A Week In My Instant Pot, Fuzzy-Brained Post Ruptured Brain Aneurysm Life. ~ Monday

***Update***
It was originally my intention to blog my week. I had taken notes for a few days to turn into posts, but then I got news of the death of a dear friend and I was not in a fit state of mind to blog******
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In May 2016 I suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm, I survived and I'm alive which is its own special miracle. The way I see it, I'm living on bonus time and I intend to make the most of it!

Post rupture, my brain isn't what it used to be. I'm still smart, I'm still me... but I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels trying to remember what I'm doing, feeling confused and finding my place again. Things take me longer and I can't multi-task the way I used to.  I care for my adult autistic son who is in constant need of attention, so whatever I'm doing, I'm also answering his queries and comments. So that's already two tabs open in my brain at any given time - one tab more than I can really handle.

I thought I'd try to share a week in my kitchen life. Share the adaptations I've found for getting food on the table in my house.

Instant Pot - I'm not going to teach you to use an Instant Pot or which one to buy. There are tons of resources out there. I will share some of my favorites with you and I'll link recipes when possible. I have always liked to cook and I like to understand WHY things work and HOW they work. I've heard from a lot of people who used to hate to cook that the Instant Pot has changed their life.  It's changed mine too. I always liked to cook and now it's even easier.

Some resources

• https://thisoldgal.com recipes and how to's for Instant Pot and Air Fryer - she also has a facebook community
• https://www.hippressurecooking.com Laura Pazzaglia is a Pressure Cooking Expert. She has been an advisor and consultant to several Pressure cooking companies and has even helped develop some of the recipe books that come with them. Her website is a TROVE of pressure cooking info with tables for cook times, news about what's new in pressure cooking, recipes, and don't miss her YouTube series Pressure Cooking School.
• https://www.facebook.com/groups/InstantPotCommunity/ Instant Pot (brand) Facebook Community - be sure to read the participation rules and search the group to see if your question has already been answered (it probably has been discussed in detail and if you you'll have an instant answer). Here's how to search a Facebook group. See that magnifying glass icon at the top of the image with the F to the left of it. You search there to search ALL of Facebook to find groups or people.
  Once you belong to a Facebook Group (it only seems to work for groups) If you look down the left hand column you'll see the magnifying icon again and it says "search this group" that is where you can do a search to look for specific information within the group. This is the way it looks on a computer, if you are using a mobile device it will look different, but once you know to look for it, you can find the search in group field.

Monday

Sunday night I got home from a 2 week trip out-of-state. On Monday I needed to get the dishwasher emptied (load of dishes I ran before I left) and the sink of rinsed dirty silverware & dishes my husband used while I was gone into the dishwasher and running.  I had done a quick market run Sunday night and replenished a few staple perishables.  While I cleaned the kitchen I got a batch of hard-boiled eggs going for my son to eat as snacks during the week.

Hard Boiled Eggs in the Instant Pot
I began with this old gal's recipe for instant pot hard boiled eggs and I have adapted it a bit. You will see all kinds of directions for how to do this. I think it must have to do with your specific machine (electric pressure cooker) and the size of eggs you use.

I'll link to This Old Gal's recipe https://thisoldgal.com/pressure-cooker-easy-hard-boiled-eggs/ and tell you how I do it. But I don't have the brain capacity to trouble shoot a bunch of what if and how to questions. There are bloggers and Facebook groups that are much better equipped than I, to cover that. 

Pressure-cooked eggs peel so easily the day you cook them. When I hard boil eggs in my Instant Pot I place the trivet that came with the pot in the bottom. I fill the pot with 1.5 cups of water (the minimum amount my pot is supposed to need to come up to pressure according to the instructions that came with my pot). I have a steamer basket that came with a stove-top pressure cooker years ago and I place my eggs in that steamer basket and set it on the trivet (Amazon is full of options for steamer baskets and egg racks and This Old Gal even has links to ones that she particularly likes).  I place 10 large eggs in the basket. Seal the lid and close the steam valve. I set my pot for manual setting - I verify that it is set to High Pressure and set the time to 3 minutes (that's how long the eggs will cook once the pot comes to pressure and the pressure indicator pops up. When the cook time is complete the pot will beep and turn itself off. I a set a timer for an additional 7 minutes to allow the eggs to continue cooking as the pot cools down. After 7 minutes I release the pressure. I remove the eggs from the pot with tongs rap them each once on the counter to break the shell and plunge them into a bath of ice and water to stop the cooking.  There they sit until they are cool enough to peel usually 30 minutes or more. If I notice all the ice has melted, I add more ice.

When the eggs or cool, or I get to the stage of cleaning my kitchen where I have freshly scrubbed my sink, I peel the eggs under running water. I store the peeled eggs in a mason jar with water to cover the eggs in my refrigerator.  The sulphur from the eggs will continue to leach into the water, you can change to fresh water after a day or two if you like.


Meanwhile I started to unpack, saved a baby bird from my puppy out in the yard. Locked the dog inside so the baby bird could recover, tried to build a ladder out of chicken wire so the baby bird could return to the tree. Filled my son's pill container with his vitamins and medications for the week. I Continued to take the dog out on a leash all day so she wouldn't eat the baby bird. I also unboxed a printer that I ordered for my craft room back in February (I had been waiting until after the new window installation to set it up). I got the printer onto the cart, installed all the ink and began the initial set-up while dinner cooked.  I'm sure there were other things, but that's what I remember.

