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Post by nana on Nov 8, 2019 7:37:42 GMT -5
Celebratory because this is the first thing I've felt up to cooking myself since my knee surgery two weeks ago. Autumnal because the red cabbage and the apples were harvested from my own garden. Everyone always does barbecue flavor, I wanted something different.
I had about 1 1/2 lbs of country style pork ribs, and I browned them in the big Twell kettle on top of the stove. Meanwhile I diced up two nice size apples, one red onion and about 5 (smallish) cloves of garlic and tossed them in there with a tablespoon of dry rub seasoning and a half cup or so of red wine. Then into the thermowell at lunchtime, 15 minutes of gas. At dinner time around 6 hours later, the pork was shredded with two forks, and the apples and onions had cooked down to a velvety sweet/spicy sauce. We mixed the pork back in and it was perfect, not too wet and not too dry. Then I sauteed up some red cabbage, just in bacon fat and salt and pepper till it was soft but not mushy. We topped our slider buns with meat, red cabbage and some dill pickles. DELISH!!!!
It's good for me to stand and walk around a bit, but if I over do it my knee swells back up, so I have to find the sweet spot between activity, and elevation and ice. This amount of cooking was just right. Thank you, Thermowell!
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Post by Chuckie on Nov 8, 2019 19:34:14 GMT -5
Celebratory because this is the first thing I've felt up to cooking myself since my knee surgery two weeks ago. Autumnal because the red cabbage and the apples were harvested from my own garden. Everyone always does barbecue flavor, I wanted something different. I had about 1 1/2 lbs of country style pork ribs, and I browned them in the big Twell kettle on top of the stove. Meanwhile I diced up two nice size apples, one red onion and about 5 (smallish) cloves of garlic and tossed them in there with a tablespoon of dry rub seasoning and a half cup or so of red wine. Then into the thermowell at lunchtime, 15 minutes of gas. At dinner time around 6 hours later, the pork was shredded with two forks, and the apples and onions had cooked down to a velvety sweet/spicy sauce. We mixed the pork back in and it was perfect, not too wet and not too dry. Then I sauteed up some red cabbage, just in bacon fat and salt and pepper till it was soft but not mushy. We topped our slider buns with meat, red cabbage and some dill pickles. DELISH!!!! It's good for me to stand and walk around a bit, but if I over do it my knee swells back up, so I have to find the sweet spot between activity, and elevation and ice. This amount of cooking was just right. Thank you, Thermowell! SO GLAD to hear you're healing well, nana!!!! When someone on the forum is "outta the loop" or otherwise NOT feeling well/sick/infirm, I worry about them!!! Guess I can put my 'worry stone' away for YOU now!!! Keep up the good work, keep mending!!! CHEERS! Chuckie
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Post by mach12 on Nov 9, 2019 0:32:59 GMT -5
Man that looks good Nana. Especially the onion part but I don't get to cook with onion much anymore since my mother-in-law has developed an intolerance for them. We moved her in with us when her dementia developed about a year ago. I've played around and have found that dicing up some celery in its place is a passable substitute and it might possibly work well in this recipe too. Not the same but usually still comes out well.
I'm going to do an Indonesian dish this weekend called Samoor that I normally cook in a Wok or a Dutch oven and it uses an onion. I'm probably going to do the celery substitute with that, too. I'm planning to do it in the Thermowell and that'll be a first for the Samoor so we'll see what kind of a disaster I come up with.
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Post by pooka on Nov 9, 2019 3:30:32 GMT -5
nana, it's good to hear your convalescence is going well after your surgery. Just don't push yourself too hard too fast. Moderation in all things is the best medicine. This dish sound interesting. The sweetness of the apples contrast with the sharpness of the onions, seasoned with the dry rub & garlic, marinated in red wine, then cooked down to a sauce if I followed right. That's got to be a kind of ambrosia on anything, especially pork. Sauteing red cabbage in bacon fat is genius. I don't thing there's anything that isn't improved by adding bacon or it's fat. I remember reading or hearing a story a few years ago about food scientists cracking the chemistry of why bacon & it's odor is irresistible to us. I friend told me once he'd asked his grandma why his green beans didn't taste as good as hers. She asked, do you add bacon fat? It's getting to be a good reason to start making big batches of soups & chili now that the cold weather is hitting us. Our weather has been pretty mild. I read a couple a days ago where October was the warmest on record. Our last two years have been the warmest on record. Here in southern Indiana, we're forecast to get up to 61 Sunday, then plunge to 16 Monday night, then 12 Tuesday night. It then will bounce back to 51 the following Sunday. Sounds like a good reason to whip up a batch of potato soup & get a good loaf of crusty bread. Oh, they're predicting rain showers early changing to mixed rain and snow later in the day Monday too. What fun!
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Post by nana on Nov 9, 2019 7:08:11 GMT -5
14 degrees here this morning. Brrrrrrr! But I love the way the cold weather brings all the birds back to the feeders. They do enjoy a free lunch, as would anyone.
