Category: Food & Drink

#1: The Cannabis Coconut Oil 7-day Challenge

With all the fancy cannabis products out there, one simple solution for medicating might be overlooked. And that is cannabis-infused coconut oil. I wanted to explore how to use infused oil as medication, so I started this challenge. My goal is to find creative and simple ways to add a single dose of cannabis-infused coconut oil to foods I would eat anyway.

I started with something easy for breakfast. Peanut butter. I added a spoonful of peanut butter to a small bowl and stirred in 1/4 teaspoon of infused oil (you can melt it in the microwave if it has solidified). Spread on whole wheat toast. Ideal dosage varies, depending on your tolerance, what kind of high you are seeking and the potency of your cannabis. I’m a microdoser, so I want happy hints of pleasantness.

Delicious! It’s like coconut oil was made for peanut butter. It reminded me of tahini. I could not detect the taste or smell of cannabis, although I could taste some coconut. I love it, but you could reduce the coconut flavor by using refined coconut oil when you make the product.

Happy hints of pleasantness rolled in about 40 minutes after breakfast. It’s going to be a great day!

Medicating with cannabis-infused coconut oil

I tried a new way to medicate with cannabis, and I can’t wait to tell you about it. But first, a refresher about my previous experience with medical marijuana.

When I started using cannabis after I retired, I was excited to learn you don’t have to smoke it. I was mostly looking to relieve post-mastectomy pain. Cannabis worked, and it also helped with other things I didn’t expect, such as low-level depression and anxiety.

I love Kikoko tea, which comes in varieties to help with mood, pain, sleep and libido. The Tranquili-Tea for sleep is unparalleled, and the Sympa-Tea just makes me feel good and pain-free without being high. I also use a vape from time to time.

However, for daily use, I settled on a dropperful of tincture, which is basically cannabis-infused alcohol. I add it to juice. I made the tincture at home in my Magical Butter Machine with a strain of cannabis high in CBD, the non-psychoactive component in cannabis everyone is talking about. CBD works as an antidepressant and can reduce nausea, vomiting, seizures, anxiety and inflammation.

As I’ve become more comfortable using cannabis, I’ve experimented with other products. I recently wrote about making my own topical – a skin balm to treat pain. The base for making topicals is cannabis-infused coconut oil. Again, I made it myself using a strain of cannabis high in CBD. I had infused oil leftover after making the balm, so I put it in a mason jar and tucked it away in the pantry for safe keeping.

Then I started reading about cannabis-infused coconut oil and realized it might be the ultimate cannabis product, especially for older adults who may want the benefits of medical cannabis without all the drug paraphernalia. It’s the base for many recipes. You can cook with it, you can use it to make skin creams and you can eat it straight out of the jar.

I tried the infused oil today in coffee, and it was delicious. I wasn’t sure how much to add, so I used this calculator. I am somewhat of a lightweight when it comes to cannabis. As a microdoser, I only want to feel hints of pleasantness and perhaps the beginning of a smile. I know from trial and error that even 5 MG is too strong for me. After using the calculator, I concluded ¼ teaspoon of my infused coconut oil would come in at about 3.5 MG. Perfect! I felt great without feeling stoned.

I’m thrilled about the possibilities of cannabis-infused coconut oil. I’ve not been a big fan of edibles such as chocolate or gummies, because I don’t typically eat that kind of stuff. And I don’t want to cook with cannabis oil, because I think it would be difficult to control dosage and certainly don’t need a pan of brownies calling my name.

Adding a single dose of cannabis-infused coconut oil to something I would eat anyway seems like a pretty good way to medicate and not have to worry about taking too much. I can see this having tremendous benefits for people who are ill or don’t want to mess with smoking or vaping or hate the smell/taste of cannabis. I’m thinking it could replace my daily dropper of tincture.

