Humble Pie and Sin On a Spoon

Shh...

I'm laying low these days. There's a stomach virus making the local circuit and I don't want it to know that I exist. I'm sorry, but after two months of pneumonia and a month recovery time, I figure I've done my duty by the sickness fairies this year. One more bug this winter and I'll be ready to open an artery, you know?

I was agreeing with a foodie friend--who happens to be down with that little stomach bug thing--that it just isn't fair. Isn't eating right supposed to give us iron-clad immunities? Aren't we supposed to be able to sail through life, smugly consoling the unwashed masses who guzzle high fructose corn syrup and munch on extruded cereals sweetened by high fructose corn syrup and subsequently catch every little thing that comes down the pike? (By the way, did you know that a study of these cereals fed to rats found that the rats eating cereal died before the other two groups...one of which was only fed the boxes that the cereals came in? Nice, no?) It is more than a little humbling to find that we have immune systems of clay.

Yep. So these days, along with the other stuff on the menu, I'm eating humble pie. I'm less hostile to antibiotics these days, though the ear infections in the house didn't get dosed with them and everyone recovered with their hearing intact despite the dire predictions to the contrary. (I'll spare you the drama of trying to contact a pharmaceutical company on the cusp of a New Year's Eve weekend: No one answers the phone for five consecutive days.) In fact, there are a few other medications that I'm beginning to feel pretty grateful for. Along with the antibiotics, my doctor gave me diflucan to counterbalance some of the less pleasant and more uncomfortable side effects of killing off every little organism in my body. The diflucan accomplished in four little pills what I've been working toward, inching toward for an entire year: I can eat all my old foods again.

This resurrected some unresolved feelings of resentment I've had against a former family doctor. We went our separate ways when I'd asked him to prescribe diflucan for the Hobbits when it first became apparent--at least apparent to me--that dysbiosis was the underlying cause of the spiraling food reactions. He was quick to dismiss me and I remained dismissed. I pretended that he didn't know what he was talking about and began addressing the supposedly imaginary dysbiosis with alternative methods. And that's where we've been this past five years. My recent experience confirms to me I was right all along and this five year grind was avoidable. Sigh.

Still, there is a quiet thought that accompanies the occasional stabs of resentment that flare up: we needed to take that five year grind. We needed the discipline. We needed the journey. The struggle. There's no way of knowing until much further down the road what seeds have been planted during these five years that will produce fruit. In me. In them. Fruit that would never have come to bear any other way. "It has not yet appeared what we shall be..."* I rest on that.

I'm still staying away from sugar, though. So I'm still casting around for ideas of how to fill that hole. You know, the hole that still nags at you, even after you've had a full meal. Or when you're burrowing down under the covers with a toasty rice bag and a good book. Just the time when something to nosh on would make everything perfect. Just the time that I used to cuddle up with a bag of Rollos and not stop until the bag was empty. And of course, every sugar-free candy you can lay your hands on is...drum roll please...sweetened with corn. Um. Not. Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Nope. He was wrong. That would be 99% desperation, because it is during the times of desperation that inspiration strikes.

The taste I had in my mouth was for chocolate butter cream frosting. So I dug around in the dusty recesses of my food stores and came up with an almost empty box of powdered cocoa, left over from the days when the Hobbits could do chocolate...which blessedly they can again...but somehow this box got overlooked. Hallelujah. The rest of the stuff was near at hand and I went to work with a passion. The prospect of sugar free chocolate will do that to me. What can I tell ya? Sin On a Spoon was born.

Sin On a Spoon

(All ingredients/amounts negotiable)

8 T ghee
1/4 cup cocoa powder
2 T coconut milk
2 T vegetable glycerin or agave nectar

Blend butter with balloon whip mixer attachment on high until soft. Pour in cream/coconut milk and sweetener, whipping until blended. On stir setting, add cocoa powder, turning speed up to high as the powder becomes incorporated.

Find most isolated spot in the house, lock the door, and refuse to share with anyone. Enjoy.

*_{1 John 3:2}