Most of my mom's (and also my) favorite recipes are from her grandmother, who I always called Grandmother Faith even though technically she was my great-grandmother. Unlike my mom and I, she never ate cheese. She wasn't allergic, but her reasons for not liking it were that her father didn't like it and that it smelled weird. Once, before I was born, my mom took her to lunch at Krystal's, a hamburger place. My mom decided to order Grandmother Faith's burger with cheese and not tell her. She never found out, but she said something like, "There must be something special about this Krystal burger because it's the best I've ever had!" It turns out she did like cheese after all, and she just never knew it.
One of our absolute favorite recipes is pasta with veggies. Some people may not like veggies, my brother included, but when my mom
and I get the chance, we love to make our veggie pasta. Basically all we do is
we cook spaghetti according to the instructions on the box, and at the same
time we cook some vegetables in a separate pan. We use zucchini, yellow squash, mushrooms, onions, and sometimes red pepper or asparagus if we have it.
When the pasta is done, we put it into the pan with the veggies
and put in some sauce. Sometimes we use Alfredo sauce, other times we make Grandmother Faith's Blonde Roux (white sauce). Take equal parts butter and flour-- melt the butter over medium heat in a
sauce pan, take the pan off the heat and slowly add the flour
sprinkling it in and stirring constantly, stir until it starts to get
thinner and more like liquid (that means it's cooked), put it back on
the heat and add milk. Whisk milk into mixture (about a cup for every
1tbs butter/1tbs flour). Keep whisking! The mixture will start to
bubble and let it do that for about a minute if the sauce is too thick
add a bit more milk. Add Salt and Pepper to taste.
Once the veggies are cooked (not too much or they will be
soggy-- it's nice if they have a little crunch in them), add the pasta
to the pan, and the sauce to the pan, and then grate lots of fresh
Parmesan cheese over the top. Delicious! It is really good with a
salad on the side.
If you want to make it in true Grandmother Faith style, leave off the cheese. After all, it smells funny!
It is one of my
favorite dishes to make with my mom, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Sausage Cheeseballs- Never Out of Season
I said I'd be posting about normal, everyday stuff instead of just my medical craziness, so here goes: I'll post a recipe.
This is a recipe that my family has enjoyed around the holidays for as long as I can remember, probably even longer. Even now that my parents are divorced and my dad is remarried, both my mom and my dad still enjoy them. I know it's July, not Christmas, but there's never a wrong time for Sausage Cheeseballs.
This is a recipe that my family has enjoyed around the holidays for as long as I can remember, probably even longer. Even now that my parents are divorced and my dad is remarried, both my mom and my dad still enjoy them. I know it's July, not Christmas, but there's never a wrong time for Sausage Cheeseballs.
Ingredients:
2 lbs (32
oz.) of uncooked sausage
1 ½ cups of
all-purpose baking/biscuit mix (Bisquick works well)
16 oz. of
sharp cheddar cheese (or 4 cups shredded)
Optional: ½ cup of finely chopped onion, ½ cup of finely
chopped celery, ½ teaspoon of garlic powder; for a firmer mixture, add an extra
3 cups of the baking mix and an extra two cups of shredded cheese.
Procedure: Preheat oven to 375°F.
Shred cheese and mix all used ingredients. Form the mixture into 1” balls. Bake
the balls 15 minutes on an ungreased cookie sheet until golden brown. This
recipe makes about 6 dozen sausage cheeseballs.
For a more summer-y snack (but again, there's never a wrong time for sausage cheeseballs), you could always make open-faced cucumber sandwiches. My stepmother and I actually made these for dinner tonight, and she wanted me to post the directions on my blog for you.
Serves 4
Ingredients:
1 cucumber, sliced thinly
4 pieces of bread
Cream Cheese
Lemon Pepper Seasoning
Cut the crusts off each slice of bread. Spread the cream cheese on the bread thinly (unless you want more- it doesn't matter how much you put), then evenly divide the cucumbers between the bread slices. Sprinkle lemon pepper seasoning on each slice on top of the cucumbers.
