Fine Young Fauves

My last day of the Whole30-times-two was Friday. On Saturday, very early, I got up and crept warily to the scale. In my mind were two conflicting voices: A) “The number is not important”; and B) “Please let it be twenty pounds!” The reality was an awesome, stunning, 23 pound drop. That’s in 60 days of unlimited, unmeasured, healthy, bountiful, and delicious eating.

I think the lack of measuring may have been my favorite part of this experience. There’s something so evil and constraining about, say, poor Betty Draper from MadMen weighing out her five cubes of cheese, or serving herself her walnut-sized morsel of stuffing on Thanksgiving. This sort of “diet” makes my flesh crawl. It’s intolerable. And it leads directly to Betty Draper standing at the fridge and squirting whipping cream into her mouth under the cover of darkness. It just breeds self-loathing and outbursts of rebellion. The Whole30 is mighty restrictive, but not like that at all. You eat big hearty meals when you’re hungry, and stop when you’re full. There’s not really an impulse to overeat when everything is so nutrient-dense and filling. Your body naturally knows when to stop.

In addition to the weight loss, I found several other great things happened during this 60-day experiment. For instance, I managed to reduce my Prilosec intake to half my former dose, and to stop eating Tums (previously a food group in its own right) altogether! I sensed that my esophagus was healing well. I had no trouble swallowing anything at all. My knees stopped hurting when climbing stairs. I had moments of tiredness, sure, and never quite managed to erase my need for naps, but I also had bouts of heady energy and bounciness. My dizziness…? I felt much less dizzy. I managed to exercise quite a bit at the Cardiac Rehab center in Cleveland, and even went out into the world of normalcy and exercised at the regular-people gym! Without a problem!! I’m almost ready to wean from Cardiac Rehab, I think, and only check in there once in a while.

But now the bad news. The really horrible news. Are you sitting down? I now have learned that dairy is bad for me. Dairy!!! The stuff that ice cream, yogurt, cheese and butter all have in common. I come from the land of carved butter sculptures and the all-you-can-drink milk barn at the Minnesota State Fair. Milkshakes!! But Saturday through today I have added dairy back in, with bad results!!! Instant dizziness, for one big one. Huge heartburn flaring up out of nowhere. Last night Ben heard my Tums bottle rattling in the dark for the first time in two months…. All I can say is, this is dreadful. I really had hoped that it was grains. Somehow living gluten free seemed so much more attainable.

You know, the Whole30 people talk a lot about inflammation. That’s why they pull out legumes, for instance, whether or not the cave dwellers had them. They are inflammatory. I sort of didn’t buy it. Until the dairy thing, when it seemed to be that upon the very moment I ingested dairy, everything in my body started to react and swell in this horrible manner. My sinuses began to press on my ears somehow, and suddenly I felt dizzy. I even had trouble swallowing something– an item got stuck on the way down– for the first time in ages. Dairy!! How could you play me so cold?

Now. On to grains. Over the next 3 or 4 days I’ll try wheat and see if gluten is also my foe. I hope not. One or the other, people! If I’m okay with gluten, at least I can still have an occasional vegan brownie.

Whether I will even want a vegan brownie is another question entirely. This is so weird, so bizarre, and yet it’s true: my tastes have really changed. I had ice cream on Saturday night. My favorite: Jeni’s salty caramel. To my amazement, it wasn’t good! It was… sickly sweet and cloying. I managed to suffer through it, but it was frankly not at all like I remembered it! Today I wanted carrot cake as the opening foray into grains, and while at the store got seduced by a sample of chocolate-caramel torte. After grimly walking past these things for two months, I succumbed. Again, much too sweet! I had a couple more samples to be sure, and then after that binge (three tablespoons of cake), felt ill and gained a headache on half my head. Why must it be so sweet?

Now a banana seems very sweet to me, and raisins and dates are really too much. I think that I actually did adjust my tastes– all that watching for the traces of sugar in ketchup and on the outsides of bacon and such actually worked! I know this may seem odd, because the Whole30 people said it would, but I just assumed it was not actually going to be true in my case. I mean, I love sugar! It’s my favorite food group! And sugar plus dairy equals ice cream, which truly makes the world go round.

…. Or used to.

So now I am fumbling forward. What do I like? What should I eat? And most importantly, can I lose another 23 pounds?? That would be spectacular!

My gut feeling is that as much as possible I must just march forward without changing much. You dance with the girl you brung, right? So this eating method has improved my health a great deal. Why would I abandon it now?

And now, answers to your common questions:

1) Wasn’t it hard as hell? No!! That’s what was so weird about it. It did take a few weeks to get into the groove of the new paradigm, but it really wasn’t hard. Well, not at home. Being out in the world and trying to stick to it was a challenge for sure. But at home, no problem. The food was delicious and abundant. What’s not to love?

2) Wasn’t it a huge amount of work? Yes. Frankly, it is a lot of work to cook everything in your life from scratch. Making your own mayonnaise, stock, etc., where other people would buy them. But I quickly learned how to manage it. Make your own convenience foods. Cook a lot! Have leftovers on hand all the time! these are some of the keys. Also, I should mention that being sick and seeing doctors all the time is even more work.

3) Wasn’t it wildly expensive? In my case, yes, but this is mostly because I make no effort whatsoever to economize. Halibut at $25 a pound? Yum! But you don’t have to be like me. If you think about what you drop from your diet versus what you add, you can see that it would level out. Instead of spending $4.00 on your supposedly healthy processed and sugar-laden breakfast cereal, you can spend that $4.00 on 2 pounds of organic yams. Processed foods are not as cheap as they pretend to be. Sure, a beautiful pastured chicken could set you back $15. But think of what you get: a dinner for four, two solo lunches, and a huge pot of chicken stock. Compare that to the equal cost of Lean Cuisines, and you will see what I’m talking about. And eggs! Even the best, most lovely eggs are $5.00 a dozen. Which is six servings of excellent protein at about 80 cents each. That sort of calculation really makes it no longer seem expensive. Think of your pop and latte budget, and how much kale that could buy!! Also, most importantly, how much does it cost to see the doctor, even one time? If I can eat better and get my medical costs under control, it will be very , very cheap.

In summation, if you are not happy with your weight, your energy level, or your overall health, I really encourage you to try the Whole30. And no, that’s not a paid endorsement. I just have had a really good experience with it.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 Catherine Park

After thinking about it for 24 hours, I decided I just had to keep going. I then announced on Facebook that I’m going to make it a Whole60, ending March 2, and lo a few friends were thinking the same thing. They too were loathe to stop. We’re all re-upping, staying the course, and heading onwards. I’ve sort of even lost count of what day this is. Day 4? Whatever. Pretty soon it’s just “Sunday.”