Let’s test this out! I’m going to do a 7-day challenge. Starting tomorrow, I will medicate with cannabis-infused coconut oil – something new each day – and I’ll share the results. In the meantime, here’s the recipe I used for making my own oil. I used 1/2 ounce of cannabis, two cups of coconut oil and 1 tablespoon of lecithin. If you don’t have a Magical Butter Machine, here’s a recipe for how to make it in a crock pot. Special thanks to Corinne at Wake and Bake for her inspirational and educational blog.

See you tomorrow!

The 40-year diet plan

People sometimes say how lucky I am to be thin. What’s my secret? While many adults face down mid-life weight gain, I’ve slowly lost 60 pounds over time. I call it the 40-year diet plan.

As for the backstory, I was a thin adolescent but exploded breasts and hips when I turned 14. I struggled with my weight throughout high school. My mom and I joined Weight Watchers together, and that worked … until it didn’t.

I joined the Army at 18 and had to lose 15 pounds just to get in. Then I started eating my way through the mess hall and ballooned to my highest weight – 195 pounds. Fortunately, the Army made us run, and I began a lifelong love of fitness. Running eventually gave way to walking, but once I started moving, I never stopped. I lost 50 pounds over four years.

Then I relapsed in my late 20s. I gained about half the weight back and hated it. I went on crazy diets. Remember the Beverly Hills Diet? I lost weight, lost my periods, lost my good sense. My husband was so pissed at me, and my mother said, “You’ve been obsessed with your weight since high school, don’t you think it’s time you figured this out?”

I decided to accept myself exactly as I was. I vowed I would never go on another diet … ever. I would eat delicious and healthy food, and if I gained weight, fine. If I lost weight, fine. I was not going to ruin my life over this. I started walking more, thinking of it as much-needed mental therapy not exercise.

Over three years, I lost the weight I had gained and kept it off for the next 30 years. I continued to exercise and eat well – focusing on health but never saying no to anything I really wanted. I thought, well, just keep doing what you’re doing, and who knows? You might look pretty good in 40 years.

When I was 59, a routine physical led to a diagnosis of breast cancer. That same physical revealed slightly elevated blood sugar, so I started reducing sugar and carbohydrates. I lost another 10 pounds over two years. At age 62, I’m holding steady at 135 on my 5’7” frame.

I still exercise (mostly walking) and eat everything I want, but mostly I want real food that doesn’t come in a package. I wouldn’t waste my calories on a store-bought cookie. Pass on fast food. Haven’t had a soda, diet or otherwise, in at least 10 years. On the other hand, we eat pizza every Friday!

My breasts are gone, and I did not have reconstruction. Just flatness and a lattice of scars. There’s a humongous vertical scar up my belly from ovarian cancer in 1999. I love my body for surviving all that, and after all those years of beating myself up, I love how I look! Best of all, I feel great.

But I don’t feel worthy of praise simply for being thinnish, just as people who are bigger or weigh more are not worthy of shame. This is just who I am now, who I became because of lifestyle choices and possibly wear and tear.

It’s never too late. You can learn to love your body. It’s not about losing weight as much as it’s about being happy and celebrating life. Move your body as much as you can and continue to enjoy delicious healthy food. See what happens. That’s my 40-year diet plan, which of course, isn’t a diet and isn’t a plan.

Thinking about missiles and dinner

Just prior to my retirement, I was working on a couple of intense communications projects involving missiles and people who love them, and while I love the people who love them, mostly I was bored and thought about dinner.

Retirement freed up my brain to think about dinner without the distractions of incoming missiles. My husband and I spend a good bit of our day thinking about dinner, shopping for dinner, cooking dinner, eating dinner and then talking about it afterward. However, Dale is retired military, so I’m pretty sure he thinks about missiles, too.

Dale and I are both avid cooks, so for us, dinner is a hobby, the highlight of the day. Well, that and happy hour. When we were both working, it was an opportunity to connect after a long day at the office. Now it’s an opportunity to connect after a long day of getting in each other’s way.

