Fat Guy

Now we are moving into the sour-candy phase of the operation. Between my various family members, there have thus far been four acquisitions: On the left are the Simpkins grammatically incoherent candies, then Lemon Head candy, then War Heads, and finally Royal Lemon Drops. The Royal Lemon Drops I have immediately dismissed as artificial-tasting and of poor quality. The other three are all good and I'm not sure I've settled on a favorite (I also don't have to). The Simpkins candies are probably the best tasting but they lack in the sourness category, they have an annoying powdered-sugar coating and the packaging is not good - odd since they call themselves "travel sweets." By far the sourest are the War Heads. They also have the best packaging. The issue with the War Heads is that, while they're great on the attack, once you suck through the outer layer they're insipid. The Lemon Heads are a good compromise. They're both sour and not chemical-tasting. I'll eat a few dozen more and by then maybe my opinions will gel.

I'm supposed to start sucking on sour-lemon candies in order to get any iodine-131 out of my salivary glands. It's surprisingly difficult to find sour sucking candies that don't have forbidden dyes. Then there are the punctuation issues. At the pharmacy, on the shelf was a tin of candies labeled: "CITRUS LEMON & SOUR CHERRY TRAVEL SWEETS" There were no commas or hyphens. The container was opaque. The illustration on the tin was of lemons and cherries. What do you think was in the tin: one, two or three types of candy? I bought it just to find out. The tin contained two types of candy: citrus-lemon and sour-cherry. I'm supposed to eat 1-2 candies every 2-3 hours through Sunday.

Low-iodine breakfast is served.

I only have two more meals to get through, and things have become much easier since I learned that Thomas' English muffins are allowed. I've already had an alarming amount of cantaloupe this morning. I hope it wasn't grown in an iodine-rich part of Mexico. I've got my eye on an English muffin with this nice organic pear butter for my main breakfast. Lunch is going to be a little weird because I have a PTA snack-committee meeting and I won't be able to taste any of the snacks. I may just skip lunch and sleep until dinner -- kind of like placing oneself in cryogenic freeze for a long spaceflight.

The existence of an iodine intolerance is yet another thing I didn't know about iodine. I've gone from zero iodine knowledge to more iodine knowledge than 99.99% of the population in a week. I have to guess that the low-iodine diet is only somewhat relevant to the efficacy of these Iodine-131 tests and treatments. Were it truly critical, they couldn't possible be giving those dietary guidelines out to the general population with an expectation of good compliance. It must be that it helps a little, maybe, so they figure there's no great harm in people messing it up and some possible benefit to following it. I mean, today early in the morning I was chatting with other people in the waiting area who were on the diet and some of the misconceptions were astounding. It seems a lot of people don't even get that salt and iodine are two different things, or that cream is made from milk. It was very interesting to talk to the medical staff who had knowledge of actual iodine measurements taken from actual foods. Apparently there is huge variation in things like vegetables just based on where they're grown. Who can be expected to keep track of that? I'm glad it will be over soon is all I can say.

Dinner at mom's this evening. Based on today's new findings, she acquired some Thomas's English muffins for me. Dinner was hamburgers topped with sauteed onions on English muffins, and french fries. With one day left on the diet I feel like I'm really getting the hang of it.

As luck would have it my period of semi-isolation will end at the same time as my diet: dinner tomorrow (Thursday) night. At the moment I'm leaning Chinese. For my second lunch, or perhaps it was retroactive breakfast, I just had (homemade) turkey hash. I'm thinking a hamburger and the inside of a baked potato for dinner maybe. We'll see. Hey maybe I'll have it on a Thomas's English muffin.

These are the best photos I could get of my low-iodine lunch (cell-phone only today): The commissary here has unfair advantages, because they have access to a lab that can test for iodine. So they've determined that these rolls from Rockland Bakery are no- or low-enough- iodine. (The nurse tells me they've also tested Wonder Bread and Thomas's English Muffins and that both are low-iodine -- thanks for telling me at the end of the diet.) The chicken soup was quite palatable, the fruit was fruit and the olive oil provided to dress the salad was not garbage. The chicken plate was the same rubber chicken from hotel banquets of old. I'm sure I've had worse chicken but I can't quite remember when. The peas were steamed to molecular incoherence and the rice was dry and weird. But really, I give them credit for producing this meal. There was enough edible stuff to make for a nice lunch, which I hadn't expected.

I'd love to know the answer to that question. I get the sense that there are a lot of distributors and that the better retailers are dealing with a lot of logistics in that regard. But I don't really know.

