Playing With My Food

I’ve had a few projects go by without blogging, so it’s time to catch up a bit. Last night, I recalled wanting to try Banana Pain au Levain from the Fresh Loaf website. We had two old bananas turning nicely brown, so I gave it a try. Her recipe is a sourdough, and I didn’t have any spare of my starter, so I used instant yeast. I also bake exclusively with whole grain flour, so I used some ground red wheat from the Grain Mill in Wake Forest. Her recipe suggests a 72% hydration and assumes that bananas are 65% water. With that guide, and the amount of banana I had on hand, I made a small loaf like this:

• 210g pureed banana (2 bananas)
• 40g water (to aid the puree)
• 245g whole red wheat flour
• 4g salt
• 3/4 tsp instant yeast

Mix together by hand then rest 5 minutes to hydrate. Knead by hand for 1-2 minutes. Stretch and fold 4 times, then rest 10 minutes, repeating the cycle for about 40 minutes. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Allow to warm for 3 hours next morning. Heat oven to 425F and bake on stone until inside reaches 202F.

A couple weeks ago I broke down and bought a Family Grain Mill to make my own flour. It’s a manual mill – I decided not to splurge on the motor base so far. Now I’m buying whole grain from the Mill in Wake Forest rather than having David  mill it into flour for me. Net result: while I’m baking bread each weekend, I spend 30-60 minutes milling up the flour for the next batch. My shoulders are still sore from yesterday’s session, but it works well and gives me a bit of exercise.I got the flaker unit as well, so I can roll oats for my breakfast. Oats are soft enough to flake pretty well. Wheat, rice and rye grains are harder and seem to shatter into coarse meal rather than flakes. I uses some of the coarse spelt meal in my weekly bread last week. It didn’t add much to the bread in the way of texture or flavor, so I’ve left it out of this week’s batch.

This week I didn’t have enough spelt flour milled up, so I replaced it with kamut flour. I think that may have been a mistake. The resulting dough was a LOT wetter and stickier than I’m used to. I couldn’t work the dough to stretch and fold it as much as I should. I nearly poured it into the loaf pan this morning. Even after the overnight rest in the fridge, it was still very sticky. It’s resting for another hour or so and rising before I’ll bake it. Hopefully it has enough gluten structure to rise to fill the pan.

Another experiment this week was coconut milk kefir. I have milk kefir grains, and my breakfast almost every morning is oatmeal, soaked/fermented overnight in fresh kefir. I read that coconut milk will actually ferment with milk grains, so I bought a coconut to try to make some. My first try was a disaster – the coconut I bought looked and sounded fine, but was moldy inside the shell. The second try yielded a good coconut. I drained the water into my blender, then shelled and peeled the meat. Put it in the blender with 1.5 cups of hot tap water, and pureed it all until fairly smooth. The hot water melts the coconut oil. Strained the milk out using one of my cheese bags, and ended up with about 1 quart of coconut milk, and a cup or two of dessicated coconut flakes. The milk seemed to ferment pretty well with the kefir grains, but the coconut oil keeps separating out and congealing. I now have some very watery coconut kefir in the fridge, covered with a solid cap of slightly fermented coconut oil. I’ve been adding the dried meat to my cereal each morning, but I don’t think I’ve gotten anything worth the effort out of the milk. Oh well. Not every experiment works out.

Kellie wanted soft pretzels again, so I repeated my recipe from this blog. They turned out well. I need to get some decent pretzel salt, however. The kosher salt works while they are fresh, but even left in a paper bag there’s enough humidity to melt the salt into the crust after an overnight sit.

Wednesday afternoon Kellie was posting Corgi pictures on facebook again. She’s been wanting a corgi dog for a while now. For whatever reason, I started looking at corgis in the area, and came across this…

URGENT!! Lexus needs donations!

