Okonomiyaki

I'm doing it again! Blogging twice in a day? Blogging about food two days in a row? I wasn't even going to prepare these Japanese vegetable pancakes tonight, but...well...I didn't realize the ribs I planned to make needed to sit with the dry rub on them for 12 hours. I discovered this delightful fact at 4 pm. Oops!

Lucky for us, I had already purchased the key ingredients for this delightful dish at the local Farmer's market. Tonight, I went a little bit crazy and took actual pictures of the food as I prepared it...with my phone. Well, I took pictures with my phone. I didn't prepare the food with my phone, although on many nights that would be a good explanation for what I made. 

On to the food, you say? Let's!

First, the vegetables: shaved ribbons of carrots, thinly sliced red onions (substituted for scallions), kale, green cabbage, and baby bok choy (added just because) as pictured, below. Doesn't that look fresh and yummy? I think it would make a great salad with some tomatoes.

To that, I added a cup of gluten-free, all purpose flour because Miss Emma has celiac disease and needs to be gluten free. I tossed the veggies with flour to coat them...not quite as fresh and yummy looking now, BUT...

BACON!!!! No, that wasn't in the original recipe, but...BACON!!! I had six pieces left from the BLT salad last night and decided to use the rest to add a little kick to the veggies. I think this is a must if you have a family like mine, who all think I'm being abusive to them if supper doesn't include meat

.

 

 

Let's detour to my little side dish which is Dean's favorite thing in the world to eat: fruit salad. (I'm using  Blogger's iPad app and can't quite discern any way to change the picture order nor to make a hyper link...)

Back to the pancakes. I added the crumbled bacon. I know you might be confused when you look at the picture below, but that's what I did. Cooked it, drained it on paper towels, crumbled it, put it on the veggies. Still confused? Yeah. I thought not. I am the master of explanations. 

Now,I'm sure I don't need to tell you, my amazing reader, just what happened next. It's immediately obvious that I lightly beat a dozen eggs and stirred them into the veggie/BACON/Flour mixture, right? Sure!

 

This next step was fun...making the sauce to drizzle over the pancakes, NOT the fruit salad. This involved whisking together ketchup, Dijon mustard, Worcester sauce, honey, GF soy sauce, etc... Oh look! It's the web page with a picture of the finished product. Not MY finished product, mind you. I mean, they got pretty close and stuff so let's not be too hard on her. 

Oh look! MY finished product, resting on my well-used stone pan before warming in the oven while I finish the batter.

And on a melamine plate many of you may remember seeing at Target last summer, we have Vera's meal. I mean, not this exact plate, unless you live in my same small town AND read my blog. Hi, Alynn! 

So, did it pass the Spicer test? Indeed! Not a bite was left. The kids said they could taste the veggies, and that was a good thing! I thought the bacon added a lot for such a small amount. The sauce seemed almost like BBQ sauce, so next time I might use more soy sauce and ginger. It was a really easy item to prepare and cook and make gluten-free, so I believe we will do it again!

As noted in the website from which I took this recipe, the combinations for veggies and even meats are almost endless: 

http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2013/05/japanese-cabbage-and-vegetable-pancakes/

For all of you who have made it to the end of my second (last?) cooking blog post (hi, Alynn!), I won't be on for a while because I am having neck surgery (discectomy, etc.) in the morning. I really don't have a sense for how long my recovery might take, so I'll see you on the flip side!! All prayers are deeply appreciated!

 

Small town stories

We live in a smallish town. Not tiny (about 28,000 people) but definitely smaller and much different in feel than the larger city of Fort Worth in which I was raised. 

Because we live on 30 acres, our home has a rural feel, although it is at the end of a neighborhood of homes on about an acre each. 

Vera petting our horse, Hachie.

The "downtown" has some restored buildings that are fun to see and visit.

A cute little restored depot by the train tracks, across from the weekly Farmer's Market that I frequent and where I am well-known by a few vendors. Small wonder, given the large number of people I feed!

Our town is known for its gingerbread houses. We used to live on the same street as this house and the one below. Aren't they adorable? We were renting a much smaller restored home, but it was really great, too.

Yesterday, the small town quality of our town was brought home to me in a new and kind of funny way.

Our dryer has been on the blink for a while. As you can imagine, this is tragic for a family of our size. I had it fixed a few months ago, then the same thing happened again. When it was fixed the first time, the repairman said he thought we would need to have the vent cleaned or it would happen again. So, yeah, he was right.

Ok, who cleans dryer vents? I discussed matters with my brother-in-law, a local doctor. He is the resource for everything local, and is plenty smart besides. He decided to have his newest handyman, Jesus, take his leaf blower and use it to blow out our dryer vent. He messaged me Jesus's number...no last name, so now as I scroll down my contact list it appear as though I have Jesus on speed dial. 