Yesterday would’ve killed me a few months ago, but yesterday I made it through in decent shape, and am up and around quite nicely this morning. The kids were invited for an all-day playdate at a friend’s house. So Ben and I decided to have a “day date” up in Cleveland. Step one, we went to the museum. The Cleveland Museum of Art just underwent this incredible renovation and we hadn’t seen it. (It’s really beautiful! And free! Go there soon!) So we went up there and had lunch in this lovely  atrium and then walked through a bunch of exhibits. For hours. I did get tired out at times, and had to sit down and pretend to really examine a painting closely for a while. But I then would get up and roam some more. Ben and I have been watching this old TV series called “Civilisation” (british spelling) “A Personal View By Lord Kenneth Clark.” It’s really cute. Lord Clark is like the real life Lord Grantham. It’s art history from the middle ages to the industrial age. Then a new series kicks off, “The Shock of the New” which is all about Modernism, and the Fauves! And the Dadaists, and so on. Very scruffy-haired, 60′s narrator. Anyway, with all this under our belts it was fun to go see some of the paintings and artists in real life.

I really was exhausted when we got back to the car, but Ben needed to get some shirts. He’s very trim what with all his running and his push-up regimen, so has shrunk. That took a little while. Then we went to get spices at Penzey’s. Got a huge ton of things I’ve been wanting. Hate it when recipes call for “Sunny Paris” or “Tsardust Memories” and I have no idea what that contains.

After that we had a sort of trying shopping experience at Whole Foods. The goal: grass-fed steak and a salad. In and out in five minutes. The reality: they were out of grass-fed steak! And … here it comes… I just couldn’t bear to eat the conventional corn fed. I know! it’s getting pretty serious! So Ben was disgruntled. We had some marital discord. The butcher was also disgruntled. But I’m like, Dude, it’s WHOLEFOODS!! You have to expect customers like me. So I finally regrouped and settled on some wild caught halibut and Ben capitulated and we headed out. On the way to the car I said, “Were you amazed that I managed to out-snob Whole Foods” and he goes, “Amazed is not the word for it.” We laughed, I think it’s very tiring to be Ben sometimes.

Next stop, picking up the kids. However, we were invited to come in for a minute and then ended up being there for an hour and a half. The kids didn’t want to leave mid-play of course, and Ben wanted to have a beer with the dad, and I wanted to talk spices with the mom (they are from India). I brought in my haul and we sniffed all the wonders and she ended up giving me some lovely spices she gets at the Indian store. So we finally stumbled into our house at 8:00. I had to get dinner on the table STAT. Everyone was totally tired and hungry.

I did pull it together quickly, though. And the new spice collection saved the day. I used “Sunny Paris” in some almond meal and made an instant paleo crust for the halibut and baked it in a hot oven in ten minutes. Some veggies, and voila! Done!

I know this was an inspired moment that came along as a sort of blessing to me, but I think that so many people assume that good cooking is beyond their reach, sooo difficult and time-consuming. There are large segments of our culture that have completely lost touch with cooking from scratch as a concept. I had a conversation with a caterer (!!) one time and basically couldn’t understand her, and she couldn’t understand me, because she really believed in her heart that opening a can at your house makes the item “homemade.” It’s true the Whole30 entails a lot of cooking. If you are starting off with Lean Cuisine is your “easy” and Hamburger Helper is your “difficult” meal, it will take a while to get comfortable. But you can do it. You really can.

As I was going to bed last night I was prepared for the usual bone-exhaustion and muscle/joint aches. But … no….? I went to bed thinking, “By gosh I feel pretty good!!” My legs actually felt sort of tingly, like they were happy with all the walking??  This really bodes well for London, and for just life.

So how is it being Paleo in a grain-centric world? It’s hard at times. When I shop, even at the healthiest possible venue, I feel an odd sense that I live on the other side of the looking glass. There are aisles upon aisles of things I no longer can imagine ingesting. Not that it’s wrong or bad, so much as baffling. Just … why? Yesterday at the museum there was a treat case full of lovely little tarts and cookies, but I tricked myself, as I so often do, into believing that they were made of plastic. That sort of worked. It wasn’t really that I wanted some so much as I remembered wanting — and having– some in the past. It was like a faint echo.

Do I get cravings still? Sometimes. Lately I’ve been looking forward to having dairy again, especially since I was planning on plain yogurt on January 31. But when the option was there, I just opted not too. Not that I never will again. But… not yet. Sometimes in my old haunts I still get a pang. The bakery section at the Mustard Seed (local upscale health food market) can be tough, especially if they have samples! So tiny and so easily popped into the mouth. But I’ve walked by now many times. At first the kids would hold my hands still, giggling, and I would pretend to shake as we walked by. But now it’s easier. The ice cream area in Earthfare is an issue, as is their chocolate department. I keep walking. Get berries. Walk on by. It’s a little easier each time. Meanwhile, I look at these things and wonder how blindingly sweet they must be by now. Now that I’m discovering sweetness in unlikely places, like coconut milk and carrots.

Whole60?? Yes! How will this all look in a couple more weeks? Even better!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 Catherine Park

So it’s January 31. The first day of the rest of my life after the Whole30.

It’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll begin with the scale. I lost 10.5 pounds.

Now, weight is only one small measure of overall health, and there the story is of course a lot more complex. But it’s a measure. It’s quantifiable. It’s clear. And for me, this is a good steady, safe pace of weight loss. It’s just a start, of course, but it’s a solid start.

The most important thing to know about this is that, after the initial couple weeks of brain fog, tiredness, crabbiness, confusion about what to eat, etc., this did get easy. I am never hungry nor unhappy about food. Indeed, I’m happy! I’m eating a lot of great food! The sheer volume of food coming into the house and being consumed by all is amazing to me.  The boys are chowing too. (I can’t keep apples and carrots in stock!)

The usual horrors of dieting (measuring and weighing things, walking away from the table hungry and depressed, feeling deprived and half starved) are just not at all in evidence here. There can also be a punishing, self-loathing quality to diets (“I’m fat so I have to suffer through this.”) It’s not like that at all. It’s abundant and delicious and pleasant. This is more “I love to be nourished with food that feels great” and “I can have all I want.”

I think this psychology is part of why they (the Whole30 mavins) forbid you to weigh yourself during the 30 days. You will lose weight, but that is not the only point. Healing your body after years of mistreatment, reducing inflammation, gathering more and more energy, ferreting out andy food sensitivities you may have, and overcoming a dependency on food for emotional support, are all really the main points. Weight loss flows from those.

