Don't Ever Give Up...
...on my intentions, even if I lapse for more than a year. Truth is, every time we eat, which is, of course, every day, I think, You know, I should mention something about this in the food portion of my journals. Not necessarily recipes, although those, too; more often, odd facts and observations about my mother's food preferences and persnicketiness as she ages. The actual caring, though, trumps the writing of it and I usually have more than I can handle trying to report as much as possible in the two main journals: Mom & Me Too and The Dailies. If I manage anything more in the way of writing, it's usually the occasional sally over to The Essays.
    Yesterday, though, I devised something so spectacular I had to make an effort to record it here. One of Mom's favorite foods is shrimp. One of her favorite ways of eating shrimp is cocktail style, slathered with sauce. She so loves it that I've often wondered if the shrimp is merely an excuse for the cocktail sauce.
    Almost all cocktail sauces are loaded with sugar in several forms. This, of course, is probably one of the reasons Mom loves cocktail sauce. While they usually don't taste sweet to her (although they do to me), the sugar renders them hearty and flavorful. When she was younger and not diabetic it was not unusual for her to switch back and forth indescriminately between ketchup (probably her favorite food/condiment of all time) and cocktail sauce. Now-a-days we don't eat shrimp very much in any form because, well, from Mom's point of view, shrimp isn't shrimp unless it's drowning in sauce.
    I like shrimp cocktail, too. My preference is to have it as a meal. So is Mom's. I happened to notice some gorgeous shrimp at the grocery last Saturday. Since I was shopping well between meals I couldn't help but salivate. I didn't automatically add the shrimp to my cart, though...I could just imagine what sort of a sugar fest my mother's blood would have if I decided to serve shrimp cocktail for dinner. I steered away toward the location of the items on my list.
    My taste buds, though, wouldn't let up. They continued to remind me of those beautiful fresh shrimp on ice. Okay, I decided, if, while roaming the market, I could come up with an idea for a cocktail sauce I thought my mother would like without all that sugar, I'd buy the ingredients and the shrimp and we'd have a shrimp cocktail dinner on Sunday.
    I was successful. It took some innovation but I'm at my best when trying to figure out how to fix food according to a strict set of taste and nutritional values. The following sauce was so good my mother asked for more, after she finished her shrimp, to use as a dressing for the bed of greens upon which the shrimp had sat:*  *  *  *  *Spectacular Seafood Sauce

Ingredients:
4 4oz cans diced, fire roasted mild green chilies
1 Tbl Huy Fong's Chili Garlic Sauce
1 tsp regular powdered mustard
3 Tbl basil, garlic & oregano tomato paste
2 tsp pure prepared horseradish (NOT horseradish sauce; Morehouse is a reliable brand)
juice of one medium lemon
2 tsp kosher salt
Preparation:
Dump everything in a blender (or food processor) and run the appliance until everything is well blended. At this point it's consistency will be that of bottled cocktail sauce and the color will be that of bean dip.
Let the flavors peak for a couple of hours and serve it at room temperature.*  *  *  *  *    Caution. Although my mother and I consider this sauce mildly spicy, it's got a good bite. The normal tongue might consider it in the lower register of "hot". If I'd made it for myself I'd've added maybe two more tablespoons of the Chili Garlic Sauce (which I eat as salsa with chips), which most people would consider quite hot.
    Most people would probably want to add another teaspoon, maybe even two, of salt. My mother and I aren't salt snobs, we've been known to indulge in all kinds of salty snacks and foods. As well, there's no medical reason for me to restrict my mother's salt. For the most part, though, in food preparation, salt tends to get in our way. Most restaurant food and prepared food, for instance, is too salty for either Mom, or me or both of us. Thus, this sauce is not terribly salty in the above incarnation.
    The main flavor is a strong undercurrent of chilies, so if you don't like chilies you won't like this sauce. The tomato paste is undetectable, except for the bean dip color and a bottom sweet note that compliments all the other flavors. The horseradish, mustard, chilies and chili sauce combine to the place where you can't definitely detect any of them but what comes through is a smoky, spicy sauce that draws seafood into a robust dance on your tongue. While I was making it, refining the amount of ingredients, my mother and I taste-tested it by dipping plain tortilla chips into the mixture. It makes a fine salsa, as well.
    My previous experiments with turning prepared salsa into seafood sauce inform me that the above sauce would work equally well by using your favorite prepared salsa in place of the diced chilies and tomato paste. Most salsas have a lot of salt so, if you decide to do this you might want to eliminate added salt. If your favorite salsa doesn't contain sugar (most of them don't; the main sugar offending salsa company is La Victoria), this substitution would still make for a splendid diabetic friendly seafood sauce. If you're using salsa, you might want to substitute the juice of a lime for that of a lemon.
    Dinner, being delicious but a bit on the light side, was immediately followed by dessert, which I mention because, although it's not my recipe, being unable to ever follow a recipe exactly, I engineered a few substitutions and additions that rendered this dessert even more luscious:*  *  *  *  *Quick and Easy Spice Cake

