The Assertive Cancer Patient

The Gardening Report

Despite last weekend's very unusual weather--heavy rain followed by hail showers followed by snow!!!--my garden survived with very little damage.

A few tulips lost their petals, but that was about it. I went out in the hail to rescue my pea plants, which are in containers, so easily moved. The Chinese pea pods are a couple of inches tall now, the sweetpeas are just barely though the soil.

The only things I'm harvesting in my garden at this point are onions, garlic, and chives, all of which wintered over. There is nothing like a fresh green onion to wake up your taste buds. I have lots of them, interplanted with the peonies--don't ask, it just happened that way.

I have edamame plants that I started from seed that are now about six inches tall. They will go to my vegetable garden in the sky before they get tall enough to need to be staked. And I have greens--lettuce, spinach, and chard--that my friend Laurie started and gave to me (I gave her edamame plants in return).

Some of the seeds I tried to start haven't germinated, so need to try again. And yesterday I started some lettuce (seeds from the Amish store in Ohio) and some small French strawberries.

I still want to start carrots, but those have to go outside, they don't transplant well. And I need to get out and weed and fertilize (with chicken compost--I think that's the best) my strawberry patch--I'm seeing the first blooms, so it's time to do it. But it's been so cold! I haven't wanted to work outside for that long at a stretch.

Oh, and my nashi tree in blooming, so I need to get out there with a paint brush and pollinate, just in case the bees are busy elsewhere. I've been seeing bees this year, so we have some around.

Oh, and my lilac is budding, as are the bleeding hearts. The forget-me-nots are blooming. And the purple iris. I'll try to take a photo.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Buying Seeds

Let me confess, first of all, that as a gardener, my eyes are bigger than my stomach. In other words, I bought far more seeds than I have room for in my rather modest garden space.

Never mind that I created a vegetable garden in the sky in my backyard: a structure that was once Younger Son's fort is now a little retreat for me with pots of vegetables and two folding lawn chairs. I drink my coffee there on summer mornings, and having the plants up high keeps them safe (mostly) from slugs and snails.

When my friend Laurie and I visited a couple of plant nurseries on Tuesday, this is what I bought:

Hungarian Breadseed Poppy
So that I can grow my own poppy seeds for cooking. I've tried these before and didn't succeed. I'm trying again.

Edamame
These are Japanese-style soybeans. You cook the green pods in salted water and then eat them cold (slit open the pods and eat the beans inside) with beer on summer evenings.

Alpine Strawberries Mignonette
A tiny, very flavorful French strawberry. I grew these successfully a couple of years ago, but lost the plants to winter cold.

Tricolor Pole Beans: Green, Yellow, and Purple
These delicious beans are really fun and easy to grow. The seeds are a mixture that produces beans of three colors. Unfortunately, they all turn green when cooked.

Heirloom Runner Bean, Painted Lady
This is a new one for me. I think I'm going to plant them on my trellis on the front porch, because the beans have coral and white blossoms which are edible and the plants should climb eight to 10 feet. This bean dates to the 19th century, according to the seed packet.

All of the above are Renee's Garden seeds, a brand that I've had good luck with in the past. And they have such interesting seeds. Look for them at specialty nurseries.

I got some hollyhock seeds too. We had these in our garden at home when I was a kid, and I want to plant them up against my front porch so that they will be at head height when I'm sitting on the porch. These seeds are from Burpee.

I also have some Ranbow Blend carrots (Ed Hume seeds) left from last year that I'm going to plant again. As advertised, these carrots were white, pink, orange, yellow, and red, and were really delicious.

And I have some bush peas (Ed Hume) that I'll plant again. Older Son and I both love sauteed pea pods in fried rice.

I've tried growing tomato plants from seed, but have given up on that. Now I buy young plants at the nursery. I usually get lots of cherry tomatoes and a roma or two. Larger tomatoes don't ripen well in Seattle's mild climate. And I'll look for eggplants and peppers as well, and a zucchini or two.