So, how am I feeling?

Frankly, not as awesome as I hoped. Yet. Yet!! I started in a very deep hole, dealing with health issues that are very complex and daunting. A miracle would have been nice, of course. But a good beginning is okay too. I heard from a friend of a friend online who said that she was recovering from migraines, and it took her three full months (during which she lost 30 pounds, as a minor detail!) for her to really feel beyond incredible. The Whole30 people themselves suggest that if you have medical issues, you should keep going for longer.

One set back I had is that last week I had a bad stomach flu. It was brief, and horrible, as they so often are. But being me, it’s taken much longer than a normal person to recover. I still am feeling sort of weak and semi-ill after that. I do not feel strong, not as strong as I would like. I’m still struggling to get through the day without needing to rest. My head is congested, too, and my stomach still feels kind of tender. Elias has been semi-sick also all week, variously having a sore throat, and sick tummy, etc., although he’s been going to school normally. I think he and I have the same thing, sort of a nagging little virus that’s taking it all down a peg. I even have low-grade fever and chills nibbling at me around the edges. So… that’s casting a little shadow over what should be a moment of true glory.

No worries. That too shall pass.

My plan at the moment is to change nothing, add nothing, alter nothing, for at least another ten days so that Isaac and I will finish together. After that, I’m honestly thinking of still staying the course until mid-March. We’re going to London at the end of March, and I’d like to take a couple weeks to experiment with reintroduction before we go (e.g., is dairy or gluten a problem? Are both fine? etc.) so that in London I can have high tea and fish and chips and so on with a clear sense of what that all means in terms of how I will feel afterwards.  And armed with that knowledge, enjoy the vacation to the fullest!

By then, too, maybe the tiger blood will really be coursing through my veins. (Isaac is doing great by the way. It’s his day 20. Yesterday he came home from school and announced: “The tiger blood kicked in right in the middle of dodge ball!”)

My “learnings” from this Whole30, if you’re thinking about doing it too. My advice:

1. Before you start, a couple months before would be ideal, get yourself this cookbook called “Well-Fed: Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat” by Melissa Joulwan. Of all the resources I used during this experience, that was the most useful. Cook things out of it. Practice the “weekly cook up” a couple times, get a sense of what it all will entail. Then when you really begin, those first weeks will be less bewildering.
2. Get used to cooking extra of everything all the time. Food shopping and prep is your biggest challenge. I’ve finally gotten a handle on this. Don’t freeze everything raw the minute you take it out of the grocery bag. Cook it! Chop it! Last night I was making meatballs with red sauce, and while I was standing at the stove I browned a pound of extra ground beef with onions. No reason. Just because. Now it’s there and when I show up at the fridge  starving I will be able to just grab it. Similarly, when I’m chopping sweet peppers or onions, or whatever, I chop a couple more than I need. Who cares? you’ve got your knife in hand. Now, next time you need something, it’s ready to grab.
3. On a related note, invest in a lot of wonderful glass pyrex containers with plastic lids. You will need a million containers. Get nice ones. Target is your friend. They are not expensive and last forever.
4. Most of the time… this is a shocker… I don’t really care what I eat. this is the normal, workaday eating. Need food. Now. In my gullet. When I’m hungry, I will eat whatever’s handy. The key to the Whole30 is to make the right things handy. This morning I dropped the kids off at school and came home, hungry. I had no idea what I was going to eat. I opened the fridge and there were chicken nuggets (fools gold) I made a couple nights ago, and broccolini. Breakfast in three minutes. I didn’t plan it, but I was prepared. If you can see what I mean.
5. You will have food dreams. I had three. One involved a cousin’s wedding, where I showed up in towel! Yes, pretty mortifying, standing in all those wedding pictures in my towel! There was a tray of cupcakes and I was trying to get one, but the frosting (which I wanted most), kept falling off. Then someone showed up with a tray of raw suet and told me I should eat that! The second two were both about eating something (one was a cupcake, the other a chocolate thing with toffee inside) off the plan, and that I would have to reset to the beginning and how horrible that was! Both times I woke up upset, and only gradually realized that I hadn’t eaten anything.
6. The only way to kill the sugar dragon is to starve it. These cravings do go away. And the strangest part is that other things start tasting really sweet! Like sweet potatoes and berries. They just are amazingly sweet. I was eating a pear the other day that I found actually oppressively sweet and could not finish it. You can change your tastes! It’s so incredible, but it’s true. I actually don’t want a cupcake anymore.
7. That’s how they get you on track. You commit for thirty days. You figure: “I can do anything for thirty days.” You do it. And then when it ends, you’re different. You don’t want to fall face first into a box of donuts anymore. It’s… just… over.
8. The Whole30 is incredibly strict. That’s the whole point. You do it or you don’t do it. There’s no middle ground. Ben keeps telling me, “I’m pretty much doing your diet.” He’s great. He’s been so remarkably patient and kind through all this. He’s been incredibly supportive. But he’s not doing the Whole30. He drinks beer and wine every night. He has cut down on grains a lot, was never huge on dairy or sweets, never cared about legumes at all, he’s getting pretty paleo. But he might have a roll when he’s out for lunch. He’s not checking for carrageenan, nitrates, or MSG in anything I’m positive. And yet he’s awesome! He’s been doing push-ups– with a small child on his back– and has the body of a 25 year old. But he’s not doing the Whole30. You see my point? It’s a thing. With rules. They are hard-asses about it for a lot of solid reasons. Either drink the unsweetened herbal tea (I say this instead of “drink the kool-aid,” for obvious reasons) or don’t.
9. But that being said, DO. Do do it. It’s a great, great thing.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 Catherine Park

First let me sit in silent awe that I have not posted in two months. Too much going on I guess… namely Thanksgiving, Christmas, our 17th wedding anniversary (!!), New Year’s, test-solving a ton of crossword puzzles for Rex Parker, (who is putting together a book to raise money for Hurricane Sandy victims), and now… the Whole30, which has taken up 90% of my brain since January 1.

If you’re not familiar with this, it’s a sort of a 30-day diet challenge. You can read up on it here. It follows a Paleo format, and is very strict for the 30 days. That nets out to no sugar of any kind (including honey, agave, stevia, etc.), no dairy of any kind (except ghee, which is clarified butter and has no lactose or casein), no grains of any kind (whether gluten or non-gluten), no alcohol, no legumes, and no food additives (specifically MSG, nitrates and carrageenan). If you mess up, even on day 29, you need to reset to day 1. Thirty consecutive days are needed to make the magic happen.