Last night for dinner we had baked potatoes. I ate the insides and Ellen ate the skins. PJ ate both. I'm busily planning my post-low-iodine-diet meals. I'm thinking either pizza or Chinese food Thursday night, eggs for Friday breakfast, deli for Friday lunch, and Friday night I have a date to go to a great seafood place.

I just had my dose of Iodine-131 and have to stay here at the facility for a couple of hours. They're going to serve me a hospital-kitchen-produced, low-iodine meal soon! If I can get a cell-phone photo of it I'll share.

Oh great. I just learned today that when they said I'd need to do this diet for a week they weren't using the normal definitions of "week." Rather, I started the diet Wednesday morning and need to continue it through Thursday evening. That's nine days as far as I can tell.

Yesterday I came very close to overruling the dietary guidelines my doctor gave me. For example the no-bread rule seems like a bit much. I know with a pretty high degree of certainty that the good bakeries aren't using iodate dough conditioners or iodized salt. Indeed I doubt most of the salt in commercial anything is iodized. The idea that you have to avoid all this stuff completely just on the off chance that it contains iodine seems nutty. There are many other aspects of the diet that are hard to swallow. But I decided that for a week (and with just a couple of days left) I'd continue to play along. So during the day I had tea and oranges and at night I had an approximation of shepherd's/cottage pie: sauteed ground beef topped with olive-oil mashed potatoes. And a few slices of turkey breast. And a couple more oranges and salt-free tortilla chips.

I ate well today. Being at home all day made a huge difference. I went shopping this morning and bought, among other things, the makings of brunch for our expected guests. Fairway had Pico, my favorite cheese, in stock. I bought it for our guests, but for me there was not to be any dairy. I got a ton of fruit and other things I could eat, so I could sit at the table and not come across as too much of a lunatic. As soon as they left I ate lunch. The mouse has ensured that there's no bread available for me, so I just ate turkey and avocado -- with a little non-iodized salt and lemon -- right off the cutting board. Thinking about dinner, I noticed that I had a whole bunch of plum tomatoes, purchased last Sunday, that were on the brink of turning. So I washed them. I also had four hamburger patties in the freezer that were never going to be turned into hamburgers, so I figured I could combine them with the tomatoes convert it all into a low-iodine pasta sauce. I set out to build that all up into something edible. It came out pretty well, served over DeCecco organic spaghetti(I figure the enriched non-organic stuff could contain some additives that include iodine), though I should have run the tomatoes through a food mill to eliminate the skins. Not that I care about the skins, but still. I also ate various snack foods throughout the day and there's still time to eat more. So I did well today. Too bad I have three days coming up where I'll be mostly out of the house.

I thought I had gamed the whole thing with some intelligence. I worked with the same team last year and thought I had seen the range of issues, so I planned around them -- that's part of why I picked up so many of the minor ingredients myself. Last year, though, they did bring fresh citrus juices that they'd squeezed back at headquarters. So it was really surprising when that curveball came at me.

I can't believe how many things went wrong tonight. It's a miracle that we managed to serve three cocktails to a large crowd, and even more of a miracle that they were well received. First of all the glasses. There were Champagne flutes but no rocks glasses or martini glasses -- just "all-purpose glasses." These all-purpose glasses looked basically like white-wine glasses. Which was fine for the tequila cocktail but kind of silly for the bourbon cocktail on the rocks. The glasses were also pretty damn big, so the drinks kind of got lost in them. The pineapple juice, lemon juice, lime juice and pineapple chunks were all supposed to be fresh. But what showed up were cans from Dole and bottles from ReaLemon and ReaLime. There was no space to work, no usable measuring device, no tool to open the cans of pineapple juice. The caterer only brought one cocktail shaker. And best of all we didn't have enough Bourbon so I had to run out in the middle of the event to buy more. Everybody seemed to love the cocktails, though, except for one guy who came back to the bar with his Bourbon cocktail to ask to have more fake lemon juice added.