Corgi Mix: An adoptable dog in Rustburg, VA

Lexus was hit by a car on Saturday, March 3. The family who found her held her till Monday, March 5, to get her some help. Lexus’ femur is broken and the ends are all askew. It’s a race against time getting the ends of the bone back together and pinning them in place! We pray it is not too late because of built-up scar tissue for this repair to hold! Please help us help Lexus! Donations are needed to cover her hospitalization! $300 isn’t so much, when you see the look in her eyes begging you to help her walk, play, and be a whole puppy once again! She is only four months old, and weighs about 10 pounds.

I knew I dared not show the listing to Kellie, or that face would make the decision. Well, I was right. We talked about her as we went out for dinner, and agreed we wanted to see if she was available for adoption. By the next morning, her story had developed further…

UPDATE: Lexus’ leg was amputated. The bone that needed to be pinned had disintegrated from her injury. She is recovering and we hope she will be up and around soon.

And on facebook…

Alas, when surgery was begun, Dr. Thomas Nelson discovered the knee joint was shattered and there was nothing to anchor the pins. Amputation was the only option for Lexus. She is now recovering from not only the amputation, but also from a broken pelvis, injured front right leg, and lots of bruising. There is good news in the midst of all this, however: Her spirits are bright and she is trying to get up! Arrangements are being made for her to go to a foster home for recuperation!

Those arrangements being made? They were with us. We both agreed that losing her leg didn’t make her any less in need of our help. With Tinker’s back trouble, we’re already used to a dog in the house who is less than fully mobile. All of our canine living space is on the main floor of the house, we have a dog door, a large fenced back yard, and ramps on the deck to reach it. Barbe with the rescue group asked us to join her at the vet’s office in Lynchburg at 10am on Saturday.

This morning we got up at 6:15am to leave the house by 7. The drive to Lynchburg took about 3 hours with stops. We were allowed to get to meet Lexus on our own by the vet, while we waited for Barbe who was busy arranging other fosters for their group. Lexus/Penny is absolutely the doll that everyone says she is. Wags her tail when you come up. Licks all over you. Barbe came in and asked if we were still interested… oh heck yes!

We had a chat with Dr. Nelson about her situation. He thinks she’s 6 months old. (She has her adult teeth in but some puppy teeth still as well.) She lost her right rear leg to the accident – there wasn’t enough of the knee left to reconstruct the joint. Her left pelvis is also fractured, so while she tries to stand up on her remaining leg, she doesn’t have the strength there yet. Her right front leg was also bruised, but not broken. She weighs 8.25lbs without her leg. At her suspected age, she’s not likely to grow much larger. He gave her rabies and distemper shots, and sent us home with an antibiotic and de-wormer. No pain meds – she’s not in any pain from the missing leg. She can eat and urinate/defecate on her own, just cannot move to an appropriate place without help. We filled out the foster/adoption contract and agreed we were taking her home for good. We paid her vet bill, which surprised and pleased Barbe. We told them she was being renamed Penny, for her copper color and the fact that we didn’t want a dog named after our car, or after the car that might have hit her.

Kellie rode home in the back seat so she could sit with or hold her new puppy. She was sweet the whole way home. Once we arrived home,  she peed in the yard before we brought her inside. Then she met the family. Phineas, Nikki, Tinker and even Boo came over to check her out, and she accepted them without trouble. Everything was looking good until we settled her in a basket at the foot of Kellie’s desk. Then she started getting territorial. When she’s in her basket, she will snarl and snap at the other dogs. When she’s out in the yard later, she’s fine with them around. It looks like she’s just defending her spot, and/or she feels a bit cornered there unable to move out of it. Either way, she’s been here only a few hours and will need time to adjust to our home.

We’re not sure what kind of mutt she is. Her face and ears look like dachshund. Her long legs and the way she looks at you face-on suggest beagle. Her color is similar to a corgi. Her temper when she snarls reminds me of a dachshund or chihuahua. Whatever the mix is, she’s very cute!