Turns out, Jesus maintains the washers and dryers at the local laundromat, so he was well able to attend to the needs of our dryer. He wasn't planning to come over, though, so he kept having to borrow tools from us. He and his wife had been working at my BIL's house a couple of doors down, a fact that I first learned when he made his wife come down and clean up the mess he made when he blew out the vent--from the attic into my house! It blew around a corner and a good 30-35 feet into my living room! 

I further found it out when he asked to borrow a bike to go get his tools out of his truck. How many times have you had your handyman ask to borrow your bike? Of course, we only had Vera's bike handy! Didn't bother him...

Finally, I found out when he asked me to take him to the appliance shop to get a part because his wife had taken their truck home and it was too close to closing time to wait on her. If I hadn't had to pay for the part, I would have just let him drive my 12 passenger van (Jesus, take the wheeeeeeel). I can assure you, he would have returned it! When we left the shop, he asked me to drop him off at his house so he could get his truck. Seriously. And I did it! Why not? 

So there you have it: life in our smallish town where leaf blowers are community property and doctors are key people to know and Jesus rides your bike.

Y'all come back now, y'hear!

Smashing Supper Success

OK, clearly a pod person has taken over this blog...two days in a row? Really, Jill?

Yes, really, generic blog reader who NEVER COMMENTS ANYMORE.

Not that I'm bitter. I couldn't be...not after making this fabulous supper tonight!

Now, let's just be straight up about the whole business of Jill and cooking and fabulosity: I follow recipes pretty well. I can even tweak and change recipes pretty well. I don't, however, come up with completely new and different recipes, so if you're looking for that you'll need to look elsewhere. Plus, I'm pretty sure no one is here looking for recipes anyway, so we're good. We're good.

So what was this fabulous dinner? Honestly, it was only soup and salad.

The soup? Butternut Squash soup from Southern Living's 2012 Annual Recipes cookbook.

Butternut squash, carrots, slightly carmelized onions, cream, honey, vinegar...yum! Use your stick blender and it's a breeze to get a huge pot of creamy yumminess with a little bit of kick. Spicer kids approved!

The salad? BLT Salad, also from Southern Living's 2012 Annual Recipes cookbook.

Oh my! Salady perfection! Arugula, bacon, heirloom tomatoes, bacon, tangy dressing, bacon, onions cooked in bacon drippings, bacon! The recipe calls for artisan bread slices but I used challah from the grocery store bakery. We otherwise followed the recipe for this, too. Other than Anna, who doesn't like bacon (we don't know where she came from), this recipe was also Spicer kid approved.

So...generic blog reader, if you're like me,the bad blog writer, always in need of supper ideas...here's, y'know...one. Or lunch, if this doesn't seem meaty enough for you and you don't mind taking a really long time to cook lunch. Frankly, I do. Mind, that is. So...supper, for us.

Happy cooking! Happy eating! Happy rare two days in a row of blogging to me!

My daughter

I took the girls to a swimming party today, but Ella wouldn't swim--it was too cold. She let me know the same way she lets me know a lot of things, by signing or pantomime. She still speaks very infrequently. So today at the pool, she wrapped her cute little brown arms around herself and shivered, even as she positioned herself poolside and screamed her displeasure when cold water splashed her again and again. Typical behavior for a kid with sensory issues, I thought to myself for what seemed like the 1000th time.

Eventually, we ended up sharing a chair and I whipped out my phone to capture the moment. Ella enjoyed looking at herself and Mommy in the phone as I snapped our picture, as she saw me mimicking her, as she saw herself hamming it up. We both giggled a lot. When we got home, I had fun making a photo collage and posting it on Facebook.

As I returned to look at it a couple of times, the enormity of it hit me: when she became my daughter, I really had no idea if moments like these would ever happen, could ever happen. When she became my daughter, legally that is, she was so shut down yet combative that her father and I thought her likely to be on the autism spectrum. She simply didn't respond to much of anything. Her deep dark eyes hid her soul rather than revealing it.  

But

Month by month, year by year, she opened up, she blossomed, she became our daughter, emotionally that is. We no longer think she may be on the spectrum but instead realize that her sensory issues at times cause the world to be a difficult place for her to navigate. One thing she consistently and beautifully navigates, however, is her Mommy's heart. She knows now, deeply knows, how loved she is.

So today, when I held up a camera for some self portraits it showed more than I thought it would: it showed a miracle. The pictures show a girl who learned to love and trust and show love and and mirror facial cues when words wouldn't work. Oh, and it showed Ella, too. 

Above all, it shows a mother and a daughter, hamming it up for the camera, arms around each other, laughing in the Texas sun. 

And above all that? Love, pure and simple.

A Pain in The Neck, Fear, and Being Hemmed In

I awakened one recent morning in pain, a familiar pain between my shoulder blade and spinal column. I thought, with my vast storehouse of medical wisdom, that I just needed some muscle relaxers and it would go away. It's worked before; it will work again, right?