I hope you enjoy these recipes! If you try them, let me know how they turn out. I'll be posting more soon!
Until next time,
Semper Fidelis
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Mission-Stay-Cation
Medical stuff aside, I actually had an awesome week serving people around the area of my church with a group from our church on something called "Mission-Stay-Cation". What our church usually does, and what my mom, my brother, and I did last year, is they send a group of families and their kids on a short-term mission trip to Brunswick, GA. It's called "Mission-Cation" because in the mornings we do a service project, and in the afternoons we have free time to spend on the beach on St. Simon's Island, which is right next to Brunswick. This year, a lot of the families wanted to do Mission-Cation but didn't have the money to go. The church arranged a "Mission-Stay-Cation", where the service projects were in our area and in the afternoons the whole group would go and do something fun together, like bowling.
It was an awesome week of serving God and the people in our area who needed us! Like I said in an earlier post, I missed the first day because of what's been going on. However, I was able to participate in all the other projects! Today was probably the best day of the week because I was sharing the gospel to little kids using Frisbees that had John 3:16 (in Spanish or English) and coloring pictures on them.
Here's a link to my church if you want to know more: http://fellowshiproswell.org/
It was an awesome week of serving God and the people in our area who needed us! Like I said in an earlier post, I missed the first day because of what's been going on. However, I was able to participate in all the other projects! Today was probably the best day of the week because I was sharing the gospel to little kids using Frisbees that had John 3:16 (in Spanish or English) and coloring pictures on them.
Here's a link to my church if you want to know more: http://fellowshiproswell.org/
Until next time,
Semper Fidelis
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Still Waiting for Results, But Meanwhile...
Yesterday the neurologist told me to go to the emergency room to get some bloodwork to see if anything was wrong with my calcium or electrolyte levels or something like that. That came back OK, so we scheduled an EEG for next Monday to figure out what is going on. Your support and prayers would be greatly appreciated as I get through the rest of this mess.
I haven't had another "episode", which is great! I was actually able to go on the second day (I missed yesterday, the first day) of my church's "Mission-Stay-cation". In the morning, everyone in our group helped three different families with their yard work. In the afternoon, we took the families to a bowling alley and had lunch with them. It was a lot of fun to serve and socialize with them! It felt great to be out and doing things instead of staying home waiting for a call or being in the hospital.
This evening, my mom, my brother, and I went out to see Despicable Me 2. If you saw the first one and thought the Minions were hilarious, then you should definitely see this one too!
I want to thank everyone who has seen and shared my blog. It's doing so much better than I had hoped!
What are you doing for fun this summer? To phrase it another way, what are you doing to keep your head throughout the organized chaos until school starts back?
I haven't had another "episode", which is great! I was actually able to go on the second day (I missed yesterday, the first day) of my church's "Mission-Stay-cation". In the morning, everyone in our group helped three different families with their yard work. In the afternoon, we took the families to a bowling alley and had lunch with them. It was a lot of fun to serve and socialize with them! It felt great to be out and doing things instead of staying home waiting for a call or being in the hospital.
This evening, my mom, my brother, and I went out to see Despicable Me 2. If you saw the first one and thought the Minions were hilarious, then you should definitely see this one too!
I want to thank everyone who has seen and shared my blog. It's doing so much better than I had hoped!
What are you doing for fun this summer? To phrase it another way, what are you doing to keep your head throughout the organized chaos until school starts back?
Until next time,
Semper Fidelis
Monday, July 22, 2013
Neurological Messes and the Cats Who Snuggle Through Them
Last night I had some kind of neurological episode. I'm still not sure what it was (my mom and I are waiting for a call back from the neurologist), but I'll do my best do describe it.