I went out to the shop and got her a collar, tag, food and other supplies. She ate her dinner quite happily even with the medication mixed into it. Now she’s curled up in her basket asleep at Kellie’s feet.

Yesterday was fun. After a pleasant morning, lunch with friends, and errands with Kellie, we had settled in to a quiet afternoon at our desks. I was playing one of my games about 430p when something hit me in the chest. It just started hurting, right under the breast bone and radiating up my throat and into my right ear. I could breathe fine, in fact, I was breathing slowly and deeply because of the pain. I took my blood pressure, which was slightly elevated 143/93 and a low heart rate at 57. Kellie asked if we needed to go to the hospital. I sat for a bit, 5 minutes or so, hoping it would pass. It didn’t. We bundled up and headed to the ER in North Raleigh.

We arrived at the ER a little after 5p by 530p or so I had been EKG’ed and triaged. The EKG was normal. Also by then, the pain had subsided (of course!) Nevertheless, they wanted to see me for more checks. We waited in the front nearly 2 hours before I was given a bed and hooked up to all the monitors. Doctor came in and started telling me everything that would have happened if it were my heart, and thus what they were looking for. (Note the lack of any interest in alternate explanations. Find out what happened to my heart was the only concern.) I had blood work – clear. I had a chest xray eventually (10p) – also clear. One last bit of blood work at 11:10p – clear. At 11:45p they let me go, with no indications that my heart had any problems or had damaged part of itself to loss of circulation.

I managed to read 2/3rds of a Carl Hiaasen book I had on my phone. The ER nurse saw my thyroid condition, and was telling me about her own thyroid and how she like many such patients has a low B12 level and that causes more problems. Kellie is reading her own medical book which talks about (surprise!) a patient on the MI express, diagnosed with a heart problem that ultimately turns out to be B12 deficiency.

Apparently the world wants me to learn about my B12 levels. So that’s my reading for today. Still don’t know what happened yesterday to cause this. The doctor didn’t ask about my diet, or he’d have known I had a salty/acidic lunch of sushi, soy sauce, and ginger dressing. And followed that with a coffee at Starbucks with Kellie. Not terribly unusual for me, but also things that could cause reflux. So maybe that was it. Suffice to say, if it happens again, I’ll look for an antacid first and see what that does for me.

Friday dinner we found an old round roast in the back of the freezer from before our local-meat-only days. Rather than waste it, I went ahead and cubed it into stew meat and browned it. In the crock pot, I put the meat, 1 qt of my chicken stock, one diced onion, 2 stalks celery, 2 carrots, one bell pepper, sliced crimini mushrooms and some garlic. Basically by volume there were more veggies than meat. Added a bit more water, a little beef base, and some red wine. Let the pot simmer all day, then thicken with a little kamut flour. Served over homemade kamut pasta squares = beef and veggie stroganoff. It mostly worked, but that meat was still super dry even after stewing all day. Glad I won’t be buying any more of it.

Saturday I started my weekly baking. I made my spelt-rye sourdough bread recipe, with a little twist. I reduced the water to 300g and added 120 g of cooked, whole-grain kamut, so it had big chunks of softened grain in it. I can’t stretch the dough to form a skin without the grain kernels popping out. Even so, I took it out of the fridge this morning, shaped it, and put it in a loaf pan to rise before baking later today.

I also made a trip to Kroger to return my creamline milk jugs. They had a fresh supply of creamline milk, so I bought another gallon to play with some cheese. I like making cheese, but I really don’t have a good aging cave, which severely limits how much I can do with it. And I don’t know that I’d use a cave (or old wine fridge, really) enough to justify the cost of another appliance. I settled for making more uncured cheddar curds like last time, with another twist of my own. When I prepared the milk for the culture, I took about 10g of blue cheese that we had on hand, and dissolved it in a few tbsp of milk from the batch. The idea being to try to culture some of the penicillin mold from the existing cheese into the curd. It may or may not do anything with the short (12-24 hour) aging that these curds are currently sitting through. I don’t think it can hurt anything to try. In their raw stage, just before I set them out to dry and age, they tasted about the same as normal curds.

