Jaws Wired Shut

Hiatus/Comeback

Can someone please tell me what happened to summer? And, how did it get to be October?

I know I’ve been a little MIA ‘round these parts, and happily, it’s because I’ve been doing the most unremarkable things: working again, seeing friends (and actually holding conversations with them), going away for the weekend here and there, and, of course, eating. I’m just about back to normal, aside from a few really chewy foods — peanut butter cookies were oddly problematic, as was bacon — and anything that requires opening wide to take a bite. This has mostly been managed by daintily cut foods into small pieces. However, it did lead to a rather ungraceful attempt at eating a TimBit when Dan recently surprised me with a box, sweetly remembering that while wired I had missed the grand New York debut of this beloved Canadian institution (and just about the only chain restaurant in which I willingly set foot). I also had to pass on the incomparable burger at DuMont when we ate there to celebrate my entering a new decade. Also, sushi. How cruel that it is so soft, delicious, and high protein, and yet so awkwardly sized for the recovering jaw. I really appreciate how polite my friends were at dinner last weekend, not saying anything when half a spicy salmon roll fell out of my mouth.

It has been almost four months since my accident, and this week marks one more visit to the dentist, who is working on the teeth that sustained damage, and a follow up with the oral surgeon, who measures my progress with a tiny ruler; how well I’m doing is based on how many millimeters wide I can open my mouth (currently at 60% of full capacity).

And now that I’m off this diet:

I’m working on adapting my “normal” nutritional intake and routines so that I am not a person who tends to faint and break things. This means drinking the occasional juice box and carrying around protein bars, so I feel like both a kindergartener and a mom who always has a snack in her purse (see also: last week’s episode of “The Office”). Add those to the list of things I’d rather be than a person with her jaw wired shut.

Despite all this good news, I do intend to keep up a routine of posting here. I won’t have much to say regarding the progress of my own jaw (fingers crossed, there won’t be anything to report after this week), but I will continue to share recipes and resources for anyone who can make use of them. Now that a new season is upon us, I have a backlog of recipes to test, a whole new world of autumn flavors and blender possibilities. A couple weeks ago I discovered that adding butternut squash makes for a fantastic twist on my sister’s carrot-ginger puree.

I don’t want to get all mushy and sentimental now, but it still amazes me that, having never met anyone with a broken jaw before my accident, so many complete strangers who have been in this unpleasant situation have reached in support and solidarity over the past four months. So, thanks to all of you for wishing me well and giving such great advice. It only seems right to keep it going for those who have to endure the same in the future.

4 weeks ago | Comments (View) |

Rice Pudding Comes Full Circle

A little over seven weeks ago, as we waited in a pre-dawn holding pattern for the results of my ER tests, Dan went out, starving and sleepless, in search of food. Because of the lingering possibility of surgery, I wasn’t supposed to eat anything, but before anyone could officially tell me otherwise, I snuck a few bites of rice pudding, the only reasonable soft food the nearby deli had to offer. Despite my long standing disdain for all things gelatinous, rice pudding has always had an inexplicable free pass.

Finally, as of last week, all the wires and bars are gone. Like having house guests who overstayed their visit by a month, the feeling of getting my mouth back all to myself is glorious. It needs some tidying up and I’m still getting used to the space being all my own again, but it’s so much closer to normal than I’ve been all summer that I don’t really mind the fact that I can’t fully chew or that I get a stabbing pain when I yawn too wide.

As I’ve mentioned before, rice itself has been a challenge — it’s a lot chewier than you realize when you take chewing for granted — but rice pudding I can do. With this recipe, everything came full circle and now I have both an alternative-to-ice-cream dessert and managed to avert leftovers from going to waste at the same time. Because it was brown rice that needed repurposing, I seasoned with cardamom and nutmeg, which seem to better match the depth of flavor than the usual suspects of cinnamon and raisins.

