smaller amount of soy milk after I finish writing this. I asked my mom for tips (she's made tofu for years), so, hopefully, I'll have better luck with her advice. Maybe the nigari salts (magnesium chloride) I was using as a coagulant were too old and ineffective. Or I stirred it wrong. 

Wish me luck. I would absolutely love not having hot flashes anymore. There's nothing fun about them. If phytoestrogens can help me out, I'm all for it. 

This Is Not What I Planned to Write Today

If you're like me, you tend to overthink things. It's so irritating that my brain can take positive interactions with people and turn them into haunting questions like "do they actually find me completely annoying?" or "am I so stupid that I don't get that people are just laughing at me, not with me?" Perfectly positive and upbeat interactions get twisted into depressing question marks. I know my brain spirals are not reasonable and are not based in logic because I am not completely un-self-aware (I'm way too self-aware, which is the problem), but emotion is frequently and frustratingly impervious to logic and reason.

I got a call today from one of the ladies I am somewhat acquainted with at church. She had made a comment during a discussion on faith in our class, and she had shared some concerns she was dealing with. She was calling me because, during her comment, the ladies sitting behind her had laughed, and I guess she had been stewing over the worry that they were laughing at her because they thought she was stupid for having the concern. She even got a little emotional on the phone, which both surprised and annoyed her. 

Girl, I've been there and done that! 

I was happy to reassure her that the women who had chuckled were doing so in solidarity, not in derision. She had described a concern that every one of us has faced, and I told her that I always appreciate when someone is willing to make themselves vulnerable in order to ask a sincere question. Even if we don't all face the exact same situations, everyone could relate to her general concern, and that was what the women were laughing about. They wanted to communicate to this woman that they understood and commiserated. 

She was relieved and thanked me before we hung up, and I have been sitting here appreciating the fact that this woman had the sense to get someone else's more objective perspective in order to help her stop spiraling. I have an incredibly difficult time making myself vulnerable, and it fascinates me when people are able to let down their guards and allow themselves to be vulnerable--especially in public. I don't know if I can do that. I feel like I can expose only certain parts of myself, but there is a part of me I protect so fiercely that I doubt I can ever expose it to anyone, even Husband. I've gotten better, but when I was young, it used to almost put me into a rage if someone was able to guess what I was thinking about something that was a sensitive topic to me--only because I felt too exposed, and not because I have any rotting skeletons in my closet. I hid the rage, which I realized was actually fear, and I have become less anxious about exposure the older I've become, but I still feel like I too carefully curate my persona so that I can protect the tenderest, most vulnerable part of myself. Is that just me or is everyone like that? Am I emotionally stunted or is that merely part of my INFJ personality?

Anyway, let's be done with that. I managed to turn this into a bit of naval gazing, didn't I? The point is that I am in awe of this woman and her willingness to ask the question in order to get an objective answer. I was happy to be able to honestly and unreservedly reassure her that the women who laughed were on her side. I cannot imagine any of the women in that room would have purposefully laughed at her to make her feel bad. They just aren't like that. 

Sophia and Matt have come over to hang out and play Mario Party with Husband and the other kids, so I am going to go make some chicken parmesan to keep them here for dinner. Whatever else I am, I am pretty confident in my cooking skills. 

I Did Not Die at Girls Camp

 Did I think I was having a heart attack last Friday? Yes.

As you know, I went to Girls Camp last week. It was at a Church-owned high adventure camp perched on the side of a mountain at 7500 feet above sea level, which is about 1.5 miles straight up (2.3 km). At the camp, there were three different ropes courses, hatchet throwing, zip lines, and various other sports available. I don't know what good any of those activities are when you are gasping for air every time you exert yourself even a little, but we were lucky to get reservations and the girls were all very excited. I suppose we went in somewhat acclimated because, for us, it was only another 3000 feet higher from where we normally live. 

Adult leaders were encouraged to participate in all the activities, so I did. On our first day, we were scheduled for the high ropes course, the hardest of all the courses, with two levels of torture layered one on top of the other. You could either be really high up and scared or really, really high up and absolutely petrified.

One of the young women on the lower course moves her C-clamp around to get herself to the next challenge. 

