Daniel Fast, Day 10: The Brown Rice Edition

I said it before, some time back, and it's still true:  Too many starches in the system make me cranky, and pasta and rice are the worst offenders.  I discovered today that the rice being brown makes zero difference.

Rice is permitted on the Daniel Fast if it is brown.  The distinction is important.  A grain of brown rice is a grain of whole, intact rice, with all the parts God gave it when He created it, except for the outermost layer, called the hull.  White rice, by comparison, is the starch capsule that's left when all the layers under the hull are removed.  This is done by polishing the rice until it is white.  Once the rice has been polished white, the remaining starch capsule is enriched with a few vitamins to save it from being nothing more than just another source of empty calories.  However, the resulting product is still a very poor source of nutrients and fiber compared to how it would have been in its unpolished state with only the hull missing.  Pair brown rice—or any other whole grain—with a legume, and you've got a "complete" protein.

But brown rice, as nutritionally dense as it is, is still rice.  And when I finally bought some today, cooked some, and ate maybe a 1/3 cup amount over the course of an hour, I became a little irritated.  I actually needed to listen to some music to distract myself. Since no one had done anything to me, and nothing upsetting had happened, I finally figured out, after a few minutes of listening to the calming music selection I'd chosen, that I was reacting to the rice.  The good news was that I was able, within maybe a half hour of becoming symptomatic, to ingest a large salad composed of mixed lettuce greens, tomato chunks, cucumber slices, and sunflower nuts and dressed with apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper, followed by a sweet, crunchy, Red Delicious apple.  This mitigated the effects of the crankiness and I mellowed out quite nice.y.  Also, before eating the rice, I'd had a light lunch of baby carrots and sliced cucumber with black bean hummus and red pepper hummus.  Breakfast, since I'm telling you everything else I ate today, was a bowl of pinto beans, and I just ate a bowl of pintos mixed with the brown rice.  I'm going to bed shortly, and since not only do I take melatonin nightly, but I also am due to apply a fresh patch of a transdermally applied medicine that makes me sleepy, I do not anticipate that I will be unduly bothered by any recurring crankiness from eating more of the rice.

In fact, I'm beginning to be tired enough that concentration is a bit of a problem just now, so I think I'll just stop right here and call it a night.

I will say, before I go, that while I was shopping for the rice, I came upon the little section reserved for gluten-free store offerings, and I found some pasta made from brown rice:  Lasagna, rigatoni, rotelli, fettuccine, spaghetti, a good selection.  There was also some made from corn and quinoa, and I kid you not, those were the only two ingredients listed.  I'd like to try that!  I also found some selections of grains and flours from the Red Mill Company.  I even saw some soups from Amy's Kitchen, and at a lower price than at Whole foods!  Someone's getting the message, at least a little bit, about what some of us want to eat.  I like that.  it makes it possibly easier for me to become a pescetarian after I've completed this fast.  I just wish I'd eaten that summer sausage roll first :-)!

A Rather Random Day

Today has been a rather random day for me. Last week, our pastor challenged us to find ways to “be the Church”; that is, to find ways to demonstrate the love of Jesus to those close to us. I live alone, and I do not socialize much—okay, at all, except to speak when we see each other in passing—with my neighbors. I do not drive, and I did not go anywhere today.

Which is not to say that I have not had an interesting day. A certain noted pastor out of the west coast has a widely-watched and long running broadcast on one of the several Christian cable stations available to me where I live. I enjoy listening to his sermons, and I happened to tune in to one today. He took his text from the Song of Solomon 2:15, talking about little issues in our lives that have a negative effect on our faith. Since he spent the whole hour talking about unforgiveness and its impact on our lives, I gather that this is actually a sermon series, and I would have to stay home from church a few more Sundays to catch more of it. No matter. The lesson today was thought-provoking enough. The grudges we hold, irrespective of why we hold them, count as extremely little by comparison to the debt of wrong Jesus could have held over us, yet He chose to forgive us, and it cost Him so much! So for the comparatively little we do to each other, no matter how often it occurs, He asks that we forgive each other. In our eyes some sins seem huge, and He understands this. But not even the absolute worst, most horrific things we can do to each other, and choose to do with frightening regularity, weigh anything at all compared to what He died to forgive in every one of us. Furthermore, unforgiveness is an anchor that ties us to hurt and will not allow us to move on. So for our own good, and so that we may obtain forgiveness from the Father when we need it (and we need it all the time), it is imperative that we learn to live a life of forgiveness with each other.

