Gastric Bypass Series Part 1 Days 1 and 2

This is my tummy, which usually isn't quite this round. You can see two of the six small incisions I'm now sporting on my tummy. There are two more above this area, and one on each side. The incisions are very small, and only slightly sore. My tummy is swollen, because a lot went on in there 2 days ago. I had a gastric bypass surgery, and my surgeon also repaired a hiatal hernia and did a biopsy of my liver, which is fatty. She says that the liver problem will likely resolve as I lose weight. I didn't know I had either of those problems when I went in to surgery, but neither surprises me -- excess weight causes both.
My surgery went well otherwise. The staff at my hospital were friendly and supportive. The anesthesiologist put an oxygen mask on me, gave me some medicine in my IV, and the next thing I knew I was waking up in Recovery. As soon as I woke up, I decided to go right back to sleep, because I was feeling nauseated. There was a nurse sitting at a computer right beside me. After several times of waking up/going back to sleep, the nurse happened to notice when I woke up and spoke to me, and I told her I was nauseated, and she gave me medication. That helped, somewhat. Before they transported me to my room, I asked for more medication, because I was fearful the moving and bumping would make me more nauseated. I had gone into surgery at around 10:30am, and I got to my room around 3pm. Vital signs were taken. My RN removed my oxygen, but I was still dozing off/on and an NA put my oxygen back on when she noticed that my oxygen sats dropped into the 80's while I was sleeping. I also had a urinary catheter in place, and IV fluid running into the same IV that they'd placed prior to surgery. They had given me some Ceftin in that IV during surgery and recovery, and now I was getting Tylenol (yes, IV!) and either lactated Ringers or Normal Saline. I also had a Morphine pump with a button that I could push every 6 minutes for a small dose of morpine. I used it a bit for that first night in the hospital. There was pain, but it was mostly in my shoulder area and I think it is from the air they use to poof up your abdomen to do the surgery. It's still there, 2 days later, but not as bothersome. I needed help to get all my tubes and IV lines squared away so that I could walk in the hallway, which I did twice on that first night. I was a little dizzy the first time when I stood up, but it went away quickly, and I didn't walk until it passed. Mike stayed with me until 4:30pm, then he left to make the hour drive back home to feed the animals and lock up the chickens. He came back at 7:30pm and then left again at 9:30pm when we both agreed that the staff was taking good care of me. I pushed my morphine button and went to sleep, woke up briefly around 2am, pushed the button and went back to sleep, woke up when the lab came to get some blood at 5:30am, then dozed off again until 7:30am when my surgeon came in and looked at the incisions and asked how I was doing. She told me that I would likely be going home later that day, and we briefly discussed the hiatal hernia and fatty liver. I dozed off again, and Mike was there. The staff brought in sugar-free sorbet, sugar-free protein drink in fruit flavors, broth and water. My RN wrote on the board in my room that I was to try for 30 mls an hour x 2 hours, then 60mls an hour x 2 hours, then 9 mls an hour x 2 hours, and finally 120mls. I could only comfortably do 60 mls. I can STILL only comfortably do 60 mls today. If I drink more than 2 sips every 10 minutes, it feels very uncomfortable and full and the pain in my shoulders gets worse. They wished that I would pass gas, and I STILL haven't! I do burp frequently. Yesterday was pretty much a blur of drinking, drinking, drinking. I walked again. My daughter Jess came and helped me with the drinking and braided my hair after Mike left to prepare for an event he is cooking for tomorrow. After a couple hours, she went home, and I napped again. I discovered that broth did NOT taste at all good. At about 2pm, the RN came in and said that my surgeon said it was ok for me to go home. I was able to reach Mike by about 4 pm, as he was in the store and his phone didn't work until he got out of the store. Meanwhile, the RN insisted I take a dose of oral Lortab for pain before my trip home, even though I didn't really have that much pain. I was worried it would take up too much room in my new stomach, but she reassured me and it was ok. I took off my hospital gown and put on my jeans and T shirt (jeans were not a good choice, and I'd recommend sweat pants or yoga pants instead). I packed up the hospital stuff: basin, emesis basin, protein drinks and water bottles, Blistex for my lips, little toothpaste tubes. They throw this stuff out, and I figured I could use it for something. When Mike got there at around 5pm, we called for Transport and they put me on a transport chair and whisked me out to the Durango. I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to the staff. It's a busy floor, and they were all off helping other patients.
The drive home was unremarkable. Mike chose the least winding route, which probably helped a lot. I was entirely comfortable. When I got home, I walked a little bit around the house, found a bottle to put my drink in, and mixed up a batch of protein drink. Mike had the kitchen and dining area pretty much filled with stuff for his cooking event, and I figured that was enough excitement for one day and went to bed with my protein drink. Every time I woke up, I went to the bathroom and rinsed my mouth out, then drank two sips of protein drink. At about 2 am, my mouth was really yucky and after I rinsed it I drank 4 sips of water, and my stomach protested immediately. I walked a little, burped, and went back to bed. Mike came in around 7am, and I asked him to fill the vaporizer, as I think that makes it easier to breathe and my mouth doesn't get as yucky. Sure enough, by 9 am I didn't feel nearly as congested and my mouth wasn't so horrible. I got up, checked Facebook briefly and posted that I was alive, made my day's worth of protein drink and another bottle of water, and began sipping. Took a nap between 11:30 and 1pm, then came back to the computer to post this. All in all, I feel like I've been hit by a truck, but it's not necessarily PAIN. The soreness to my belly is entirely tolerable. The worst of it is not being able to drink much. I rinse my mouth a lot, which helps. I think I'll feel much better when I'm able to either pass gas or have a BM. My goal for the rest of the day is to finish my protein drink, check Facebook, and maybe stuff some dates for Mike later if I can tolerate that. Even looking at food is hard, to be truthful. Although yesterday I did have some thoughts about refried beans, which won't happen for weeks. I did try sugar-free Jello in the hospital, and it tasted fine but didn't seem to leave the pouch well, so I'm sticking with protein drink and water for now.

