Yes, we had that many leftovers in the refrigerator that we're getting another day out of them, so no new recipe today, either.
Thanks for the encouraging replies yesterday. We really did need that "mental health day" to unwind before starting today's busyness, starting with the lawyer to get new Power of Attorney and Advanced Directives forms drawn up. When hubby was in the hospital the few days before his surgery I looked all over the apartment for the old AD's we drew up when our son was a baby but couldn't find them, so the hospital gave him the Five Wishes booklet to fill out. For 3 days he couldn't get anyone to witness his signing of it, so he went into surgery without one. When he got home, he was in no shape to sit in a lawyer's office to get it done, then when he felt good enough for it, the lawyer was on vacation. So that's how we're spending the early part of this morning. After that's done, it's off to the park for a nice long walk along the waterfront as our exercise for the day, as long as my knee holds out.
This afternoon is also planned out, with him doing some work on the computer, and me going through some library books looking for recipes, deciding whether I want to buy the books or not. The first is Dr. Fuhrman's Cholesterol Protection for Life. I know I've used a recipe or 2 from it already, but that's because he has them available in his Member Center. I would have bought this book last year when he still had it in ebook format on his web site, but by the time I got around to doing it, he already pulled it. He said he's working on a new book about heart health that's being released in 2014 that will replace it. I still wish he would have kept the old one available. Used it's still selling for $80 and up! The book itself says nothing new that isn't already covered in Eat to Live, and he even refers people to that book for further details and recipes. There's no difference in the food plans for people needing to lower their cholesterol, including the eating of nuts, which he considers essential for cardiac health.
The second book I'm looking over is Lindsay Nixon's Happy Herbivore Abroad. I have her other 2 books and was undecided about this one, based on recipes I've already seen on her and others' blogs. I bookmarked a few, but they all seem very familiar, as if I've seen them elsewhere. Even the names of the recipes are familiar. I'll spend some time doing a few on-line searches to see if I'm right. I probably won't be buying this book any time soon but wait for cheap copies to show up on Half.com. Lots of photos in it, not only of the food but the places she traveled to while backpacking through Europe.
The other inter-library loan book is Forks Over Knives - the Cookbook. I love the recipes Rip Esselstyn and others share on the Engine 2 sites, and many of the recipes shared in the original Forks Over Knives book were good, too. But when I read that the recipes in this cookbook were coming from a gourmet chef Del Sroufe and Isa Chandra Moskowitz did the dessert section, I had my doubts about it. I'm not a gourmet cook, and the grocery stores around here aren't geared towards gourmet tastes. I have to hit three different stores just to find shallots, it's only the past few years they're carrying more than just white button mushrooms but now offer cremini and portobellos. Shiitake's are still a rare find. Nobody carries any dried mushrooms any more - I found that out while looking for dried porcini mushrooms for a dish of Mary McDougall's I was thinking of making. So far I only glanced through it, but unlike Lindsay's book, I don't have any recipes bookmarked yet. And I won't be looking through the dessert section any more. All Isa did to change her regular recipes to be compatible with the FOK way of eating was change the margarine to nut butters. Since nut butters are now banned from this house, and we really shouldn't be eating sweets because of my weight and both our triglycerides, that whole section can't exist for me.
So, thanks once again to the American free public library system for saving me some money. I'll use these savings to purchase Kindle & other ebook versions of the Esselstyn and McDougall books I already own. I already bought the ebook/PDF of The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart, and even though it's not really formatted well for use on a Kindle (pages are cut in half and the view - landscape vs portrait - are messed up), or even on the computer (bad OCR transfer so things like "1 1/2" appear as "h y" when I copy and paste), I'll probably also buy the ebook versions of the two Health Supporting Cookbooks, the books that were my introduction to the McDougal program back in the 1980's. And when Amazon's new Kindle MatchBook service starts in October, I'll definitely be nabbing the Kindle versions of the other McDougall books I've purchased through Amazon as well as Dr. Esselstyn's Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease and all of Rip's and lots of other books. Having an ebook version makes saving recipes so much easier than typing things out by hand. At least I'll finally be assured of having all ingredients and directions 100% correct.
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