Last spring, I started reading Minding My Mitochondria , and started trying to cure myself with food. I added a lot of green leafy things to my diet, although not coming near to the 9 cups a day recommended, and tried to cut down on the grains, sweets, and dairy. But as the year wore on I got onto the carb-go-round really badly. The fatigue! The crushing fatigue was my main problem. Sure, I still get dizzy from time to time (even as recently as yesterday), but the situation of being so exhausted I couldn’t stand up, yet needing to get up and get the kids from school, was a good formula for eating chocolate as an emergency fix. And then crashing, reaching for toast (even whole grain!) or brownies, or [add whatever sweet, starchy thing here]. And then crashing again. Repeat, repeat.

A year ago, Terry Wahls, the Mitochondria lady, said (well, her book said) I should quit this and that white sugar, white flour, lots of dairy, etc., was only making things worse. She said in fact that I should go Paleo… that eating like our ancestors would lead to improved health in countless ways. But did I listen and actually do what she said? No. I just added a lot of kale smoothies. Took grains out of dinner. But threw a turtle sundae on the side. Coupled with my on-going exercise prohibition, this added up to a lot of blubber. I mean– tons and tons of added weight. Which lead to more tiredness, as I tried to heave my beached-whale self up a flight of stairs. Without enough oxygen getting to my brain. While dizzy. Etc.

All in all it became painfully obvious. … MORE than painfully obvious… that I had to do something rather drastic. Something I never dreamed I could do: give up dairy and sweets and still live!

So sometime in the fall I was trying to deepen my relationship with Paleo eating, and I bought a couple new cookbooks. One of them, Well-Fed, described the Whole30 and had an introduction by the whole30 people, Melissa and Dallas Hartwig. I started cooking all these lovely things out of that cookbook and thinking… hm… could I really do this? Then I suppose around Thanksgiving I set my mind to it for sure. At the end of December I put a shout out on Facebook that was going to start the whole30 Jan 1., and would anyone like to do it too? I was just looking for one buddy. But I got a lot of interest, and it netted out to 3 friends actually doing it with me.

Yay! We set out Jan. 1 and have been cooking and eating like crazy since then. If you look on Facebook, you can find my page about it, and see the many wonderful things we’ve been cooking.

So, how’s it been?

One thing I could say about it is that up until now I was not in any condition to blog about it. The first period of brain fog was really hard. I felt like hell for at least a week. They call this a “carb hang-over.” Your poor body has to suddenly adapt to this unfamiliar thing: not getting energy from sugar. (And when I say sugar, I mean not only cookies, but also cereal, toast, crackers, mashed potatoes, whatever, and don’t tell me whole grain makes it okay.) It has to suddenly learn this new concept: get energy from fat. Which you have plenty of. And when, or if, you can finally tap it rather than adding to it, it’s like discovering that solar energy really has unlimited potential with not much downside. The Whole30 also makes you eat a lot of fat. If your turkey breast and roasted veggies doesn’t have enough, you must add half an avocado or put ghee on things to hit that minimum. Weird, right?

I have not hit the glory quite yet. The stage I’m in now is supposed to be “Tiger Blood!” that is, you feel incredible! You have so much energy! It’s a wonderful world! I’m not there yet. But as a friend pointed out to me, it’s going to take me longer to dig out because I started in a very deep hole with a lot of underlying health problems. But that being said, I can feel, I can sense, I know in some fundamental way that I am on the right track. I feel really, really different. I told Isaac that this is the “tiger blood” stage and he said, “Is that in contrast to your usual sloth blood?”

Why yes.

This is day 21 for me and the trend line is really good.

Meanwhile, Isaac has decided to join me on this quest. This evolved because his need and want for an Xbox 360S with Halo Reach has been the center of his being for at least a year. Ben issued a standing offer last summer, that if Isaac could master the times tables 1-10 that he would get at least the Xbox. (The Halo Reach is too violent and we’re not doing it.) But Isaac hasn’t been willing or able to do that. To him, that seems like an impossible mountain to climb, which is another topic entirely. (Yes, he’s officially a genius, and yes, he doesn’t know what 7 times 8 is. It’s a paradox, like Sherlock Holmes not knowing that Earth goes around the sun.) Anyway, while watching me do all this, somehow it evolved that we started conversing about whether he could ever do it. I mean, Isaac lives on carbs. He loves candy to a fault. And his day would begin with Purely O’s (like Cherrios, only more PC), go on to pizza at school, and end with mac and cheese. I’m always force-feeding him milk to get some semblance of protein into him, and if he eats a few green beans or a cucumber then that’s a good day. He’s also semi-vegetarian in that there are rare meats or poultry that he will eat, and no fish whatsoever, and a stray egg here or there.

So the concept of Isaac giving up grains and sugar and dairy seemed pretty incredible. I was definitely the ring-leader on it, but Ben agreed that it would be okay to try. I figured that if Isaac couldn’t make it, he might go back to trying to learn multiplication. Or, if he did make it, it would be a great learning experience re: how the things you eat make you feel. And if Isaac could learn, at age 10, really experience something that many Americans of all ages don’t know, that eating junk food makes you feel bad, and eating healthy food makes you feel good, then this would be a life lesson worth at least one Xbox!

Isaac and I wrote up a contract, and after much strife over the Halo problem, we both signed it. Because Isaac is a semi-vegetarian and I was worried about his protein intake, I took a couple items from the vegetarian whole30 list (edamame, plain full-fat grass-fed yogurt, and finally the coup de gras, no-sugar peanut butter). Because Isaac has such a sharp legal mind, I tried to make it air tight:

the official document

This has posed some challenges for me logistically. Now I have to figure out foods for me that are Whole30 compliant, as well as working this Venn diagram of foods that are Whole30 compliant that Isaac will actually eat. Because Elias is not doing it, this means making multiple menus per meal. Last week, getting through all those meals was a trial. I’m glad he started 11 days after me, though, because if I had been in the thick of the worst of the transition, my brain would never have been able to figure it out.

But here we are. Isaac is incredible. Another angle of the goodness of this is that he’s suddenly developed amazing self-control. I mean, saying no to cake! Passing up popcorn and root beer at the movies! Serving pizza to other kids at school without having any! Standing by while Elias stuffs his pie-hole with cupcakes at church! He’s been just really, really amazing. I hadn’t thought of the whole concept of having self-discipline and learning to delay gratification and things like that when we started, but those have turned out to be amazing side benefits. He’s on his day 10. The worst is behind him. We’re getting into a rhythm. He’s boldly trying things to see if they are possibly good. He’s eating… good…. food… He said, for instance, “Mom, when you’re not eating candy all the time, blueberries taste really sweet!!”

At which point I nearly fainted from joy. He gets it!!