Yes, I harnessed myself up and completed enough of the lower course exercises (three) to get myself around to the zip line that would take me back to solid ground. I may be old and fat, but I'm still ready for an adventure even when I have moments of "I've just made a serious mistake." I'm sure I looked like a beached whale that has been driven up a mountain and prodded up a ladder to flail--flukes a-flappin'--across ridiculously precarious cables and ropes. While it wasn't exactly fun, per se, it was very gratifying to have finished. 

A brave girl on the top ropes course.

That night, after having finally fallen asleep in my tent for a couple hours, I awoke in utter agony. I had sharp pains centered around my heart with shooting pain down both arms. There was no position in which I could get comfortable--even sitting up--and while I didn't cry, I did feel very sorry for myself for a good three hours. I reasoned that we were so far from any medical help that I might as well let everyone else get a good night's sleep before having to deal with my dead body in the morning. To make matters worse, my cell phone battery was dead, so I couldn't even use my phone to distract myself from the pain (I was one of the only ones who still had cell coverage at the camp). I just tossed and turned and listened to the pitter-patter of raindrops on my tent's fly cover and the small animals passing by my tent.

Around 5am, when the sky started lightening and the first bird woke up, it finally dawned on me (dawned, haha!) that this was not, in fact, a heart attack but deep muscle trauma from the ropes course. I had been holding almost my entire weight by my arms and shoulders for about 45 minutes the evening before, and that is not something I usually do at any altitude. Mentally comforted but still in physical agony, I decided it was late enough in the morning and light enough outside to go and rummage around for the First Aid box and swallow 800 mg of ibuprofen. Within an hour, I was feeling like I was going to live. I also felt pretty stupid, which isn't something ibuprofen can fix (alas). I should have packed ibuprofen in my bag.

Fortunately, everyone had a great time at camp--though not during any of the times we had to hike up any inclines, and all of the trails were either steeply downhill or steeply uphill. (I did not know my lungs could hurt that badly trying to gasp in enough oxygen.) Pranks were played, fears were overcome, and testimonies were strengthened. Hopefully, next year's camp will be easier on me because I'm losing weight, but I'm pretty sure I would have been in agony no matter what weight I carried after doing that ropes course. The fact that the couple missionaries who run the camp are older than I am and were still shimmying around that &$*(# ropes course like it was nothing is just embarrassing, but it's a good incentive to keep going.

The two junior camp leaders having a cooling swim in a lake before we headed up into the higher altitudes. 

My Initial Flirtation with Soybeans

EDIT: I realize now that I am repeating myself a bit from my last post. Sorry about that. I don't tend to re-read my previous posts before starting a new one. 

I ordered some non-GMO soybeans and just finished making my first batch of soy milk. I am surprised to find that I like it.

I didn't always appreciate soy. In fact, for a long time, I have considered it dangerous in large quantities; but dealing with the return of hot flashes and doing more research in desperation has convinced me I was wrong -- at least for myself, as others may not do as well with soy. As a Blood Type A, soy is supposed to be more medicine than food for me, working miracles in my hormone-imbalanced, middle-aged body.

When I was growing up, my mom cooked healthy food. I'm talking crunchy granola, tree-hugging, hippy-type food even though she was not a hippy in any way. She ground her own wheat and made bread, we raised chickens for the eggs and meat, she grew a garden for years, and everything we ate was as natural as she could get it. Bean-cheese toast (on homemade wheat bread, of course) was a frequent dinner dish because it was a complete protein. She often said she only shopped around the edges of the grocery store, where all the whole foods reside. 

We were also not rolling in the dough, so Mom never spent money on the unhealthy convenience foods and sugary treats that my fellow schoolmates had in their lunches (which made me pretty jealous sometimes). I think I've mentioned before that my high school lunches (which she was kind enough to make for me even though she could have told me to be a big girl and make my own, so thank you, Mom!) always included a wedge of raw red cabbage that I was instructed to eat for dessert, as cabbage has enzymes to aid in digestion.

