WIAW 99 – the Last of the Double Digits!

I thought it was cold last week? It’s colder, this week – and it may (finally) snow this weekend. (Last weekend, of course warmed right back up so that those of us who have Issues with abrupt changes in temperature got to experience that all over again… it’s been a busy year so far for us.)

Double digits doesn’t refer to temperature, though. It’s rarely below 10°F here in New York City – though that’s not unknown – and when it does get that cold we feel very hard done by. No, we’re going up, not down, this is my 99th What I Ate Wednesday post. Oh, my!

I do like doing them, and you seem to like reading them. You get to see what we really eat (since, more often than I like to admit, this is what I ate Tuesday, when I suddenly say “I didn’t take any pictures!”) I’d like to pretend that it’s all nicely curated, but it’s not – and really, that’s the point. It’s (usually) a perfectly ordinary day.

I was a little more together this week – I took pictures Sunday…

I finished the porridge mixture, the corn muffin mix, and the waffles. Even though I’ll go on a run of one thing or another, I’m amazed by how much variety I have for breakfast these days, after years of oatmeal… I did put together more porridge mix yesterday, so that’s what I had for breakfast this morning, but on Sunday I just made cheesy scrambled eggs, and ate them wrapped in corn tortillas. And you barely see it in the picture – but that is a glass of kefir with orange juice next to the coffee.

We’re making a change, here, too, though you mostly won’t see it. Rich and I will be eating the same breakfast. See, we’ve never been quite on the same schedule in the morning, and he preferred to eat essentially the same cereal mixture he always had (though it had gradually changed over the years.) But since I stopped eating gluten, that’s been a bit of an issue. A year ago he noticed that a cloud of fine powdered oats floated up from his oatmeal when he poured it, and settled on the stovetop. So he stopped eating oatmeal, and started covering the stovetop – and another of my symptoms (which no one had connected with gluten) improved. Huh.

Last Fall, I tried making cereal, to replace his Grapenuts (and my granola) and he decided to try eating it (and stop having to put down covers and wash them after, because that was a nuisance) and that last symptom completely cleared up. So yeah, we now have a gluten free kitchen. (Wheat bread had gone away quietly during the year.) But making the cereal was a nuisance for me, and it was never more than OK, and so I’ll go back to that at some point, but for now, I’ll make two servings of porridge, or make sure there are enough muffins or tortillas, and he’ll scramble his eggs. And yes, thank you, I am feeling better! (It would be nice if the migraines went away – but that’s another issue entirely, it seems.) And from here on in, his tastes and preferences will be a factor in breakfast, as well as other meals.

For lunch, I made a big pot of lentil soup – stew, really. I’d taken a container of cooked sorghum out of the freezer, so I added that to the lentils, along with carrots, onion, and plenty of chopped mixed greens. (Those green muffins from the freezer are so useful!) That batch gave us enough for three lunches! With it, I had rice cakes and peanut butter…

If you’ve noticed that you haven’t seen home baked gluten free bread, lately, you’re right. I decided to step back a bit, when the last loaf was worse, not better, to decide what went wrong, and then I was busy with gingerbread and all. And then… I’m sure my notes are here somewhere… but not in the file where they should be. So they will be found, or reconstructed, and I will carry on – but there is a delay.

Meanwhile – dinner. I had already cooked a pot of Roman beans, so they were ready. We’d picked up a big package of ground beef, and I packed some away to freeze, and browned the rest, so I could package it, also. I find it very convenient to have a bag of already cooked ground beef that I can just drop into something – beans, pasta sauce, stew, anything that can use a bit of a meaty boost. (And I don’t have to grab a pan, spend 10 minutes browning it, wash said pan…) So I wanted a fast and easy meal, and just dropped some of the meat into a pot with some onion and a container of beans. Let it all simmer, then added a frozen vegetables mixture – broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. Served it all over the ubiquitous brown rice, and it was dinner.

So that’s my food, in my life.

What are you eating, now that it turned cold? (Or did it? The really cool thing about blogging is that you are all over the world – I was discussing strawberries with someone in China the other day on Twitter… Welcome to 2016!)

Do you have a Favorite Basic Soup? Come join the party! What have you eaten, Wednesday, or any other day?