It seems as if the fatigue has left my body. For the past several days, I have felt amazingly normal. No fatigue, no mouth sores, no nausea. Just normal. Yesterday, I attended a luncheon meeting of the Austin Advertising Fed. I was very interested in hearing the guest speaker talk about a new trend in the business (Connection Planning). I wore my wig. Nobody at the luncheon knew I had cancer. I met some lovely people at my table. One guy was an illustrator from Waco. Another guy was a sales rep for a local film production company. Perhaps I thought these guys were lovelier than they really were because I was having such a great time NOT talking about cancer.
Then I got it in my head that I wanted Emma to have the memory of our entire house smelling like Chanukah. So, I decided to fix latkes. I had no idea what I was doing. As usual when I attempt to do this sort of thing, we had to call David’s mom in New York for emergency cooking backup. My latkes were not sticking together in the pan. By the third batch – “a little more egg and a little more matzo meal” – at least they LOOKED like latkes.
As I was putting Emma to bed last night, she gently touched my arm and said, “Momma, I don’t want to be mean or anything, but your latkes are not as good as the kind Shira’s mom makes.”
“Oh, Emma,” I said. “I am well aware of this.” So, with that, I had a relatively normal day.
It was just a few days ago that I was debilitated on the couch, so I was acutely aware of how different it felt to be pain free and energetic. I need to keep this awareness up. Why is it that we forget how good it feels to be healthy until we don’t have good health?
4 comments:
Beautiful and inspirational blog! Thank you so much for writing it, and letting us see it.
Love, Tandy
Glad to hear that you're doing better. I hope you have a good holiday...
-- Mike Hollis
OH! Something I can totally help with (for next year, anyway, or if you need a midyear latke fix)! If they have a product called Simply Potatoes in your area (green package, usually in the same section of the market as prepared foods, lunch meat, etc - ironic!), buy two packages of the *shredded* variety. Dump these into a bowl and add two finely chopped (or, if you have a food processor, shredded) onions, a 1/2 cup of flour and a 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. MIX WELL (or you end up with little blobs of baking soda which taste lousy). In a separate bowl, beat 3 eggs. Add these to the potato mixture and mix well again. There's your latke mixture (and I find that flour works better for this than the traditional matzo meal)... my other tips are to not flip the latkes until you see the edges start to brown AND don't use too much oil but make sure that if you add more you wait until it heats up before adding more latkes!
Bon appetite? ;-)
Great tips! Thanks.
-Gigi
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