My mom's early flirtations with soybeans gave me food nightmares for years. In elementary school, I remember one day pulling out my lunch and finding that it consisted of a cup full of rice mixed with boiled soybeans, seasoned with some soy sauce. I liked rice and soy sauce, but I hated boiled soybeans. They made me gag every time I had to eat them. The slight crunch, the taste, the consistency of the pulp left in my teeth after chewing...everything about them repulsed me in a visceral way (to this day I cannot stand edamame). I gagged my way through a couple bites of the rice and soybeans before I gave up and sat in dismay in that cheery lunchroom painted with massive Peanuts characters, my lunch inedible. I felt pretty sorry for myself.

Around 2005 or so, Mom was going through menopause, so she pulled soybeans out of her arsenal again. This time, she made soy milk and tofu and ate them daily. Doing that prevented her from suffering from the symptoms of The Change, and though it was time-consuming to make homemade soy milk and tofu, it was well worth it to her to be able to control what was in the final products. We lived with my parents at the time, and I can testify that her firm tofu, fried with soy sauce and garlic, was delicious, though I wasn't as much of a fan of the plain soy milk. 

Fast forward to today, and my tastebuds must have changed because my body is desperate for the soy phytoestrogens it needs to balance my hormones. 

I soaked the beans overnight before rubbing off most of the thin bean skins and discarding them. Then I boiled the beans for exactly fifteen minutes before draining them and blending them thoroughly with some fresh water. I added a little vanilla and a squirt of liquid Stevia, and the resulting smoothie was dang good and very filling. The soy milk itself has a very neutral flavor with just a hint of sweetness. 

The nut milk bag I ordered with a tofu press and nagari salts (for coagulating soy milk into curds to make tofu) hasn't arrived yet, so I couldn't squeeze the milk out of the soybean pulp (okara); instead, I just drank the well-blended okara and milk together, which I enjoyed like a thick milkshake. Then I added a spoonful of peanut butter, a sprinkle of cocoa powder, and a pinch of salt, and that was also really good. 

I soaked a lot of beans and didn't use all of them for today's experiment. I will freeze the rest of the soaked, boiled beans to await my return from Girls Camp, which starts tomorrow.

 I'm trying to be excited. I better go pack.

Father's Day Sushi Feast and Fun

It's definitely summer. The temps are rising into the triple digits, I don't set my alarm to get up in the morning, and I only work for a few hours a week. 

Husband and I are back on the low-carb lifestyle, and I quickly ended up reverting to only one meal a day as soon as I cut out sugar and low-nutrient carbs. I guess OMAD (One Meal a Day) is my natural rhythm because I just don't get hungry until about 1pm or 2pm when I load up on protein and low-carb foods until I'm comfortably full and then don't need to eat any more until the next day. I have lost an average of a little over half a pound a day eating this way as well as cut out the need for heartburn medication and eliminated the symptoms of insulin resistance (including skin tags).

I'm getting older, however, and things haven't gone exactly the same as they did even just a couple years ago, so I've had to make some minor adjustments. First, after the first two weeks of eating mostly OMAD, I've had to switch to two smaller meals within a four-to-six-hour window instead of one large meal because I wasn't getting enough calories. I also had to add in some more carbs. It has been immediately obvious that eating low-carb (which means cooking from scratch almost 100% of the time) has thrown off my estrogen/progesterone balance, and maybe one of the reasons is because I'm not getting as much soy estrogen from packaged foods and junk foods. I'm speculating here, but there is no question that going low-carb on whole foods immediately equaled some unforeseen side effects having to do with an estrogen/progesterone imbalance, including the return of hot flashes (though only very occasionally and not the former fifteen to twenty per day, thank goodness!). My mom and I had a long talk yesterday about how she made her own soy milk and tofu for years, which got her through peri-menopause with almost no symptoms whatsoever. 

I remember my mom making soy milk because we lived with my parents for a long time before buying our own house. She bought a soy milk maker and organic, non-GMO soybeans. Two batches of beans in the soy milk maker would yield enough soy milk for plenty of homemade tofu (she made it very firm) as well as milk for a soy milk/berry shake every morning. The pulp left over from making soy milk is called okara, and she used that to make croquettes that she fried in a little bit of butter. It was quite an undertaking, to say the least. The soy milk maker did a lot of the hard work, but she still had to coagulate the milk into curds and then press the curds in a tofu box to extract the whey, which took a while, though the resulting tofu was delicious when sliced and fried in some seasonings. Cleaning the soy milk maker was also tedious. Yet I am tempted to buy my own soy milk maker and organic, non-GMO soybeans and make a go of it. 

