Food, Glorious Fasts (not about dogs this time)

Picture above from

 http://www.io.com/~beckerdo/minis/mini28/MedievalTavern

I’m interested in many things, not just dogs. For example, I was a vegan for about five years once, although of course at that time I didn’t own a dog.

There are many types of vegetarianism, and many reasons for it. People may be vegetarian for religious, nonreligious-but-ethical, health, or economic reasons. Dogs may be vegetarian because they love their humans and want to please them. Vegetarians might abstain from red meat, fish, eggs, milk, honey, spices, alcoholic beverages, or even certain vegetables. The Buddhist monks I once knew, for instance, abstain from garlic and onions, but use shiploads of leeks.

Below is a menu and recipes for a nice medieval Lenten supper. Don’t, don’t, don’t feed any leftovers to the dog, except maybe a small crust of the bread. Alcohol, onions, and raisins — so I’m guessing maybe currants too — are all poisonous to poochie.

A. The menu.

- Crusty whole-grain bread (preferably containing some barley flour)

- Cabbage chowder

- Ale (not lager, which is a summer drink)

- Wheatberry-sesame dessert

B. The recipes.

1. Bread. Pick up your favourite loaf on the way home from work. You won’t be buttering it (milk products were forbidden during Lent), you’ll be dunking it in your soup, so you want something hearty.

2. Cabbage Chowder. Wash and finely chop 1 large onion, 1 leek, 1 lb or so of cabbage.  Place in a big enough pot with 3 or 4 cups water, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp each coriander, cinnamon, & sugar, 1/8 tsp saffron. Cover and simmer about 20 or 30 minutes, until you like the degree of tenderness. Freeze the leftovers.

3. Ale. Ale is the proper brew for winter/late spring, but if you’re more the lager-lovin’ type you might try an India pale ale. Water’s fine, too — but it didn’t use to be, which is why it was usually served up in bactericidal, alcoholic form.

4. Wheatberry-sesame dessert. This one is delicious — and copious. Share the leftovers with your friends and neighbours. Cook and drain 2 cups wheatberries. Toast 1 cup sesame seeds. Grind up 3/4 cup nuts — I think mine was a mix of walnuts and slivered almonds. Dismantle 1 pomegranate for its seeds. Stir all these things together, along with 2 Tbsp currants, 1/2 cup sugar,  and anywhere from 1 to 3 tsp cinnamon.

The cabbage soup recipe is taken from Maggie Black’s The Medieval Cookbook (1992). The dessert recipe is from Ingeborg Ralph and Penny Stanway’s Christmas: A Cook’s Tour (1991). I’ve chosen a Christmas dessert for this menu because its ingredients are medieval and acceptable to Lenten observers and vegans. Also because, if you’ve just put up with cabbage and unbuttered bread, you deserve something colourful and tasty. Also because, except for the two hours or so needed to cook the wheat kernels, it’s really quick and easy to make, and of course you don’t want to take time away from playing outdoors with your dog.

But this post isn’t about dogs.

Paper Towels Ad Nauseam

A good 25 per cent or so of my reading public — i.e. Cody Bear’s mum – has asked me to write a little more about megaesophagus. Cody Bear suffers from gastroparesis, which shares similarities in definition and symptoms to megaesophagus. Today I’ll just post a quick compare-and-contrast of the two diseases. Tomorrow I’ll go for the human-interest stuff, on how poggles and I have lived with his condition. Someone out there in Blogland has been looking for information on whether megaesophagus can be outgrown. I’ll address our personal experience regarding that question tomorrow.

Caveat: the information here is strictly googlesearch; I’m no expert. I had never heard of megaesophagus before our vet diagnosed it, and never heard of gastroparesis until reading Cody Bear’s mum’s comment yesterday.

But anyway:

Similarities

Both gastroparesis and megaesophagus are a failure of peristalsis (smooth muscle contraction), resulting in food not moving properly through the digestive system.

Both gastroparesis and megaesophagus may be idiopathic (i.e. the cause is unknown), or they may be the result of an underlying disease.

Both g.p. and m.e. mean a lot of barf cleanup.

Both g.p. and m.e. can be diagnosed by barium x-ray.

