In Which I Have Fun in Public

Our Director of Nursing at "Mountain View" is leaving for a post closer to her home, so several of us staff members met at Applebees for dinner to say goodbye. She has such wonderful qualities, honesty, a quirky sense of humor, rarely found in DNS's, and she'll be hard to replace. I will miss her.

When the dinner was planned, I had just committed to the plant based whole foods eating style, so I stopped by Applebees to scout out the menu then. I had steamed vegetables with a house salad, and learned Rule Number One: Always ask questions. The house salad had cheese and bacon on it, and they very kindly made me another one without. So I had found an edible entree and figured I was set for tonight. Honestly, this was the only plant-based entree in the entire menu.

So tonight when the group of us were seated, I scanned the menu through and through and didn't see this entree. Oh, dear. Fortunately I asked the waiter, and he said they still make that entree but it just isn't listed on the menu any more. Not popular enough. So all was well. Along with a salad with greens, cucumber and plum tomatoes, the steamed vegetables included cauliflower, broccoli, baby carrots, zucchini, and potatoes. Delicious and ample. So I was able to talk about my change to a whole food plant based diet with the friends at my table and impart a lot of information. For example, that casein contains an opiate-like substance, and some other foods such as chocolate that also affect our brains and keep us "hooked." [See Breaking the Food Seduction by Neal Barnard, MD.]

I'm sure followers will recall that in 2009 I also made this switch, eventually defeated by my occasional, then constant, "cheating." This time I wasn't planning on discussing this in my blog, but I'm feeling so good about it, and feeling so much better, and getting such a charge out of taking control of what I choose to eat, it's hard not to talk about it. So I am. Anyway, I invented and learned so many recipes last time that I was much better prepared to make the change this time.

We had so much fun, meeting in regular clothes instead of scrubs, away from the stress of work, talking about where we were from [Cairo, Ghana, the Philippines for my tablemates], children, marriages, school, languages, travel, cruises, childbirth, surgeries, so on and so forth. I discovered other people at work like me a lot better than I imagined. We had a blast, and decided we should go out more often.

I made rye bread today from the simplest of the recipes I found on the internet. I used a lot of cornmeal, as I had seen in some other recipes, and it turned out hard on the outside, sweet and a little dense, soft and crumbly on the inside. Maybe difficult for sandwich bread, but tasty and filling anyway.

Experimented with kale the other day, plugging it into my formula for pea soup: sauteed onions, vegetables, a star vegetable such as cabbage or beets, and dry yellow peas, plus 8 cups of water, ten minutes in pressure cooker and slow pressure release. It failed miserably. Neither the kale nor the peas cooked thoroughly, so I cooked it longer, then finally pureed the entire mess. If all else fails, puree. So it was rich and satisfying in pureed form, but I doubt I'll try again. I'll just have to learn other recipes for kale. I'm not defeated that easily. Kale is just so full of wonderful nutrients.