Okay now I'm just getting annoyed with the mouse. I stored yesterday's bread in the microwave. That worked great. No mouse damage. I also made more dough last night and let that rise in the regular oven. Today when I went to extract the dough I found that the mouse had managed to get into the oven and go crazy on the dough. How is it even possible for a mouse to get into a closed oven? He can't be living in there because I use that oven all the time. There must be enough of a gap somewhere that he (or she I guess) can get in there. I guess bread dough is likely to be good bait for our mousetraps. BeeZee's suggestion of avocado on the turkey sandwich came in moments before I made my lunch, and I happened to have a quarter of an avocado left from a sushi-making experiment earlier this week. Turkey, avocado and non-iodized salt on toasted homemade no-iodine baguette. Quite good, I thought. For breakfast I had a fruit smoothie. This was the first day since I started the diet (it feels like a million years but this was only my fourth day) that I've been home and not in a rush at breakfast time. The smoothie contained blackberry, strawberry, orange and peach. It was really good. I also had a little of my no-iodine bread with breakfast. Dinner didn't work out so well, though. I had grand plans to make myself something early before going to my event tonight. But I had to mail a package, and my plan to get over to the West Side at 5:30 got blown when I learned that the post office closes at 4. Thanks, 13-ounce rule. The only things I could eat at the event were the raw vegetables from the crudite platters. So throughout the evening I ate carrots, cucumbers, celery and tomatoes while everybody else enjoyed pigs in blankets, deviled eggs and other great stuff I can't eat. When I got home I had some more bread. Tomorrow morning I'll hit the grocery store and see what I can do to make the next four days a little easier on myself, although it's strategy more than shopping that seems to be the key here. We also have brunch guests coming tomorrow, so I'll have to make a menu that has enough stuff for me to eat.

Tonight is the night. I finally have everything. The driver for the Monin syrup distributor in New Jersey called me yesterday morning at 6:45 to arrange the handoff. The per-bottle savings were only about 25% as opposed to buying at Zabar's, but that added up to $25 of the school's money plus I didn't find out about Zabar's until after I'd placed the order. And it makes for a better story to get the stuff off a truck at 6:45am. I just wrote up some instructions for the bartenders. I'll be arriving early at the event, hoping all the supplies are there, and making the batch mixtures. Then I'll demo the drinks for the bartenders during the pre-service meeting and I'll give them instruction/reminder sheets.

On paper I'm an excellent candidate for this diet: I work at home and I have food knowledge as well as access to the knowledge of this community. But these past few days I've been out of the house more than a person with a 9-5 job would be out, and despite my theoretical knowledge I haven't planned very well. Tomorrow morning I'll be going grocery shopping and I hope to be a bit better prepared for the Sunday-Wednesday back half of the diet. Today I'm at home most of the day so I'm thinking I'll be successful with breakfast and lunch. I'm planning a fruit smoothie for breakfast and perhaps a turkey sandwich and a salad for lunch. I wonder what I'll put on the turkey sandwich, with mayo, mustard and cheese all out of the picture. Tonight I'm working at an event -- it's a fundraiser for PJ's nursery school and I'm the bar manager in a manner of speaking. I'll have to arrive in the late afternoon and prepare the cocktail batches, train the bartenders to make the cocktails I designed (with a lot of help in the cocktails-and-spirits forum) and generally supervise the operation. It's a catered event that runs through midnight, but I won't be able to eat any of the food being served there. And because it's in the synagogue where the kosher regulations are in effect I won't be able to bring my own prepared food from home. I guess I'm going to have to eat a late-afternoon dinner at home and throw a couple of pieces of fruit in my bag.

I've only been on the low-iodine diet since Wednesday and already everyone I come in regular contact with is now sick of me saying, "Boy, I could really go for some iodine right about now." The helpful booklet my endocrinologist gave me notes that "This low-iodine diet does not meet the suggested daily allowance for all nutrients." I definitely lived upto that caveat today. For the first time I ate enough not to be hungry, but I can't say I ate a balanced diet. I started the day with several pieces of fruit -- and I mean several -- at a nursery-school breakfast. Everybody must have been thinking, "Why is PJ's dad eating so many clementines? What's wrong with the guy? He should really leave some for the kids." For lunch I ate a turkey leg. I know there's nothing about the diet that truly requires such absurd gestures, but I didn't trust the turkey breasts at the supermarket -- they looked like they'd been treated or brined or whatever -- so I went with a pack of two drumsticks, rubbed with a little olive oil and roasted. I ate one for lunch. I also acquired some permissible peanut butter from the grind-your-own machine at Whole Foods. It took about 5 seconds to fill the container from the machine and 5 years to wait on line to pay $3 for it. I then took it home and mixed it with some of my allowable salt. Then I spread some on a couple of salt-free rice cakes. A legitimate snack. We made home fries for dinner. With only olive oil and no butter (and no skins) they never acquired a beautiful brown crust but they were tasty. Here they are approaching done: I also made some more salads and followed the great suggestion above to dress with lemon juice (and olive oil, salt and pepper). I decided not to discard the dough that had been attacked by the mouse. Because it was going to bake at high temperature eventually, I figured it was okay just to remove the top layer. PJ shaped it into four baguettes and they came out looking like baguettes made by a four-year-old artisanal baker. They are resting safely on a platter in the microwave.

