What?? Huh?? What's Going On in New York??

This article

NY issues do-not-resuscitate guideline for cardiac patients amid coronavirus

appears on the same page as this one:

Cuomo tells Trump NYC no longer needs USNS Comfort during WH meeting

and people wonder why I go around like Dilbert in today's strip in the previous post?

Today's Dilbert Comic

https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-04-22

Brown Lentil Chili Soup

I haven't made any of Jill McKeever's recipes lately, so decided to make her Brown Lentil Chili Soup.


The ingredients are listed on the YouTube page for the recipe, and I pretty much made it as-written. But not totally. Naturally, I reduced the chili powder way down to only a teaspoon (but it was still a bit too spicy for me), used one box of broth and 4 cups of water, because packaged broth is pretty hard to get right now and I don't want to use up all my stash yet. And of course, no cilantro! I used parsley instead.

Instead of serving it over potatoes I made some short grain brown rice. The texture of the rice I figured would make this a more filling meal.

Um, let me put it this way - I cooked it as Jill specified, including the 30 minutes on low simmer, then added another half hour on low because the lentils were still rock hard. At the end of the hour I let it sit another half hour on keep warm, but all that did was make it hot, not cooked more. I dished out my bowl of a cup of rice topped with about a cup and a half of soup, and for hubby, around 2 cups of rice and 3 of soup. This was so hot I burnt my finger when the soup touched it, so we let the bowls sit to cool for almost a half hour before we sat down to eat. I started eating at 5:20pm and was finally finished with my bowl at 6:15pm. My jaw is cramping up from all the chewing. The rice was chewy, the lentils were, as Jill's husband Charlie described them, crunchy. The brothy part of the soup tasted great, but I was not happy at all with the texture of the rest of it. During his first bowl my husband said it was fine, wonderful, fantastic, but after he served himself a second bowl much smaller than the first, he got about half-way through and said "Now I know what you mean about getting tired of chewing."





Next time I may just cook it under pressure for 8 minutes like all the other lentil soups.  I'm not a fan of crunchy lentils and much prefer them mushy. Will there actually be a next time? Eh, maybe not. I much prefer Heather McDougall's lentil soup recipe, but my husband liked this one well enough, so it's possible but not probable. Let's see after he eats all the leftovers on Friday for his dinner while I make something else for myself.

Free, Free, Free!! Thanks, Dr. McDougall!

I suppose by now all of you have gotten this email from Dr. McDougall?

Dear McDougall Friends,
During this uncertain time, there is nothing more important than staying safe and healthy. Dr. McDougall’s Health and Medical Center has always been dedicated to educating the public on how to obtain and maintain optimal health through the numerous articles Dr. McDougall has written over the years on various medical conditions and topics. Now is the time for us to help as many people as we can. How? We are offering all digital content on our website free of charge. 

See the email itself for the links to everything.

I'm now downloading the zip for the one DVD set I don't already own and the few ASW videos that I never purchased, and I already had purchased all those books when he first put them on his store and had them on my Kindle already, but WOW!! For anyone who hasn't, this is a fantastic deal! Thanks, Dr. McDougall!

But I'm a pessimist - I wonder what's going on with him.

 

Working on My Harmony House Stash

If my husband and I can't leave this apartment until autumn, that's fine with me. HE is a little antsy staying indoors and likes to walk back and forth to C-Town, but I keep reminding him that every time he (and our son) goes out, we start the quarantine countdown over again. With our son working 5 nights a week, we're never really out of quarantine. That's very scary to me.

But even though the shelves of my usual grocery store are still bare, and waits to get into the other chain grocery and department stores are an hour or more long, and the only way to get a grocery delivery window - IF the stores have the items you want - is to stay awake all night constantly hitting the refresh button, I am so glad that Harmony House (and Amazon, of course) exists! Spinach, broccoli, celery, onions, carrots, mushrooms, white potatoes both diced and slices, sweet potatoes, peppers, lentils and pinto beans, blueberries, mixed vegetables by way of a vegetable soup mix, peas, cabbage, jalepeno peppers - and probably a few others I missed - are all lined up on the shelves in the hallway outside our apartment door and squeezed into a few places in the apartment. I had to moves piles of books around to find room for them inside, but I really should read those books then donate them, anyway.