I get it too!! It’s win-win. Tiger Blood has to be just around the corner for me. If Isaac hangs in there, I’ll go with him to his finish date, which will be my day 41, and we can finish strong together.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 Catherine Park

This morning, I was working on some writing for National Novel Writing Month and wanted to dig out an old journal about a trip to my grandmother’s house in Tickfaw, Louisiana. It took a while to track down because I had remembered it as being a summer trip and I couldn’t find the journal for summer 1989. Finally working backwards I realized I had the year right and the season wrong. It was actually fall. November to be exact. And then I found that the day in question was actually November 19, 1989. 23 years ago today, when I turned 23! This amazing numerological confluence struck me a so lovely that I needed to share it with you.

Imagine me and my mother in a tent, by flashlight, in the pouring rain: exhausted, filthy, covered with flea bites, spider bites, and cur-dog bites. We were engaged in the hopeless, hopeless project of trying to make my grandma’s house fit for human habitation, especially since she insisted on continuing to inhabit it. Also imagine us laughing so hard that our sides were hurting.

November 19, 1989

Happy Birthday! 23! Today I…

• Fell through the floor
• Broke my tooth and glued it back on with super glue
• Spent hours trying to make soup, build a fire, etc.
• Put tarps on the roof, climbed up there barefoot with grandma who is nimble as a goat and knows her way around roof and its holes much better than we do
• Slept in tent in pouring rain
• No showers, filthy, unwashed, etc.
• Overwhelming quantity of work
• sense of hopelessness
• Gigantic cockroaches and spiders, threat of alligators and snakes. Grandma says “gators will never catch you if you run in zig-zag pattern.” (Seems they are fast on the straight-away but slow on the corners?)
• Fleas in my hair, creeping and crawling

Mom and I will find good homes for the horrible worthless curs with this ad. Grandma says we can’t get rid of them because we need to “preserve the bloodlines”!!! :

“Wanted: Loving home for seven homely, mange-covered, scrawny, sickly, pregnant, flea-infested, poorly-socialized dogs with hookworm. $10 (or best offer) for complete set. Will not separate…. Great high school science project!”

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Okay, so two days post-op. I am still rather sore and achy. I don’t feel full of vim and vigor. Ben is exhausted from being himself plus Mr. Mom. “Riding two horses with one ass” as he likes to say. But it went SO well. I mean, just as perfect as can be. Dr. Marchetta is my new hero. He’s the best guy in the whole world. He was right. (Dr. Cheryl suffered a stunning defeat in this round of Iron Doc.) He found a lot of crud in there. AND HE FIXED IT.

I couldn’t get him to say a stage of endometriosis, but he implied it was about stage 3, i.e., “Quite a lot.” He also said “Your ovaries were heavily involved, with a lot of scarring and two cysts.” Which means all that gunk could cause a lot of hormonal issues, and could generally make me feel horrible! Which is great! Because now it’s fixed!

Also, the crack team at the surgery place (I had this done at the Akron General Wellness Center in Montrose, where many of you may work out. They have surgeries by the ER on the other side.) did a great job dealing with my POTS and my fear of nausea. They tanked me up on fluid beforehand. When I came in, even sitting down, my BP was a wan 103/70. But after two bags of fluid it came up to a rosy 130/80 or so. Also, the anesthesiologist was so nice about my nausea concern. He came in and said, “We’re going to throw the kitchen sink at you.” They gave me two different IV nausea meds while I was still under, and then another pill to take at home. The result? ZERO NAUSEA!! Praise Jesus! I haven’t even felt queazy and am back on normal food as of last night.

There was one scary part, of course. That’s the brief moment when I walked into the OR  in my ridiculous gown and slippers and got onto this tiny cot. There was a bank of bright lights and lot of people with masks on looking down at me. I didn’t like the sight of these big holder things to put my legs in. It was starting to feel like an alien autopsy situation. It was also incredibly cold in there, and windy. Dr. Marchetta was actually wearing a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The nurse said, “It’s supposed to be 67 degrees in here, because it keeps the bugs from growing.” And I said, “It feels more like 57” and Dr. Marchetta said, “Make that 27! And it’s not just the temperature of the air, it’s the velocity!” And I said, “You need winter scrubs, like some kind of thermal L.L.Bean scrubs….” (He was wearing short sleeves!) And he laughed and said, “You’re funny!” (I get extra funny when I’m scared.) I was just thinking that I really really wanted to run away from all this when the guy said, “I’m putting something in your IV now that will make you go to sleep. It will feel warm…”

And that’s the last thing I remember until they were waking me up. I woke up roughly, feeling panicked, and saying I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt so tight and this mask on my face seemed to be smothering me.

Man’s voice: “Your breathing is fine. Your oxygen is 100%.”

Me: “I can’t breathe…My stomach hurts…”

Woman’s voice: “In through your nose. Out through your mouth. That will help you not cough. In through your nose…”

Ben said when he first came to see me, I was crying. He asked why I was crying and I said I didn’t know, I just felt sad. I remember none of this. What I remember is that I was sitting up and reasonably fine when he came in, so he must’ve come in at another time too.

So now I’m sitting here with a tiny, sore incision in my belly button. There’s another tiny incision below that, but it doesn’t hurt at all. My back hurts and I feel quite tired. I still have Percocet, which is my friend. My bedroom is not at all tidy, but it’s beautifully sunny and I have a gorgeous silky black cat dozing by my feet. Cleaning people are down in the kitchen. Shortly I’ll trade with them, go downstairs where it’s clean already, and they will come and impose order on the chaos up here.

Dr. Marchetta called last night and said that by Monday I will feel back to normal, “Only you will feel much, much better!”

I am so excited and happy about the prospect! If I could physically jump for joy, I would do so at this moment.

Yay.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

You may want to avoid the following if you’re not a fan of the female reproductive system.

I’m going into surgery tomorrow to see if I have endometriosis. This is the thing where your uterine lining can grow in places other than where it belongs, like, say, on your kidneys. Weirder still, it can, you know, do the uterine lining process, swelling and bleeding on a regular basis, even though it’s latched on to some wholly inappropriate body part in distance regions of your abdomen. This seems very, very wrong, and I can see why it it could cause a mess of problems. Its hallmark is epic pain. I luckily don’t have that. I do, however, have epic bleeding. That’s what caused the ob/gyn to check into the possibilities, and to finally settle on this one as the most likely hypothesis.

