therapy

Food Therapy

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A good friend posted this recipe for her focaccia bread. — A few of you asked for my Focaccia bread recipe. Here you go: 

In a large bowl combine 4 cups of flour, plus 2 teaspoons each salt and yeast. Stir until dough comes together. Drizzle with a good olive oil and gather it into a rough ball. It will be quite moist. Cover the bowl and place in the refrigerator for 8 to 24 hours. When you remove the bowl, gently punch down the dough, drizzle with a little more oil and gather into another ball.  Take an 11 by 13 inch pan, spread olive oil all over the bottom and sides of the pan. Press the dough to the edges of the pan.  Let sit for 30-60 minutes (some recipes suggest 2-4 hours).  Sprinkle fresh rosemary leaves on top. Drizzle more olive oil on the surface. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Using all ten fingers dimple the dough until it has small depressions all over it.  Drizzle a little more olive oil and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from pan to a cooling rack. Cut into shapes of your choosing. Serve with butter or olive oil and herbs. Enjoy. See my post from earlier today to see photos.

Always up for a good challenge I noticed that Robyn didn’t mention any liquid other than oil. Her ingredients will need about 16 ounces to get a dough. Many years of making my own bread tells me this. I made it last night before I went to bed,  oiled my bowl put the dough ball in after kneading for a few minutes. I drizzled more oil on top, covered with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator overnight.

Robyn sprinkled it with olive oil and fresh rosemary. Alas I was out of fresh rosemary leaves, so I adjusted.

I cut the dough in half after letting it warm up to room temperature for about an hour or so. One half I put in the freezer for a couple of days later.  Dough freezes well. It will keep a couple of weeks.

The other half I rolled out a little  and pulled it into a 10 by 14 roasting sheet that I use a lot. I previously spread olive oil on the pan and after helping the dough into the corners, I covered it with oil and wax paper and let it sit about 2 hours. During the last 30 minutes I chiffonaded some spinach, diced an onion and a green pepper, found my jar of minced garlic. I spread more olive oil on top and decorated the surface.

After decorating the dough…it is ready for cheeses.

Alas again I am out of fresh Romano. Another adjustment to my normal pizza activity. I forgot to mention that I intended to use Robyn’s recipe for focaccia and make a white pizza. I sprinkled the veggies with a combination of mozzarella, Colby-jack and parmesan.

Into the  450 degree oven for 10 – 12 minutes.

Good pizza is made in a very hot oven. My oven only goes to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. 10 – 12 minutes at 450 works pretty good.

Out of the oven after 12 minutes.

I let it rest long enough for me to touch the pan to cut it.

Leftovers. Nice.

I cut the remaining into four pieces and put them into a ziploc bag in the fridge. I think that they will reheat okay. The dough soaked up a fair amount of the olive oil. Letting it rest overnight coupled with the two teaspoons of salt gives the dough a sourdough taste and chew to it.

Overall an excellent choice for homemade pizza or focaccia.

Robyn’s product.

Thanks Robyn.

Carpe Diem.

Like Drifting Sand – some days

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Friday – Happy Friday. We have gotten to the end of the week, almost anyway without any major disasters. This was therapy week. Cheryl’s doctor suggested that she might benefit from PT, OT and ST. Those are speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy in reverse order from my listing of initial abbreviations.

These were the initial visits for evaluation of where she is currently. She did this last year. This disease of Parkinson knows no schedule or any sort of time table but my overall observation of Cheryl is that she is deteriorating at an incredibly slow rate. She is nevertheless deteriorating. I put her in a transfer chair in the morning to take her to the toilet and then later to the kitchen table for breakfast. Eventually she is able to maneuver herself around without my help.

No one dies from Parkinson’s disease, they die with it. Some days however their care partners seriously consider cliff jumping without the necessary safety apparatus. (Sarcasm)

The mundane rigor of it all juxtaposed to the chaos is draining. Perhaps we all need to talk more.

The occupational therapy appointment was at 3:45 PM. The facility is handy. It is about a 10 minute drive from our house to the Drake Center. Cassidy asked Cheryl lots of simple questions about where she is physically and what she did with her day. Questions about cooking, cleaning, sitting and standing. Cassidy also preformed some simple strength and agility testing. Cheryl only misspoke once or twice about her role in the household chores.

My grand plan for the day had been to visit the OT expert and then move on to the Board of Elections. More about the Board of Elections later, but the scheduled appointment to the occupational therapist was almost foiled by a trip to the restroom. At 3 PM I suggested that Cheryl visit the toilet – just in case – so that we had time to make it to the OT appointment at 3:45 PM. Only 5 minutes away but there is that “Please arrive 15 minutes before your appointed time” that medical health services always ask you to do for them. (What makes them so special?) Nevertheless I try to abide by their scheduling rules. Parkinson raised its ugly head and said, “bathroom! Now!” After a little bit of argument we managed to get to the appointment at 3:45 PM. Sadly, there was no 15 minute breather.