Thanks to Amazon and its vendors I have almost 50 pounds of beans around the place, too. And over 100 pounds of rice, mostly brown but a bunch of white bought locally, too, because it doesn't go rancid like the brown.

We're starting to have trouble finding canned tomatoes lately. C-Town has plenty of diced and stewed, but none are no-salt added, so when something calls for 2 cans of tomatoes, I use one unsalted and one salted to stretch the healthier ones out a bit longer. Forget about suggesting making from fresh - tomatoes have been lousy for a while now and not just pale pink to white inside but pretty much tasteless. It's been that way for years. I already mentioned a few times how scarce frozen veggies have been.

My current menu is made up of mostly soup meals, a few rice, bean, and veggies ones, and when we don't feel like either of those, pasta meals(Over 20 pounds of pasta in here, too). All of those can easily be made from the stash of food I already have in the apartment.

Last night I made up the Sweet Potato and Yellow Split Pea Soup made from this recipe. I used 1 cup of dehydrated sweet potatoes soaked in 2 cups of water for about a half hour; for the mirepoix veggies I used a half cup each of dehydrated onions, celery, and carrots and added an extra 3 cups of water to the Instant Pot. I tossed about 1/2 cup of dehydrated spinach, too, because we love it and it makes the soup a wee bit healthier. For the liquid smoke I used hickory. And oops, I just realized I forgot to add the tablespoon of no-salt seasoning (usually Mrs. Dash Table Blend). It wasn't missed. Instead of cooking it on the stovetop I tossed it all into the Instant Pot and cooked it for 8 minutes, the time I've made other lentil and pea soup recipes. Even after I let it sit with the heat off until the pressure sensor dropped down and then at least another half hour, it was still red hot when I opened the lid and served it.

The soup was as thick and delicious as it always was when I made it with fresh veggies. My husband said if he didn't help me carry those gallon containers of veggies from the front hall he would never have known I used them. I forgot to take a photo of it in the pot or bowl, but here's some of the leftovers in their container, waiting for me to eat them for lunch:

Tonight I'm making the Bob's Red Mill Veggie Soup, but unlike when I made it here, I'll be using the dehydrated onions because I only have one bag left in the freezer and one raw and I'm saving them for a special occasion meal. Dehydrated spinach, too. I have none of that left and C-Town hasn't had it in almost a month. It's a good thing I just got a 5 pound box of it (and 20 pounds of carrots) delivered from Harmony House over the weekend! Now I'm debating whether or not to also buy the box of onions.

As I said, I have enough food in the house that we can do without shopping in person for quite a while. I won't be making anything fancy, just good, simple foods. Dr. and Mary McDougall would be proud of me!

From the Fingers of Dr. McDougall

In a recent post on the official McDougall forums, Dr. McDougall wrote:

 Me Too!

Post by John McDougall » Sun Apr 19, 2020 10:28 pm

From March of 2017 until now we have had some life-changing events. Mentally and emotionally we are better off from the experiences.

In March 2017 Mary fell in a hotel room in Portand and fractured (seriously) her left acetabulum (head of her arm bone). She had the metal and screws removed in February 2018 and had almost overnight pain relief.

Oct. 2017: The wildfires of CA (Tubbs) took all of our material possessions (cars, home, etc.).

In November of 2017 ) (during post fire confusion) I fell off of a rental home porch and fractured my left femur (leg bone - not hip). I almost bled to death and suffered from acute renal (kidney) failure. I had blood transfusions and a surgical repair with a screw.

Since then we have had several minor fractures, but have otherwise recovered remarkable. We are left elderly and disabled, but still mad as hell and fighting for you, your families, and Planet Earth until the end.