I should add that Dr. Cheryl totally dismisses this option. She thinks this whole endometriosis quest is lame, and I don’t have that at all. I just have too much estrogen and we can treat that. So… we’ll see who wins the great diagnosis battle. [Strange thought: should we have a medical game show, sort of like Dr. Oz meets the Iron Chef, but instead of kitchen stadium it’s a doctor’s office and the two doctors have one hour to determine what is wrong with the patient...? “Okay, he’s drawing blood... what’s that Jim? Six vials!! What can he be testing for??” Seriously, I think this idea has a lot of potential.]

The only way to find out for sure whether you have this lovely thing, is to basically open the hood, take a flashlight, and have a look around. While they’re in there, if they do find something, they can then zap it or laser it or taser it, or whatever they do. I’m a little hazy on the finer points. It’s a one-hour, laparoscopic, outpatient procedure under general anesthesia. I should be done and home on the couch, where I belong, by mid-afternoon tomorrow.

And now an enumeration of my hopes and fears.

My hope, frankly, is that I have it big time. If I allowed myself to fantasize about the big reveal at the end of the procedure, my fantasy would be that the doctor comes in  all exhausted and weary, wipes his brow, and says, “It was the worst case of endometriosis I’ve ever seen! How this poor woman has been somewhat conducting her life… being a good mother to her children, and even occasionally making a nice dinner or doing some decent knitting (although woefully inadequate in pretty much all other spheres of existence) well, it’s just beyond me!! She’s a goddess!!” And then the critical coda to this statement: “AND I FIXED IT.” That’s a very, very important element of this fantasy.

I know that this seemingly strange hope will make perfect sense to my POTS peeps and my other buddies in the chronic illness community. We just so long for some specific thing that can be addressed and treated, as some sort of possible doorway out of the endless illness maze.

My fears, on the other hand….

Fear number 1: Something goes wrong, it turns from laparoscopic to open, and I end up with a big incision, a couple days in the hospital, and a six-week recovery. Chances of that happening: literally 1 in 1,000.

Fear number 2: They find nothing. Psyche! That was a fun exercise for no reason, and now you get to still have stitches and anesthesia goodness for no gain whatsoever. Chances: 1 in 10, maybe? Just guessing.

Fear number 3: They do find something, but it’s just a little bit here and there, no biggie, and they fix it, big whoop, but I then spend the next three days vomiting because of the anesthesia, and being in pain, and it’s sort of for naught. Chances: 1 in 5, maybe?

I had my gall bladder out some years ago and threw up for three straight days, so this last one has a special resonance to me. I talked to the pre-op nurse about it today and she swears up and down that I will get lots and lots of anti-nausea medication this time. Why the Clinic didn’t hook me up when they did the gall bladder I’ll never know. I kept calling them and pleading for succor and they kept just saying, “Oh, it’s just from the anesthesia!” And I was all, “I know what’s causing it… Will you please make it stop?” But no. They offered me literally thin gruel. … “Just drink some chicken broth when you can keep that down.”

Gah.

Speaking of nausea, I just attempted to eat way too many jelly beans. Yes, for medicinal purposes! There’s this famous nutritionist from the 1950s and 60s, Adele Davis, who says that the night before surgery you should eat one pound (!!) of jelly beans or gum drops, something full of sugar but low in fat, such that you will store glycogen in your liver and make it through the day of fasting and surgery better. Or something like that. My mom told me about it, and I looked it up on the internet. At least in the quote I found, it also said you’re supposed to have an enema the night before surgery too! Of course Ben thought this was quite funny, and made a point of saying “Oh sure… you want to follow her directions when she says to eat jelly beans, but when she says enema you just disregard her entirely!” But to his credit, he went out and bought me a pound of gourmet jelly beans. Although I’m the only one having surgery tomorrow, we all gorged on them to our heart’s content…. and all four of us still did not get through one pound.

Oh yes, in other news, I had a full day at the Clinic yesterday. It was first the Stress Echocardiogram and then the get-together with my Syncope dude, the big cardiologist who deals with POTS. Part one was pretty okay! It was a stress test combined with an ultrasound of the heart before and after exercising on a treadmill for like 7 minutes. I was all covered with electrodes and wires, and then spread with goo for the ultrasound, but the good news was that I survived pretty much unscathed. My blood pressure did not tank, and I did not get too dizzy to stand up (both of which happened in my previous stress test in September.) Better news than that, my heart itself is totally fine. It’s lovely actually. It was weird how they had the room set up, so that I was lying on my side facing away from the ultrasound man (I think he was Kenyan but I didn’t ask), but they had a mirror there, so I could see my heart beating on the reflection of his screen. I could see all the four chambers and the blue and red blood swishing in and out (they color it blue and red on the screen, which I think means the non-oxygenated and the oxygenated portions). And I actually got sort of misty eyed looking at it. I know this may sound strange, but it looked so beautiful. There it was, this incredibly strong, tireless organ, endlessly pumping, pumping, through thick and thin, night and day, to keep me alive. It was really a sweet and touching sight. Such a determined Little Engine That Could sort of organ. I’m really proud of my heart.

My thoughts about my uterus tonight are less sentimental. This thing has brought my two boys into the world, and for that I am really bottomlessly grateful. But otherwise it’s basically been a huge hassle since I was about 12 years old. It caused a huge amount of heartache and pain with all my miscarriages, and just about slew me with grief when we lost our first baby boy. It continues to be a nuisance to this day. The uterus is really quite a mixed bag for me. Extreme highs and lows of existence, and then just the monthly grind for three or four decades. I feel quite mixed about it. If it’s been trying to assimilate my other organs, and making the whole rest of me feel horrible, I will be really quite annoyed with it indeed.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. Stay tuned.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

It’s been a heckuva week in Bath, Ohio. I know that Hurricane Sandy really hammered the East Coast, and we are 500 miles away. I know that many people have lost their homes, been flooded out, and some have even died in this storm. So I have to count my blessings that we did not lose power for more than a couple minutes, and no major trees on our property went down and we are all warm, dry, safe and well.

Nonetheless, from what I can gather, things have been more messed up here than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Cleveland got blasted with those wild Sandy-fed north winds off the lake. Trees were down all over the place and that meant lots of power out; something like 150,000 customers are still in the dark. Among those places without heat or light is in fact our school. We have not had school in session since Monday. Also, needless to say, the weather has been horrendous. And Ben had gone out to Chicago on Sunday night, and then got stranded there on Monday night when the Cleveland airport was closed. Tuesday morning he did make it home, but had to go almost directly to work. Then an elderly family friend died. So now he has funeral-related things to deal with.

The net result is me and the boys trapped in a house for days on end.

We just got word that school will be closed again tomorrow, too! And now, due to Halloween in the mix, tons of candy just got poured on the flames. I am thankful for RedBox, which has provided me with the Three Stooges video that now has tamed them. And, just at the worst possible moment, National Novel Writing Month starts today. It’s November 1 all the sudden! So words must happen, no matter what else goes on.