Things I learned from What You Must Know About Statin Drugs, by Jay Cohen, MD:

• most cholesterol recommendations are based on studies of patients who have already had heart problems, and therefore the target numbers presented are extra conservative to prevent a second heart attack
• my own numbers are less than 10% off reasonable limits
• my current statin medicine is expected to change my cholesterol by more than 25%, so it’s overkill
• statin drugs interfere with brain function as a side effect in some people. (I have not noticed this, myself. Nor had I tried to look for it.)
• four nutrients have more effect on heart health than cholesterol levels and statin drugs: Omega-3 oils (and reducing Omega-6 oils), Coenzyme Q10, Folic Acid, and Magnesium.
• Saturated fat (a) is the devil incarnate according to the author, (but with frequent nods to Dr Mercola championing coconut oil in spite of it being saturated);  (b) has not been confirmed in clinical trials to have any correlation to cholesterol levels; and yet (c) reducing saturated fat as part of a low fat diet is “proven” to improve heart health. Confused yet? Me too.
• Red Yeast Rice is a natural fermented product that produces a family of statin like compounds, including the compound that was later refined and patented as lovastatin.
• A healthy diet includes good carbs and good fats, and avoids bad carbs and bad fats. (Saturated fats are bad fats.)

On the other side of the debate, I’ve started reading The Great Cholesterol Con, by Malcolm Kendrick, MD. He’s a little hard to take seriously, as his writing is more sensational and less clinical than the first author. There’s a line somewhere been alternative scientists and conspiracy theory nuts, and I really have trouble telling which side he’s on. He is on the side of the Atkins, Taubes, and Fallons of the diet debate, for whatever respectability that brings to the discussion. He tells me that:

• There is no correlation between cholesterol levels and heart health
• Cholesterol measurements are actually measuring lipoprotein carriers used by the body to transport fats and cholesterol through the blood.
• The presence of these carriers is assumed to be the cause of plaques and clots in the arteries, and that this assumption has never been proven even though widely accepted.
• Saturated fats and cholesterol in the diet have no effect on cholesterol levels in the blood. The liver has to make additional cholesterol for you to maintain necessary levels, and adjusts accordingly to the amount it receives in your diet.
• “Why do eggs contain a lot of cholesterol? Because it takes a lot of cholesterol to build a healthy chicken!” An amusing quote, and one that underscores the point that our cell walls and neurons require cholesterol to function properly. (This seems a likely explanation for why statin drugs can cause neural problems by blocking cholesterol production.)
• When the liver processes fat for storage in our bodies, it creates saturated fat. Unsaturated fats must be processed by the liver before they can be used by the body.
• Trans-fats are evil because they are not compatible with our liver enzymes that process fats. Contrast this to the pro-cholesterol camp saying trans-fats are evil because they raise LDL and lower HDL cholesterol levels.

What to do with all of this? So far, I’ve added red yeast rice to my daily regimen as a lower-dosage statin than the one I was taking. I’m on the fence about whether or not I need to keep taking this in the long term. I haven’t noticed any side effects or benefits either way. I did add a CoQ10 supplement as well, both as a necessary nutrient and because statins are proven to interfere with the body’s production of this enzyme. I’ve already been taking 2g of Omega-3 fish oil every day, and removed Omega-6 vegetable oils from my diet. I have also added saturated fats back to my diet: coconut oil, butter, whole-fat milk. These items pass the “was it considered food 100 years ago” test, where corn oil, soybean oil, and margarine do not. Lard also passes that test, in spite of the statement that “lard is never a good fat” by the pro-statin book. Lard and butterfats have been around longer than the diet and heart-disease epidemics. That alone makes me think that they are not the culprits that food policy thinks they are.