Reality Hide & Seek

Beautiful Buns

Now pull your heads out of the gutter, I'm talking about hamburger buns. The same weekend that I made my new bread I also made hamburger buns for our dinner with Greg's son and his fiancee. These were some beautiful buns (of course I forgot to take a picture) and were so easy to make. One of them came out in a triangular shape, so I just told Greg to make one triangular hamburger.

Hamburger Buns

1¼ C milk, slightly warmed
1 egg, beaten
2 T butter
¼ C sugar
¾ tsp salt
3¾ C bread flour
1¼ tsp yeast
sesame seeds for topping

Either use a bread machine with the dough setting or prepare dough by hand as usual.
Cut dough into 12 pieces and roll into balls with your hands, flattening to about 1" thick, be sure to place far enough apart on the cookie sheet so that they don't rise to the point of smashing into each other.
Let rise for about an hour or until doubled in size.
Before baking, brush with egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds.
Bake for 10-15 minutes at 350˚F.

Adapted from a recipe from www.RecipeZarr.com

Yeast gone bad

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Bread Bliss

Over the past 12 years baking bread has been both a bane and a blessing to my mental health. Unfortunately I'm a perfectionist, and when my breads aren't perfect I take it as an absolute failure on my part. I've been getting better about those feelings because whenever I start to get angry with myself, my beloved says "I'm going to eat it, not hang it on the wall." When the bread comes out to my standards of perfection, my self-esteem soars (fortunately that's more often than not).

Because some of my recipes are ones I've developed myself, my daughter suggested that I start a bread blog, but since it is somewhat related to my mental health I've decided to include posts about bread in this blog. Besides, two blogs would be too confusing for me.

I bake bread every weekend. Sometimes just one loaf, sometimes up to four, depending on who wants/needs bread. This week I baked both a recipe I developed and hamburger buns. I'll talk about the one I developed today, and leave the hamburger buns for another day.

I love breads with substance, so this weekend the recipe that I developed is 10-Grain with Toasted Sunflower and Flax Seeds. I didn't take a picture because I didn't think about blogging it at the time, but I'll try to remember to do that in the future. I baked this one in a bread pan instead of shaping, and brushed with an egg wash. I really like the finished look with this technique.

10-Grain with Toasted Sunflower and Flax Seeds

1 C buttermilk
½ C water
2 T butter, softened
2 T honey
⅔ C 10-grain cereal
1 tsp vital wheat gluten
1 tsp salt
2½ C bread flour
1¼ C wheat flour
2 tsp yeast
¼ C sunflower seeds, toasted
¼ C flax seeds, toasted

I use a bread machine for the initial mixing and kneading (my wrists don't work as well as they used to), then I shape the loaf and add the finishing touches. If you are a traditional bread baker, you know what to do. If you'd like to learn there are plenty of websites that can help you.

Bake at 350˚ for about 40 minutes.

"Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven." Yiddish proverb

Nothing to rival harhoo and spinge

One of my oddities is that I love to collect the strange words that come up as word verifications for blog comments and other needs. My favorites so far have been harhoo and spinge, noted in two previous blog posts. There are none in this batch to rival them, but these are still fun nonetheless.

comed
horpint
erwing
beappan
phonsl
trailyc
mations
masist
jupess
sceapken
coessess
simme
bantled
inessess
ulparf
cotak
bantica
imednep

Silliness is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again. ~Mike Myers

Artwork Credit: Flowers With Ladybugs Originally uploaded by SheriW1223

The Waiting Game

Wellbutrin was thrown into my med cocktail a couple weeks ago, and Paxil was drained out. With Paxil I was sleeping all day with no problem sleeping at night. Wellbutrin keeps me awake all day and most of the night, making it impossible to hide from my depression under the covers. The next step is that hopefully the Wellbutrin's antidepressant effects will kick in.

Psych meds are a waiting game. It can take about 4-6 weeks for a drug to take effect, and this can be a problem to many people. After all the years with messing with my cocktail, I have learned how to deal with these problems, although it doesn't make it much easier. In addition to delay of effectiveness, some drugs can act as an antidepressant (or mania inducing) medication at a low dose then anti-mania at a higher dose and vice versa. One option to waiting out the gradual increase in dosage is to go through a med change in a hospital, which is a much safer environment. In the hospital, side effects caused by fast increases can be carefully monitored.

Until the drug companies can come up with a psych med that one doesn't have to wait for effectiveness to kick in, I will continue to play the waiting game...hopefully with success.

Some bipolar drugs will soon become generic

This is a blog post that was on the site Noli Irritare Leones

Bipolar drug market “to plummet from 2011”

The market will be constrained over the next several years by the patent expiries and subsequent generic erosion of a number of key antipsychotic agents including AstraZeneca’s Seroquel (quetiapine fumarate), Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa (olanzapine), Bristol-Myers Squibb/Otsuka’s Abilify (aripiprazole) and Pfizer’s Geodon (ziprasidone), according to the study, from Decision Resources….
Moreover, patent expiries of branded antidepressants that include Wyeth’s – now Pfizer’s – Effexor XR (venlafaxine), Eli Lilly’s Cymbalta/Xeristar (duloxetine) and Forest/Lundbeck’s Lexapro/Cipralex (escitalopram) will further constrain the market, according to the report….

These patent expirations happen at various times between 2011 and 2018.

Here We Go Again

Image by ashley rose, via Flickr

My psych added Paxil last month, but that had horrendous side effects. This month we're trying Wellbutrin SR. I had success with that medication over a year ago but it's effectiveness wore off. Now we're giving it another try. The depression half of my bipolar disorder has become treatment resistant over the last year, and it's been very frustrating. Knowing Wellbutrin worked before gives me hope that perhaps this time it will work again. I just wish that its effectiveness didn't wear off, but then I understand that happens with quite a few psych meds.

Hibernation

hibernate: three
Originally uploaded by leslie sophia lindell

The bed beckons me
"Hide here, it's safe"
Dreamless sleep awaits
"Hide here, it's safe"
But if I hide from depression,
it will never go away.
If I hide from depression,
I lose precious days.
Yet I am bound to my bed
By the bonds of depression.
Even though I know it's a vicious cycle.
"Sleep your life away, it's safe."

They're Only Trying to Help...

....or Anthropomorphizing My Cats.

I'm laying in bed, achy and miserable from a cold. The cats are doing their best to make me feel better. They snuggle their hot little bodies next to my feverish one, but I don't want to make them move because I know they have no idea they're increasing my body temperature exponentially. They just want me to know I'm loved.

They climb on top of me, kneading my aching muscles, but I don't want them to stop because I know they're just trying to help and have no idea they're making the achiness even worse. They just want me to know I'm loved.

Zoe is chattering away, and I imagine that she's telling me I'll feel better soon. Her meowing is not helping my headache, but I can't tell her to stop because she just wants me to know I'm loved.

I know that if these two loving kitties could, they would go downstairs and make some chicken soup for me. Then they would bring it upstairs and spill it all over me while jumping up onto the bed. But I don't want to tell them not to, because they just want me to know I'm loved.