• about 2 cups leftover (i.e., already cooked) brown rice
• 2 cups lowfat milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 cardamom pods
• 1/2 cup sugar
• nutmeg

Bring the rice, sugar, milk, and cardamom to a boil. Add a couple dashses of nutmeg and the vanilla, reduce the heat, and simmer until the milk is mostly absorbed and thickened, stirring regularly. How long this takes depends somewhat on your rice, but give it about 30-40 minutes. It’s ok if the liquid doesn’t fully reduce, since you are still on a modified liquid diet and it is extremely sweet and tasty. Let it chill in the refrigerator at least a few hours before eating. Apparently some people eat cooked cardamom pods, but they must be incredibly chewy, so, you know, now’s not the time to try.

Will this blend? My best guess is yes, but mix with ice cream and extra milk to balance out the gluey-ness of the rice.

For variation, I think this would probably also be good with a mix of regular milk and coconut milk.

3 months ago | Comments (View) |

Gazpacho

Milkshakes aside, gazpacho seemed to be the food most frequently recommended to me this summer, but only today did I finally make it. Here in the Northeast, we’re having a wretched summer tomato-wise and this was the first week at the farmer’s market I could find a decent selection (and at a price). This was also the first week that actually felt somewhat normal and busy. I underwent the procedure to have the arch bars removed and after that, did things like talk on the phone and plan my upcoming work schedule and order food in a restaurant and continue to make daily misjudgments of what my jaw can handle while I regain the ability to open wide, then close and chew properly. Looking ahead, this week looks to be the first of the summer that will be genuinely hot, with temperatures upward of 90F.

For all these reasons, gazpacho was the perfect thing to save for the very end. When made with fresh ingredients, this soup is at its finest in puree form, and it’s good at various stages of puree. I know I would have loved the flavor when consumed as a complete liquid, but it’s also great when blended in chunky, uneven batches left with some of the texture of bread and tomatoes.

Variations on the Spanish original have proliferated wildly; now there are recipes with all sorts of twists to make gazpacho spicy or sweet or fruity or a particular color or a Bloody Mary having an identity crisis. I’m not exactly a purist, but I’m also not convinced that any cold soup with tomatoes in it deserves to be called gazpacho. And I get that, if you’re trying to make your version marketable or you crave gazpacho out of season, it could be useful to make it with a set of alternative ingredients (again, consider the possibility that the soup you’re making isn’t actually gazpacho). But at the height of fresh summer vegetable abundance, traditional gazpacho ain’t broke and it don’t need fixin’:

• 3 field tomatoes, chopped (I used two yellow and one red)
• 1 decent sized onion, chopped, divided into two portions
• 1/2 large green bell pepper, chopped
• 1 cucumber, peeled and chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• olive oil
• good crusty bread, cut into large pieces and toasted (I used about a third of a baguette)
• a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
• 1 1/2 cups “Garden Patch” (a vegetable juice sold at Trader Joe’s) or tomato juice
• salt to taste

Only as I prepared to dump everything in the blender did it dawn on me that this might be too much raw onion and garlic for my taste. If you love those things raw, then this is a no-cook recipe (except for toasting the bread): put everything in the blender and pulse until blended. Also, in this case, you could leave out the olive oil, except that it tastes great and if you’re wired shut, you need the fat. So nevermind.

In my case, the olive oil went toward sauteeing the garlic and about half the onion (after spooning it, piece by piece, out of the bowl with all the other vegetables; I don’t recommend repeating this step), just to soften it up and take the edge off. Then I dumped the garlic and onion in the blender, followed by the toast, then the vegetables and liquids in batches, pulsing it down to a puree with texture but no visible chunks.

About the liquid:

1. To blend to straw appropriate consistency, you should add additional juice as needed.

2. Most gazpacho recipes have a tomato juice base, which would have been my first choice, but I used this product called “Garden Patch” because it was already in my fridge. I bought it while wandering the aisles of Trader Joe’s in despair, thinking it would help me get enough vegetables while wired and forgetting I’ve never enjoyed V8 or anything like it. Although it made for a horrific michelada mixer (we all make mistakes), Garden Patch does fine in gazpacho and sneaks in a bit of extra Vitamin A and potassium. It’s pretty high sodium, as are many tomato juices, so factor that in to how salty you want your soup to be.

