In which the Rodent discusses meal planning and its online profile.

Look for Supermouse The Rodent, migraine on Google and what you get is myLivejournal. There's no trace of this blog at all. To be honest, that's the way I prefer it. It's just a mild nuisance when I am on a borrowed computer and don't have my bookmarks to hand.
My Livejournal is more or less a report to my friends of everything I've been up to. This blog is a report to myself and possibly medics about how my migraines and ME and other health issues are affecting me. It's much duller, on the whole, but neither are exciting.

Today I want to talk about food, meal planning and how migraines affect what I eat.

On Tuesday I baked trout stuffed with a mixture of sweet potato (which should be precooked), lemon grass paste, ginger paste (very little, but enough) and spring onion. I was intending to cook mackerel, but in my un-drugged addledness accidentally clicked the (much more expensive) 'responsibly raised' trout from some Lord's lake.

It was very nice. It was also three times the price of the meal I'd intended to have.

Migraines make it hard to budget. It's harder to plan a journey properly, because I get confused about when things are, what date is 'now' and what day goes with which date. Even with a calendar in front of my, I can get puzzled. It also makes it hard to work out where to get buses, so I end up with taxis a lot of the time out of a need not to have to think too hard. And, as above, they complicate meal planning.

ME does similar but with extra problems on top. You have the difficulty of planning, and the additional joy of not knowing whether or not you're going to be able to cook the food you've bought. Fresh trout looks very pretty in the fridge, but what if you then are exhausted from putting the shopping away, and can't cook it before it goes off? I eat more fresh food now, just because I can usually rely on myself to be able to cook, for example, fresh meat before it goes green and smelly. I use less tinned milk and tinned fruit. I cook proper meals and then have the energy to freeze portions.

Just as being rich lets people save money that the poor can't (tax rebates, bulk buying, better quality therefore longer-lasting goods), being full of energy lets me save energy. I can cook a huge meal and freeze it later in the same day or the next morning. I've been able to clean up the kitchen right away, so I don't have to scrub off dried-off gunk before I start portioning things out. The kitchen is tidy, so I can find the pen and the freezer containers.

The payoff is that for a while after a cooking session, I can just throw in a home-made frozen meal, nuke it for five-and-a-half minutes and know I've got good food going. I can use the getting-food-ready energy on other things, which might make it even easier next time as I shop for new ingredients and plant food plants so I can pick my own. And, of course, I save money too, money I can spend on taxis.

If I could plan food out properly, I'd save even more. I think, once the Tramadol is properly back in my system, I'll be more able to. I don't think it's worth taking a break of more than three days, just because the migraines then take such a hold that I spend days drugged up but no better off thinking-wise.

Last night, newly back on painkillers, I was in terrible pain and so the planned painting session didn't happen, but I did get to socialise and the planning ability was there, in that I knew it was Wednesday and I knew that Wednesday, therefore this day, was art day. I'd even managed to buy a vinyl table cloth for art, and remember I'd bought it, and put it out before the evening began. I'm quite pleased with the level of joined-up-thinking this implies. I am just greedy and want to be able to apply it to meals.

Tonight's dinner is tinned soup and Matteson's U-shaped sausage. The delicious taste of planning failure.

In which the Rodent eats steamed buns and watches Reaper with friends.

Happy New Year for Friday, to those it affects.

I woke up and came downstairs as usual, but Pol came back from work just as I was waking up. I hadn't realised just how much I needed that first groggy hour of watching inane drivel on telly. As a result, I ended up on edge and snappy while he was trying to unwrap his new purchases.

Pol unpacked various things and when Rob, Angela and Claire came round, Rob helped him take it up. He gave me a box of good acrylic paints, shiny! Very shiny when some of them are Windsor and Newton. Big tubes, too. These will get used. Painting is very hard for me to do now, since my head has to be tilted forward and it takes a level of concentration and detailed vision in good light.

We talked about Chinese restaurants, about how irrational jealousy can make people very isolated, played Identify the Steamed Bun and flux and watched Reaper on E4 for buggy goodness.

Now I am tired and headachey and very, very happy. Being in pain didn't stop me having a good time. I do want drugs though, so I'll get some more after typing this up, making two doses of cocodamol for today. My pain level is at a nice, solid thumping 6, heading toward the 7 where I stop enjoying myself, and I want to be able to keep this sense of having had a good time. When it gets to 7, I literally can't enjoy anything, although I still function.

In which the Rodent enjoys artistic endeavours and Chinese food.

That was fun. Claire and Angela and Rob came round so we could do cards, which tomorrow I have to try to post. Tonight, they're drying. It was like being back at school, with a table full of bits to cut out, and people showing each other what they'd done, and paint getting everywhere. Claire did stars, Rob did a tree and a cracker, Angela did a penguin and I did a tree. They're all bright, cheerful and friendly.

The cards will be sent to Amnesty International, who will send them on to various prisoners in various places as a morale booster. I like the idea, and it's exactly the sort of thing I joined AI for. It tells political prisoners that, whatever else happens to them, they have not been forgotten by the world at large. I can get right behind that.

The Chinese restaurant sent us a new menu and one of the items on it, I discovered afterwards, is a platter of steamed buns, all different flavours. I am nuts for steamed buns, so I can't wait until next month's Chinese meal. I think it might well be Chinese New Year by then too, and I think the year of the Rat. I like Rat years.

Steamed buns are hard to make, which is a shame because their texture is fantastic - soft and not quite chewy. They're made from wheat flour, but what sort of wheat flour I don't know to turn out the bright, bleached white you get on restaurant steamed buns. The obvious ones are the steamed custard buns - since the pastry is doughy and sweet, this makes sense to the English palate. However, the pork buns, the char sui bao, are savoury pork in the same sweet, soft bun, and that seems very odd. I can't wait to try lotus bun, yam bun and peach bun.