April 2011
1 post
September 2010
1 post
Bourbon Street Milkshake →
I’m sad to say that I’ve never been to Bourbon Street - not the famous one in New Orleans nor the bar on the West Island of Montreal that is the source of incessant radio ads (or least, it was a decade ago when I lived there). It’s just plain pathetic that I still haven’t been to Brooklyn Bowl, which is within walking distance of my house and serves up this amazing sounding...
June 2010
1 post
March 2010
3 posts
Peanut Butter and Everything
Amazingly, of all the shakes and smoothies I drank while wired shut, many of which involved either peanut butter OR bananas, none involved both. Well, here’s an easy recipe for one shared by Carol, a food blogger who unfortunately recently joined the broken jaw patient ranks.
Peanut Butter and Banana Smoothie
1 serving Greek yogurt, 0 or 2 percent fat
1/2 cup 2 percent milk, or whatever...
Blender BFF →
“A blender is arguably the professional cook’s most important tool (after the knife),” claims Sophie Brickman on the Atlantic Food Blog, as she talks blenders and soup.
Check out her recipes for mushroom and cauliflower soup, but also memorize her steps to universal soup-making; those are money in the bank while you’re wired and long after.
Guest Post: Pumpkin Pie & A Blender
Perhaps the most ubiquitous reason to take a turn on the blender diet is having one’s wisdom teeth removed. I unwittingly took a trial run myself, getting all four wisdom teeth out about a year before I broke my jaw. Luke from Tuna Cupcake went through it himself last fall and managed to make it fun — beyond the requisite painkillers — by testing out this awesome milkshake and...
February 2010
1 post
Medal count for wired jaw survivors: 1
Congratulations to Shannon Bahrke — mogul skier, bronze medal winner at the Vancouver Olympics, wired jaw survivor. As if becoming an Olympian isn’t hard enough, several years ago Bahrke faced the setback of a broken jaw after an accident while competing in Japan. Well, here’s what we all really want to know:
What does an Olympian eat when her jaw is wired shut?
Go ahead and...
December 2009
3 posts
Holiday Cranberry Smoothie
Here’s a little experiment I undertook over the holidays when I had extra cranberries after making the annual batch of my grandmother’s cranberry sauce. It was different, but festive.
2 tbsp. macerated cranberries (with juices)
1 cup apple cider (you could probably use orange juice too)
1 small handful of walnuts (1/8 of a cup or so)
a dash of cinnamon
To macerate the...
The Holiday 101
My suggestion in July that Mark Bittman’s 101 ideas for salads made for a great source of blendable possibilities was received by many with skepticism, so I understand if you decide to disregard my singing the praises of another Bittman 101 list. But if you can find a little holiday spirit in your heart and give this one a chance, you’ll see that his 101 Head Starts on the Day really...
Holiday Gift Idea: Stainless Steel Straws
These stainless steel straws are advertised as adding “a little zing to any drink” and “perfect for dinner party cocktails” - and they may well do and be just that, IF you’re up for zing and dinner parties this holiday season. But a loved one who is wired shut or otherwise on the blender diet through the holidays can use these straws just because they are shiny and...
November 2009
2 posts
Coming Soon: the Jaws Wired Shut Holiday Survival...
Eggnog Latte by a song under the sugar sugar
If you’ve been with me since the beginning of my adventures here, you may remember my quip to the oral surgeon: Is there ever a good time for this?
It was a rhetorical question at the time, but now, five months later, I can pretty confidently answer it. No. There is never a good time to have your jaw wired shut. Life keeps on truckin’,...
Trick-or-Broccoli
Broccoli by La Grande Farmers’ Market
Every once in a while I happen upon a list of “superfoods” and am reassured that I actually enjoy so many things that are good for me (just to balance out all the things I love that aren’t). It’s also reassuring that there are viable blender options for yogurt, honey, dark chocolate, pumpkin, walnuts, oats, blueberries,...
October 2009
1 post
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...
August 2009
6 posts
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...
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...
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...
July 2009
29 posts
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...