3 months ago | Comments (View) |

I just sip the sizzurp

How did I go through the last six weeks without anyone, until today, making a reference to Kanye’s Through the Wire? (Thank you, Chris, for stepping up.) The more important question may be, for all the times I’ve listened to it, how did I not know until today that the song is not only about his own broken jaw, but that he wrote and recorded it WHILE wired?

And I was just proud of myself for leaving the house every once in a while.

Better late than never, with apologies to Kanye West, sipping the sizzurp* is an apt description for how I’ve been eating. The past few days I have been able to spoon things into my mouth so not everything has to go through the straw, yet I’m still unable to chew. I have had to cultivate a few strategies for eating through this stage, most of which involve slurping a modified version of whatever someone else is having. By all accounts, it will be about another month of baby steps, from becoming fully metal-free to regaining normal motion and chewing capacity.

The easiest approach is to keep on keepin’ on with the straw — smoothies, juice boxes, and shakes are still definite staples. Last Thursday I miscalculated my intake and went to a party without eating enough; after several hours of a staring contest with the spread of cheeses and dips and cakes, the chocolate peanut butter milkshake I picked up on the way home was like manna from heaven.

Now that I’m physically able to get food with some texture in my mouth, blending beyond recognition is intolerable. But the blender still has to…help me chew. There’s a reason this post has no pictures. Pulsing the blender just enough has allowed me to eat the insides of a falafel pita without the pita (falafel, tabouleh, hummus, and hot sauce) and stir fry, without the rice, but full of marinated tofu and fresh vegetables like Napa cabbage, kohlrabi leaves, zucchini, and even some corn, which I thought I’d be missing out on entirely this summer. Last night I attempted some overcooked cappellini, drenched in sauce, although the noodles were surprisingly difficult to eat. Aside from this rejection of carbs, as though my mouth is on its own evil version of the Atkins diet, it is amazing to be tasting food again. In fact, the best meal of all required no blending. On Saturday night, I slurped away at the mush of lentils, spinach, and tikka masala sauce that Dan picked up for dinner from an amazing Indian take out place in Curry Hill. It seemed like the most wonderfully flavorful thing I had ever tasted.

I’m reluctant to call what I’m doing “eating” now that, even more deeply than before, I understand that to be a process beyond just getting calories from point A (plate) to point B (stomach). More connected to food than I’ve probably ever been in my life, the plan is to keep tasting all the tastes I’ve missed, and prepare for a wonderful meal, not too far into the future, when I will truly eat again.

*for the non-Kanye fans, that’s sucking syrup through a straw because someone has cruelly ordered pancakes in front of you while your jaw is wired shut.

3 months ago | Comments (View) |

Pea Soup, Made Interesting

Early on I fell prey to a misconception that beans and a wired jaw don’t mix because the skins are too tough to break down to straw-suckage proportions. Now I can’t even remember how this idea came to me or why I believed it, especially in all my desperation for non-powder protein. Finally, at week six, just in time to start transitioning back to food with texture, a staple of my regular diet returned and I have learned that beans, like many other foods, can be made smooth if you add enough liquid and let the blender run long enough.

With hesitation I share a recipe for this, because a few things went askew in its making. First, I went against my better judgment in making black eyed peas and greens without some sort of meat. It may be possible to do so — in fact, I referred to two vegetarian recipes in deciding how to go about this — but I don’t recommend it. It also may be possible to sneak in some sort of fake meat product if you’re vegetarian, but I haven’t tried and so can’t recommend that, either. You get lots of important nutrients by making puree or soup out of beans and dark leafy greens, and it will taste infinitely better with ham in it, if that’s something you eat. You could probably make this with a different bean, but black eyed peas are tasty and bring good luck. At least, they’re supposed to if you eat them on New Year’s Day, which I did, and the year was going pretty well. Until I broke my jaw. (Note to self: eat two bowls next year so luck lasts twelve months instead of six.)