Younger Son ate zucchini last year and loved it--which I count as a real parenting success since he is such a picky eater!

Once I'm over my cold, I'll start all of these seeds inside, and then move them outdoors as things warm up and we move toward summer. Anticipation!

See also:

Pushing Spring

What I'm Eating 4

Carrots for Breakfast

The Cancer Garden

Bamboo: Eat It, Grow It, Wear It

Paradise in a Pot

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

What I'm Eating: Lunch

As I've said before, I'm struggling to eat a healthy diet.

The Tykerb, my new miracle chemo drug, seems to kill my appetite. It also upsets my GI tract. So I don't feel much like eating, and the foods that do appeal to me tend to me light on nutrition: crackers, bagels, pudding, rice. Too many vegetables at one sitting leaves me with gas and cramps.

Also, by 6 p.m. or so, I don't feel like cooking, so I've been shifting my main meal to noon or early afternoon. I eat out with a friend or one of my sons once or twice a week, because I eat a better meal that way.

But I also seem to have odd food cravings--these I indulge.

The other day when I was at the grocery, I saw bunches of fresh asparagus. It looked wonderful--expensive, but wonderful. So I bought some.

Today I made myself a very tasty rice dish, using the asparagus, mushrooms, and tofu.

First, I precooked the rice, which was a box of seasoned brown and wild rice, the Farmhouse brand, which has no additives.

I cut the asparagus into 1 1/2 inch pieces and precooked it for just a minute in the microwave. I sliced the mushrooms and cut the tofu into small cubes. I put all of these into a heated wok with just a little oil and cooked them quickly on high heat. When they were almost done, I added a splash of soy sauce.

Then I stirred in the rice, and that was it.

I ate in on the front porch in the sunshine where I could admire my garden. Crocuses and small daffodils are blooming, tulips are above ground, and the blueberry bushes have new leaf buds.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Spinach Soup

I very rarely cook with cookbooks these days (which doesn't mean I don't enjoy READING cookbooks, I do). I like to get in the kitchen and make a dish based on whatever food cravings I have or whatever I have on hand that looks like it needs cooking.

Today, that style of cooking resulted in a delicious pot of spinach soup.

I had about half a bag of prewashed organic spinach in the fridge, leftover from a couple of recent meals of sauted spinach and scrambled eggs (don't add cheese, or you will reduce the amount of iron you absorb from the spinach, or so I'm told).

I also had half an onion left over from something else and a potato or two. Plus some vegetable broth.

I chopped and sauted the onion, then threw it in a pot with the broth thinned with water, and the spinach. I microwaved half a potato and then threw it in the pot. Once the spinach had wilted, I dumped the whole works in the blender, blended it a bit (not too much, I wanted to be able to see bits of spinach) and then returned it to the pot.

I blended a big spoonful of flour with water, and added that to the soup in the pot. After it had heated through, I poured in a generous splash of half-and-half.

I've eated two bowls-full already. It's delicious--thick and creamy because of the blended potato and the flour, but fairly low in fat since I didn't use as much milk or cream as I usually do for a cream soup.

I bake bread the same way--without a recipe, using whatever flours and grains I have handy--the result is delicious bread, never quite the same twice. Which makes it tough when someone asks for a recipe!

What's your favorite cookbook? Extra points for vegetarian or Asian cookbooks, since that's the way I eat. Please post recommendations below in the comments section.

Also, do you USE this cookbook, or just read it? I think cookbooks make excellent bedtime reading.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Dirt Under the Fingernails

The first crocuses are blooming, which as far as I am concerned means spring is here.

Time to start cleaning up the garden beds. Time to mulch, to keep the weeds from coming on stronger than the plants. Time to choose seeds to start inside.

Yesterday, as part of my effort to baby myself, I went to the Fred Meyer gardening department and bought four bags of bark mulch and some potted bulbs--daffodils and tulips. One pot of tulips, the purple ones, is inside against the pumpkin walls of my dining room (Have I said that I love color?). The pink tulips are outside in a pot next to the daffodils by the front steps--a "welcome to my house" greeting, if you will.