Here is what I made for dinner.
I cooked a pot of basmati rice on the stovetop (I probably could have done it in my instant pot while the chicken cooked, but I forgot). I made Butter Chicken out of a cookbook. I used chicken thighs and I ended up blending it in my blender because I have the 8 quart instant pot and the sauce wasn't deep enough in the pot so my stick blender was splattering everywhere. I used butter and whipping cream because I had purchased them to use in the recipe but next time I will try using the suggested alternatives of coconut oil and canned coconut milk as these are both things I have in my pantry.
https://twosleevers.com/instant-pot-butter-chicken/
Dinner took much longer to make because I had to search my whole spice cupboard for all the spices. When I got ready to cook, I realized that I had been looking at the wrong recipe. My ingredient list was much shorter, but somehow this detour took me about 45 minutes because my brain was in a  confused state. As a result it was quarter to 8 when we sat down to eat dinner, but everyone agreed this recipe is a keeper.

The recipe is in this cookbook, which I accidentally bought for Kindle (usually I buy physical copies of cookbooks) but when I realized my error I decided to try it on Kindle (and my Ipad) and see how I like it.

https://smile.amazon.com/Indian-Instant-Pot-Cookbook-Traditional/dp/1939754542/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1533650952&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=indian+instant+pot+cookbook+by+urvashi+pitre&psc=1

Not every selfie is about ego, sometimes they're about something else entirely

Before I talk about this page, I need to bring you up to speed.

I had a brain aneurysm rupture on May 17, 2016 (4 months ago).
I had 3 brain surgeries, I was in the hospital ICU for 2 weeks. Even once I came home it's been a long recovery, a road that I am still traveling. I am only beginning to feel like things are getting close to normal. My doctor told me it will probably take a year for me to get back to where I was, before.

My head was shaved for the surgeries. As my hair began to grow back I was faced with a new challenge, what would my look be? Even if I grow my hair back out, it will take probably a year to get it long like it was before. I have always found that I don't "feel like me" if I trim my hair even an inch or two shorter than a certain length. I knew I couldn't spend a year not feeling like me, so it was time to re-define who I am. I decided to take control of the situation, and to make it fun.  It's been exciting. I've moved my boundaries, I'm re-writing myself.  The reason I share this here, is that I look very different now than I did in the photos on this page. I anticipate that someday soon I will be making another page with the selfies I've been taking of how I look now in my recovery. I am so glad I came to peace with self-photos years ago, I think it has made it much easier to accept and even celebrate how I look, now.

The photos are from 9 days after the aneurysm, 10th day after aneurysm which was also the day after the final surgery, and 4 months after the aneurysm.


This is another of my favorite pages, it's about one of my soapbox subjects... mothers who don't appear in any of their family photos. This is a page from last year's October Layout A Day we had a pirate theme.  The prompt was to make a page about something that you do that others think is annoying and explain why it's not. I thought to myself "Well I'll never do THAT one."  And then IMMEDIATELY I thought "Here is my chance to talk about Selfies!" I find that LOAD is like that. Sometimes the prompts that you don't like at first, end up making the best pages!


Pirate LOAD 2015
Day 13 Parrot - Tell us something that you think others find annoying about you and why they are wrong.

I adapted the journaling on this page from a Facebook post I had written on May 31, 2015 in response to an article which denounced the selfie as everything that is wrong with the world. I often turn social media posts or blog posts into journaling for scrapbook pages. I struggle with writer's block when I sit down to write for a scrapbook page, I have less difficulty writing for other forums so I pull from those.

Not Narcissistic
Not every selfie is about ego.
Sometimes they're about something else entirely.

Although I am a scrapbooker I was absent from the family albums I created. As the family photographer I spent most of my time behind the camera instead of in front of it. When I did end up in a photo, I often felt so bad about how I looked that I deleted it.

I began taking selfies as a conscious effort to leave images of me behind for my child to cherish and remember me by, the way I cherish photos of my mother. In the beginning it was a HUGE struggle not to delete them all. It was an exercise in self acceptance. I was teaching MYSELF to love things about how I look. It was not easy.

It took about 2 years of taking selfies for my family to to get in the picture with me. We live across the country from our families of origin, for all three of us to be in a photo together required a tripod or a benevolent stranger. Now not only do I have images of myself to include when I tell my family’s stories, I have pictures of the 3 of us together, laughing, being silly, living our lives.

No, I don’t always look the way I do on Instagram and we have plenty of moments I wouldn’t share on Facebook. But the photos I share are moments I want celebrate. What I post isn't about who wants to see it. It’s the record I’m keeping of my life, memories I want to hold on to.

Digital elements are from Limitless by Amber Shaw for Sweet Shoppe Designs part of The Digi Files from The Daily Digi (Oct 2014?)
PSD template Everyday Template 1 by Cindy Schneider for Sweet Shoppe Designs part of The Daily Digi Everyday Life Collection which is a membership bonus kit.
Page created in Photoshop Elements 12