Notsomuch.

I graduated to what I call "The Nightmarish Night of Vicodin". I would take one, fall into an uncomfortable sleep for a couple of hours, then awaken to pain that seemed to be increasing. At 6 a.m., after spending most of the night on the couch trying not to wake John (who was recovering from knee surgery), I collapsed on him in a sobbing heap of frustration because I just couldn't escape the increasingly unbearable pain. (We are quite the fun couple these days!) 

That prompted my sweet doctor to prescribe a med for nerve pain (that worked and is still working, thankfully), a steroid  (that didn't help, but made me very happy and chatty), and an MRI. The results of the MRI led me to a neurosurgeon and will soon lead to surgery because my neck is a mess! Actually, one of the biggest concerns is that the tricep on my left side is not working properly and the fingers on my left hand have lost sensitivity--some of them can't feel pinpricks anymore. Weird, huh? Evidently, if you don't get that fixed you could suffer permanent loss of function.

When I saw the neurosurgeon the first time, he naturally went over the results of the first MRI with us. In addition to the bulging discs and intervertebral foraminal stenosis, I also had a mysterious white spot in my spinal cord. He ordered another MRI, this time with contrast dye to rule out a tumor and he was also concerned I might have multiple sclerosis. I was under the impression that those were the only two options, that "everything is fine" was not anything I would ever hear. He had his nurse set up an MRI and an office visit on his next day in the office...five days away.

Can I just say: that was brutal! It felt like an awful sort of Sophie's Choice. Did I want a tumor that may need to be removed from within my spinal cord, possibly leaving me paralyzed for life, or did I want a chronic condition with unexpected twists and turns? 

As we waited for the day of the MRI to arrive, the verses that kept coming to my mind were from Psalm 139. As a mom to kids with special needs, these are familiar verses to me: 

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. Psalm 139:14-16 

Those are always the verses applied to kids born with things like Down syndrome, and appropriately so, I believe.

The verses of that Psalm that I particularly thought of, however, were 5-6a: 

You hem me in--behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me...

I picture God, my Heavenly Father, surrounding me. Of course, He is always there, isn't He? Still, at certain moments it is wonderful to think of Him as more vividly present, in front of us, around us, behind us, letting nothing into our lives that isn't in accordance with His will for us. It is wonderful to know that for my good and His glory, He brought me to a place where I truly thought my health would be permanently affected and I could be placed into deep dependence on those around me...on Him. 

Yet through those days my greatest comfort came from verse five as I heard God speaking to my frightened heart over and over: 

Jill...I've got your back.

And so He does. The spot turned out to be nothing, but even had it been something I would still know He hems me in, behind and before, because nothing could tear God, our beautifully protective Father, away from us. 

He's got your back, too. 

Two years...80 pounds...wow

I have rarely posted pictures of myself on this blog. I'm obviously not a stickler for privacy. I am simply prideful. I didn't want/need reminders of my failed weight battles. I would much prefer to show pictures of my beautiful children anyway, or so I told myself.

I don't want to post this, but...

I have this longtime online friend named Trish, see? Two years ago, unbeknownst to each other, we started our own weight loss journeys exactly one day apart, April 27th and 28th. She keeps posting her before picture on facebook, reminding others of her 151 pounds lost (seriously!) and inspiring the ladies she LEADS in exercise classes to keep plugging away, to never give up, to just start now. And she puts me to shame.

The thing is, in 2011 I lost 80 pounds and have kept it off ever since then. I love how I feel now. I can't even really put it into words just how great I feel, just how much easier it is to move through the world, to be me, to have an even temper (ok, relatively speaking), to have energy that lasts all day, to exercise and parent and cross my legs and buy clothes and heck...just to walk in heels! I love heels! I love not being controlled by my weight anymore.

I want to pretend I have been this way my whole adult life, but the opposite is mostly true. I want to pretend that I could always get to the top of a staircase without huffing and puffing, but that isn't true, either. I want to pretend that I've had these size 8 jeans for years, and not the size 20 stretchy pants that I wore the last few years as my weight really exploded.

But

As much as I might like it to be, life isn't always and only about me. It might be about one of you, about offering you hope that change is possible. It might be that you and I need to look at my "before" pictures with some love and grace and know that I was covering up some hurts and have now peeled them off...mostly. We need to take an honest look and acknowledge that I wasn't healthy. We also need to take an honest look and see that I am still essentially me. I was funny and sarcastic before...I am funny and sarcastic now. Some things endure.