Outside, the bulbs I've planted over the eight years or so since I bought this house are just starting to bloom: the crocuses, a few here and there, and a tiny purple iris that I planted last year. But most of the daffodils and tulips have just barely poked their heads above the soil. Time to get out and ruthlessly murder slugs and snails, before they eat the tops off of everything.

I'm an organic gardener, so I just cut slugs in half with whatever tool I have in my hand at the moment, and I step on snails. Awful, I know. I also surround attractive plants with coffee grounds, the slugs don't like those. Good thing I drink a lot of coffee!

I dumped two bags of bark in the backyard in the areas the dogs use. That keeps them from tracking in mud from bare dirt, and also keeps down the doggy smell.

The other two bags are going to go on my beds out front, but I'll leave that job for tomorrow. Time to take a sauna, shower, clean my nails, and walk Connie.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Sunday in Seattle

It's Sunday, and I woke up with a burst of energy--very welcome after the past week. I felt myself sliding toward depression: I missed a therapy appointment (didn't check my calendar) on Wednesday, then on Friday I skipped my treatment appointment. (I did call and reschedule for tomorrow, so I wasn't all the way down into depression--where you're there, you can't even move.)

Erasing Barry
The first thing I did this morning was go through my blog and delete all my posts about Barry and his daughter Rose. Turns out "Barry" wasn't real. Just someone playing games with me.

Boycott October 2008
Then I got the mailing list of people who have sent donations to my blog from PayPal and packaged up Boycott October buttons for them. So those will go to the post office tomorrow, and you should have them in a few days.

If you've sent me a donation, no need to do anything else: I will mail you some pink buttons from 2007 and the new noire ones for this year.

What I'm Eating
My appetite has been rather capricious, which I'm blaming on the Tykerb, my new miracle drug, but I also realize that I have to eat as well as possible, just for my general health. So I've been cooking more, and also making sure that I drink enough water. Most of my prescription drugs have that little symbol on the label that means "drink lots," and it's hard to do.

I tried a squirt of lemon juice in water, as a couple of my blogging friend suggested, and that does help the water go down.

Today, I am making a batch of Japanese curry, to eat over rice. It smells wonderful--the whole house smells like curry. Yum!

I buy the base for the curry at Uwajimaya, the Asian grocery store in Seattle's International District. The brand I get is "Vermont Curry," beacuse it's made with vegetable oil rather than lard. I'm a vegetarian, so I don't eat lard.

Traditionally, Japanese curry has meat in it, but I just put vegetables--potatoes, yams, onion, and mushrooms in the batch I'm making today. When I have it I put in firm tofu or atsu-age, a deep-fried tofu that I also get at Uwajimaya. No tofu in the house, so I think I'll hard boil a few eggs to go with the curry for protein.

Seattle Weather Report
It's gusty out today. Branches are blowing off the birch trees in front of my house, but the air also has a spring-like sweetness. Once I eat some curry for lunch (it's almost ready!) and take a shower, I'm going to head out with Connie for a long walk.

He's been a bit out of control lately, and keeps trying to dominate me, which I know means that he needs more exercise.

Hoping both boys will be home this evening to help me eat the curry. It's one of Older Son's favorite foods, so I think he might show up.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Eating Better

Well, now that my life expectancy has yet again moved out to the horizon (See Postcard from Tucson), I have no excuse for eating badly.

Well, no excuse except that the Tykerb kills my appetite and exercise is still a test of will--I'd much rather nap than walk.

However, I'm pretty self aware, and I know that eating right is important. So I'm paying attention to my eating patterns and to my energy levels at different times of day. For example, I rarely feel like cooking dinner. I have more energy earlier in the day, so I am now eating my biggest meal of the day in the early afternoon.

For the past couple of days, this has been Japanese fried noodles (yaki soba), made with lots of vegetables (cabbage, carrots, mushrooms) and cut-up vegi burger and a fried egg for protein.