And… today was my big new doctor appointment since I got diagnosed with the MTHFR thing. The lady is called Dr. Cheryl, and she works in a little blue cottage in Richfield. Last week I filled out a 15-page new-patient form, and then ended up writing an additional 4-page essay to explain what the F*ck has been happening with my poor, totally messed up self. This lady is very different from the Cleveland Clinic and the whole round robin of medical craziness. Unlike all those highly specialized and brainy people at the Clinic, she grasps that the leg bone IS connected to the knee bone. I’m so tired of doctors that just only care about their one part of expertise. The brain guy doesn’t care about the heart, and the heart guy doesn’t care about the uterus, and the uterus guy doesn’t care about the stomach and so on. But I am actually ONE person, one entity, one sentient life form, and all these parts actually interact and affect each other. Each one does not exist in its own little island, severed from all the rest. All the more so with a weird background ailments like POTS and MTHFR.

Also, it was just so much more homey there. Instead of a collection of giant buildings extending for blocks in all directions (the hand building, the eye building, etc.) it’s a tiny charming– human-scale– cottage with flowers in front of it. Inside I was directed by “Grandpa Money” (a sweet old guy who volunteers -!!- there) into a bedroom with a big comfy chair in it and a mural on the wall. It had 1800s-era wood trim around the doors and the floor was very far from level. The mural was a seascape by a moderately skilled painter. (She got the light right, the clouds were pretty good, but the kites were flying the wrong direction, and the kite strings were as thick as a man’s arm.) All these are elements that endeared me to the place at once. Dr. Cheryl herself, a perky young woman with an enormous pregnant belly out to here, further made me feel that I was in a whole different kind of place. And… she personally has POTS. I can’t emphasize this enough. She is one of us!! She gets it!!

She went over my massive dossier and asked me to clarify this and that. We talked about various tests coming up, and ones I’ve already had, and ones I haven’t had that she wants to get now. We talked indeed for a full hour. I never got the sense that she had to go, or that I was one of ten patients waiting for her (I was the only one there), or that there was any particular pressure or rush about it. This is a stark contrast to other appointments where I’ve actually had to physically CHASE doctors down to get a few more critical pieces of information, and they are running away at full speed.

Okay, so what’s the bottom line? Well, the main thing is that I need to get these nutrients into my body in a way and a form that they can be utilized, despite my genetic issues. We need it to get into my body already methylated (whatever that means, I take it to be like “ready to use”) and to bypass the questionable digestive system. That means… gulp.. shots. I have to give myself shots. Okay, only twice a week for three months, not so bad, right? And a TINY needle. … But she did mention that it kinda burns. Luckily (?) the compounding pharmacy in Cleveland where they make this stuff is … you guessed it… without power. So this will be a few days or maybe even next week before I get my hands on it and get my head around the idea. I’ve never given myself a shot before. I guess you just sort of DO IT.  Also she gave me a (oral) supplement to help me get ready for and recover from my impending surgery on Nov 14, and I started taking that today.

For show and tell, I brought in literally a shopping bag of supplements from my cupboard. My mother gives them to me, and now and then I buy them when I’ve read something or other. They tend to accumulate. They drive Ben crazy. I put together a small baggie of what I’m actually taking now, and dragged in all the rest so she could tell me what to do with them. One by one, she patiently looked at them, read their ingredients and sorted them into groups. Some I could keep for the days when I can’t stand to do my shot. Others I should not take until after my surgery because they might make my bleeding worse. Others I won’t need. Only one actually alarmed her: niacin. She said I should throw it away! This apparently because it dilates your blood vessels, which is basically the last thing a POTS person needs.

We talked about the exercise problem. Yoga? I said. No, she said. Pilates? No. No, you could really pass out. She said I should get in a pool. Not a warm pool, nor a deep one. Not past my chest! Not swimming! Just walk in chest-deep water. The water will compress the blood vessels and make it easier to keep blood going up to my brain. If I don’t try to swim or go over my head I am unlikely to drown (my concern about swimming=passing out and quietly slipping under the water while the lifeguard is doing her nails), and with all that lovely pressure on my veins I will have plenty of oxygen in my brain! I will feel better while exercising that way. She also said that the Clinic has this (insane!!) inpatient rehab thing for people like me… and that it works well. Six weeks, inpatient!! Living at the hospital??! Gaah. No!! She could see I loathed this idea and said to just keep it in mind.

She also said that she doesn’t think I have endometriosis at all. It doesn’t hurt to check. But her thought it that it’s MTHFR plus too much estrogen, both of which she can treat. She also mentioned that menopause and POTS is hell on wheels, but that she can help manage it when the time comes. So I guess that’s something to look forward to!

And she thinks I should not try to get off the Cymbalta any time soon. It really does help with the symptoms for lots of people and lord knows it’s helped me. I’m at a comfortable cruising altitude of 30 mg a day. She said that if my husband thinks I’m too spacey, “Tell him to try going through the day with a constant head rush and see how he likes it!” Ah… so nice to be understood by one who’s actually lived it!!

So. Step one, is do the shots for the next three months and then see what happens after that. Maybe I will need to keep going on the shots, or maybe will be well enough to switch to normal-person oral supplements. She does think it will help me feel better. Maybe even much better, although I dare not hope too much.

Meanwhile… back at the Clinic: I have the stress echocardiogram coming up on November 12, with a cardiologist appt to follow the same day. Then the endometriosis thing on Nov 14. She pointed out that it’s much harder to recover from surgery with POTS than without, and to expect it to take a while longer than they say it will.

And then…? Onward. All in all I’m optimistic about this. I think this has been useful. I feel that we are getting closer, ever closer, to a real solution.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

Great news! I have a rare genetic disorder.

It’s called MTHFR gene mutation. If you google it, as I did, you will soon find yourself up to your neck in incredibly complicated information, like this helpful piece from Wikipedia:

Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) is an enzyme that in humans is encoded by the MTHFRgene.^[2] Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase catalyzes the conversion of 5,10-methylenetetrahydrofolate to 5-methyltetrahydrofolate, a cosubstrate for homocysteineremethylation to methionine. Genetic variation in this gene influences susceptibility to occlusive vascular disease, neural tube defects, colon cancer and acute leukemia, and mutations in this gene are associated with methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency.^[3][4]

See? Aren’t you glad we cleared that up? What’s that you say? Your biochemistry is a little rusty?

