What It's All About

A year ago today I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Today, I'm fighting with the bad sinuses I'm so used to. I suddenly love my bad sinuses! And I'm procrastinating with stuff like this:



Now I'm off to play with the plant friends and make today positive, between shower steamings.
Also! 100th post! I'm sorry it's not more substantial but I'm happy it's here.

Spicy Pumpkin Soup - SlowHome Style

I'm not going to lie, kids. This recipe I'm about to share was adapted from this one, over at Epicurious. But I have to say I like my version better and judging by the several happy dinner guests, you may too.

So did I blog about pumpkins last year? Mark and I always look forward to picking out pumpkins in October. We select very carefully, ride in wagons, drink cider, and our pumpkins usually end up with names by the time they get home.


See? I'm even wearing my favorite shirt. A friend and I were talking (waay back when things started getting nippy in her part of the country) about looking forward to pumkiny foods. But we noticed that you can't even find the most basic recipe that doesn't call for canned pumpkin. It's odd that we still handle this gourd every year, but the food part of it is completely removed from our homes. It pretty much only comes from a factory, even for people like me that cook from scratch 6+ nights a week. So this year we also got an eating pumpkin. And even though I still remember it's name, I did manage the butchering just a few weeks ago. I'll tell you how I did it, but before you think, "well, that must be a nice thing for a stay-at-home lady of lesiure to do," know that I was just a few months out from boob surgery #2, in the middle of physical therapy, and getting ready for an evening out while I broke this sucker down.


The Incredibly Simple Steps to Prepping a Pumpkin for Cooking:

1. Make sure your pumpkin is quite clean (nooks, crannies, etc.) and split him in half. Don't be intimidated. Go slow, use a sharp, large knife. Again, physical therapy girl did well here.

2. Scoop out seeds & fibers. Most eating pumpkins have very low seed-to-flesh ratios. It's a lot easier a job than with jack-o-lanterns. You can toast the seeds if you like. My pumpkin had about ten, so it wasn't worthwhile.

3. Place each half, skin side up, on a jelly roll sheet or roaster (a lot of juice may render, you need something to contain it well) and bake in a preheated 350° oven for 1 1/2 hours or until skin is very darkly burnished & bubbly. Your house will smell divine.

4. Scoop pumpkin out of skin. If it's completely cooked, you shouldn't need to mash it at all, but you can if you're on the cusp.


You can then use it straight away just as you would canned pumpkin. I divided mine up and froze half. Also, if you keep your pumpkin around in the fridge for a few days or so, you may notice additional liquid separating from the cooked pumpkin, yogurt-like. Totally normal. I just poured it off as all my recipes had their own liquid.

The Incredibly Tasty Spicy Pumpkin Soup:
Serves 14

1/2 c. whipping cream
1/2 c. sour cream
1 tbsp fresh lime juice

6 tbsp butter
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 jalepeno peppers, seeded & diced
5 2/3 c. (45 oz.) pumpkin
2 c. whole milk
1 1/4 tsp. dried crushed red pepper
2 tsp. nutmeg
9 c. vegetable broth

3/4 c. toasted pepitas and a few dashes sweet paprika, to garnish

Whisk first 3 ingredients in small bowl. Cover & chill.

Melt butter in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add garlic and jalepenos and saute until garlic is just starting to turn golden, stirring frequently. Mix in pumpkin, milk, and crushed red pepper. A little at a time, puree the mixture in a food processor or blender. Return puree to pot and add broth, stirring well. Add nutmeg and simmer 10 minutes. Add salt & pepper to taste.

Ladle soup into bowls and drizzle with cream. Sprinkle with pepitas & a little sweet paprika, if you like.

An Odd Interval

So here I am, now. Healthy, able to concentrate on lots of new and exciting things. But my recent past is chockablock full of heavy, scary junk. Stuff that new people do NOT want to hear about. I was prodded to test this by a particularly adorable friend last night and, um, I was right. As funny as I tried to be, those two nice young men were praying for a trapdoor to open under them when I said the c-word. Oops! Perhaps this is all feeling a little heavier a monkey on my back because of the ominous anniversary coming up on Sunday. Diagnosis Day. Ugh.