Although we’re not overly materialistic, we do like our kitchen stuff, old and new. We still use the dishes we bought at the PX when we got married almost 40 years ago, and we have a handheld mixer from the early 80s. Dale has a vintage Wearever Super Shooter specifically for making cheese straws. Then there’s the yogurt maker, the juicer, the Instant Pot. We converted a downstairs bedroom into the Williams Sonoma annex.

I also like what I call side dishes. Artichoke plates, egg cups. Bar ware. Pasta bowls. My sister makes us beautiful two-sided cloth napkins, my favorite being pizza on one side and garlic on the other.

We sometimes take sides on what to have for dinner, but during the meal itself we may bicker over what we had for dinner on that rainy Saturday in June of 1998. Remember, it didn’t rain until late? No, it was pouring down when I woke up. I’m pretty sure it was a rib-eye. I remember buying it. No, he says, I bought it, I remember it was on sale at Publix. No, it was Harris Teeter. No, they had closed by then.

Eating together unlocks the memories so we can argue about whose version is correct.

I don’t understand sacrificing dinner to climb the ladder at work. I met several high-powered women executives in my career who said they usually ate a bowl of cold cereal for dinner because they worked such long hours. A former boss said she often ate a granola bar in her room during business travel, presumably to win the prize for saving the company money and free up more time for emails.

Now, I get the whole thing about holing up in the room after a day in close quarters with vice presidents and their ilk, but I had different priorities. Bath fizzies! Movies! Room service! I didn’t care if I had to pay for it myself. It was like a fiesta. I enjoyed the time alone, but the best part was coming home, when Dale would make something delicious to celebrate my return.

We make almost everything from scratch and do focus on healthy foods, but we also have lots of not-so-healthy food rituals:

  • Comfort Food Tuesday
  • Full Mexican (Mexican food Friday, Saturday and Sunday night)
  • Meat Weekend (Meat Friday, Saturday and Sunday night)
  • Pizza and Beer Friday

I know there’s plenty of serious stuff going on in the world that probably needs my attention, but as you can see, I’m kind of busy.

Bacon of the Month Club

During the first couple of months after I retired, my husband and I were driving each other nuts, what with me wanting him to eat healthier and live longer and then his raging indifference to my loving intentions. So, I thought, fine, you want to die, let’s get this show on the road, and I gave him “Bacon of the Month Club” for Christmas.

He would receive a monthly shipment of bacon for three months courtesy of Zingerman’s. I would have done the whole year, but that seemed too obvious.

I like bacon, but most of the time, I’m like, no thanks, I’ve already had cancer. Until delicious specialty pork products started arriving at the door, I wasn’t even tempted. But now there was pressure.

The first shipment was a pound of Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon from Wisconsin. The package included a keepsake binder with articles about bacon and the people who make it, “A Pocket Book of Bacon” and a pig magnet for the refrigerator.

Nueske’s was by far the best of the three we sampled. The article in the binder described it as the Platonic ideal of bacon, the one against which all other bacons are measured. And it’s true. I’m not good at describing the positive qualities of bacon after so many years of pig-shaming, other than to say Dale cooked it to perfection, and it was crispy, smoky and succulent.

At first I would only eat one piece, and I said we can never have this more than once a week. Then I said, oh, two pieces won’t kill me, but never, never more than once a week. And then I said, oh, what difference does it make if we eat it twice a week? We’re all going to die anyway.

In hindsight, I can see bacon helped us bond through a challenging transition in our lives. Whatever was going on – me in bed at night, worrying about what happens if the North Koreans bomb us and ruin my retirement and him worrying about me being awake worrying about North Korea.

But then it’s morning, the sun is glorious, the birds are chirping and wait, what is that other sound? Could it be the siren call of bacon?

One morning I took a picture of two simple slices of bacon on a plate and posted it on my Instagram account. I don’t get tons of Instagram traffic, but bacon is my most popular post to date. I look at the number every couple of weeks, and I report to Dale that bacon, of all my posts, is still in the lead. He laughs every time. The picture of me bald after chemotherapy is a heart-tugging second, but it’s not bacon.