In Ohio there is a statewide ballot issue concerning the way we modify the Ohio Constitution. The leg-ups and self-righteous in control of the state government are annoyed with the fact that the OMG’s and the gracious are so easily able to call them to task by proposing a constitutional amendment and forcing them to defend their positions in public. Never mind the fact that graft and greed in the form of direct payment for votes has caused the leader (Householder) to be visited upon by the Feds with gaol (old English) in the offing. The amendment process has survived the rise of the special four who attempted to write themselves into the constitution as the only ones to cultivate cannabis in Ohio if it became legal for recreational use. (I wonder if bars will have special places for them with the tobacco smokers?) So, in the end, the process probably does not need to change.

Early voting at the BOE was not in the offing, however, The OT appointment went longer than I had expected. I do not know what I was expecting. The early voting office closed at 5 PM which was about 4 minutes before we got there. So, after a series of snafus we finished at one of our local pizza stores which was located across the parking lot from the Board offices.

Pizza is a go-to for Cheryl when she cannot decide on anything else. We have often come to this particular pizza palace after church on Saturday evening. We succeeded in landing a table at the empty restaurant at 5:16 in the afternoon just as the skies opened up with a late afternoon thunderstorm. It is Ohio and late July. We enjoyed our pizza and drinks and sat to watch the storm wash our car in the lot. When it came time to leave, Cheryl announced as she often does that she had to visit the rest room. All sorts of things zip into my head when she makes this announcement. Mostly there is a flashback to the many less-than-satisfactory trips to public bathrooms. She refuses to recognize that she needs help more than merely occasionally in the ladies room. I have been in many over the past few months and yet I think she is unconvinced that any help is required. (So I sit and wait to see if she can get back through the door with her walker and seethe while I do it.) Public bathrooms and their cleanliness and the equipment or lack there of is often the main topic of the drive home conversation. (Not the quality or the enjoyment of the food.) It is no doubt just me and my internal opinion but often it seems she is acting like a newly toilet trained child who needs to try out all the toilets they come across because they have this new found ability.

We left the pizza store and drove to one of our favorite soft serve ice cream places for dessert. She wanted to use the toilet there also but theirs was marked closed for repair. I wonder how they get away with that with the health department rules we have.

When we returned home, she spent many hours sitting in her office touching and reading her cards. We eventually went to bed at midnight. She seemed to know where she was then although she had spent the better part of an hour in our from guest bathroom. (Lots of bathrooms are in this story.)

She awakened today at 9:30 am. Spontaneously! I attribute that to a new medication her neurologist prescribed along with the OT, PT and ST. He felt that some if not all of her sleep problems were due to smoldering anxiety and depression issues.

After breakfast and after getting cleaned up and dressed we had a funny little discussion.

“When did I get involved in this play? Who was that girl that put me in it?”, she asked after we had discussed the weather and Jill’s Christmas in July party tomorrow. I thought she was kidding about her situational awareness of her disease. I was wrong. She believes she is in a play that may never end.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely Players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…

As You Like It — William Shakespeare

Carpe Diem.

Occupational Therapy

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Today we go to OT. Next week we see the speech therapist for the second time as is true for the physical therapist.

On Tuesday of this wek the speech therapist gave me as caregiver a homework assignment. I am to keep track of what Cheryl eats and whether she has a coughing fit while eating whatever it is.

Yesterday I wrote: She had scrambled eggs and bacon with toast and orange juice for breakfast. I aways put water on the table near her just in case. She did not cough (or hack) while eating any of this. Earlier when I gave her the morning meds she coughed a bit while sipping water through the container with a straw. This often happens but less so when I get her to sip a little water before she takes her meds.

She coughed not at all again until our late afternoon grill out on the patio. Again when she was sipping a little water.

I have to admit that I have paid little attention to how Cheryl eats. She eats more slowly than I do. I am a wolfer. She is not. She drinks very little liquid while eating.

Thinking back, her mother drank very little at supper time when we had her over. Her mother had a swallowing problem as she aged, often her throat worked bacwards for her. (She would become embarrassed and refuse any kind of help. I would take her home.) I wonder if Cheryl worries about this problem her mother had. I wonder if Cheryl worries that she might develope the same problem.

On this morning we had Pillsbury refrigerator rolls. These are a favorite of hers so I try to make sure we have some hanging around in the refigerator. She always has orange juice but this morning I also gave her some applesauce. She has been requesting this more when she takes her pills. After eating the applesauce and two and most of a third roll she complained of “nausea”. I do not know what she is actually feeling. She has not vomited since I went to visit my sister two years ago in California. (Then she was extremely constipated.)

She coughed for a bit and I gave her a chewable Tums smoothie with which she sipped a little water. All was well afterwards.

It is remarkable how little water she uses to take her meds. I encourage her to drink more water. It is remarkable how repetative it all is. It being daily life.

Carpe Diem.