Mushroom soup is controversial... it is right in the league of things like olives and raisins, those food items that one either- as they say- loves, or hates. All of the aforementioned foods fall into the former category for me, and I like to think it's because I have slightly gourmet tastebuds. I happen to worship the glory of the mushroom, in all its salty, flavourful richness, and always have. As someone who even enjoyed those cans of cream of mushroom soup as a kid, I admit my love for them is not fickle, but as I've learned to cook over the last several years I have gained new appreciation for the methods that best honour the flavour and texture of these beauteous gems from the world of fungi.
This recipe is something that does capture these qualities, in creamy, luxurious soup form. As I have craved little during this pregnancy other than lots of pure fruit juice and a good bowl of soup, I cannot help but give the recipe, titled "On Golden Pond Mushroom Soup", from La Dolce Vegan by the famous Sarah Kramer a respectful mention. Creamy, mushroomy, dill-y perfection. It definitely outshone the mashed potatoes I also made for dinner, and my baby now has the hiccups (whatever that may mean!). I am very excited that I have leftovers for tomorrow.
I am starting to need more sleep again. While my energy returned a bit after I began the second trimester, I now once again require a minimum of 9 hours sleep at night, sometimes more. I’m not really able to take naps during the day; they don’t seem to fit in anywhere. Perhaps the need for more sleep also comes from the fitfulness of the sleep I do get. My hips are extremely sore after a few hours of laying down, and I continually catch myself flipped onto my back. The placenta is at the back of my uterus, so it’s not the best thing for the baby’s weight (not that it’s much right now; just over a pound!) to be on top of it; that can slow the baby’s heartbeat. Plus I feel the weight, and it makes me uncomfortable too! The body pillow that Patrick’s parents gave me helps a lot and makes sleep way more comfortable. Once my belly gets bigger, too, it will be much harder to accidentally roll onto my back. One other thing about bed: it’s gotten way harder to sit up and get out of the bed! I currently sleep on the inside (next to the wall…our room is pretty small) but we will soon have to reverse this so I can get out of bed to go to the bathroom more easily.
The holidays are coming up, and while I don’t really have much time off work, I am for once looking forward with much ease to simply spending time with Patrick and my/ his family. Besides all the generous help with maternity clothes, my family is giving me the most wonderful gift this year, and that is no Christmas gifts between Patrick and I with anyone else. We have wanted to try this for a long time, and this seems to be the ideal year to start. Patrick and I currently have very little time apart from work to do anything but either cook dinner, do laundry, or watch the occasional movie. Patrick more so than me, as my energy level makes me call it quits on cleaning up more quickly. He works more hours than me in the first place, and has been incredible about doing dishes every single day, as my back gets sore so quickly and I simply can’t seem to muster the energy to do more than a few sink-fulls a week. So for the holidays, we are doing away with the stress of being out and about among the masses of consumers, and settling in, perhaps, to an actually clean and orderly home for some happy and quiet cooking, game playing, movie watching, reading and knitting time among our favourite people. My cousin will be visiting after a year away in Alberta, which makes things even more exciting. A wonderful holiday indeed!
I am about 115 pounds. I admit that sometimes, especially at work, I don’t take the time to snack quite as often as I should. Though I am within the perimeters of a healthy weight gain, I am still near the bottom end, so have been trying to up my calorie intake. So far today I’ve had oatmeal with dried fruit, hot chocolate made with organic soymilk, and two pieces of toast with peanut butter on one and nutritional yeast on the other. For lunch I plan to have leftover parsnip and celeriac soup, crackers and hummus, and for snacks a Larabar and a smoothie with blueberries, banana, fruit/veg juice and flax oil. I’m not sure how easy it will be to gain weight in the third trimester, as I’ve heard accounts of women both being more hungry and less hungry. Guess I’ll eat up while I can! Geez, I sound weird listing everything I’m eating! Pregnancy makes you do strange things.