The second problem was my inability  to test the consistency of both the beans and the kale (a major challenge to cooking with your jaw wired shut), and was dependent on Dan to tell me when it was just right. Even after it had been on the stove for far longer than any recipe advises or what seemed instinctively right, he said it didn’t seem ready. This doesn’t matter a whole lot if you plan to blend the entire batch — I thought my version was great — but if you want others to eat the non-puree version, let them tell you when the consistency is right for them.

So if you are already in possession of a tried and true black eyed pea recipe, such as Hoppin’ John, or if you know a Southerner who’s willing to share his or her secrets, make as you normally would, then put a ladle or two full into the blender (probably leave the rice out, if you do make Hoppin’ John), add a decent amount of chicken broth, and let ‘er run until you have a mixture that is the consistency of pea soup, only better tasting.

If you don’t have your own recipe, here’s what I did:

• 2 cups dried black eyed peas, rinsed
• 4 garlic cloves, smashed
• 1 bunch of kale, well rinsed, stems removed, and chopped into 1/2 inch ribbons
• some minced garlic
• olive oil
• hot sauce
• salt to taste
• some kind of meat: ham, bacon, pepperoni

I did the quick, no-soak thing with the beans (covered with water, simmered for about 45 minutes), with the four cloves of garlic in there, too. Separately I sauteed the kale with some additional garlic and olive oil. I added hot sauce to the beans and let them keep cooking for another twenty minutes or so, adding water as needed, and then finally added the kale, just at the end. If you have some meat to add, that should go in with the hot sauce. Whatever greens you use, only add them in the last 10-15 minutes, so they aren’t overcooked and lose their nutritional value. Then I blended as described above. It comes out looking like pea soup and tasting even better.

Enjoy, and good luck to you.

3 months ago | Comments (View) |

Empanadas: It's What's on the Inside That Counts

While on a quest last weekend to do something with kohlrabi and zucchini beyond simply sauteeing, this Straight From the Farm post piqued my interest in empanadas. Why sautee and then blend your vegetables when you can sautee, fold them up in pastry dough, brush with egg wash, bake at 425F for twenty minutes, and THEN blend them?

I followed the recipe pretty closely, except I replaced scallions with garlic scapes, left out the radish, and used extra olive oil instead of the olive oil-butter combo. About half of the mixture went into empanadas, and the rest went into the freezer to be saved for future puree or another round of empanadas in the depths of winter when I’m looking for excuses to crank the oven (oh, and will be able to EAT an empanada). I also made some with a sausage and goat cheese filling, because that is a fool proof combination, at least for people who eat sausage and goat cheese.

Empanadas are pretty fun to make, especially when you cheat and use pre-made dough — to make life easier, and because I have little confidence in my ability to make edible pastry, I used Goya frozen empanada wrappers — and the fun of it eased the disappointment of how they tasted in liquid form. To say it tasted like a pastry smoothie is misleading — although now I very much wish I had attempted this experiment with a chocolate croissant instead — because it didn’t taste only like the pastry, and yet, the flavors of the fillers were totally overpowered by the pastry.

Oh, the irony: that which can be wrapped around almost anything to make it infinitely better has the exact opposite effect when blended.

(For the record, Dan said the actual empanadas were great, and I earned some serious brownie points for making them.)

Yet again, I learn the hard way. Foods that play a foundational or vehicular role in a chewing person’s meal — lettuce, pizza crust, noodles, empanada dough — are rendered anywhere from futile to useless on the blender diet. The glutinous ones are the worst offenders, requiring so much liquid to be thin enough for the straw that it becomes an unmanageable amount of food to eat in one sitting (for me, anyway).

Here’s my advice: much like the secret gems within the Bittman salads, follow your cravings for the fillers and toppings and sauces you love, because they will make satisfying blender creations and this is your free pass during which there is no shame in openly eating extra helpings of pastry filling without the pastry, pasta sauce without the pasta or salad ingredients without the salade.

3 months ago | Comments (View) |