Fermented Tea???

About a month ago, around the same time I was making the kraut and kimchi, I became intrigued with Kombucha Tea. I headed down to the Nugget Market in El Dorado Hills, which is a remarkable supermarket that stocks raw milk and organic foods in addition to conventional food industry stuff. Sure enough, they had raw Kombucha Tea.

At the time, Miach had some GI thing happening and I suspected he needed some good microflora, so I bought 3 bottles of the Kombucha Tea and made him drink one. I also drank one (not bad...) and the third I saved for the live cultures.

In doing some research, it seems that Mother of Vinegar and Kombucha Mother are pretty much the same mix of organisms that form a leathery, rubbery disk that covers the top of your fermenting juice or tea. This blob is called a SCOBY: Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast. The main bacteria is Acetobacter and the yeast is wild yeast from the environment. Now, I have a real admiration for the wild yeast that live in my geographic area. I have a wild yeast sourdough that is absolute gangbusters. It can be in the back of the 'fridge for months, untouched, and yet you can feed it some flour and water and it will snap into action. It raises bread dough almost as quickly as commercial yeast. In traditional San Francisco sourdough, the tartness of the bread is very important. This is NOT that kind of sourdough. This is more the kind of sourdough that people have been making bread out of for thousands of years, and it produces bread that is indistinguishable from bread made with Fleischmann's Yeast or any other commercial yeast. But it's LOCAL yeast! So, I had a lot of hopefulness that I could end up with a very viable and productive Kombucha SCOBY, if I could just get it started out well.

