Sunday Summary and #ROW80 Round 2 Goals

  1. This is the eve of the start of Round 2 of ROW80.  I’ve been running numbers, thinking about goals.  I finished Act 1 this week (about 7300 words this week), along with a lot of later series plotting.   Really pleased with that.
  2. I’m only setting two goals this round.  Write  at least 20 days out of every 30 and finish To Get Me To You.  Bonus goal: I’d like to get out another Meet Cute or two, but the focus is really on getting this novel done.
  3. Unrelated to ROW80, I’m working on coping with this new dairy allergy.   The thing about finding out you have a food allergy is that you absolutely go through the stages of grief.  Right now I’m smack dab in the middle of Pissed Off.  Kinda hard to stay in denial when every time I eat more dairy than what goes in my tea, I break out into head to toe eczema.It’s so…craptastic.  Pretty much every single one of my favorite foods involves dairy.   Pizza.  Mexican food of all kinds.  Cheesecake.  Ice cream.  Mac and cheese.  Parmesan polenta.  Cheeseburgers.  And unlike the gluten thing, which I feel we’ve successfully conquered for my husband, there is no such thing as a substitute for cheese.  Which, by the way, apparently has a compound called casomorphins that have opiod effects on the body.  Cheese addiction is a real thing, evidently.  Having a casein allergy now is about like having a gluten allergy fifteen or twenty years ago.  When nobody knows what it is or how to accommodate it and it’s in every blessed thing, including many of the alleged dairy substitutes, which are formulated for people who can’t deal with lactose and still include casein (the protein in milk that people with true dairy allergies are allergic to).  And of course being a small town, what options are generally available aren’t available here.

    At the suggestion of a vegan friend, I picked up The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook.  Last night I tried the nacho cheez substitute which…while edible, generally made me want to weep.  I’ll keep trying and testing stuff because that’s all I can do, but right now it feels like it really sucks to be me.  At the start of this kind of thing, the only thing you can focus on is all the things you can’t have, which is an absolutely miserable place to be.   I’ll adapt because that’s what you have to do, but it sucks.  So my crusade is to find acceptable substitutes for at least some of the things I can’t have now–once we found a good recipe for hamburger buns and loaf bread, the gluten free thing was a lot easier to manage.   It just means we’re in a stretch where I’ll be testing and tossing a lot of stuff out.  And who knows…maybe it’ll go away eventually.  Sometimes they do.

 

13 thoughts on “Sunday Summary and #ROW80 Round 2 Goals

  1. When I found out I had diabetes, I started thinking about the things I couldn’t have. But then I realized sweets weren’t my BIG thing. And there are GREAT sugar free things. However, if I had to give up cheese….I don’t know HOW I would handle that. Honestly, I feel really, really bad for you because I get how you love cheese. I wonder why this developed, since you’ve been eating cheese all your life. Isn’t there anything that can counteract the effects? I know you’re a strong person, and when you put your mind to something, you can do it. But it still sucks.

    1. From my reading on the subject, there’s been a [insert some alarming statistic I can’t quite remember] increase in the number of adult onset food allergies. A lot of that can be traced to the food industry and the fact that they keep screwing with our food supply in unnatural ways and our bodies simply don’t have the capability of adapting that fast. I haven’t done the research yet on dairy, but with gluten, they’ve been screwing around with wheat since the 60s. What’s called wheat now in this country isn’t even the same thing anymore and it has more than 10x the gluten of natural, non GMO wheat. With adult onset food allergies, evidently it does tend to be to things you eat all the time because your body gets whatever the thing is in high concentrations–and if you hit a certain threshold of a stressor to the body (be it a major physical trauma like my husband’s broken leg or a huge emotional stressor that may be ongoing for some time), it can essentially flip the switch in your immune system into an intolerance. The same is true of a lot of mental disorders. It’s this concept known as the diathesis stress model–you have certain innate qualities that may or may not manifest, depending on the level of stress your system is put under. I wager it’s hitting now because it’s finally catching up to me that I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and in the middle for a decade now. Since I’m having what’s very clearly a histimine reaction, I’ve been doing some small experiments to see if I can take an antihistimine prior to dairy consumption without having a reaction. We’ll see.

      1. This might not be a factor, but…what about milk bought directly from a family dairy? My grandparents used to do that when I was a kid. I know you live in a small town, but I wonder if you have anything like that there. It might not even make a difference, but I was thinking maybe THAT milk hasn’t been screwed around with. *sigh*. What are we doing to ourselves in this crazy world?

  2. I’m so sorry to hear about the dairy allergy. Two of our kids were on a GF/CF diet and we ended up not even bothering with most cheese substitutes after a while. Daiya was good, though. It actually melts and is completely vegan (no casein). Can your store do a special order? Some do.

    I hope you’re able to find what works for you soon.

    1. I’ve put in the request. Who knows if they’ll do it or not. I’ll be passing through New Orleans in a little over a month, so I’m going to hit up Whole Foods and pick some up to try.

  3. I’m so sorry you can’t have dairy. Been there done that, along with the wheat. I can only say that after a while it gets easier going without dairy.

    It’s been a tough row to hoe trying to go without wheat though. Bread substitutes don’t work for me. I use lettuce wraps instead, and have chef’s salads and stuff instead of sandwiches. Sans cheese, of course.

        1. For my all purpose stuff, I am huge HUGE fan of pretty much everything that Jeanne at The Art of Gluten Free Baking. I use her all purpose mix all the time for my loaf bread, burger buns, and the like. As well as her recipes for same. Her blog is FANTASTIC.

          http://www.artofglutenfreebaking.com/2013/01/answers-to-questions-aboutsubstitutions-for-my-gluten-free-flour-mix/

          I am NOT a fan of Bob’s Red Mill all purpose mix. The bean flours just don’t…eh I don’t care for them. Pamela’s isn’t bad for stuff like pancakes and sausage balls.

          If I’m baking something sweet (brownies or desserts), I often use a mix of Jeanne’s all purpose mix and sorghum flour (as it is faintly sweet). I don’t buy much premixed, so I usually have bags of brown rice flour, white rice flour, sweet rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, sorghum flour, and corn starch in the pantry (it’s a big baking shelf!). We have Amazon Prime and buy it all in bulk (as we live in small town with not much available locally).

          I am also a fan of the cookbook You Won’t Believe It’s Gluten Free, which has a really nice selection of single flour recipes (which is good if you have multiple allergies).

          I talk about our conversion to GF over at my food blog here: https://kaitnolan.com/gluten-free-stuff/

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