I Know My Shapes

One of the suggestions the nutritionist gave us (when once we finally got the insurance company to agree to pay for us to see one, but that’s a different post…) was to freeze cooked meatballs or hamburgers, as an easy instant meat option for E2.  They would have to be made without any egg to bind them, of course, but she reckoned it would work well enough.  I made some the other week, in preparation for our weekend away, and friend them first in canola oil (frying for E2 is good — she needs as many calories as we can give her) and then poured in a bunch of apple cider and let it boil away.  Turns out that ground beef cooked in American (that is, cloudy) cider is absolutely gorgeous.

My mother makes the girls cornmuffins almost every week.  She’s figured out a way to make them without any egg or dairy, and it’s so handy to me to have them in the fridge for last minute snacks.  …And for anytime bribes — it’s amazing what my daughters will do for a cornmuffin!  And the making of cornmuffins is as good for my mum as it is for them — given all of E2′s food issues, it means so much to my mum to be able to help fill her up.

We’d got a late start for home on Sunday and so were belting it back when the girls started asking for dinner.  We didn’t have time to stop… and I had nothing that would give them a proper meal that they could easily eat in their carseats…  What to do?  And then I remembered the little hamburgers still sitting in the food bag, and now nicely defrosted.   Of course, they weren’t so much like hamburgers really, being by necessity bun-less and condiment-less.  And they’d started falling apart when I tried to squish them flat, so their shaped ended up as a sort of midway point between meatball and burger… and oddly familiar.

As I reached back and handed them to the girls, they looked at their strange dinners in confusion.  E1 turned hers over in her hand and asked, “Is it… meat?”

“Yes, sweetheart.  It’s meat.”

E2 held it in her little hand and gamely bit straight in.  When she surfaced, it was with a huge grin…

“Meat Muffin!” she annouced with glee, and dug in again.

My poor, sweet, multiple-allergy baby has the strangest diet!  She goes without cookies or cakes or candy, she lives on what most people would called diet food, and she almost never gets to eat out.  And now… now she eats meat muffins!

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I Miss What I Shouldn’t Want

By the time Friday night rolled round, I found I was feeling notably better and — for the first time in a week — I wanted to eat.  I was still very worn down and so I certainly didn’t want to cook, but I wanted to eat something delicious, something comforting, something lazy and luscious and Friday night.  I know what I wanted — I wanted to order a pizza.

But I can’t.  My diet is zero-tolerance on soy and that rules out vast swathes of the normal choices for both eating out and ordering in.  Most restaurants struggle to accommodate me (oh wow, I can haz dry salad again?) and some have simply suggested flat out that I go elsewhere.  In the year that we’ve been here, I’ve found only two restaurants that I feel really comfortable eating in — one rather expensive but worth it because they firmly believe in “inclusion rather than exclusion” (to quote the owner) and so go to extra lengths for me, and the other because they import almost all their ingredients from Italy (which means the ingredients don’t contain soy where American versions would) and then cook their food very simply, so it is easy to spot any potential danger.  I have come  to hold a real fondness for these two restaurants because of the way they treat me and they are where we go whenever we eat out, but still…  it’s the same two restaurants time and again.  And neither of them deliver pizza when I’m craving it on a Friday night.

At first, I really struggled with this soy-free thing, but now that I’ve got the knack of it, it’s become less difficult.   I eat plain meats cooked in nothing but their own juices or a bit of olive oil.  I eat plain vegetables, plain fruits, and make my own bread.  I have a few sauces that I know I can use, but I still check the label every time I buy a new jar, just in case.  And I’ve got used to life with no chocolate whatsoever — though that was particularly difficult.

It’s an austere diet, but it does its job and keeps me pain-free.  And it’s certainly the sort of diet that would make any nutritionist smile — this is what they are always telling us we should be eating but know that no one ever really will, because it’s unrealistically spartan and inflexible.  Every meal made from scratch — including breakfast — every single day, no snack foods, no store-bought desserts, no easy quick foods, no pizza on Friday night…

There was a woman I used to converse with who always seemed to take issue with my soy problem whenever I mentioned it — I never found out why, but somehow, it pressed a button for her in a big way.  She mentioned to me several times that, as far as she could see, soy wasn’t as prevalent in US foods as I was making out and it just shouldn’t be so burdensome for me to eliminate it from my diet.  It just wasn’t that big a deal, she seemed to be saying — and at a time when I was in a lot of pain and battling desperately to make it go away, her repeated dismissiveness felt really difficult to take.  But when I asked her what sort of foods she had in her pantry, her responses suddenly made more sense — she and her husband enjoy cooking their meals from scratch and bake their own bread, so her pantry is filled with foods in their most pure forms.  And so, of all people, her pantry would be less littered with needless soy than most …and I guess my difficulty in going soy-free would seem over-blown to her.