I'm also gathering information on the Three Day for November of this year. Very positive stuff. Exciting and challenging, and I will keep you posted. But there's this funny thing that happens sometimes when you see a snapshot of your emails, before you open the full in-box. For instance, Mark frequently gets emails from "Abraham Lincoln." I get all excited until he opens the email and I see that he's really being contacted by the Abraham Lincoln Book Store. Which is a cool bookshop, but not, you know, Abe. Today I logged into gmail and saw:

9:00am

Breast Cancer - Let Us Help You Take the Next Step -

Okay, ha ha, no thank you, Breast Cancer! Apparently you're not over our break-up yet. Which I understand, I'm pretty awesome. Let me make myself perfectly clear then, we're through! No Mas! Basta! Get lost!!!

Oh, right. It's an email from the Breast Cancer Three Day, which I asked for. Must remember these important details.

And now, a birthday picture.


P.S. I do realize that Abraham Lincoln is not technically "alive" in a way that would be conducive to emailing. But maybe someday ghosts will learn to use computers? Or maybe Lincoln had a premonition about the interwebs and built a time-capsule to be opened in eight score???

Answers for Steve and Lacey

1. What's your favorite color? Orange.

2. Why isn't 11 pronounced onety-one? Too long. Besides, if it were we wouldn't have your favorite number, eleventy-threeve, or mine, eleventeen.

3. Mark - Boxers or briefs? Boxer-briefs.

4. What was the best thing before sliced bread was invented? Germ theory and the advent of regular bathing.

5. Can you post that recipe if the super yummy salad dressing you made last we had dinner at your place? I will, but I always make it on the fly, so give me some time to measure it all out for you. It's true, though. Everyone likes it.

6. Why do you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway? Shouldn't you ask some of your engineer friends?

7. Can you tell me how to reprogram my sprinkler system? Absolutely! When the green light is flashing, pres and hold the program button until, "Steven!!!" appears on the screen. Actually no, I can't.

8. What's your favorite food? Cheese.

9. Are you supposed to rinse herbs before you use them or does that make the flavor go away? Definitely rinse them. Dirt's on the outside, flavor's on the inside.

10. Why won't these voices in my head stop arguing? Maybe you need to distract them with a shiny new toy. Like beer!

11. What are the numbers for the next lottery drawing? I'm not telling, but if I win you'll get a present.

12. If you were travelling in a ship going the speed of light, what would happen if you turned the headlights on? I don't know, but I would be compressed to a pancake, right? So I don't think I'd notice the headlights.

13. What's another word for thesaurus? Lexicon would work. Actually a dictionary can be used as a thesaurus.

14. Am I annoying? No, you are lovely.

Also, nobody asked me any more boob questions but Lauren did call to my attention a fact that I failed to mention here. Fake boobs don't last forever. Great ones that work as they should still need to be replaced around every ten years. Doesn't that suck?

Open for Questions

So, I haven't gotten any comments for a month now, but I know you're still out there. In fact, I'm getting visits from new cities every day. So let's make sure you're getting what you want. Can I answer any questions for you? Do you want to hear more about my plants? Curious about something I've neglected to mention on my new body? Something nagging you about skin transplants, the scintilating business of home-making? Speak up, readers.

MLKJ Day of Service

Somehow I ended up tossing logs up a steep hill today. I'm sure I'll be sore, but I loved every minute of it.

What the Body Can Do

I've spent a fair amount of the hours in 2008 marveling at the human body.

My mom made the doctors' jaws drop when she basically did a pull-up in her hospital bed a few days after her 2nd hip surgery. It was easier to get the linens sorted that way.

The men's gymnastics at the Olympics this year had me googling "Iron Cross" late into the night.

And by most measures, I've healed pretty quickly. I've already mostly forgotten more pain than I think I'd experienced cumulatively up until this year. Last week I finished physical therapy. Although I'll count it as a very positive experience, I'm looking forward to overhearing very bad pickup attempts at 24 Hour Fitness instead of anecdotes of being shot 8 times. Just the therapists words, though, "I have no restrictions for you. You can do whatever you want to." still make me giddy. Whatever I Want To! To quote my friend Kristin, what will that look like??

Tomorrow, at least, it will look like planting, pruning, and clearing at Balboa Park as part of an interfaith MLKJ day of service. I hope to take a few photos of this enormous treat that right now I'm too excited about to sleep.

In the future, who knows? I think I've missed a few too many crucial years of training to get close to the video below, but seeing Streb vs. Gravity tonight kicked my wonder at the human body up about a bazillion percent. I highly recommend.



As a modern dance performance, I most appreciated the performers sense of fun and irreverence throughout and the utterly fearless falling. You can find out more about the company here.