New heights...

Yesterday evening and all of last night, I experience new heights of innards misery.  The writhing was nearly unbearable, pain even just from taking a breath.  I wondered how I was going to make it through nearly every moment.

Dysautonomia is a wretched, wretched, wretched disease.

Amos has been a real trooper, a faithful companion.  Today, he let me stay in bed until nearly 4:00 PM, trying to get some sleep after the agony subsided a bit.  This was rather generous of him because he was still working on forgiving me for combing out the mats in the curls on his ears.  All his frolicking about requires that from time to time, I get out the detangled and comb and ... torture him.

Last night, as the pain was starting, I set about harvesting some herbs to see if I could figure out the freezing of them.  Let's just note that the blanching was a miserable failure and go on from there.

I found several folk who swear by simply laying out rosemary, thyme, and sage on a tray to freeze individually and then store in freezer bags once frozen.  It seems sort of ... too easy.  Then, there are lots who advocate freezing them in water, but others who swear that's the worst thing you can do.  One man, who actually grazed on his basil in front of the camera, puts his leaves, whole, into a ziploc bag, drizzles olive oil in there, and then pushes out all the air.  He showed a package that was two years old ... bright green basil still.  My leaves, though, are tiny.

My neighbor gifted me with the Ball herb storage set, so I decided to try the minced cubes method.

One tray is all basil.  I am of two minds on how it looks.  So, I thought I would try to make a garlic basil alfredo sauce with it in a week or two to see how it turns out.  The other tray is three sets of the herbs I use in stew:  thyme, rosemary, and sage.  Can you tell which is which??  I put one cube of each into a snack bag and then am storing the snack bags inside a freezer quart bag.  I will be making stew this month, so I thought that I would use the cubes to see if they work.  I am more worried about trying them, as opposed to the basil, because the ingredients for stew are not economical.

Since I had a few extra sage leaves cut, I also tried the straight freezing method.  Hmm...  Sure does look okay to me.  But what do I know?  I thought I would also thaw this out later this month and try to use it.  If the straight freezing really does work, I might just do that.  It's less work, after all.  Basil, however, has to be preserved in some sort of substance.  I am planning, though, to try and bring one of the basil bushes indoors to grow in the solarium over the winter.  If that works ... I'd be happy to not bother trying to preserve much.  Plus, there is always the alternative of the Gourmet Garden's Basil Paste that I like ever so much.

Today, other than popping out the frozen cubes and putting them bags, all I did was to make another batch of the Blueberry Lime Oatmeal Muffins.  To me, they are the best muffin recipe yet. Just how helpful a puppy is Amos?  I went to rest on the couch whist the muffins were cooling and forgot that I had made them.  After a while, Amos started whining at me, leaping down from the couch and then back up and then down again.  I finally dragged myself off the couch, a bit perturbed because he had recently done both his major and minor business.  Well, Amos didn't want to go outside.  He wanted one of the muffins sitting on the cooling rack.  I gave Amos a small treat and then put the muffins in my freezer containers.

When I fetched my prescriptions yesterday, my neighbor went with me.  We also got my monthly groceries.  Yes, I came home with parsnips.  So, I am now vacillating between making the beer cheese rutabaga soup recipe and one I found for maple glazed roasted parsnips and carrots.  As it is, I do need to make some more Spicy Dr Pepper Pulled Pork for my tacos and some Myrtle's Medley Black Eyed Peas.  But not today.

Today, I've just been mostly resting and ... absorbing ... just how bad my innards were last night.