The directions for making your own Kombucha SCOBY were to mix 1 part Kombucha Tea with 3 parts sweetened tea; put it into a large non-reactive (glass, ceramic or food-grade plastic) container with a large surface to volume area (not a wine bottle, but a canister or bucket) and stir it like crazy getting plenty of air into it, then covering it with a thin, medium-weave fabric to keep out bugs but let in air and yeast. I took it a step further, and figuring since Mother of Vinegar and Kombuch mother were virtually the same thing, I dug around in my cabinet and found my bottle of Bragg's Natural Apple Cider Vinegar with The Mother. Sure enough, a SCOBY had formed on the top. I had to pour the whole bottle into a glass pint measuring cup to get the SCOBY out, because it had a narrow neck. I tore off about half of it, and put the rest and the vinegar back into the bottle. I used a large glass storage canister from IKEA as my fermentation vessel, cleaning it with soap and water first. Then I put the 16 oz bottle of commercial raw Kombucha tea from Nugget into the canister, threw the vinegar SCOBY in there, and brewed up a half-gallon of strong black tea, which I cooled to room temperature and added quite a bit of sugar. Probaby 1/2 to 3/4 cup. It tasted sweet. I added that to my canister, covered it with muslin and tied string around the neck of the canister to keep it in place, tucked it into a dark corner of my counter and tried not to bother it for a few days.

Sure enough, presto, after about 2 weeks a SCOBY had formed on the top of it and I had a sweet/sour kombucha tea. I poured this out of the canister, leaving about a cup or 2 with the SCOBY, and refrigerated it. Then I made another half-gallon of tea, this time sweetening it with honey, and did it again. That tea was much less full-bodied when fermented, so the next time I went back to sugar. Most recently, in preparation for an upcoming surgical event that will limit my ability to tolerate sweets, I fermented the tea for 2 full weeks and have a very tart, only slightly sweet tea now that I'm going to attempt to take after the surgery in very small amounts to see if I can tolerate it.

TMI ALERT!!!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU CAN'T TOLERATE TALK OF BODILY FUNCTIONS.
I'm a gassy person. It's really aggravating and occasionally embarassing. Obviously, one tries to be polite and discrete, but there are times when things are just totally beyond one's ability to stop them, and this situation had gotten worse and worse over the past few years. I'd noticed that when I follow a low-carb diet, it takes care of the problem about 75% of the time, which is going to be the subject of a post-surgical blog post, I'm sure. Well, Kombucha Tea seems to take care of the problem, too, but for it to work most effectively I've found that I need to drink it with most meals. If I do that, no intestinal gas. I don't have to drink much; maybe 2 or 3 ounces. A 16 oz bottle can last me 2 days in the car in winter (it isn't fermenting much in a cold car).
YOU CAN START READING AGAIN, GENTLE ONES.

Other claims that I can't verify (yet) that are attributed to Kombucha Tea:

Due to the composition and metabolic by-products of this microcultured, living food -- which I do not want to go into, as it is beyond my pay grade and kind of boring unless you're a biologist -- Kombucha helps balance your acid/base profile, makes assimilation of B vitamins much better, makes GERD symptoms much better, helps you sleep, improves your skin and hair tone, helps you to digest food, regulates your elimination (both kinds)  and energizes you. Many people who have tried it quickly become proponents of it, and I am certainly one of them. I'm not entirely sure what the Kombucha is doing, but whatever it is, I feel much better when I drink it and my inclination now whenever I have a slight dyspepsia or other digestive problem is to swig some Kombucha tea. I recently had to stop my arthritis medication, which is NOT FUN, but on days that I have somehow missed the Kombucha tea, my arthritis is much worse and on days when I drink it the arthritis pain seems to be tolerable. This is a relatively new observation, and it could be dependant on several other factors like barometric pressure and ambient air temperature, so I'm not quite convinced the Kombucha is a good arthritis reliever yet.

The Final Fermented Cabbages

So here we have them, the Kimchi (3 and 3/4 jars) and the Kraut (5 and 4/5 jar, plus one jar of kraut juice). The Kimchi continues to be a delight, with complex flavors. The saltiness has subsided, and the pepper heat is just about perfect for my taste, which is kind of in the low middle range. The Kraut is very tart with a very kraut-y aroma, and it's the consistency that I remember from my childhood although I think it would have been a better consistency had I refrigerated it a week ago. The juniper berries were a wild card for me, as I've never eaten them before, only attempted to make ale with them. They don't taste the way I expected, which was more like a pine tree. They taste peppery.

I'm leaving the Kimchi out at room temp for a day or so, and watching for bubbles. Hopefully, I'll get a few, then I'll refrigerate it. The Kraut is going straight into the fridge, because it's texture is already soft.