Recent lunches: Here I made a very poor attempt at maki sushi. I had high hopes because I was cutting with my new Shun knife, but I still mangled it all. The avocado, from Florida, had little flavor. There was a lot of excess avocado (all this from a quarter of an avocado), so I also packed that with a little rice. Yesterday's lunch was absurdly large. I don't know why. As usual, no lunch on Friday.

One of the benefits of flax seed is fiber. I don't think you get that from the oil.

The mouse ate my dough! I just went to check the bowl of replacement dough that was rising on the counter overnight and there were ragged holes chewed through the plastic wrap and feces on the surface of the dough. Farewell, dough. I think the bread project is over for the week. I don't understand it. We haven't had a mouse issue here in years. I guess the neighborhood mouse community just couldn't resist the aroma of Jim Lahey's bread. My general rule with city mice is to throw out all of whatever they've nibbled on. My feeling is that city mice have possibly been rooting through city trash, possibly full of medical waste and whatever. So I don't think of it like cutting a little mold off a piece of cheese. Maybe I'm overreacting, though. I don't know.

I've been in enough restaurant kitchens to know that ordering anything cooked in a restaurant would be unreliable. There's the issue of not really knowing everything that goes into a given dish, and there's the issue of the kitchen not necessarily following instructions carefully enough. So, for example, you ask for something cooked without salt but it contains an ingredient that already has salt (the meat was brined, or the egg mixture was salted, or the cooking water was salted...) or they cook using butter (not allowed) or soybean oil (also not allowed). Cooked restaurant food is pretty much out of the question unless it comes from someplace like a hospital commissary where they're particularly rigorous about these sorts of things. I think mashed potatoes without the dairy ingredients are just not that great. I thought about fork-crushed potatoes with olive oil, salt and pepper but I'm probably not on the diet for long enough to justify going there. Last night I wanted to do home fries but as I was peeling the potatoes PJ insisted on oven-baked french fries. Oven-baked french fries turn out to be better when you make them with the skins on, but the skinless ones were decent. I need to figure out a way to get some of the kosher salt ground down to a finer consistency. I guess I can use the Cuisinart mini-prep for that. The coarse kosher salt crystals, I learned last night, are sort of too big to use as table salt on something like fries.

In the food-blogging class I teach at the International Culinary Center, I had a student named Mindy who did a wonderfully depressing blog called Mindy's Recipe for Disaster. A female Vietnamese-American Woody Allen of sorts, Mindy always had some sort of existential culinary crisis going on. For example: Today I must have been channeling Mindy because so many things went wrong. Last night PJ and I baked a loaf of iodine-free bread and I left it out to cool overnight. This morning he had a slice, buttered, for breakfast, and I tasted a small bit off the end. It was quite decent. I'm not going to get caught out of the house with no food, I thought, so I asked PJ to pack me two thick slices of bread in a zipper bag. I threw the bag into my shoulder bag (which Ellen calls my Jack Bauer bag, long story) alongside PJ's lunch and we headed off to school for dropoff. When we walked into the classroom, PJ announced to his teachers, Liz and Steve, that "Daddy and I made you bread!" PJ had interpreted my request to bag two slices as an indication that we were making a gift of bread to his teachers. So I lost my bread. I then had enjoyable conversation and a poor breakfast with Rabbi Josh. The pastries at Cafe Lalo looked terrific, and I know from experience that they are, but I couldn't eat any. Instead I had a paltry, overpriced, out-of-season fruit platter and a cup of tea. Rabbi Josh had scrambled eggs with goat cheese and avocado, which looked amazing. I decided the only way to get through the day would be to make an unscheduled stop back at home to restock my Jack Bauer bag with new bread before heading back to the West Side. But when I got home, something had gone terribly wrong with the bread. The bag in which I'd placed the bread now had a series of ragged holes in it. There was a chaotic trail of crumbs leading away from the location. Further examination revealed that a mouse had been feasting on my bread. I had some Trader Joe's salt-free tortilla chips instead, which were not nearly as satisfying. And don't even get me started on the skinless potato situation at dinner.