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...
Buy One, Get One Smoothies at Jamba Juice →
This is not an endorsement for store bought smoothies nor for the over-sugarification of normal eating people (which happens even at places where the food passes for “healthy” because it involve fruit).
However, last week I discovered that when you are out and about for several hours on a very hot day and your jaw is wired shut, Jamba Juice can be a true haven for calories and...
Tastes Like Chicken
Over the last five weeks there has been no shortage of one-off meals of the absurd, but Friday turned into the perfect storm. Maybe this had to happen, just once, before it’s all over. I’ve spent many moments this weekend searching for an explanation, or least a lesson learned, for Friday. I’ve also spent much of it anxiously thinking about how to make it up to myself without...
101 Salads: which ones blend? →
Mark Bittman’s awesome list of salads seemed to skyrocket to the #1 most emailed NYT article within a few hours of being posted yesterday; gratefully, I was one among the recipients, thanks to my friend Alana, suffering her own culinary challenge while spending six weeks this summer without a stove. So you may have already seen it, but look again: hidden within is a secret resource list...
Truly Outrageous Beet Salad Smoothie
Roasted beet and goat cheese salads may be the most ubiquitous — and tired, even — item on New York menus, but I still eat them. (Or, I did, when I still ate, slash went to restaurants.) Despite the salad incident two weeks ago, last night I tested out the old standard to see if it can hold its own against the straw.
The final product is not a a salad, but not exactly a smoothie,...
Red Velvet Milkshake: the à la mode motherlode
Milkshake #4
This is it. The milkshake for which all other milkshakes were but a preparation.
The idea made its way to my inbox from Noel, a former wired jaw patient; his father and my stepfather are old friends. Noel and his dad actually sent me a long set of suggestions about how to get enough protein and create nutritious blender bases, which have helped me tremendously and deserve a separate...
Bouktouf
Sometimes the best gifts are the accidental ones.
I don’t mean that as a platitude — the silver lining on this situation is not shining quite so bright this weekend. Literally, one of the best soups I’ve made comes from a gift that, a few Christmases ago, was intended for Dan’s brother but accidentally unwrapped and brought home by Dan himself. At some point it was...
Summer squash pesto
By best guesses, I’m around the halfway point of this experience, depending on which start date (the accident itself or the installation of wires) and end date (the wires coming off, the completion of delayed dental work, or the return of solid food) you’re working from. Neither adventure nor ordeal feels like the right descriptor at the moment, another sign of a halfway point....
The Panic Button
Photo: Panic by star5112
Over the past week I noticed that Jaws Wired Shut has started receiving visitors via searches for things like “jaw wired shut” and “jaw wiring” and “jaw wired shut what not to do.” And I am grateful for the mention on Diner’s Journal, as it has not only connected me to lots of wonderful new readers, but also to many other broken...
Coconut Milkshake
Milkshake #3
Photo: Coconut by muhawi001
This recipe came from my friend Sarah, tucked in with the home cooking she brought me a few weeks ago. It’s fitting that I saved it until now, because I seem to be making milkshakes in order of increasing decadence and this one is an incredibly rich, three minute tropical vacation.
Confession: for an embarrassingly long period of my life, I knew...
Hulk Juice
When you join a CSA, you welcome a season of possibility by receiving vegetables that you’ve never seen before. The sleuth work of identifying dinosaur kale was more fun than figuring out what to do with it; I’m almost certain it’s destined for another smoothie. But kohlrabi presented an even better challenge: how to do well by blending a food I’ve neither eaten nor cooked...
Banana Bread Milkshake
Milkshake #2 in the Milkshake Series.
Please, give me a free pass and let this be a milkshake. The healthful properties of the ingredients might be screaming out “smoothie” but I promise you - it tastes like dessert. It was so good that I felt guilty having it for lunch (I’m over that now, don’t worry) and even forgot to photograph it.
A couple weeks ago, when there was...