I have what they call heterozygous 677 (one bad half of the pair) and homozygous 1298 (both halves are bad). While it’s common to have at least one of these be mutated, having three out of the four is not common at all. The doctor who tested me for it is convinced it caused all my pregnancy problems in the past, including the placental abruption that led to the loss of our preemie Jacob in 2001, and the other five early miscarriages that I went through. The net total of 8 pregnancies for 2 healthy boys is what raised the issue in his mind when we first met. He thought I probably had the MTHFR gene mutation, and tested me for it, and he was right.

My first thought was “Why the F*** didn’t the Clinic find this already? They’ve tested me nine ways to Sunday.” But then it occurred to me, which I later confirmed, that when I was really in the thick of it was way, way back in 2001. Eleven years ago! Which is light years in terms of genetic science. I really think they just didn’t know about it back then.

This guy explains it pretty well:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBUCeulUoe0&feature=related

So… what’s it all mean? Well, that remains to be seen. So far, what I understand is that it makes me much more prone to blood clots, which can lead to pregnancy loss, and which also can lead to a higher risk for more serious things like stroke, pulmonary embolism, etc. And because my body cannot utilize folic acid in the normal way, this can create a deficiency effecting many or all body systems. It gets worse with age– hello?

What I find encouraging about this news is that it could be causing more or less everything to go to hell in a hand basket, including POTS, and lots of other crap, and — the best part– it’s treatable. There’s debate about what form of folic acid to take, and how much, and so on. But everyone agrees that your body can’t utilize folic acid the normal way, and that this can cause a lot of problems because that is needed in almost every function top to toe. My gyno said to take 4 mg of folic acid a day, plus baby aspirin to keep my blood thinner and clots at bay. Looking around online I’ve found several people who say that methylated folic acid is the way to go instead, but I’ll figure that out by trial and error if nothing else.

In the meantime, I have to say I’m kind of happy about it. This could be a game-changer.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park

We just celebrated Isaac’s 10th birthday last weekend. He decided on a Pokemon theme to his party and wanted some relevant cake action. Like this! Um…

Charizard!!

I know that my owl cake has given me some cred as a cake goddess, but this is waaaaaay beyond me. However, I did think I could make some sort of poke-ball-type deal. Tastewise, Isaac was all about cherries and chocolate and whipping cream. I realized he had a black forest cake a restaurant one time and that was what he was thinking about.

So my challenge was to create a confection that looked like this on the outside:

While tasting like this on the inside:

After some googling, and perusal of my personal cookbook library, I decided that the key to this project was fondant. If you’re not familiar with this stuff, it’s more or less thick, hard play-do stuff that tastes somewhat toxic, dye-filled and sugary, and people use it to cover those ultra smooth wedding cakes and the like. You roll it out like pie crust and sort of wrap your cake in it. It comes in several colors, pre-mixed, and you don’t buy it at the grocery store. You buy it at JoAnn, which only serves to underscore the non-food, decorative-object feel of the stuff.

Obviously, at times like this Martha Stewart is your buddy. I watched a few fondant videos and read her recipe for black forest cake. Hers looked pretty fragile though, no leavening, and “serve immediately,” which I found worrisome. I decided to use her black cherry filling concept, but my own trusty devil’s food cake recipe, from Lucia Watson’s cookbook, that I’ve made about a hundred times. It’s durable. It never fails. But because we were having 10-12 kids and maybe as many adults, I decided to double it. I had 9″x 2″ cake pans (I think!) and made a double batch of cake batter, which split nicely into the two pans.

My next challenge was to slice these horizontally. What I really needed was something like this:

whoa!

This would’ve been very, very helpful! However I did not have this wonderful thing, which I totally need, and had to wing it. I did nab a little tip from Martha Stewart though. You cut a vertical notch in the cake before cutting it, so that afterwards it’s easier to line up your (naturally somewhat slanted) layers.

I did not remember to take a picture of this process. My entire brain was occupied by not letting the layers break or otherwise come to ruin. Nor did I get a picture of filling it. I put in what seemed an ample layer of whipping cream (Martha calls for Kirsh, but I just had normal vanilla extract and a little sugar in mine. ) Then layered on some of the somewhat sloppy cherry sauce per Martha Stewart. (It’s just dark frozen cherries, cooked with their juice in a simple syrup and cooled.) Then another layer of cake. And so on, up the stack until I had this towering sight before me:

Since the fondant is much more about looks than taste, I had struggled with the idea of putting something frosting-like under it. The directions say to put a layer of buttercream frosting under it. People online said you could do chocolate ganache. My friend Martha checked with a pastry chef who was opposed to putting anything under it at all for fear of slippage. But I decided to risk the ganache, which I knew would taste awesome even if it did slip. At this stage, it looked like this:

looks pretty slippery, yes?

Then, while grappling with the fondant situation, I chilled the cake. This set the ganache so that it was quite firm and stable and ready for the coup de gras. Avast ye fondant!

Yes, it rolls out like stiff pie crust. You need a lot of muscle to roll it. It was sort of a work out for me. You dust it with powdered sugar as you go, and here a Rollpat(r) does help. Then you roll it up on your rolling pin to transport it to the cake, and very gentle unroll it over the top.

Add the next color…

Add the black stripe, and then trim the bottom edge nicely….

Another thing I didn’t realize I needed until I needed it: a whole set of graduated round cookie cutters. The dot on the poke ball can be achieved by placing a white circle of fondant on top of a slightly larger black circle of fondant. But this required ransacking the cupboards for glasses/cups/lids/whatever that would be the perfect sizes. Not easy!! Finally attained with a juice glass cutting the black and the top of a plastic water bottle for the white. Phew!

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Just need a few pokemon toys for the kids to take home as party favors, a few candles, and voila!!

I think the birthday boy was pleased.

And enormous as it was, it all got eaten up!

Now, before I go, let me share my learnings (people do say that, cringe):

• When dealing with several colors of fondant, start with the lightest and go towards the darker colors. Why? Because your rolling pin, work surface, and hands will be besmirched with the previous colors, as I learned when I found little red fingerprints on my white fondant.
• Clean up all the chocolate ganache slop before you go near the fondant. This was a mistake.
• Speaking of ganache, get that stuff REALLY smooth. Otherwise the lumps will show through, sort of like putting a quilt over an unmade bed.
• Put way more whipping cream between the layers, or better yet, make something with a little tensile strength, like cream cheese frosting. I was not pleased that the whipping cream sort of disappeared between the layers, because it’s mostly air and it got crushed.
• Don’t bother making even a quickie Zekrom costume for your child. He will take it off in the first five minutes, thus annoying you while also semi-embarrassing all his Pokemon-dressed guests.
• Get a cake slicer and right-sized cookie cutters.
• Party on! You only turn ten once!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Catherine Park