"Count yourself lucky"

My husband reminded me today to count myself lucky. Despite all that I've gone through this fall, my health situation is not in the least dire.

Let me explain my husband's perspective. If you've read my about me page, you know that my husband's career has been in grants and contracts. What I don't specifically mention is the area of research for which these grants apply. My husband's work has almost exclusively concerned cancer research.

He works from home 3 days per week, using our landline as his home "office" phone. For the most part, our friends and family no longer call on this line, but reach us by cell phones instead. On the days my husband is home, I only answer this phone for him when he's outside or I know he's in a meeting. On the 2 days he goes in to the downtown office, I do answer the phone, taking messages and trying to be a kind voice for the caller.

One of the cancer research projects he's currently working on is for the vaccine for breast cancer. We get a lot of women (or their spouses) phoning, trying to get help applying for a clinical trial. Today, a woman called who was having trouble with the online application and wanted a live voice to help her. My husband was in the commute home from the downtown office at this time. So I took her name and number and also told her to call back tomorrow. My husband also said he would give her a call and see if he could help her.

Many times, these women have tried absolutely everything else for their cancer with limited help and are desperate to try something, anything. My husband knows that not all of the women who want to try the clinical trial will be approved for it. I have some experience with this scenario. When my mother had exhausted all of the approved treatments for her own breast cancer, she was guided into a clinical trial. In the first phase of the trial, the only qualification for remaining in the trial for the second phase was to have the cancer not progress. My mom's cancer remained stable at that point, so she stayed on for phase two. To stay on for the third phase of the trial, the cancer had to diminish in phase two. My mom's cancer hadn't shrunk or diminished at all, it had only remained stable. She was let go from the clinical trial at that point. I remember how heartbreaking this was for our family. In our minds, if a cancer isn't actively growing, they should have allowed her to stay in the trial. But that's not how these trials tend to work.

So when these women phone and ask my husband for his help in applying or finding a clinical trial, my husband tries to do whatever he can, even though this is not really his primary role. His name and number just happens to pop up on the university cancer research site.

When I discussed today's phone call with my husband, explaining my note, I detected a note of sadness in my husband's voice as he retreated from the kitchen. As he left the room, he simply said to me "count yourself lucky."

My husband is right. I am "lucky". I not only have this Thanksgiving to enjoy with my family, but likely a couple dozen or more Thanksgivings with them.

I thought as Thanksgiving 2023 is just 2 days away, this would be an appropriate story to share with you friends. I actually had something else in mind, but this is what came up and seemed right. For those of you who are leaving Wednesday to join family and friends, have a lovely Thanksgiving. If anyone else is around tomorrow afternoon, I'll post what I had previously had in mind for today. 

Wishing all of you a happy Thanksgiving!

Rule #1 for Good Stewardship of Food Supplies

Use the foods that look like they will spoil before using the pristine items. 

My chore yesterday and today was to preserve the onions that looked like they wouldn't last too much longer before beginning to go soft. 

In late September or early October, I bought a 50-lb bag of yellow onions. I wasn't feeling great that day and didn't take the time to look over the bags. I simply pointed to one and asked my daughter to load it onto our trolley. When I got it home, I discovered that several of the onions had developed a powdery surface mold. We'd had quite a bit of rain in the preceding weeks. So I assume some of the onions sat out in the wet at some point. For the most part, the insides of the most affected onions looked okay. With the very worst of them, I peeled off the outer part and chopped the inner, good part to freeze in a large bag. I'll use these onions when the fresh ones are gone. 

A month later, I checked the onions in the cool storage room and found about 10 that needed using or preserving right away. I decided to make onion powder out of these. 

Over the weekend, I washed, peeled and began to chop the 6 largest onions. As I chopped the onions, I filled my dehydrator trays. One mistake I made was to dice the first 3 onions. After loading the trays and moving them to the dehydrator, I realized that the onion dices were falling through the openings in the tray. For the next 3 onions, I quarter sliced them, hoping fewer pieces would fall through the slots.

Anyway, the onion dices are now dry and the slices are soon to be dry.  I will finishing drying the slices in the oven to speed things along.

I decided to just do the dices in the oven along with the slices. Here's what a large jelly roll pan of 6 large onions, mostly dried, looks like.

Oh my goodness! I was taking care of something else and was smelling something really, really yummy coming from the kitchen. I had turned the oven up to 225 F after a few minutes at 200 F. I overdid the onions a bit! They're browned but not burned, thankfully. When I dry onions again, I'll make sure to not leave the kitchen and set a timer!

We make mistakes, and then we learn.

After sifting through the dried onions for pieces that felt not-quite dried (setting aside to add to the green bean casserole on Thursday),  I "powdered" the browned onions in my food processor. 

I'm telling myself I have gourmet onion powder. Anyone can go to the store and buy regular old white onion powder. Mine has been browned. Ha ha.

So you may be wondering why I went to the trouble to dry and powder onions. I like the depth of flavor you get when adding onion powder to a dish that already contains fresh onions. It's simply richer, in my opinion.

I find that in the fall I play catch-up with several different produce items. Apples always go soft and wrinkly long before we've used them all. I made applesauce with the soft ones a couple of weeks ago, leaving the better ones to use later. Pumpkins sooner or later develop soft spots, necessitating immediate processing. Those 3 large pumpkins I mentioned cooking and pureeing before my oral surgery? I didn't process those because I was being efficient and getting ahead of the game. No, I noticed soft spots on those 3 and absolutely had to cook them before I lost them altogether. These are the large, jack o'lantern pumpkins that I bought in late October.  I still have the remaining good 2 pumpkins in cool storage. I can wait to do something with those for another week or maybe two. Potatoes will also go wrinkly, soft, and begin to sprout at some point later in the fall or early winter. I will need to sort through those and use the worst of them in December. 

With the onions, while it would make for pleasant cooking experiences to just use the best looking ones right now, it makes for better stewardship of our supplies to use what will go bad first. I will use more and waste less by using food items in this order, worst condition first, best condition last.

My big chore is done for the day. I have a pumpkin and chicken soup cooking on the stove for dinner. And now I'm resting for the remainder of the afternoon. I went too long before taking more pain relievers and now I'm waiting for this dose to kick in. A piece of dark chocolate should help. 

Thanks for reading along. Enjoy the rest of your day and evening, friends!