I have managed to make progress in serving a friend, however, although it may be up for debate if this counts as “being the Church”. She brought me material for curtains and throw pillow covers about two years ago, but she bade me wait on her word as to when she wanted them made. There has been no rush on anything, and I have since completed the one set of curtains she requested, but back this summer she asked about the pillows. I had not made very much progress on them at all. The reason I cited was depression. If you have been following this blog for any time, you may recall me talking about symptoms of hypothyroidism, with which I have been diagnosed. Depression is one of the symptoms, and it can be quite debilitating sometimes, making it hard to purposefully think at all, let alone concentrate on anything. Having no pattern for what she wanted me to do with the pillows, I had to devise one all on my own, and I simply could not come up with a way to execute it. To complicate matters, the material is plaid, which requires special attention to measurments. Trying to figure out how to do it was overwhelming. Then a few days ago, the thousand and one thought fragments I'd devoted to the project finally coalesced into sense, and I spent some time putting together ordered instructions for how to do what I needed to do. I have spent this weekend cutting the material, and it is during a break from bending over the table that I am writing this. At the rate I'm going, I hope I'll have three beautiful pillows finished by next weekend.

In the background is the sound of a cash register ringing. Not a real one, but It is making me money. No the money isn't real either. If you've been on Facebook for a day, you know it is littered with apps. There are quizzes, all manner of cards to send, ways to tweak your profile, and games galore. I currently run two farms, an aquarium, a place in the city, and two restaurants, all from playing with interactive apps on FB. To be more precise, I run all of that except for one of the restaurants, which is currently running me. The potential exists for all the apps to become addictive, and this particular restaurant is highly interactive. Since getting up this morning, I have “served” 1650 slices of Triple Berry Cheesecake, 615 bowls of French Onion Soup, and well over 200 bowls of Super Chunk Fruit Salad. I just put out a platter that will eventually serve over 1100 slices of Homestyle Pot Roast, and in a few minutes I will lay out some 800 servings of Spitfire Roast Chicken. Still in the kitchen are another 200-plus servings of soup and more fruit salad. I have “cooked” and “served all this between getting dressed, watching my sermon, eating breakfast and lunch, cutting out fabric, and washing and prepping dry beans for cooking. My last task in this restaurant today, after I serve up the chicken, is to put on more chicken and beef to “cook”, then I'm done. From now on, the only things I prepare for my “patrons” are those things that are based on a 24-hour rotation. The customers will be served, and once it's gone, I'm “closed” until the next day, when it's time to serve up what I put on the prevous day. Whew!

As for my cooking in the real world? Well, being a bit short on groceries, I'm having to wax creative with the aforementioned dry beans. After they're seasoned and cooked, I'm adding to them some mixed vegetables from the freezer, some more mixed vegetables that I prepared from frozen just yesterday, and, sorrow of sorrows, starch. It is in the form of some slammin' mac and cheese I brought home with me from a visit to my parents' house and stashed in the freezer, right before I started my starch and sugar challenge. I say it is to my sorrow that I'm adding this cheesy goodness to my beans and vegetables, because I have definitely seen positive benefits, including weight loss, from adherence to the challenge, and I don't want to lose any of that. Having already made a large quantity of hummus, my plan is to eat that with fruit for breakfast and have the bean dish, which I'm going to loosely call pasta e fagioli, because that's more or less what it is, for supper.

Well, the interactive chicken is up, I'm waiting for the soup and one more bowl of fruit salad, and my hyperactive restaurant is going on autopilot! The good news: I've advanced another level!.