My affinity for pork, apples, onions, and cabbage must come from my German side. Like Creole cooking has its trinity of onions, celery, and peppers, it seems to be a recurring theme in German cooking. And they all go so well together, or so it seems to my taste. My mom never made roast pork without red cabbage with onions and apples to go along with it. And potato dumplings to soak up the gravy. MMMmmmmmm......
With the knee I have to push myself as far as physical therapy goes. You have to keep bending and straightening it past the point of comfort and into the realm of pain, otherwise the scar tissue will form too tight and you never will get the full range of motion back. Short term agony, long term reward. Yay. They really ought to be upfront about how bad it's going to hurt for weeks. They tell you prior to the operation that you will have discomfort, as though it was just a splinter or stubbed toe. I was not prepared for what it actually was. I've made it worse for myself I suppose because I refused to take the opiod pain pills for more than a few days. Each one caused me such great anxiety (is this the one that will get me addicted?) and while they do dull the pain for a while, they wear off before you're allowed to take the next one and you end up watching the clock for when you can have the next one. Plus they have very unpleasant side effects and make you foggy and stupid besides. Nasty medicine. I'm longing for the day they let me take some extra strength ibuprofen instead of stupid tylenol. CBD oil helps, and so does a CBD/essential oil kind of natural ben-gay liniment that a friend of mine makes. And I am improving bit by bit. They're not kidding about the 6-8 week recovery period, though. And it's a full year before you're really back to your best.
Mach12, is your mother-in-law actually physically intolerant of onions, or is it more of a visual/textural thing? My grandaughter inspects every mouthful of food for the slightest hint of a piece of onion before she puts it in her mouth because (in her own words) she HATES onions, but I have found that when I'm making something that calls for onions when she's around, I put onion powder in instead. That way you still get some of the flavor. In fact, I tried it in macaroni and cheese and she declared it the best ever. What she doesn't know won't hurt her!
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Post by mach12 on Nov 9, 2019 12:20:55 GMT -5
Mach12, is your mother-in-law actually physically intolerant of onions, or is it more of a visual/textural thing? My grandaughter inspects every mouthful of food for the slightest hint of a piece of onion before she puts it in her mouth because (in her own words) she HATES onions, but I have found that when I'm making something that calls for onions when she's around, I put onion powder in instead. That way you still get some of the flavor. In fact, I tried it in macaroni and cheese and she declared it the best ever. What she doesn't know won't hurt her! Her doctor says she thinks it has to do with the oils and recommended we try dehydrated onions or onion powder, and that it's possibly related to the medications she's on. We've been testing it a little here and there and so far so good but she's getting to where she can't communicate well and it's hard to know when something is really bothering her until it's severe. She has dementia with Lewy bodies which has all the stuff with Alzheimer's and then some. Like her being surrounded by people that we can't see. And she takes their advice no matter how unreasonable it is. She's not totally gone though since she thinks our BZ, Pepper, is awesome. At first I thought that was going to be a problem. She got up one morning not too long after we moved her in and put a pan of water on and was just watching it boil. I heard something in the kitchen and when I checked there she was watching the water boil and happy as can be. I asked her what she was making and she said she didn't know so we used the water to make instant oatmeal. I thought I might need to pull the thumb tabs after that but that seemed to satisfy her and her dementia and frailty have progressed to the point that she's content to get to the table and wait for her meals. I wish I'd have learned about Chambers stoves a whole lot sooner so I could have restored and installed one for her. She would have really loved having one and using it. When we put Pepper in the kitchen we had no idea that we might need the safety benefit of having a stove that you could disable for this kind of a reason. Yet another Chambers plus.
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Post by nana on Nov 9, 2019 19:19:42 GMT -5
I am so sorry for what you guys and your mother in law are going through. It is difficult to watch someone you love lose ground like that. I hope caring for her at home is not too hard on you and your wife, because it can get to be overwhelming, especially if there are personality changes. I noticed once my dad finally moved into the adult home where he lives now that his paranoia and suspicions about people disappeared. I think they were an outward manifestation of his anxiety and confusion about things not making sense to him anymore that he knew should make sense. Now that he's in a predictable, safe, comfortable place, his dementia is more of a gentle unhitching of time and place. We'll go see him and he'll be telling us about how he just came back from hiking in the woods collecting wild mushrooms. It may be something he's remembering from decades ago, but it's fresh to him. And because I know he's safe I can just go along with it instead of having to try to convince him he didn't do it and what's more that he SHOULDN'T do it. We laugh more together now than we ever could have when I was trying to care for him and keep him in his home.