It started out suddenly, but at first it seemed like one of my "normal" dizzy spells- basically my body's version of migraines. I thought it was the kind that would go away in a minute or so, but next thing I knew I could barely think. I've had a few dizzy spells like this, but usually what happens is I get my mom and we wait it out. The confusion part is usually over in a few seconds, and it just feels like spinning. This time, though, the confusion lasted longer. I tried to describe it to my mom, but it wasn't easy. Then, the scariest part happened. My legs and arms started twitching. It wasn't as violent as a seizure, but I couldn't make it stop. We almost went to the hospital, but we decided to wait 30 minutes and see if it calmed down. It did, not all the way but enough for me to go to bed. By this morning, I had stopped twitching completely.
You know how there are some dogs that can tell when someone's about to have a seizure? I think some cats are like that too. One of my three cats slept in my bed all night, which is completely unlike her personality. Not that she's mean, she's just usually aloof and on her own. She was so sweet last night!
I hope we can get some answers to this soon. I don't want it to happen at school. Honestly, I don't want it to happen again at all. Hopefully the neurologist will have some answers.
Have any of you had something like this happen? I have no experience with this except the migraine part. If you have, let me know in the comments.
Also, are there any other Mito teens out there who are just trying to have a normal summer when everything goes wrong at once? That seems to be the pattern with Mito, and it's really frustrating, but at least we have each other.
It started out suddenly, but at first it seemed like one of my "normal" dizzy spells- basically my body's version of migraines. I thought it was the kind that would go away in a minute or so, but next thing I knew I could barely think. I've had a few dizzy spells like this, but usually what happens is I get my mom and we wait it out. The confusion part is usually over in a few seconds, and it just feels like spinning. This time, though, the confusion lasted longer. I tried to describe it to my mom, but it wasn't easy. Then, the scariest part happened. My legs and arms started twitching. It wasn't as violent as a seizure, but I couldn't make it stop. We almost went to the hospital, but we decided to wait 30 minutes and see if it calmed down. It did, not all the way but enough for me to go to bed. By this morning, I had stopped twitching completely.
You know how there are some dogs that can tell when someone's about to have a seizure? I think some cats are like that too. One of my three cats slept in my bed all night, which is completely unlike her personality. Not that she's mean, she's just usually aloof and on her own. She was so sweet last night!
I hope we can get some answers to this soon. I don't want it to happen at school. Honestly, I don't want it to happen again at all. Hopefully the neurologist will have some answers.
Have any of you had something like this happen? I have no experience with this except the migraine part. If you have, let me know in the comments.
Also, are there any other Mito teens out there who are just trying to have a normal summer when everything goes wrong at once? That seems to be the pattern with Mito, and it's really frustrating, but at least we have each other.
Until next time,
Semper Fidelis
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Welcome to my Blog!
Hi! I'm Semper Fidelis, and this is my first post on my new blog, "Musings of a Chronically Unique Teen". I say "chronically" because I do have a chronic illness - called Mitochondrial Disease* - that affects my life in a big way. However, that isn't what this blog is about. This is about having fun and not letting anything stop you from accomplishing whatever you want to do with your life.
I believe that there's no such thing as normal. It simply doesn't exist. We all feel out of place because we mistakenly believe that everyone but them is the same. On this blog, I'm choosing to celebrate my chronic uniqueness. I hope you'll join me in celebrating being wonderfully different!
I believe that there's no such thing as normal. It simply doesn't exist. We all feel out of place because we mistakenly believe that everyone but them is the same. On this blog, I'm choosing to celebrate my chronic uniqueness. I hope you'll join me in celebrating being wonderfully different!
*Mitochondrial Disease (Mito for short) is a chronic neuromuscular disorder that affects the body's ability to produce energy. Since mitochondria are in every cell of the body, it causes a lot of different problems. Basically, it makes me get tired or sick more easily. However, I never let it stop me from doing anything!
If you want to know more, here are some links to some organizations that are researching treatments and cures for Mito:
-Semper Fidelis
(P.S.- in case you're wondering what my pen name means, here's a link to a good Latin dictionary:
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