Bulgarian cucumber soup
After last week’s salad mishap — and many thanks to everyone who suggested better ways to make a green smoothie — I decided to try a different tack today with ingredients that are known to blend well. My starting point was this Bulgarian cucumber soup my mom tasted over the weekend at her local farmer’s market in North Carolina She snagged the original recipe for me,...
Pizza: there's only one thing to do
Photo by kenyee
On a few occasions I’ve found myself interacting with food in ways that some observers might label masochistic (you know, beyond the baseline masochism that is this entire experiment). Like browsing through Hulu and settling on a dozen clips in a row from the Food Network. Or reading blog posts about upcoming food festivals and newly opened restaurants, neither of which I...
Peach and Honey Milkshake
The first in a series of milkshake posts. Because when you break your jaw, everyone loves wishing you well by granting permission to consume milkshakes in mass quantity, and after three weeks of explaining how important it is for me to eat real food, it’s time to admit it. The milkshakes help get you through this.
This summer I’ve been working to overcome a lifelong bias against...
Lettuce never speak of this again
Fresh lettuce reminds me of childhood summers. I loved going next door to play in the dirt in our neighbor’s garden. I would help him pick lettuce and green beans, and he always let me take some home. The stuff you get at the grocery store just isn’t the same.
This week’s CSA share endowed us with two heads of lettuce and a big bag of mesclun, all organic, freshly picked, still...
Cauliflower Gratin
There is little rhyme and reason to last night’s dinner. Honestly. Who bakes a casserole in the middle of the summer? And why would someone with her jaw wired shut torture herself by preparing something with both cheese AND bacon in it? The most rational-sounding explanation was my need to use up ingredients to make room for a new CSA share today. But I also just felt like doing the normal...
Nutella fixes everything
Tracking everything you eat is all fine and good until your appetite stops lining up with the data. There must be many a weight loss dieter out there facing the daily frustration of finding out they have already eaten too much, only to feel like they have hardly eaten anything. And perhaps there are other broken jaw blender dieters out there who, like me, lose their appetites because eating takes...
Savory Smoothie
As I dipped into the freezer stash of food my sister made me, I realized I had not yet shared the recipe for her carrot-ginger puree. Adapted from a recipe on Epicurious for carrot soup with ginger and lemon, this is wonderfully flexible — it works as a soup and a puree and now, as a sort of savory smoothie. Tonight was the first time I had to drink it through a straw, and with just some...
Green Body and Mind
In the first few days after my accident, it seriously hurt to laugh. It was bad enough that I had to hold on to my face when something was supposed to be funny. It was worse when I laughed inappropriately when my oral surgeon instructed me to restrict my physical activity. He was making some very kind assumptions about my lifestyle, but anyone who knows me well enough understands why it’s...
New Tools for a Whole New Game
Insofar as talking and eating are integral parts of who I am, getting used to a whole new way of being is exhausting.
These first two weeks with the fracture but without the wires…I had it easy. Not being able to chew is annoying, but not lifechanging. Straws made things easier, but were not a necessity. Now, an immobilized jaw rules out anything that can’t make it up a straw, and...
Peas in a Pod
One of the last questions the oral surgeon asked, after delivering the news of my impending wires, was, “is this a good time of year for you?” To which I could not help but respond, “is there ever a good time for this?”
The only thing I can imagine a broken jaw conveniently coinciding with is a phase in life when one is responsible for feeding another person with no...
Good while it lasted
Anyone who has celebrated Thanksgiving knows that there are some holiday dishes that are good when eaten for the actual meal, but really great as leftovers the refrigerator the next day. For me, the ultimate of these is mashed sweet potatoes. My mom always topped hers with a layer of marshmallows, toasted in the oven, so that the leftovers were swirled with the sweet, melted bits of goo that...
June 2009
9 posts
Spinach Curry
Last night we dished out the final serving of my sister’s spinach curry (although I bet she stashed some reserve in my freezer…). Although I loved everything she made while she was here last week, this was my favorite. It also stood up to the true test: whether a person capable of chewing will eat it voluntarily. Dan really liked this dish, although after the first few times he...