We’re adjusting to our new lifestyle. I gave up pestering him about what he eats. Besides, he kind of came around on his own. Our membership in Bacon of the Month Club had expired, and one day he said, you know, that was fun, but we shouldn’t eat so much bacon.

I let him think it was his idea – a trick I learned at work.

Eat your beans

I’m here to sing the praises of eating more beans and legumes. I can’t think of a single food that has had more impact on my life – and not always in a good way.

As a child, I hated beans. I remember going to my friend Becky’s house for a sleepover, and for dinner, her mother made some sort of dish with macaroni and kidney beans. I vividly recall puking it up in Becky’s bedroom a couple of hours later. I was not invited back.

My taste buds evolved as I got older, but I still didn’t eat beans or other legumes because I had what we used to call a sensitive stomach. I had trouble digesting beans and vegetables such as cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage, which I nicknamed, “Death Vegetable.” I would have horrible gas pain and bloating, and to me, it wasn’t worth it.

In the category of strange but true, my digestive issues resolved after my cancer surgery in 1999. The operation included removing my omentum, which is a curtain of fatty tissue that hangs down from the stomach and liver and wraps around the intestines. The omentum is thought to aid in digestion, but maybe because mine was diseased it had the opposite effect? Or maybe whilst tooling around in my gut, the surgeon unkinked something that now allowed me to enjoy beans and cruciferous vegetables?

I don’t know what happened, but after the surgery at age 43, I began to slowly introduce these foods into my diet. And then later in my 50s, I read about people in the Blue Zones of the world who live long, healthy lives. Most of them eat a lot of beans. Additionally, eating a daily serving of cooked beans is linked with lower levels of “bad” low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. I upped my game.

My husband always loved beans and legumes, so it made dinner easier. We discovered a mutual tolerance for unpleasant odors, since it did take time for my body to adjust as I increased fiber in my diet. No horrible bloating gas like I had when I was young – just painless flatulence, which Dale says is the sign of a healthy metabolism. But this comes from a guy who would sign his farts if he could.

We all know something will get us eventually, but since improving my diet by reducing sugar, eating more fruits and vegetables, eating oatmeal for breakfast several days a week and consuming beans or legumes daily, all the numbers in my lipid profile markedly improved, and my bad cholesterol dropped by 17 percent. After a lifetime fooling around with irritable bowel syndrome, I have no issues with either constipation or diarrhea.

Black beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, chickpeas, black-eyed peas and all kinds of lentils are now pantry staples. Hearty bean soups make an especially good lunch – I cook big batches to freeze in individual servings. If you’re working, you can defrost at home and put it in a wide-mouth mason jar to reheat in the microwave at the office. I kept a little squirt bottle of good olive oil in my credenza as a topper!

Cookbooks and websites are loaded with recipes that use legumes, but here are three new favorites:

In my opinion, all beans and legumes taste better if you make them from scratch. Once you get used to cooking dry beans, you will never want to use canned again. The Instant Pot®, which is an electric pressure cooker, makes it fast and easy – we would starve without ours.

I pretty much love all food, but if I had to, I would give up meat before I’d give up beans. Just don’t make me think about giving up cheese.

Breaking up with sugar

Eating well in retirement is a joy because I have time to browse recipes, shop for quality food and cook meals from scratch. Friends know I have a passion for real food that isn’t packaged or processed, but many are not aware of my dirty little secret.

Here’s to blowing up dirty little secrets.

It starts with my childhood, which refuses to go away. I continue to process my dysfunctional roots and was reading about family dynamics. I took comfort in learning Chinese parents love their children fiercely, but they don’t say, “I love you.” They show love through generosity, loyalty and food. We didn’t talk about love in my family either, unless it was something like, “I love hot fudge sundaes” or “I love Rum and Coke.”