As you can see, these are colorful ferments. They're really lovely.

Right after I poured the rest of the kraut juice down the sink (where it will hopefully survive in our septic tank) I realized I should have given it to the chickens. Darn. So I did take out the Kimchi brine for them, and they drank it. The microflora in those liquids is good for chickens, too!

The Fermented Cabbages Part Two

Kimchi definitely smells strong, but has a lovely spicey/fishy/veggie taste. I can see why people like this stuff. Kraut on the right, it's pink because it's a mix of red and green cabbage, and you can see the caraway seed and juniper berries if you look close. The brine-filled bags I was using to weigh the kraut down evidently broke, so I switched to a salad plate which fits perfectly into the bucket. The kraut has a definite sour taste now, but is still very crunchy. I'll bottle some of it up for the Emeritus Feast auction next week, and the same with the kimchi - only I'm going to try to get some carbonation going on the kimchi, so I'll leave it at room temp. Miach likes the kimchi, so that's a good sign. Although he did say "it's beginning to smell ripe out there!" when I went out to the back deck to dig around in my fermentation box.

A Tale of Two Fermented Cabbages

About 3 or 4 days ago, I cut up 3 heads of Napa cabbage, and 5 heads of regular cabbage (both green and purple) to make some vegetable ferments. This is what they look like after the intervening time submerged in brine and sitting on our back deck nesting in straw inside a covered box. The weather has gotten down to sub-32F nearly every night and daytime temps have been in the 40's to a bit over 60. No sun hits the back deck, no matter what time of day. 

The Kimchi, made mostly for Miach's knight, Gunther, who had a Korean grandmother, was made like this: quarter and then slice into 2" pieces, sprinkled with salt as I layered it into a bowl, and set aside for a couple hours. I ground up about 10 to 12 dried chili peppers (California mildly spicy, sold in the Mexican spice section in a cellophane bag) and tasted them, and they weren't very spicy. I know Gunther likes spicy. So, I sprinkled VERY CAREFULLY some of the habenero powder that one of our other friends (Dregel and Bronwyn) grew and gave us. I tasted again, and it had a bite to it which wasn't bad. I pulverized in a food processor: 8 cloves of garlic, 3" of ginger, 1/2 yellow onion and about 20 small red radishes. I used regular radish, because I can't find Daikon radish this time of year anywhere. Really, you want this mixture to be mush, and it was. 

I added 2 or 3 tablespoons of rice flour to about a cup of water and cooked it over a low flame until it thickened, then scooped it into a bowl to cool. 

After it cooled, I mixed it with the spice mush and ground peppers, to form a red goo and I added about 1/4 cup of fish sauce. I was amazed to find fish sauce in a couple of stores, and I chose one that only had anchovies and salt as ingredients. I tasted it, too, and it didn't taste bad -- it tasted salty. 

Then, I sliced up another 20 or so radishes and three bunches of green onions including the tops and set that aside. 

I retrieved the cabbage, which had wilted and was very watery, and rinsed it off until it tasted nearly salt-free. (The hot pepper goo has salty fish sauce in it, remember...)

Then I mixed the cabbage with the veggies, and dumped the sauce on them and mixed that very well, and packed it tightly into a 2 gallon food-safe plastic bucket with a lid that snaps down. I weighted the mixture down with 2 gallon size ziplock bags filled with a mixture of water and 3 teaspoons of salt (in case they break or leak...) and I had to adjust the fill of the bags so that they would fit into the bucket and still allow the lid to be loosely snapped on top (to let gas out as the kimchi ferments..). 

Making the kimchi was fun, if a bit labor intensive. The kitchen smelled pretty good from the spice mix, and I know that can change as it ferments, which is probably why Koreans tend to do the fermenting outside. 