But taking a tally of the pantry misses the point of what has been the biggest struggle in going soy-free — and I can see that it’s something that might not be apparent to an outside observer.  It’s not so much the real food, the stuff you use to make your proper meals.   It’s not been finding a tin of tomatoes without soy (though I had to put four different brands back on the shelf before I did) or comparing the ingredients on carton after carton of chicken stock.  The real rub comes when I’m standing in front of the fridge at 11pm, holding the door wide open and looking for something to satisfy my munchies, now …and there’s just nothing that wouldn’t require at least ten minutes of cooking.  The rub comes when we’re dashing out the door, having run the coats-boots-arguing-hats-mittens-crying-carseats gauntlet (x2), and then I realise I’ve forgotten to eat lunch, so I reach to grab a cereal bar or a handful of breadsticks or…  nope, can’t have any of those.  It’s when we’re out at the shops and we stop for coffee and everyone else gets something sinful to go with it, and I just can’t.   Or even when we stop for petrol and M pops his head in the door before he goes to pay and says, “Are you hungry?  Do you want something?” …and I am but there’s not a single thing — not a single thing — in that gas station that I can have except for the one lonely bruised apple or the brown banana sitting sadly in their cheery wicker basket.

I can make my own cereal bars, I know.  And I can make sure I remember to eat lunch.  And, really, who wants any of the crap they sell in petrol stations anyway?  But, the thing is, normal people don’t eat that way — even the most wholesome, cook-from-scratch people.  And when you can’t have that crap — ever — you miss it.  When you can’t have a sweet with your coffee, you really wish you could.  And when you can’t even order a pizza on a Friday night and eat it curled up on the couch with your husband while watching some rubbish movie — on the first day in a week that you feel like eating…  well, that pretty much sucks.  No matter how wholesome the pantry is.

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Four Hours Later, They Emerge with One Bag of Shopping

I am struggling with the whole food thing here in the US. Again, it’s something that I assumed would be natural to me — having grown up in America, I thought I’d be familiar with American supermarkets — but it’s got me all perplexed and, given that food is major component of day-to-day life, it’s having a noticeable impact.

The first thing that has thrown me for a loop is how darned long it’s taking us to do our shopping, and how hard we’re finding it to buy the stuff we expect to buy. We go into our local supermarket, expecting to do the shopping mostly on auto-pilot — just grabbing things like everyone does — but when you’re an newly-arrived expat (or repat), you simply can’t do that. Nothing is where you expect it to be, nothing is packaged the way you’re used to, the brand-names are completely unfamiliar, the ingredients aren’t quite what you were expecting. You suddenly realise you have to turn off the auto-pilot and think your way through the shop, from one end to the other. You have to read every label, you have to compare brands and prices, you have to check how many sheets on are the toilet rolls… It’s like you’ve never been shopping before. Everything is new and unfamiliar. It takes forever and it’s exhausting.

I expected this to a certain extent — I vaguely remember it happening when I moved to the UK — but it seems somehow worse this time. We’ve been here four weeks, and each trip to the supermarket seems nearly as much of venture into the unknown as it did on our second day here, when I actually had to walk out of the shop to get away from the sensory overload. And I think I’ve begun to realise why: when you live in a different country, you don’t just shop differently, you cook differently — you think differently. I am walking around American supermarkets trying to find ingredients for dishes that I am used to making in Britain — but the ingredients just aren’t there, because Americans eat differently. And while I am staring at the meat counter and getting frustrated because I can’t find the kind of sausages that I am used to buying for bangers-and-mash, I am missing the gorgeous brats just one row over. While I am looking in vain for double cream or lemon curd, I am missing a plethora of ingredients that would fit beautifully into something TexMex. There are great ingredients there — I’m just walking past them because my mindset is not yet attuned to my new surroundings. Moving countries is difficult — everyone knows that — but it’s surprising how those difficulties penetrate even the littlest and most mundane details of life.  And how much time and mental energy they take to overcome.

But there’s another reason I am reading the label on every single item that goes in my shopping trolley: it takes an eagle-eye to avoid what appears to be America’s number ingredient — high-fructose corn syrup. I cannot believe how many foods it sneaks into! I expect it in junk foods and fizzy drinks, but I do not expect it such straightforward (and healthy) foods as applesauce, peanutbutter, tinned tomatoes, and chopped garlic. You read that right — I had to read through the ingredients of no less than five brands of tinned tomatoes before I found one that didn’t sneak in some unnecessary (and unwanted) artificial sweetness. And why can’t garlic just taste of… garlic? Why should my bread need high-fructose corn syrup in the first five ingredients? Why is it the second ingredient in Stove Top Stuffing? Don’t these people know that stuffing is a savory dish, not a sweet one? I have given up sweets for Lent, but I’ve found that our pretzel sticks — surely a salty-savory food if ever there was one — are glazed in such a sugary coating that they actually satisfy my after-dinner dessert cravings. That’s not right. This is a nation which is battling with its collective weight problem and is fighting to keep diabetes from becoming a national epidemic — we, as consumers, and they, as manufacturers, need to wake up and realise that high-fructose corn syrup simply does not belong in the majority of the foods to which it’s being added!

Dear readers, read your labels and when you find high-fructose corn syrup high on the list of ingredients — which you surely will — ask yourself: why?  And then, come, join me in the slow lane of your local supermarket as we wander along, picking up every can and every box and scouring the list of ingredients.  Your spouse won’t thank you for spending four hours to do the weekly shopping, but your waistline — and your tastebuds — certainly will.

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