A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

WHAT, BEHIND THE RABBIT?: If you read just one series of blog entries about a nearly fatal case of Pasteurella Meningitis, a disease so rare that there have been fewer than 20 reported cases in the English language medical journals in the last hundred years, and an attempt at the long road to recovery while still cooking and his way through Jose Garces restaurants and cookbooks, be sure to read this series by my good friend Ted Fristrom (and for the Philly contingent here -- an English professor at Drexel):

Food is supposed to stay in your stomach for two to four hours. That is if you have a normal stomach. As the doctor switched from talking about gastroparesis to tachygastria, a slow stomach to a fast one, I had to do a double take. How is this not new information? How is this not the opposite of everything? The doctor explained, somewhat sheepishly, that people can have both conditions. Basically, the stomach is controlled by pacemaker tissue, much like the heart. If the contractions in my stomach are too fast, the stomach can’t keep up, so it may skip a beat, slow, or stop temporarily. But he’s less concerned with whether my stomach is going fast or slow. He’s more concerned about the symptoms, and the fact that he still can’t explain the underlying cause.

I thought on this for a while. No. It still seemed significant. Through all my diets and diagnoses, gastroparesis was a constant, and the treatment was eat less fat, smaller servings, and more fiber. For the last eight months, I spent forty-five minutes every morning stirring a pot of steel-cut oats. I’m not a morning person. I don’t deal well with the world until I eat or drink coffee, but there I was abstaining from both, stirring my oats and thinking good healthy thoughts. I not only endured this ascetic ritual, I came to embrace it as a righteous cause. I was doing what’s good for me, and steel-cut oats are so rustic, so earthy, so utterly devoid of earthly pleasures, that I can easily imagine monks in sackcloth eating it during prayer. Please God, I would whisper to the pot. Please Jesus or Allah or Buddha or that bearded guy from Hogwarts. Please accept this offering of my time and trouble and make my stomach better.

But God didn’t want me to eat oatmeal.

He wanted me to eat French toast.

Preferably made from brioche or challah.

Start here. Then move on to Better, Better II, and Better III