Changes:
I discovered I was out of brown sugar, so I substituted white sugar
I didn't have pumpkin pie spice so I read the back of an empty pumpkin pie spice bottle and substituted (mind you, these measurements are approximate; in all cases, the amounts were "rounded"):
   1 tsp Cassia cinnamon
   1/4 tsp mace
   1/4 tsp freshly ground nutmeg
   1/4 tsp allspice
   1/4 tsp ground cloves
   1/4 tsp freshly ground ginger
   A couple handfuls of dried sweet cherries
    The cake turned out a bit dry, which is typical of high altitude baking, even though I'd splashed maybe an 8th of a cup more of buttermilk into the batter. I decided to sprinkle it, right out of the oven, with a dark, dark Cruzan rum we've got just for cooking, double wrap it in foil and let it smolder and moisten until dessert time. The ready, willing and able cake was delicious; it tasted like a "quick and easy" incarnation of my version of my mother's famous fruitcake.
    The only mistake I made with the cake is that I got the "bright" idea of flavoring the whipped cream (after sweetening it with powdered sugar) with a teaspoon of the rum instead of the vanilla. My mother liked it, but the alcohol overture was a little too strong for me.*  *  *  *  *    So, as it turned out, my mother got her beloved sugar, anyway, despite the seafood sauce. Which is fine. If I'm going to feed my mother sugar, I'd rather have it standing right out there naked, in the open, than hiding away in something that avoids the dessert category.

    Although I'm making no promises, I'm going to try to get over here more often. There are lots of recipes I've promised over at the main journal that have never been entered here. As well, I'm always thinking about food in connection with my mother's age and am convinced this is an important aspect of living with and caring for An Ancient One, just as it is for everyone else. So, readers, my intentions remain intact. Let's see if I can jump start the action with this particular entry.

Labels: cocktail sauce without sugar, mom and salt, mom's food preferences, my cooking techniques, my food preferences, rum soak, salsa

