Lick the Bowl

I have decided to get back to my Lick the Bowl roots.   While this blog was originally intended to discuss food allergy related material including recipes and news items, I realized that my life was not just about food allergies.   Don’t get me wrong, they take up a big chunk of my energy, but the blog seemed to take on a persona of it’s own and I liked the direction it took.   Nevertheless, it’s holiday time and the one thing I love to do is experiment in the kitchen.   A few weeks ago, I received a fabulous new cookbook from my Facebook friend, Nava Atlas.     It’s funny how people find each other in this big, wide world because prior to Facebook, Nava and I never knew each other.   Nava is an author and illustrator of many well-known vegetarian and vegan cookbooks.   She also has her own website Vegkitchen.com.   Some of her books include Vegan Express, Vegan Soups and The Vegetarian Family Cookbook, amongst many others.    Nava found an anecdotal article I wrote for the Baltimor

Ah…finally, we have survived the six-year old on steroids.   It was a long, frustrating trip fraught with “increased” (and that’s an understatement) energy and major meltdowns.   He went to one of those bouncy places for a birthday party yesterday, so I timed the predinisone exactly 1 hour before he left.   Let’s just re-name the kid “Tigger” because he bounced every steroid laden cell out of his body and fell into a coma-like induced sleep afterward…sigh…the worst is over.   Now we move onto the inhaled steroid.   It’s pretty pathetic that my son calls us…”puff” buddies.   We stand together by the sink with a cup of water and we each inhale from our Flo-Vent (an inhaled steroid), then we both swish water in our mouths and rinse the residue out.    It’s like doing drugs with your kid.   Actually, it is doing drugs with your kid.   It’s a bit surreal and frankly a bit disturbing on so many different levels.   Bottom line, if you can get through the worst, the drugs work, because we

Yes, these are the cries of pain.   These are my muscles screaming out in agony…”why are you doing this to us? We want to go back to the way it used to be?”   Believe it or not, I have not worked out in almost two months since this nasty little chest infection took my lungs hostage.   It’s been a long trip, filled with steroids, inhalers, antibiotics, and other assorted medications, but alas, I have been released from my arrested breathing and have begun to cautiously join the world of the living again.   Of course, nothing is as easy as it seems, because now my itchy, sneezy, wheezy, coughing, allergy afflicted six-year old suffers the same fate as his mama and is on the same course of drugs.   Let’s just say that steroids on a six-year old can turn a seemingly sweet, even-tempered child into the incredible hulk on speed. I specifically switched his dosage time from morning to late afternoon, because I really like his teacher and didn’t want her to have to bear the full brunt of h