John McDougall, MD

New Jersey Guide to Stopping the Spread of Coronavirus

Local Grocery Store

People online think I'm greatly exaggerating when I say the local chain grocery store I used to shop in pre-Covid-19 (Stop and Shop) has nothing on the shelves a month after all this panic buying started.

These photos appeared on one of the unofficial Facebook communities geared towards residents of our city. They were taken Saturday, April 18th, during the senior shopping hour between 7 am - 8am. The woman who took them said they had a few containers of milk left in the dairy aisle, and a bit of cheese and yogurt, but suspected it would all be gone by the time she left the store. There was also some fresh food in the produce aisle, like apples, onions, a few bags of carrots, and some already brown and yucky bagged salads, but those salads were always that way even pre-Covid. This is how the rest of the store looked:

This is about how it looked the last time my husband and I walked in this store back on March 19th. That was the last time I was in any store, or the car, and the penultimate time out of the house. I had a podiatrist appointment the last week of March that's within walking distance, so no car ride.

People who live in other parts of NJ say their Stop and Shop store also looks like this still. Rumor has it (and managers deny it) that the company is neglecting neighborhood stores in favor of Peapod distribution centers. With what my son said his Target store may start doing by the end of this coming week (curbside pick-up or delivery only - stores closed to customers), I believe it.

I am so grateful for our neighborhood C-Town within walking distance of the house and Harmony House deliveries! Our son has even started buying stuff at Target when the night manager (Yes, our son is back to working night shift again) opens the registers during the dinner break. Every morning he's been bringing me home goodies, mostly in the form of toilet paper, Brita filters, and some canned goods our little store doesn't have. Tonight's Sweet Potato and Yellow Split Pea Soup is going to have dehydrated carrots, onions, celery, and even sweet potatoes. Let's see how it goes. This is the "new normal" around here.

PS - I see I was wrong when I said C-Town was a "chain of 5 stores" in other posts. I must have mis-heard the manager when he opened a few years back and he, personally, owns 5 stores. The chain itself is 140 stores, independently owned and operated. I guess I should read the store's website more often.

Now THIS Is the Kind of Week I Had

With all my bitching and moaning about my sewing machines the past 2 weeks, I laughed uproariously at this video. When my husband saw it, he said that she was having a better day than I did this past Thursday!

Dr. McDougall's Dietary Therapy and The Starch Solution Programs Now FREE

OMG!!

What else can I say about this gift from Dr. McDougall!?

The Starch Solution Certification Course (minus the CEUs and Certification testing, of course) is now available for free on his website. It costs you an email, that's it. You get both audio only mp3 files or full length mp4 videos. The first 17 are his lectures about the topics covered in The Starch Solution book, but the last 2 are the McDougall Made Easy and McDougall Made Irresistible full length cooking videos that he and Mary did. I've done many blog posts about recipes I've made from these 2 videos and to this day I still recommend them to anyone wanting to know more about the McDougall Program. I love these because he talks a few minutes about an important topic - blood pressure, or cholesterol, etc. - and then Mary does the recipe segment. The entire McDougall Program in short, concise sound bites! What's not to love?

The Doctor McDougall's Dietary Therapy Course I haven't looked that closely at yet, but it appears to be mostly lectures he had done over the years either at his 10 Day programs or Advanced Study Weekends, or lectures performed at other conferences. The talk he did on The Color Picture Book is in there, too. Each of these 9 videos have a few minutes of new (at the time) video of Dr. McDougall introducing the subject, and the last video is close to 15 minutes of new material about adjusting patients' medications. Old timers to the McDougall program who have purchased the recordings of the Advanced Study Weekends (I have a few but not all) will recognize these talks. I think the only one on Dr. McDougall YouTube page (and in the Quick Start guide on his website) is The Color Picture Book one, as far as I can tell at my quick glance. No audio-only files for this one, though. If you have a teen, heck, anyone under 40, in the house, he or she may know how to rip audio from a video. My son he'll do it for me on his next day off.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!!!!!!