Tuesday, December 9, 2008

I'm tasting garlic!

Oh yeah! Dick and I had dinner with a good friend in Boston last weekend who told us that she regularly eats 8-9 cloves of garlic each week. (we knew we were in good company even before she told us that!) Tonight was our first night home to fix a meal. We laughed remembering our friend's comment as we added up the number of the garlic cloves we were each eating tonight.

Here's what we did. First I took 2 pieces of pink salmon out of the freezer this morning, not knowing how I would prepare them tonight. However, when poking around the frig to see what was available and/or needed to be used up, I found about 1 cup of left-over cranberry chutney and 6-8 smallish roasted garlic cloves. I smooshed the garlic cloves, added them to the cranberry chutney, spread the whole mixture over the 2 pieces of salmon, added a couple of tablespoons of water to a shallow baking dish, covered the dish with foil and stuck it in the oven for ~30 minutes at 350 degrees (more than needed).

In addition, we finished up the kale slaw my husband made before we left for Boston, which contained several cloves of minced fresh garlic in the whole recipe. Lastly, we came back from 5 days in Boston to find that we needed to use up some of the potatoes and all of the rutabagas from our Thanksgiving CSA food, so my husband made one of his all-time favorite foods, which is the filling for traditional pasties as made in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (no need to bother making the crust, although admittedly, I look forward to stopping at Suzy's just west of St. Ignace, MI for her delicious vegetarian pasties when we travel between Ann Arbor and northern Wisconsin.) Rutabaga, onion, several varieties of potato with their skin, Worcestershire sauce, lots and lots of freshly ground pepper (if you look closely, you can see it in the close-up photo) plus yes, fresh garlic are in his recipe.

Each item on our plate could have been a standout taste-wise all on its own. As it was, I looked at my plate and could not decide where to start because I knew that each dish was going to be downright tasty! In addition, all together, we figured we ate at least 4 and probably 5 cloves of garlic (each!) tonight. Good thing garlic is one of the healthiest and delicious foods on the planet. With our friend Anne, we decided that we should just keep encouraging everyone to eat garlic daily, and then no one would ever need to worry about the smell of garlic noticeably oozing from the pores of their skin!

It felt great to be home, cooking our own food. Our blessing tonight felt like it should have been an ode to our own organic, home-grown garlic!

O heavenly Father, you have filled the world
with beauty and provided us in abundance.
Open your eyes to behold
your gracious hand in all your works;
that rejoicing in your whole creation,
we may learn to serve you with gladness.
~~ Book of Common Prayer (16th Century)

Our travel to Boston is now an annual trip for me where I see a cardiologist who has extensive experience evaluating cardiac function in (now adult) childhood cancer survivors whose hearts were damaged by the cancer therapies that helped to cure their childhood cancer. I feel lucky to have found this cardiologist (who even knows my cardiologist here in Michigan), fully understand that I am dealing with what my husband like to call "the problems of success", but I confess that it is no picnic to travel, undergo the testing, hear the mix of good and not so good news, and then come home to follow up with my "stable" of docs here at home who help keep me duct-taped together for another year, and hopefully even many many more years of beauty, abundance, more garlic, more kale, more cooking up new recipes, friends and family, and helping others as we all share life's journey together. I can do that with gladness. :-)

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

2 comments:

Shirlyn said...

Thank you for all you are doing, what a blessing you are to many. I survived uterine cancer 22 years ago through diet & herbal use. The medical doctor I was working with said I as the damndest, luckiest woman he had ever met. There was no luck, I worked hard, prayed hard and was very consistent with my diet, I had five babies after that, that's a miracle. God Bless you in your endeavors!

Diana Dyer said...

Shirlyn,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. You are a shining example of what I call "active hope"! Yes, make no mistake, hard work, but it is loving work and the rewards (life!) are endless and priceless. What an inspirational example you are to your children. :-)
Diana