The Sauerkraut was downright simple compared to the Kimchi: shred cabbage in food processor using slicing side, and feeding 2 or 3 inch chunks into your access port. Add what seems like a good amount of caraway seed, and about 1/4 cup of dried juniper berries for my 5 heads of cabbage, toss that all together, sprinkle it with about 1/3 cup of salt but again: layer it and sprinkle, etc. Then punch the mixture, toss it, punch it HARD, toss it, and finally pack it down into another food safe plastic bucket tightly and again weigh it down with the ziplock bags covering the entire surface of the mixture, and loosely place the lid. I added about 1/4 cup of whey that I collected from a jar of yogurt that I had made and put in the back of my fridge quite some time ago. It had not spoiled, and still tasted like yogurt, and I'm not dead, so I think it was fine. The whey is supposed to kick-start your kraut, add in good bacteria and acidify it more quickly, which keeps it from spoiling. But really--from what I've researched, you don't need to worry about it spoiling if you keep it submerged in it's own brine and you skim any mold and floating veggies off and throw them away. 

You don't have to add anything but salt and cabbage to the kraut, if you don't want to or if you don't have it. We happen to have stuff from our brewing and cooking hobbies that are traditional ingredients! You can also add other vegetables to the kraut, so long as it is mostly cabbage - cause otherwise you have some other kind of fermented vegetable dish, and not kraut. Which might not be bad, just not kraut. 

Kimchi is different. I think recipes for kimchi approach religious belief, and they vary from season to season and family to family and region to region. You almost can't make it wrong -- but you are never going to make it "right", either, unless you hit on the exact recipe that the person eating it had in the past. It's like my grandmother's egg noodles that no one can duplicate, but the efforts are still tasty and still egg noodles. 

So, here we are with VERY young ferments, and following Sandor Katz's http://www.wildfermentation.com/ advice to taste, taste, taste until you get where you're going with a ferment, I carefully plucked some of each out this morning. Both of the containers smell "gassy" but not bad. There is no mold on the top of either, and the bags appear intact and are continuing to submerge the veggies. It rained and sleeted/hailed during the past few days, and there was some water on the lids because the box the containers were in couldn't be totally weather-proofed (I lined it with a large garbage bag, set it inside another large garbage bag, and put clean straw inside it for insulation before setting the buckets inside, and I covered it with a large plastic storage box lid that didn't fit tightly). There was a large amount of brine in both containers, all the way to just below the brims, but it appeared to be from the vegetables and not from outside. Both lids were still on, and covering the buckets completely, and all bags were still full, so I really think its just the juices of the vegetables being drawn out by the salt. 

The Kimchi smells onion/garlic-y and is in a light orange-red brine. The cabbage and green onion taste similarly and are still mostly crunchy. There is a notable ginger taste, and a very mild spicy bite and warming effect to the palate. No notable fish taste, and only mildly salty. As a person who has never actually tasted any kind of kimchi, I find it pleasant so far, but I suspect a Korean would find it very bland, so I'm thinking about adding a bit more habenero and fish sauce. I won't be able to mix them in, so hopefully they'll disperse through the brine on their own. 

The Kraut smells mildly of caraway, and is still both green and purple pieces in a light purple brine. It is mostly crunchy, with a light salty taste, not acidic at all at this point. 

Although I'm sure that a bit of fermentation is occurring in both, due to the cooler temps that they are being stored in, it isn't really evident yet. I may bottle the kimchi at some point and let it carbonate at room temp for a day or so, then put it back outside, but I think I'm going to give it another week at least. The reason for doing that would be that carbonated kimchi is considered by most to be a better dish, so I'd like to try. The kraut just needs to acidify, and slow fermentation is supposed to be best for it, so we're right on track. Both ferments can be eaten at a few days, or can be stored for months or even years at cool temps, although for kraut at least I've heard that it can eventually turn quite soft and unappetizing. 