Management for both g.p. and m.e. may include frequent small meals,  pureed or liquid diet, and in extreme cases, a feeding tube.

Differences

Gastroparesis is the lack of contractions of the stomach muscles, resulting in food remaining in the stomach too long. Megaesophagus is the lack of contractions of the esophagus, resulting in food remaining in the gullet. The esophagus stretches, and the food sits in it as though in a pouch.

Gastroparesis may be helped somewhat by medication. This is no picnic, since the meds produce side effects such as anxiety, depression, and (sigh!) vomiting. Megaesophagus cannot be helped by medication. Meds are available for the underlying disease that causes it, but there is nothing in the case of idiopathic canine megaesophagus.

Paper towels needed for g.p. are used to clean up vomit, meaning stomach contents. Paper towels needed for m.e. are used to clean up regurgitations, meaning food and water that never made it to the stomach in the first place.

The feeding tube in extreme cases will bypass the stomach of a g.p. patient. A patient with m.e. has a functional stomach, so a feeding tube would connect to it.

Okay, time for some ball playing before Mummy goes for more petstore training. Stay tuned for the human-interest segment tomorrow!

Merganser Morning

Last Sunday we went to the mouth of the river. For three hours we tramped around in the decaying snow, each of us using her or his favourite instrument: binoculars for me, camera for my partner, nose for our dog.

Later on, we each processed our experiences in our own way. I gushed to my watercolour teacher, a fellow birder, about having seen all three species of merganser in one morning. My partner uploaded some photos to her Flickr site. And our Cardi curled up in the papasan to dream rich dreams of dried grass, goose droppings, foxes, voles, and muskrats.

Cardigan may help alleviate symptoms of menopause

My brother and his wife live on a hundred acres of scrubland with four or five dogs. One night, my partner and I stayed over, sharing the pullout couch with a midsized Jack Russell cross. Since we were in fact sleeping in the doggie’s bed, she naturally stayed the night.

I didn’t toss and turn — there wasn’t enough room — but I did awake several times. Not once, however, did I have a hot flash. I found this lack of torment nothing short of miraculous, and attributed it to the serene snoring of our canine companion. I had heard that pets can lower blood pressure; maybe they can ease menopause symptoms as well, I reasoned.

Turns out my assumption was a false one, but the thought of getting a dog of our own was a graspable straw that took the fancy of both my partner and me. We discussed it with friends, researched the various breeds, and on Remembrance Day 2006 we drove out 60 miles to pick up our little Cardigan Welsh Corgi pup.

I still get hot flashes. They’re lovely things, filling me with self-loathing and shame, simply because their heat mimics the physiological symptoms that occurred in childhood whenever I was embarrassed or a parent scolded me. They will end someday, and I would rather have them than breast cancer (a possible side effect of HRT meds).

Meanwhile, my dog helps alleviate my feelings of shame and worthlessness. Dogs are much more childlike than cats. I fill my cat’s kibble dish twice a week, scoop the litterbox about as often, occasionally leave him for a long weekend, and he’s fine. But my little Cardi needs more of my help. He can’t use a litterbox, and he doesn’t sporadically nibble on kibble the way cats do, needing instead two prepared meals daily. My dog gets me outside of myself.

In fact, my dog gets me outside, at least three times a day: morning potty, and two half-hour-plus play sessions (my partner oversees the before-bedtime potty). This season has been the snowiest we’ve had in ten years; I never would have gotten all this daily exercise if I didn’t have my sturdy little Cardi. And I never would have been forced to live winter the way I have this year, studying the changes in the snow, and spying the local kestrels and the wintering red-tailed hawks soaring over the high-rises.

I also wouldn’t have met so many other people. It’s a real sanity saver for me, an introvert, to have made so many acquaintances. Just when I’m feeling blue, one neighbour or another is waving hello and tacitly affirming my right to share the planet. Dog parents are like any other parents, happy to meet and chat while their little ones play together. We compare notes, share a laugh, and delight in the special friendships that develop between our own dog and that of our neighbour.

Come to think of it, two of my dog’s favourite playmates are Jack Russells. Poetic justice?