Month 1

Sorry it has been a little while since my last post. My motivation this week has been lower which may also coincide with my energy levels. I believe that I may have tried to do too much in the last week and it may have had a negative effect on me.

Part of the reason why I was doing so much was that it was the twins’ birthday on Monday. In case you were not aware, I now have three teenagers in the house. (Yes, I feel older just saying that!) One of the things I do for them with each birthday is prepare a special meal of their choosing. So, last weekend was the weekend to cook for them. Cassandra’s meal consisted of ribs and Greek salad. I chose to add fries to round it off. For desert, she wanted lava cakes (MA made those). Isabelle, on the other hand, wanted a breakfast meal of crepes, sausages, and fresh fruit (specifically blueberries and strawberries). MA made the crepes while I prepared everything else. Her desert was to be cinnamon buns but we postponed this as we just had them recently (PS. I did make the dough on Monday, with the plan on baking them on their birthday but that did not happen, you will see why shortly). All the meals went off smoothly and I was feeling good about the whole process, energy wise.

Sunday night, we were a man down. Geneviève slept at her grandmother’s place. This week, she was/is going to university. She was invited to take “university” courses all week as part of her schooling. This was being offered by the U of Ottawa. Since her grandmother lives near the school, it was easier, for the first day at least, to have her be close in case it was too challenging for us to fight traffic, figure out where she was going and find parking near where she needed to be. With one woman short (which I did not realize this when the meals were planned orginally), I proceeded with a steak dinner with all the fixings that I had prepared all by myself.

I had stopped taking the prednisone on Saturday and I was noticing that by Monday morning, my sleep patterns were getting better but I was still nowhere near rested. As Monday was the twins’ birthday officially, I was feeling adventurous. A few weeks ago, I had borrowed some books from the library which, ironically, were due this day. I did not get a chance to read one of them so I renewed them online for another term so that I could get a chance to read it. The first book was about professional baking and was something that I had been struggling with for a while now. It was a great book and, to my surprise, it was more of a text book than a recipe book. It was exactly what I wanted and I litterally devoured the information in the book. The other book was a Mexican cooking book. I have always loved Mexican cuisine and was hopeful that it would be written in the same way. I cracked the seal on this book on Monday and was disappointed with it as it was just a glorified recipe book. I was hoping to learn more about the nuances of Mexican cooking and instead I got a recipe book with some anecdotal stories that were very loosely tied together (really, the only string that kept them all together was the fact that it was about the author who was only half Mexican and lived in the US). Either way, it did get my creative juices flowing.

I read through this book in about 1.5h as I was able to skip over many of the recipes (all of the recipes provided could be found online by the dozens). What it did do was turn on my brain to come up with an amazing meal for that evening that allowed me to use up the steak leftovers from the previous night. As I was still tired from the lack of sleep that the prednisone offered me, I tried to take a nap that morning but my brain was still racing with the idea of making this fabulous meal. It was hard at work planning out the shopping list, mentally preparing the order in which the mise en place (a.k.a. how I would chop and prepare the food for cooking – term I learned in the previous book!) would take place, how I was going to cook everything and present it to the family. In my head, it did not seem too challenging but, boy, was I wrong!

Before going into details of how I did it, let me first share with you what was made for dinner. We had steak tacos with homemade tortilla shells, fresh salsa and guacamole, both hand made, canned refried beans (I do have my limits) along with Mexican rice for a side. All this was served tableside using our raclette (Swiss version of an electric hot plate) where one could reheat the meat and vegs, melt the cheese on them and warm up the tortilla shells. A generous coating of refried beans and guacamole would be placed on the warmed tortilla with some salsa, sour cream and fresh jalapeños and then topped with the warmed steak filling. Yes, they were as amazing as they sound. If the Internet had smell-o-vision, I would insert the smells here.

I started this experiment by shopping for the missing ingredients around 10:30. I got home at 11:30 and preceded to make my lunch. By 1:30, I started prepping by making the tortilla shells as, without this, we would need to go shopping to get store bought ones. Not something I wanted to do at the last minute. I was struggling with the consistency of the dough. Hard to believe that three simple ingredients, corn flour, salt and water, can be so difficult to get right! I spent a good 1/2-3/4h working the dough to get it to be the right consistency so that I could roll out the tortillas and cook them. (This book made it sound so easy. Arrrggg!!!) I started to get into the groove and tortillas were coming out. I got better with the rolling and the cooking so the last ones were much better than the first ones. I did roll them a bit thicker than I wanted so I will need to tweak that next time I make them. I preceded to make the fresh tomato salsa. I put too much onion in it so then I spent longer than I wanted to getting the flavour profile right. It was now 3:30 and I was starting the guacamole. I had bought 4 avocados. Ironically, the first two went smoothly however the last two were not ripe yet so I could not use them. I had assumed that they all would be good so I had already prepped the other ingredients in the food processor so now my guacamole was also challenging me. This was around the time that MA was coming back from picking up Geneviève from U of  O. I picked her brain as to what I could do with unripe avocados but she was as stumped as I was. (Ironically, the next day, Sarah Toupin liked, on Facebook, a method of how to ripen avocados using the oven and fridge. 24h too late for me unfortunately.) I proceeded anyway with what I had. With MA home now, I solicited her help with finishing the meal. I needed to get it all done by 5:00 as both G and C had activities that night that needed them out of the house by 6:00. At this point, my stress level and tiredness had both reached their peak. I had been standing for the last 4h with no breaks so I was at my breaking point. Unfortunately, MA took the brunt of it and I am sorry for that. Our communication was not good and my patience was lost at this point. Though dinner was a hit, it did have a few casualties.

After dinner, I tried to get some rest. I had my first baseball game that night at 9:30. Though, I played ok and we won, you could really tell that I had not played in a long time. It was a late night as I got home after 11:00 and did not get to bed until 11:45. On top of this, my Tuesday morning hockey started up. I was up at 6:25 to be at the rink for 7:00. Again, not a great game for me and the pace was much faster than usual. All these factors combined made for a rough Tuesday and Wednesday. I basically vegged out these last few days as I had no energy to do anything. The good news though is that I am sleeping better at night so I am slowing recovering my lost sleep.

This week, there is no Thursday hockey so to replace it, my band practice has moved to this night. Also, Saturday night, I will be meeting up with my old poker buddies. It has been years since we played last. We are all friends from university and we used to have a regular weekly game. Now that we have families it is much tougher to meet. As I have not seen them in a year, they do not know about my condition so I am sure that the glare from my head will be quite the distraction for them. Maybe I could use it as an advantage during the game (so long as it does not give up any of my tells that were hidden by my lovely locks – YES, I did have SOME hair before!). On the flip side though, it will mean that I will have more followers of the blog and, hopefully more comments and feedback.

Hard to believe that it has already been one month since my first chemo treatment. Time flies! With that, I had to lose the beard on the weekend. The damn chemo treatments were not allowing it to come in as full as I wanted and, not only that, it too was starting to fall out. So, I took the rasor to both the face and the scalp on Sunday. I never liked shaving and now I need to do it more than ever. Damn chemo, why can’t you target the hair I don’t want. Remember, back and chest, back and chest!