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Post by mach12 on Nov 10, 2019 1:48:35 GMT -5
Thanks Nana. It really is a tough one. Before we knew she had Lewy body dementia we had her in a memory care facility but it didn't go well at all. We're looking at respite care to give us some time off and have an appointment mid-month with the guy in the local senior agency to look at some adult day care programs. They estimated 3 more years based on where her dementia is at but she also has leukemia and they don't know what the impact will be with that. She also has macular degeneration and is quickly losing her eyesight. Yesterday was her 98th birthday so it's no real surprise that things are failing.
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Post by pooka on Nov 10, 2019 3:38:12 GMT -5
Too often, a long life isn't a blessing, it's a curse. The end comes far too slowly, robbing you of all that we find dear. That our minds turn to a confused jumble. It's sad when the end is welcome relief that we loath to wish for. I don't want to sound cold, but it's the reality of our extended live due to modern medicine, clean water & effective sewers. In past eras, a long life was a thing to be hoped for. Now we begin to question if in many cases, perhaps we live longer than is palatable. We speak of quality of life rather than quantity of years. I'm afraid it's a balance we'll never master.
You hope for the best, brace for the worst, & deal with it as it hits you as best you can.
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Post by nana on Nov 10, 2019 7:53:21 GMT -5
So true, Pooka. The wheel spins and all you can do is wait to see what number you're going to get. When you're young you think you are the master and director of your own destiny, and somewhere along the line you come to know that all you are really able to do is guide your little boat as best you can down the rapids, waterfalls, and sometimes the slow almost barely moving stretches of this river we call life.
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Post by Chuckie on Nov 10, 2019 9:45:26 GMT -5
Too often, a long life isn't a blessing, it's a curse. The end comes far too slowly, robbing you of all that we find dear. That our minds turn to a confused jumble. It's sad when the end is welcome relief that we loath to wish for. I don't want to sound cold, but it's the reality of our extended live due to modern medicine, clean water & effective sewers. In past eras, a long life was a thing to be hoped for. Now we begin to question if in many cases, perhaps we live longer than is palatable. We speak of quality of life rather than quantity of years. I'm afraid it's a balance we'll never master. You hope for the best, brace for the worst, & deal with it as it hits you as best you can.
My Da had his disabling stroke @ age 69 TEN YEARS before he "finally died" (his words!) He went from roofing houses and playing eighteen holes of golf to confined to the chair---which he DESPISED because he couldn't do what he had ALWAYS done! Well, he was mumbling about it when one of his friends came to visit, and as they were musing about things past over a cold beer, said friend told him "Tom, your ONLY problem is, you lived beyond your expiration date!! A man of your age was supposed to DIE @ age 68, and you lived PAST the time they had predicted for your generation!" My Da thought this over, and said he was "absolutely CORRECT!" He always told folks afterwards that if he'd of ONLY died when he was SUPPOSED to, he wouldn't have had to DEAL w/the wheelchair!!! LOL The day before his stroke he had shingled a garage, and the day before THAT he played in a golf tournament. ALL the man KNEW was work and staying VERY active! He had many blessings, even confined to his chair. He rode his electric scooter up to daily Mass, got to see my younger sister's kids grow up & play golf/baseball like he used to do, and he kept his MIND until the day he passed, which he said he "thanked the Good Lord for EVERY DAY".
ATTITUDE has A LOT to do w/how you spend/end the last of your days in this valley of tears... CHEERS! Chuckie
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Post by pooka on Nov 10, 2019 12:53:56 GMT -5
I think the thing that perturbs most is we think we have some sort of handle on our live, when in reality as you say nana is, "The wheel spins and all you can do is wait to see what number you're going to get."
I picked up a little book a while back called "The Art Of Living". It's the words of a Roman stoic philosopher named Epictetus. He went from being a slave to advising an Emperor. I say his words, because he never wrote anything we know of. We only have his thoughts because his students wrote down his lectures. The gist of his ideas were to not concern yourself with things beyond your control. He has almost an far eastern flavor to his philosophy. I'd recommend reading his thoughts. His ideas are in plain spoken language that anyone can grasp & use in our daily life. He wasn't one to flaunt high minded ideas that were of little use in your day to day lives like many of his contemporaries. Epictetus taught not be befuddled by the myriad of worries that we get stressed out over. Do what you can about the thing you can control, & slough off all the concerns that are up to others & the fates.
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Post by nana on Nov 11, 2019 9:23:23 GMT -5
I feel for your dad, Chuckie. To lose his mobility and independence so permanently and suddenly must have been awful. Attitude is important, and not always easy to adjust, but you're right, it can make all the difference.
I will have to look Epictetus up. He sounds like a Taoist!
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Post by wizardoftrance on Nov 12, 2019 2:23:00 GMT -5
I feel for your dad, Chuckie. To lose his mobility and independence so permanently and suddenly must have been awful. Attitude is important, and not always easy to adjust, but you're right, it can make all the difference. I will have to look Epictetus up. He sounds like a Taoist! Currently, they call it "Mindfulness"... focusing on the moment vs the future or the past. Same candy bar, different wrapper.
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