Then in the evenings, I drink vegetable soup. The brand I like (Pacific) is organic, and right now I'm hooked on the creamy butternut squash soup. I drink it at room temperature or cold.

And even though it's only February, I'm getting motivated to get out my vegetable seeds and start some plants indoors. When I reread my posts about gardening last summer, I realize that I ate so much better at that time of year because homegrown produce is such a treat.

Gobbling strawberries and cherry tomatoes and pea pods right out of the garden ... Eating good food because it tastes good--that's the way to go.

See: Gardening

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

What I'm Eating 4

I went out to my vegetable garden in the sky a day or two after returning home from New York City, and picked this collander full of vegetables.

For dinner that night I had green beans, sauteed with green onion; cherry tomatoes; and curried young potatoes. Also a piece of cheese for protein.

This morning for breakfast, I ate a bowl of cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes are coming on so fast now that I can't keep up with them. Luckily, Younger Son gets home next week. He loves cherry tomatoes.

Tonight, I'm going to have garden potatoes for dinner again. Also zucchini, tomatoes, onion, and maybe green beans. Yum. I think I'll combine everything except for the potatoes in the wok. The potatoes I'll season with curry again.

Oh, and I ate the first nashi (Japanese pear-apple) off my tree yesterday morning. That was a treat. The tree is still small, and I had covered the fruit with nylon stockings to protect it against pests, so it looks pretty funny, but the nashi was perfect. I have 13 left. Going to ration myself or they would be all gone in three days.

Click here to see a photo of the nashi I took back in July. I'll put some new photos up later today.

I also started some garlic in my front garden, where it helps to keep pests away. I've found that I can grow garlic year-round here in Seattle, unless it freezes. And home-grown garlic is so much more pungent that the store-bought kind. I also put in some more lettuce starts (I ate all my lettuce the first few weeks of summer), and some broccoli starts. My friends tell me I should have broccoli by October--and that's another one of those cancer-fighting vegetables, although I grow it because I love it, not (only) because it's good for me.

More on gardening.

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Carrots for Breakfast

This is what I ate for breakfast this morning: fresh baby carrots from my garden, just rinsed under the hose. I ate them outside as I did my usual morning putter in the garden.

You may notice that the carrots are different colors: red, white, yellow, and orange. That was something new this year—I bought a packet of seeds called the “carrot rainbow blend” from Ed Hume.

I’ve been blogging quite a bit about gardening, because gardening is one of the things that keeps me sane and happy during this crazy life with cancer. For me, the benefits of gardening are exercise, stress reduction, and delicious, nutritious food.

More on gardening.

Carrots and Cancer
And then there’s the whole carrots and cancer issue. Actually, it’s not much of an issue. There’s plenty of evidence that carrots help reduce your risk of getting various types of cancer. So along with that “apple a day” you might want to add a carrot or two a day to your diet.

It’s not clear that carrots help prevent cancer recurrence, but good nutrition is still important—perhaps even MORE important—for those of us who already have cancer.

Carrot Component Reduces Cancer Risk

A Carrot a Day May Keep Cancer at Bay

Vitamin A May Help Keep Gastric Cancer at Bay

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

What I’m Eating 3

The sun has finally decided to come out, and I’ve been working in the garden for a couple of hours, harvesting food to make dinner for Older Son (photo at age 6), now 22 and a student at the University of Washington.

The menu:

Salad, with homegrown lettuce and green onions.

Beet greens, sautéed.

Fried rice, with garlic, onions, baby carrots, and pea pods from the garden.

Tofu.

Dessert: rhubarb and strawberry cobbler.

The only ingredients that didn’t come from my garden are the rice and tofu; the flour, butter, and whipping cream for the cobbler; and the rhubarb, which is from the neighbors’ garden.

The beet greens and carrots are on the menu because I had to thin them, that’s why they are so tiny. You may notice that the carrots are different colors: red, white, yellow, and orange. That was something new this year—I bought a packet of seeds that produces carrots of different colors.

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.