Cooperative Creativity

We had a joint mini-meeting of the Cynaguan Brewer's Guild and the Herbalist's Guild at Investiture. Brewers need herbs.
And that got me to thinking: Cooks need herbs, too. And they need cheese.
We have all these guilds that do things, and we don't often do them together.
Mostly, I think, that's because guild membership ebbs and flows and people don't like to commit to things. But wouldn't it be really fantastic for the cooks to be able to put on their feasts using components made or grown by the other guilds?  I was really tickled to make a couple gorgonzola cheeses for Collegium this past fall; so much so that I set about making a couple basket cheese and a couple MORE gorgonzola, originally for the Perfectly Period Feast but since we're having our Emeritus Feast in our local Shire of Mountain's Gate the cheeses will be at our local Feast instead.
It's so easy to get pulled in several directions in the SCA. It's important to me to learn things, and to get better at them, but there are some things I just can't get excited about on a daily basis. Like making garb - not exciting to me. But attempting to make gruit ale, even when I fail, is immensely interesting. Cheesemaking is interesting. Fermenting food is interesting. Fostering cooperation and promoting fellowship is interesting. It is said that people born under my stars become Jacks-of-all-trades, but Masters of none. That has been true of me, mostly because I become bored and move on to something else. But the art and science of creating food and drink in cooperation with microflora is challenging and fascinating, so there's a possibility that I may have found a niche. If it is possible to promote the humans working cooperatively, too, that would make me feel very good.

It's really illuminating to return to the ol' blog and see that the last post I made, nearly 18 months ago, contains the exact same feelings on community as I was pondering today.
I need to keep better care of this blog. It's better for my mental health than Facebook and I've never been much of a Twitter(er), although I do enjoy the tweets of others.
So, here we are in January of 2013! My locavore diet has gone out, and back in, and back out since last I visited. I'm now on a waiting list for a gastric bypass, mostly because I would very much like to be around for a few years longer than I can otherwise expect at my current weight.
We now have an old horse and two wether goats. In further anxiety-provoking news, our elderly neighbor across the road cares for them while we go to events.
SCA-wise, we're kind of in a holding pattern. Miach is still fighting. I'm still Principality Chirurgeon. I've begun to think about my own relationship to the SCA vs. my relationship in tandem with Miach. Not because there is any trouble with Miach, but because I'd like to make my own place on my own merits. I've become enchanted with fermenting, and interested in pursuing this as a Period craft. Miach is now our Shire Seneschal, and our Shire is struggling. We lost our friend, Michael Pringle/Mike Johnson, a year ago. His wife, Miriam/Roz, moved to Caid. Geoffrey of Clan Fergus and Oian, and their wives, do not play any longer although Geoffrey speaks of taking it up again at times. Wylowen and Kaitlyn got married, and they still attend some events, but work and finances keep them busy. We had several new folk that came to the Shire during a period of divisiveness and ended up aligned to Chateau de Camville, the household of Sir Richard de Camville, and identify much more strongly with their household than with the Shire. (For which, by the way, I cannot blame them. The Shire floundered badly for the past 3 years, lacking Geoffrey's vision and Oian's steady all-inclusiveness.) With Roz moving to Caid, An Tellach Mor is down to just Miach and I. Morgan and Siobhann re-converted to Christianity, and more recently have expanded their Hold and concentrated on the Barbarian Freehold. They pulled out of An Tellach Mor, and the rest of the An Tellach Mor hearths formed Black Sheep Keep due to the schism. We have remained friendly with all, but ultimately An Tellach Mor is now gone, as An Triobhais Mor and Clannada na Gaedelica before it. At this point, the next household will be founded by us if and when Miach is knighted, and only then if he wins Coronet, and our vision of it is younger. Meanwhile, Gunther and Juliana rarely attend events any longer, and the Squires have varying levels of involvement. Titus moved to the East, and asked Gunther to take over his squires (Edmond and George), and I truly believe that the only reason Gunther and Juliana are still even minimally involved in the SCA is because Gunther feels an obligation to his own, and Titus', squires. Things would not be going any better had Miach become Sir Richard's squire, because Sir Richard and Alloria are now only doing Chataeu functions, which are pretty much private collegiums, and their mundane horse club. If Miach had picked Uther, things might be headed slightly up, but Uther and Kara don't attend events like they used to, either, and have been concentrating on the live steel game of Battle of Nations. So, we went from having some powerful allies to being on our own, more or less, in the space of the past 2 years.
I successfully made some good Gorgonzola cheese, and the Blackberry Mead that I was sure was going to be vinegar 'cause I left it on the lees for months and the airlock went dry a couple times, turned out pretty good. And it's the little things that keep our spirits up!