- posted by Gail Rae @ 19:06  0 comments   email...this post

 
I'm still getting the hang of switching over to this journal...
...when I write about food. Several times since I began this I've found myself writing about Mom & Me & Food in other places and thought, "Okay, I'm going to have to remember, next time, to write stuff like this in the other journal." Tonight, the same thing happened; I began writing somewhere else about food, then stopped, cut what I'd just written and hauled it over here.
    Mom came home from Costco with a sweet thing, today; an orange cranberry something-er-other, looks kind of like a very rich pound cake with shiny dried cranberries and pieces of orange on the top, really delicious looking. I okayed that purchase (I don't always okay the sweet things, in fact, I rarely okay them). When we arrived home I placed it on a high shelf in the laundry closet, a shelf so high that I have to stand on a chair to reach it. However, because her stats looked so good, tonight, before dinner, and she'd had an exercise session, when we finished eating I asked her if she was ready for dessert.
    "No," she said, "not tonight. I just don't feel like something sweet."
    I mentioned it, later, too, but she still wasn't interested. Many times now, I've noticed, it isn't the eating of the sweet that's important to her, it's the buying of it, the knowing, I think, that if she had a craving that simply wouldn't let up, she has the personal freedom to purchase something sweet and eat it. This is why I continue, on occasion, to either let her buy something sweet or I select something that I know she loves and surprise her with it.
    The four year evolution of her craving for sweets into a controlled interest has had nothing to do with me, nor with doctors. In fact, when her treatment for diabetes began her PCP gave her a choice regarding whether to be treated, mainly because the evidence suggested that even if left untreated, she would not live long enough to suffer the ravages of the disease, nor die from its complications. She opted for medicated treatment and was clear that if it could be controlled with medication, fine, but she wasn't planning on controlling it with diet. I respected her wishes.
    I honestly don't know why she started eschewing, first, her daily bag of Hershey's Almond Chocolates, then her weekly syrup coated, carb loaded amalgam (usually in the form of a cake or pie or brownies) of sugar, then, finally, her taste for high fructose condiments. During this cut-back period she and I would regularly go shopping together, she pushing the basket and helping to fill it with the stuff she liked, me filling it with the stuff she and I both ate. I truly had nothing to do with her beginning to pass through the candy aisle without divesting the shelves of bags of candy; passing through the snack aisle without throwing exotic bags of chips in our cart; passing through the frozen food section without selecting a flavor of ice cream; walking through the bread department without inhaling all the sweet rolls out of their cabinets.
    For six years prior to and a year and a half after her being diagnosed as diabetic and deciding to opt for drug treatment, she and I lived together, ate together, but ate completely different foods. I regularly prepared two meals for lunch and dinner (we essentially have always eaten the same breakfast), and continued to do so up until around 2001, when I noticed that she was eating more like me and allowing an occasional vegetable to corrupt her plate. Thus, I began preparing the same meal for both of us, just leaving most of the vegetables that I ate off her plate. Often, at that time, what I prepared would end up, on her plate, between two slices of white bread, one slathered with sandwich spread, the other with butter. But, she and I were, fundamentally, eating the same meal. The only aspect of our life together, at that time, that may have influenced her decision to cut back on sugared food was that I recall making remarks, all the time, about how much more alert she was when her blood sugar was under control. I never mentioned this as an object lesson; just, as life continued and she'd suddenly perform at a level higher than I'd come to expect through the last few years of her sugar hunger, I'd mention my surprise and say something like, "Wow, that's very cool, what a difference it makes when your blood sugar is under control." Some of her voluntary change of diet may have been triggered by these spontaneous reactions of mine. Then again, maybe not.
    Now, of course, as you know, she and I are eating pretty much the same foods. On the mornings we have bacon I don't eat an egg but will have either an extra piece of toast or an extra piece of bacon. When I eat toast I usually put some sort of preserves on mine. The bread I eat is so heavy with grains that, if I don't go through a loaf in a timely manner, it begins to sprout; although she's eating a whole grain bread, it isn't quite as hearty in grain as mine. As well, she eats at least twice as much bread as I do, perhaps three times as much. Typically I eat slightly larger portions than she of whatever we eat, although not always. And, when it comes to dessert, I am satisfied long before she is. There are certain products I buy for her, or we acquire from relatives and friends, that I simply don't like: bread and butter pickles (although I like MCS's home made bread and butter pickles) or any sweet pickled thing; sweet and sour anything; any sweet condiment, including ketchup; my preference is for large curd, drier cottage cheese rather than small curd; the only white bread I like is sourdough, which she doesn't care for unless it's smothered with garlic butter and Parmesan cheese; crackers...she loves crackers and I've never seen much of a point to them; pancakes and waffles - not my favorite food and certainly not for breakfast. I've always made it a habit, though, to buy for her and me and satisfy both of us in regards to food preferences. Which is why her voluntary and completely independent changing of her eating habits has really surprised me.
    During her recovery from her back injury she was pretty much at my disposal when it came to food. This, however, is when only the final changes in her diet occurred. All the rest, including her passion for Cobb salads (which I used to prepare and eat alone, usually while she was eating some very strange combination of refrigerator food between two slices of white bread), developed before her back injury.
    I don't think the food she ate was a huge liability to her, healthwise, despite what nutritional science claims. She ate a particular way her entire life and has made it here due, mainly, to her own food choices, not mine. I like that she's eating "healthier", and can certainly see some felicitous differences "in her aspect and her eyes" when her blood sugar is under control. But, the truth is, if she decided, tomorrow, that she'd had it with what is considered to be a healthy diet and she wanted to go back to eating the way she used to eat, after a protracted argument, if I lost, I'd do as she asked, because, although there is some difference in certain aspects of her behavior that stem from what she eats, there is no difference in her joie de vivre. I would not take this position with her cigarette smoking. The evidence is much too pronounced for me to allow her to become an habitual cigarette smoker, again, unless I knew she was, literally, on her deathbed. But, food? Well, I feel lucky that she's accepted the changes suggested in her diet to keep her blood sugar under control and has managed those changes on her own. I feel lucky that she's come to enjoy the way I cook and eat and absolutely loves certain things that I never thought she'd recognize as food, like most of the ingredients in a Cobb salad.
    Most of all, though, I feel lucky that we share our meals with one another, whether we're both eating out of the same serving implement or different ones.

Labels: elder onset diabetes, managing sweets around Ancient diabetics, mom and sweets, mom's food history, mom's food preferences, mom's food self-regulation, my food preferences

- posted by Gail Rae @ 23:09  0 comments   email...this post