And because someone will ask, this is how I did it: I had gastric sleeve surgery. Yup. I did. I had weeks of protein shakes, months of high protein/low carb, and 18 months of keeping it off. I'm really proud of those 18 months, matter of fact. I started exercising and kept at it in one way or another. I even ran in my first 5K lately. My son Luke beat me by 7.5 minutes and I don't care...I'm still proud! So maybe I took the easier way out by having surgery, but once the easy part was over I've stuck with the harder part, the maintenance part, the get out there and exercise because now you CAN part.

So

I'm sharing my pictures. Ugh. The two collage pictures span about two months from left to right, starting with the day before surgery (and I had already lost 14 lbs. the week before surgery so I actually looked even worse than the first picture on the left). The next picture (with John) is from about 6 months out, and the rest are from a year to two years post-op. So yeah, I'm laying the weight loss pictures on thick, to make myself feel better, hoping those are the pictures people remember. But honestly, I know better, and I'm sharing it anyway.

Trish, my love, this is for us! Congratulations on two years of working that weight off the hard way, for continuing to inspire me with your workouts, and your tenacity, and your tenderness toward those who are just getting started...knowing we are looking to you as our inspirational rock star!

And...Happy Anniversary!! A workout and a small steak should just hit the spot, right?

Gentleness

Proverbs 15:1 A gentle answer turns away wrath.


I well remember the time this verse saved me. I had taken the kids to a McDonald's PlayPlace (with a jungle theme) after a children's theater performance. The homeschool group's gustatory decision had held sway; my kids wanted to play with their friends! One son was going through a Star Wars phase...and had lost his glasses. The combination created the perfect storm. While in a "hut" he was acting out an epic light saber battle alone...or so his 9 year old, nearly blind self thought.

A 3 year old girl had crawled in to watch this silly boy who was pretending to strike at Sith Lords, but who wouldn't hurt a fly. Her mother, however, didn't know my son and proceeded to start screaming at my son that she would take him out if he touched her daughter, that she knew what jerks men were, and on and on.

I wasn't close enough to realize what was happening, other than to hear screaming, but some of my friends were. They came quickly to let me know and as I walked those few steps the Holy Spirit whispered that verse in my ear. I quietly and calmly got my son out, spoke reassuringly to her very traumatized daughter (traumatized by the mon, I should add), listened to her concerns and calmed her down, gently. She was clearly reacting from a place of deep hurt and fear and a softer gentleness was crucial.


Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.


Years ago, I took a Beth Moore Bible study about the fruit of the spirit. I have forgotten most of it, naturally, but I have never forgotten her illustration about gentleness. Like most people, I naturally assumed it referred to a soft gentleness, one with as little pain as possible.

She told a story about her daughter with thick, curly, long locks. Her daughter had dutifully brushed her hair daily...well, most of it. At the nape of her neck a giant tangled ball had formed without her daughter having noticed because the parts she could see looked fine. Having a daughter with such hair myself, I have seen this happen before. It's like a huge dreadlock has formed and it starts to irritate the scalp under it, to pull it, to hurt even.

When Beth became aware of the problem, she gave her daughter a choice: cut it out or work it out? Her tender-headed daughter chose to have her mom try and untangle this giant mess. Beth picked up a comb and started. It was painful. Tears were shed. I don't remember how long it took, but a substantial amount of time was required to restore her hair to its proper disposition.

In this story I see a stronger gentleness, the type that says I will use my own muscle, my own patience, my own time to tease out, smooth out each tangled strand in your life. This is a gentleness that says I know it seems easier to cut out the difficult parts of your life, but I know that if you're willing to go through pain and tears, your life can be restored and when it is, you'll be stronger for having submitted to gentle care.

So how do you know when to give a gentle answer and when to untangle? I believe the answer lies in relationship, in love. I didn't have to love the angry woman to give her a gentle answer that would keep her from trying to hurt me or my child. Beth, however, loved her child enough not to leave her in the state she was in.

As adoptive parents we know this gentleness. We know we can't leave our children in the state they were in, that we must lovingly, with power and conviction and above all gentleness, straighten the tangled messes hiding in places that were inaccessible to them.

Philippians 4:5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.

Joyful dance

I think to Live — may be a Bliss

To those who dare to try —

Beyond my limit to conceive —

My lip — to testify —

I think the Heart I former wore

Could widen — till to me

The Other, like the little Bank

Appear — unto the Sea —

I think the Days — could every one

In Ordination stand —

And Majesty — be easier —

Than an inferior kind —

No numb alarm — lest Difference come —

No Goblin — on the Bloom —

No start in Apprehension's Ear,

No Bankruptcy — no Doom —

But Certainties of Sun —

Midsummer — in the Mind —

A steadfast South — upon the Soul —

Her Polar time — behind —

The Vision — pondered long —

So plausible becomes

That I esteem the fiction — real —

The Real — fictitious seems —

How bountiful the Dream —

What Plenty — it would be —

Had all my Life but been Mistake

Just rectified — in Thee

--Emily Dickinson