Food.

I am a great cook and I love to cook. Especially since I decided to stop catering to my kids' tastes -- like when I make a honey/balsamic vinaigrette pasta with peppers and broccoli and onion and olives and mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes and fresh tomatoes, I figure they can pick around the veggies they don't like. Although if I am feeling especially benevolent, I might heat up some tomato-based sauce for them instead of forcing them to eat my much better stuff.

My newest recipe, and one I made up (based on but very different from something I saw Gordon Ramsay do)...It's insanely fussy. The last time I made it it took me an hour and a half, but damn it is worth it. (When I have my son and his girlfriend in the kitchen, it goes much more quickly.)

Chicken stuffed with mushrooms with a honey/balsamic glaze.

Butterfly and flatten 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (Ikea has a great meat tenderizer that is really cheap. Otherwise cover the chicken with waxed paper and whack it with something til it's pretty flat.)

the filling: sliced fresh white mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh chopped parsley, fresh grated Parmesan cheese, and a couple cloves of garlic run through a garlic press.

Here's where it gets a little complicated. Take a sheet of aluminum foil (maybe 16"?) and lay 4 slices of bacon (not thick sliced) on it, with the long edges of the bacon touching. Put some of the filling on the flattened chicken, roll the chicken up around the filling, and place it in the middle of the bacon. Wrap the bacon around the chicken roll, and then wrap the whole thing in foil. Wrap it tight and seal the edges.

notes: make sure the bacon covers the whole thing. don't worry about the bacon overlapping. use plenty of filling. roll the chicken up as tight as you can, but don't worry. the parboiling really cooks the whole thing together, so when you slice it later, it stays in rolls. although last time I used thick sliced bacon and it didn't work as well. I told you, this is an insanely complicated recipe...

Drop the foil package in boiling water for 20 to 25 minutes. That fully cooks the food, but the bacon is pale and floppy, not good and crispy.

So you have to unwrap them (carefully, the little suckers are hot) and slice the rolls. Probably an inch and a half wide slices. Now you have little bacon-wrapped chicken pinwheels. Brown them in a frying pan to crisp up the bacon.

Except I am going to try broiling them next time I make it, since that way you can do all the slices at once and perhaps lose some of the fat.

Whew. Now the chicken is done, but while you are doing the chicken, you must also make the pasta side and the honey balsamic glaze...

I use farfalle or rotini whole wheat pasta. Boil it while the chicken is finishing up. I never manage to get the pasta and glaze and veggies and chicken done all at exactly the same time. Nobody's perfect.

Saute in olive oil peppers (I use the mini sweet vine peppers from Costco, or bell peppers) and onions. This is kind of a timing thing, the leftover mushroom filling, fresh tomato -- I use grape tomatoes sliced in half -- chopped up broccoli, black and/or green olives, whatever other veggie I have laying around, get tossed into the pan with the sauted onions and peppers just long enough to heat them up (I hate overcooked broccoli). Then I add balsamic vinegar, a little honey, a dash of soy sauce, and a tablespoon or so of brown sugar to the sauted vegetables. This is a taste thing, if you add too much honey or brown sugar, it gets a little too sweet.

I know I am annoying, because I never measure anything when I am cooking. Ever.

Toss the vegetables with the pasta. Make an extra bit of the glaze with the vinegar, honey, soy sauce and brown sugar to pour over the chicken slices, or make the vegetables without the glaze and make the glaze separately.

Serve with garlic bread and a decent wine. Maybe a spinach salad. And sit back and wait for the raves.

(Obviously, the honey/balsamic vinaigrette pasta with peppers and broccoli and onion and olives and mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes and fresh tomatoes is the recipe above without all the chicken fuss.)

Ironic...And waaaay TMI. I suggest you don't read it.

You're reading it. I wash my hands of it being TMI. You were warned...

Yesterday I willingly ate a radioactive sandwich.

Yesterday afternoon it suddenly occurred to me that I take 6 pills a day to reduce my chances of getting colon cancer -- people with Crohn's have a much higher risk of getting it, I guess because instead of smooth healthy happy shiny cells lining our intestinal tracts we have cranky irritable damaged ucky cells lining our intestinal tracts, and those suckers are much more likely to go mutant.