No problem, because I loved sugar. As one of the original latchkey kids, my favorite after-school snack was eating powdered sugar out of the box with an iced-tea spoon. Sometimes a scoop of plain white granulated sugar from the bin poured straight down my scratchy little throat.

My mother used to send us off to the movies on Saturdays. She gave my sister and me a quarter each, and we could buy whatever candy we wanted at the corner store to take with us into the theater. Back then, everything was a nickel, so that was five treats. FIVE!

I liked my sugar unadulterated by chocolate. My candy of choice was compressed dextrose, sometimes known as chalk candy. Necco® Wafers, Smarties®, Conversation Hearts, Bottlecaps®, SweeTARTS®, candy necklaces …

Even as an adult, I thought sugar was OK as long was you watched the fat. I became a fan of fat-free candy such as jelly beans, candy corn, those strange orange circus peanuts – plus all the compressed dextrose yummies from my youth.

Up until a few years ago, I had a special candy drawer in the kitchen. I figured if I kept my weight under control, I could eat whatever I wanted. I used to say, “Sugar is your friend.”

Then age and genetics caught up with me. My blood sugar inched up toward the pre-diabetes zone, and the doctor advised me to change my diet. Candy, that ruthless bastard, was not my friend. I’m getting older, trying to live a long and healthy life, so I gave it up. I just did. I told myself, “I don’t eat candy anymore.”

That’s not to say I don’t occasionally eat dessert or foods with sugar – and I enjoy wine and beer, so I’m by no means a purist. But I consumed a lot of sugar, and eliminating packaged candy seemed like a clean break. I didn’t have a weight problem to begin with, but over the course of three years, 10 pounds disappeared, and so far my blood sugar is under control.

Easter is my favorite candy season. So easily tempted by the siren call of marshmallow peeps. Last year I fell off the wagon (just a box or two). I saw the Easter candy displays out earlier this week, and I had to walk away. I texted my lifeline.

how about a challenge? neither one of us eat peeps this year?

lol too late.

We agreed to the challenge anyway. In the spirit of continuous improvement. Game on, but I think we’re both a little sad. Breaking up with sugar is like breaking up with love.

Cooking at home is a retirement skill

I had been planning retirement for several years and to be sure I wasn’t just a crazy kid with a dream, I created a spreadsheet detailing our income through age 95. Not sure what happens after that.

But I am a journalism major, so I needed someone qualified to check my math. We met with a financial planner, and I showed him the spreadsheet. He validated my numbers and asked about money for travel and dining out because certainly we’d be doing a lot of both in retirement.

I’m not opposed to travel or eating in restaurants, but that’s somebody else’s dream. My husband, Dale, and I traveled extensively for work and pleasure when we were younger, and we don’t have a big travel jones. As far as dining out is concerned, we mostly cook at home.

While cooking at home saves money, it’s more about eating well, especially as we age. Dale and I are no saints when it comes to so-called clean eating. Our approach is most things in moderation. Even decadent treats like chimichangas (do you hear that, chimis? I love you, man) are better for you and better tasting if you make them at home, with homemade refried beans, homemade salsa, etc.

One of the many things I love about retirement is having more time to participate in the kitchen. Dale is a fantastic home chef, and because he retired 10 years before I did, he pretty much took care of dinner. Now we are sharing, and although I was worried I might be encroaching on his turf, our kitchen adventures together have turned out great. And I’ll just say it. I like me some control.

Our dietary goal is to cook and enjoy delicious food, keep off excess weight and manage cholesterol.

Meals include lots of Mediterranean-type dishes noted in aging badass bible, The Blue Zones, but we love a wide variety of food purely for the sensory pleasure and refuse to demonize it. That said, there are a few things we just don’t do. No sodas, diet or otherwise. We avoid packaged food, fast food, fake anything, diet anything. I’m also a huge fan of Michael Pollan, if you need inspiration for cooking and eating well.

In my view, learning to cook and appreciate quality food is a retirement must. Start before you retire! You really don’t want to go through old age in fear of food. There’s already plenty to be afraid of.