The rest of my 2011 daily photos can be viewed here.

So I got cherry tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, balsamic vinegar, and toothpicks… stood over a plate for about ten minutes, and came up with…

It was so good that I made it for about the next six weeks in a row, too, and in looking at that photo I think I know what I’m having for lunch tomorrow. NOM NOM NOM.

The rest of my 2011 photos can be viewed here.

I think I forgot to post about this. We’d been watching an HBO series, Treme, with Aunt Gay, Uncle Joe, and Barbara. Every few weeks we’d get together for dinner and to watch an episode or two. We finally had time to watch the last two episodes, and clearly that called for an appropriate dinner! Tim did most of the cooking, and rumor has it that his brother wants a heads-up next time we do this so he can fly down for dinner first.

The rest of my 2010 photos can be viewed here.

What I meant was I feel sick and tired in my heart about not being able to walk in to basically any place to eat and order one simple thing without second-guessing everything. Is there egg in that salad? Chicken? Do they make the salads fresh or pick it out? If they make it fresh, how often do they wash their hands in between making salads? Do they wear gloves? If so, how often do they change gloves? If the person before me had a turkey salad, the gloves are contaminated. How often do they clean the counter that they make the salad? Did the person before get chicken? If so, the counter is contaminated. Just because I’m not ordering chicken doesn’t mean my food isn’t touching something chicken has touched – and believe me, my body will know. I’ve had to stop eating at a couple places for just that reason (Roly Poly, I’m looking at you!). If the salad is freshly made and nothing I’m allergic to has touched it, let’s move on to the dressing. Did you know that some dressings contain eggs? Yeah. That fucks me up, too – just ask Aunt Gay!

Moving on from the salad course, let’s talk about the main dish. Can’t have chicken. Can’t have turkey. Can’t have fish. Can have steak. Oh, but wait – is that steak cooked on the same grill as the chicken, turkey, or fish? What if I have a hamburger instead? Is that cooked on the same grill? Maybe I’ll just have pasta. Oh, but is that a wheat-based pasta (good) or an egg-based pasta (bad)? What about the sauce? Is there egg in that sauce?

There’s a really great breakfast place in town (actually, a couple) and do you know how much it pains me to go to them? I can have grits. And a biscuit. Most places offer turkey bacon as well as bacon bacon. And I can have the regular bacon… unless it’s cooked on the same grill as the turkey bacon.

You see what I mean? It takes me 30 seconds to figure out what I want, and another 30 minutes to figure out how they make it and whether it’s safe for me to eat.

It’s almost not worth it to go out to eat sometimes, at least at a new place. Some places I’ve been going for years and I either know and trust the menu or the servers know me well enough to happily work with me on menu changes. People who are invested in having happy repeat customers are definitely happy to work with menu changes. But it still makes me sad in my heart. Makes me feel defeated; bad. Not on their part – on my part. I miss the days when I could go in and say “I want blah blah blah no onions” just because I don’t like onions.

Edited to add that there must be something in the water (or the milk) because a friend of mine with very similar allergies just made a good point. Speaking of which, I have to be careful about what vitamins I take – no Omega-3 from fish for this allergen-ridden girl!

The rest of my 2010 photos can be viewed here.

Lorena’s Chex Mix

Everybody always asks me how I make my Chex Mix.

Before I tell you that, you have to sit through a history lesson.

My grandmother always made this Chex Mix at the holidays. Quite popular, it was, and I was never able to get to it until after all the grown-ups had their fill. It wasn’t until after she died, and I found her recipe in an old cookbook, that I even knew there were nuts in it! So I took the recipe to my dad and was all, there are NUTS in this! How come I never had any nuts? And my dad just covered his mouth with his hand and giggled and giggled. Apparently he would pick through before I got to it, to eat the nuts.

So. I sort of make it the same way my grandmother did, if by “the same way” you mean telling people you do it one way to get them to stop asking you, and then doing it any damn way you please because it depends on what’s on sale or what the store is out of when you go. Personally I tend to use about six times more nuts than G-ma did, just because. Mostly because (see above story) people seem to want to pick through when it’s still warm and eat all the nuts. You are welcome to try this, but let me just warn you that plenty of my friends have tried following my recipe and each one of them has told me that theirs didn’t turn out as good as mine does (must be that they don’t put in enough Crack).

Here are the ingredients I used for my Chex Mix for Christmas 2003:

1 box Cinnamon Crunch Crispix cereal
2 boxes Honey Nut toasted rice and corn cereal
1 large box of Cheerios
1 large box of Rice Chex
1 large box of Corn Chex
2 pounds of cashews
2 pounds of almonds
2 pounds of pecans
2 pounds of walnuts
2 pounds of brazil nuts
3 containers of Wheat Nuts
1 bag of pretzel sticks
1 bag of small twisted pretzels
10 sticks of butter (real butter, not any of that pansy-ass margarine*)
1 jar of steak sauce
1 small jar of hot sauce
1 jar of Worcestershire Sauce
Old Bay seasoning
Garlic salt
Onion salt
Seasoned Salt
McCormick’s Spicy Seasoning

*I have tried margarine before and it leaves a really disgusting greasy film on everything. Trust me; use butter.

You also need something to bake it in (I use big cheap turkey roasters) and something to store it in when you’re done (I use the cheap containers put out by Glad and/or Ziploc, depending on what the store has in)

This will feed armies. Armies! I am not kidding. This made approximately 114 cups of Chex mix (give or take a cup or two for munching… I have to taste-test, you know).

I put as much as I comfortably can into one roaster (usually the equivalent of two boxes of cereal). I sprinkle on a liberal amount of the dry spices. Then I melt two sticks of butter, mix in a liberal amount of the wet ingredients, and pour over the contents of the roaster. Bake at 300 degrees for two hours, stirring from bottom to top every 30 minutes to coat everything in the butter/spice mixture. As I finish with one batch, I pour it into a huge container that will eventually hold all of the Chex Mix; this makes it a lot easier to mix up. Thanks to my new range, this only took six hours instead of the 12 I was expecting, since I can fit two roasting pans into the 5 cubic square foot oven.

When completely finished, mix up and store in smaller gift containers. Or just shovel directly into mouth.