Speaking of my mom, we had a big family get-together yesterday at our house for Father's Day. Almost all the usual attendees were there (my parents, my brother Aaron, my sister Ann and her SO, my three married daughters and their spouses, and all of us who live here; missing were my nephew, who had to work, and my youngest brother, Thomas, who also had to work), and we had a great time. When my three-year-old grandson, Tyler, walked in, he threw up his hands and shouted "Hi! I'm here!" because we all get very excited when he shows up, and he loves that. He had a great time.

I decided to make Sushi Bake--or Deconstructed Sushi, if you want to sound more avant-guard--and it was a big hit. We all love sushi, but making sushi rolls is one of the most tedious ways to spend hours of your time for a couple minute's worth of eating. Instead, you make sushi as a casserole, which will give you at least ten rolls' worth of great sushi experience for a fraction of the time spent making it. In short, you press the seasoned sushi rice into the bottom of a 9 x 13 pan, top the rice with furikake seasoning (found in Asian grocery stores) followed by whatever sushi filling ingredients you want to use. In this case, I kept it very simple by shredding surimi (fake crab) in my food processor and then mixing it with mayonnaise. On top of the crab filling, I squirted lines of Kewpie mayo (Japanese mayo), sriracha-mayo, and unagi sauce (eel sauce) before baking the casserole for fifteen minutes to get it warm. I served it with chopped cucumber, sliced avocado, sliced green onions, roasted sesame seeds, and more of the previous sauces along with squares of nori seaweed. Everyone scooped the sushi filling into their seaweed squares to eat it. 

I made two pans of the Sushi Bake and a huge pot of hot and sour soup (yes, I mixed Japanese and Chinese cuisine) to fill in the nooks and crannies if anyone was still hungry. Everyone got seconds of the Sushi Bake, and I still have a ton of the soup left (Elannah loves hot and sour soup and has been asking for me to make it again, so having leftovers was my goal). 

My kids and family are used to me making weird stuff, so they're experienced in bravely trying out my attempts at international cuisine, and I am fortunate that my sons-in-law are also pretty food-adventurous. Not everyone in the world enjoys trying unfamiliar foods. Still, if they want to marry into our family, they're going to have to put up with my food experiments. I was very happy with the outcome. We all talked and laughed and played games until I was ready to drop, and then they all went home and Husband and I collapsed into bed.

Sushi is definitely not low-carb, but I ate some protein before eating dinner and then didn't eat any dessert. Also, even though it was my second meal of the day, my first meal was pure protein. Also, the fact that you mix vinegar into the sushi rice helps to slightly mitigate the insulin response from the rice. I won't be eating this type of thing again for a long time, so that is how I justified it, haha. 

Today I had to run to the store, and I stopped by the soup aisle to grab more bouillon because I had decimated my bouillon supply making the hot and sour soup yesterday. Two men were standing there looking at the broths and bouillon, so I snuck in next to them and snagged a bottle of beef Better Than Bouillon, which prompted one of the men to ask me if I liked it better than granulated bouillon because he had never tried the Better Than Bouillon paste. We had a little chat about bouillon and then they asked if I make bone broth and if I roast the bones before making the broth, which I do. We bid each other a good day and separated to continue our shopping, and I thought how fun it is to have unexpected pleasant little conversations with strangers. Is that mainly an American thing to just spontaneously strike up a conversation with strangers? It's been a long, long time since I was out of the country. The other day in the checkout line at a different grocery store, the cashier (whom I had never met before) quietly confided in me when I asked her how she was doing that she was having a hot flash and was very uncomfortable. I can definitely sympathize, so I told her about evening primrose oil, and she asked me to write it down so she could get some later. I hope it helps her like it did me. Weirdly, I had almost the same conversation with the lady who cut my hair a day later. I must be God's ambassador for evening primrose oil.