Pork Liver, Meatball, and Soya Bean Soup…

I won’t be able to get into my flat during the day for the whole of next week as I’m having a wet room installed at last. I’ve not been able to use a bath for years as, even if I managed to get in, I don’t have the strength to get out again. A wet room and a shower wheelchair will solve that problem.

Today I’m making the following soup and tomorrow, all being well, I’ll make a cherry-laden fruit cake.

Anyway…

The idea of this soup, and my previous Chunky Beef and Bean Soup, is that by combining elements of a vegetarian recipe with meat, I can maximise my protein intake. As regulars might know, I have only one meal a day, and getting sufficient protein in a veggie diet is impossible, no matter how desirable it might be.

Some Gaggia Classic espresso machine tips for Spoonies…

This is an addendum to my previous post and is aimed, for the most part, at Spoonies. (If you’re not a Spoonie,** and/or want to know more, please click through.)

**In a nutshell, a Spoonie is a disabled person whose illness is not immediately apparent to a casual observer – think MS, Crohn’s, or ME, or my heart/lung/Addison’s problems.

**

Noise abatement.

First, some background. I live in a sheltered flat (I’m disabled, and a Spoonie, for the newbies among you). The place was purpose-built but you could be forgiven for thinking it was a conversion as the build quality is crap.

Each flat is a brick box, but all the internal walls are hollow stud and plasterboard abominations. In the kitchen, the worktops are mounted on these hollow walls, turning it into a huge, reverberating, drum.

Roast salmon fillets – a quick and tasty, spoonie-friendly, meal…

This is the sort of very quick dish I’ll make for myself when I’m able to cook. It’s childishly simple, relying, as it does, on bottled sauces

For one person take 2 salmon fillets, you know the type, wide strips, thick in the middle, thinning down at the ends. Sit them, skin side down, on a pad of kitchen paper, to dry the skin, and wipe any moisture off the fish itself.

Preheat the oven to 200C – I use a mini oven, it really does keep fuel costs down.

First, knock up a dish out of

Pressure-cooker problems, and emergency computer power…

Last year I bought myself a new electric cooker, one with solid plates, and for one very good reason, they’re very easy to keep clean. For spoonies, that matters – a lot.

A lot of people, however, dislike solid plates as they’re slow to respond to the controls, being made of cast iron, which is slow to heat up, and slow to cool down. However, in normal cooking it is a simple matter to adjust your technique to suit these characteristics, turning

The pressure of cooking pulses…

Though not a vegetarian, of late lots of pulses (beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc), have been finding their way into my diet, the more so since I started tinkering with food that has a pronounced Spanish influence (the flavourings, rather than the actual recipes, though my home-made versions of chorizo and morcilla are rather good).

The trouble with pulses, though, is

Do you know any #spoonies, and do you understand them?

The answer to the second part, based on experience, and on what others have said, is almost certainly no. But why should that be? It’s not hard to understand with just a little effort.

For example, there are days, more of them of late, when I feel too ill to talk to anybody, either face to face or on the telephone. A combination of pain, nausea, feeling faint, plain, old-fashioned exhaustion, brainfog, and a modicum of fear – and that’s

Making life in the kitchen easier for spoonies…

My kitchen has made concessions to spoonieness** for years, long before I’d ever heard of spoonies or realised I was one. For example, I’ve used rice paddles instead of wooden spoons since the eighties, as they’re simply a more ergonomic shape and they do what they do much better than spoons. I have a small one I’ve had since 1984 and it’s now stained almost chocolate with use, and a newer, larger one, still a nice light brown, evidence, if it were needed, that I don’t cook nearly enough.

**If you don’t know what a spoonie is, you can find an explanation of the excellent Spoon Theory here.

Likewise, since my teens, I’ve

A Happy New Year to Everyone who doesn’t live in Downing Street, Westminster!

I hadn’t intended to write an end of the year post, but what the hell . . .

2011 has, arguably, been the worst year of my life, blighted by medical care, in Arrowe Park Hospital, Wirral, which can only be described as abysmal, culminating in their omitting to record their diagnosis of heart failure, compounded by my GP’s failure to follow up, and by a GP with a “special interest in cardiology” who, frankly, set herself so firmly against the idea of my having heart failure that she refused to accept that my classic heart failure symptoms are actually caused by heart failure, though she had no interest in finding an alternate cause, nor did she have any suggestions.

So take a bow, Dr.