(Yeah. I have a truly scientific mind, no?)

So suddenly it occurs to me that I have radioactive poo working it's way down my colon. And in my truly scientific mind, radioactive egg + cranky colon = cancer.

Not really. I know it was a very weakly radioactive bit of egg, and that the risks of this test are small.

But in my non-rational part of the brain, I am thinking "I need to poo. I need to poo."

And true to my uncooperative digestive tract, I didn't have to poo. Not as soon as I would have liked, at least.

Good news, though, the new anti-nausea drug seems to work, without sedating the hell out of me. Woot!

Radioactive Egg Sandwich done!

Tedious, mostly. I had to eat a sandwich made from microwaved and radioactive egg white and dry toast, with half a glass of water. It was a little hard to swallow, since it was pretty dang dry. Because they need a solids study, not a liquids study. Apparently we don't care how fast my gut processes liquids.

Then I had to lay still for 90 minutes while the machine that was 4 inches from my nose watched that egg travel from my stomach into my small and then large intestines. That was a little unnerving at first, having this big box right over me. I was very grateful it wasn't completely over my face.

I am thinking I do not have a problem with my stomach emptying too slowly, since the sandwich made it to my large intestine in 50 minutes.

(Were I to work in the Nuclear Medicine Element, I would want to have two patients take this test at the same time and place bets on whose sandwich moves through the fastest.)

Laying on my back on a narrow bed without moving for 90 minutes sucks. Things itch, my body doesn't like lying flat without moving so muscles start to hurt. And my sleeves were bugging me -- I had to pull them up to eat the sandwich (don't want to drag your sleeves through your radioactive breakfast) and I forgot to pull them down again. It's a new sweatshirt and they were a little tight around my forearms.

Fortunately I had my IPod, and fortunately I had almost exactly 90 minutes of battery power...I think it would have died in another couple minutes. I listened to a podcast of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me radio show, which was great but also hard because it's funny and I had to try not to laugh or laugh without moving. (It's a great current events quiz show. Very funny. The podcasts are available on ITunes for free.)

Also, laying on my back is about the only position where I tend not to feel nauseated. So I hardly at all felt like I was going to throw up (nice change from the other time I was in Nuclear Medicine having a scan of my lungs done to make sure I didn't have a pulmonary embolism. That time I threw up in their garbage cans three times, including one time right after I had spent 10 minutes filling my lungs with radioactive dust, so that they had to treat that particular garbage can's contents as radioactive. For a couple of weeks, the hospital had a garbage bag with my radioactive vomit in their lead-lined vault. Woo.)

In a couple weeks I have the ultrasound of my gut. I also have a new drug -- Zofran -- to try for the nausea. I haven't tried it yet -- I didn't want to take one the night before the gastric emptying scan in case it's another one of those drugs that knocks me on my ass. I think I will try it tonight, depending of course on whether or not I am feeling nauseated.

Thus my medical adventures continue...

Okay, Why?

I was just on my gmail account, and there was an ad for a recipe site...

The recipe they were using to lure me to visit them?

Spam quiche.

That is just wrong.

On the other hand, is this a sign of how bad the economy has become, that even the elite are forced to eat Spam?

As a Minnesotan, I would like to apologize on behalf of the entire state and tell you we are truly sorry for foisting Spam on the rest of the world.

But if you happen to be in Austin, Minnesota, you can visit the Spam Museum. It's FREE!

(I just spent like two minutes on the Spam website, until the nausea drove me away. At least this time there's a reason for my nausea...)

How did I not see this coming?

Donna commented on my head CT yesterday...

Oh, and since you have a good sense of humor... your head CT showed nothing there, huh? That explains a lot. :)

Funny, Donna.

I think one thing that did not come across yesterday is that I do feel fortunate, the Remicade treatments are keeping the Crohn's under control, other than the nausea. And chronic nausea is preferable to some of the things other people with Crohn's suffer. I just get cranky about it sometimes. :)