Okay, I’m cooking again….

 Before Silent Sam’s diagnosis (DUM DUM DUM…) I had not been cooking very much.  There were various reasons but really, I just never liked to cook.  Getting up really early each morning meant that by evening, I was tired and didn’t feel like cooking.   Silent Sam seemed to enjoy it more so he was doing the cooking.

 

We had to make changes.  One of these changes involved sitting down and actually planning meals.  We suddenly needed to have the right foods in the right portions around the house.  Apparently this takes planning.  Who knew?

Let me say a word here about cookbooks.  They are so pretty.  They have such great sounding things.  But if you aren’t much of a cook, some cookbooks are really not meant for you- especially some of the prettiest ones.  Between the ingredients and the prep, you need to be realistic.  Since we could no longer eat the steaks- as- large- as- your- head anymore, we needed to find a way to work on portion control and still feel like we ate a meal.  Completely by accident, it turned out that the first cookbook that I bought back when he was diagnosed pre-diabetic is a great cookbook for us.  The cookbook is from the American Heart Association and The American Diabetes Association and it is called Diabetes & Heart Healthy Cookbook.  The recipes are fairly simple and have been really good.    Also, thanks to my daughter, we have a subscription to three magazines (Taste of Home, Simple and Delicious, and Healthy Cooking) that are devoted to recipes.  The magazines are all published by the same company and are very inexpensive.  I have had the most success with Healthy Cooking.  It has lots of recipes in each issue that have worked for us.   So when I sit down to try and figure out what we will have for dinner, I have lots of options.  

I have even started a binder where I put copies of new recipes that we like.  I did this so I could easily find the recipes again but I also know that by Christmas everyone will want to know our secrets.   I figure that by then we will have wowed everyone with our physical changes and they will want to be like us.  You know, perfection… (right…) and I can go to the binder and  give them a copy of the recipes we are now using. What a generous friend –or- someone living in a fantasy world who thinks she has birds help dress her.  We’ll see….

Thanks for reading!