I arranged for us to begin taking prenatal classes in January with Public Health. We start either on the 12th or the 31st. I really can’t believe how fast everything is moving. Have I really been pregnant for almost 6 months? This little one just doesn’t stop growing, and before I know it he’s going to be here and continuing his next stage of growth.
Last night we had a veggie stir-fry with mock chicken and cashews over brown rice with a lovely orange/ginger sauce. So delicious! The recipe for the sauce was from The Everything Vegan Pregnancy Book. I always eat a lot of stir-fry when I make it. Even though it's full of nutrition, it's so easily digested that I'm hungry again in a few hours. Oh well, I never mind having a snack.
Anyway, despite my generous sized helping, we had some cooked brown rice leftover (actually this was because I forgot that Patrick had made brown rice on Sunday and refrigerated it for use this week, and so I unknowingly made another pot, hence the leftovers) so this morning I threw it in a pot with some soymilk and let it cook for awhile, and then added some maple syrup and a pat or two of Earth Balance. It brought back memories of the rice pudding my mom usually makes at Christmas. But you totally don't have to wait for a holiday to enjoy this creamy dish as breakfast any time of the year.It's a nice change from oatmeal.
Rice Pudding
Cooked brown rice, enough for however many servings you want
Soymilk
Cinnamon
Maple Syrup
Vegan butter
Throw the rice in a pot and add enough soymilk to cover the rice completely. Cook on medium low heat and stay close to the stove, as you will need to stir it often to prevent a skin from forming on the top. Let cook for about 30-45 minutes, depending on how creamy you want it (or have time for). The rice will absorb all of the soymilk eventually, and you will want to keep adding more, a few tablespoons at a time, continuing to stir, till the milk is absorbed and the rice is as creamy as you desire. Serve it into bowls, add maple syrup, brown sugar if you like, cinnamon, and a dollop of vegan butter (I have to admit this is my favorite part!).
I forgot some weird symptoms in my last posts. Nothing terrible, but my hips hurt a lot, I wake up at night feeling very stiff and sore in my hip joints and often feel like they need to be stretched during the day. I suppose it's the weight of this kicking boy babe! Another odd one is nasal congestion. I have generally sneezed a lot more than usual throughout this pregnancy and often feel like I'm coming down with a cold, but never do. Once again, vegan power!
Approaching 19 weeks on Friday and all is well. Our prenatal appointments at my family doctor remain uneventful. Yesterday we had an appointment. The doppler lets us hear the heartbeat more reliably every time, and yesterday's attempt also showed that the baby is moving around a lot, as we kept losing the sound of its tiny heartbeat. It! I may only be able to call it "it" for another couple of days, as Monday we will very likely discover the sex! Although I'm excited to find out the news, I have grown to love feeling this little androgynous "it" in my belly and am very fond of its ambiguous identity. When it comes down to it, I have no particular feeling on which it is. When I try and think of names, girls' names come to mind the most easily. When I look at clothes, I am drawn to the boys' items. I can honestly say (and I wouldn't have predicted this- I used to strongly prefer the thought of having a girl) that although I have always gotten along well with little girls and have often dreamed of raising one, now that I have a baby in the works I am completely neutral in my desire for one or the other. The few dreams involving infants I've had so far usually didn't indicate which it was as I was still pregnant, and I've had one dream each of giving birth to a boy and a girl. In both dreams, I might add, I was unable to muster the brainpower to take care of either baby. Very bad dreams, and so I don't take either of them seriously.
Going back to the Dr.'s appointment, here are some stats, for anyone's comparison: The belly measurement she took was 17.5 cm this time, and was 14.25 or so last time (four weeks ago; 14 weeks). The heartbeat was 144, fluctuating from 156 last time. This makes my mother suspect it could be a girl, as it is said girls have faster heartbeats than boys. Who knows!? I am getting very excited indeed, especially to witness the babe in all its glorious activity on the screen.
Other than that, I have been eating quite well. I have not had as much time or energy to cook as I'd like though. Today on my day off I baked some Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies from Sarah Kramer's Vegan a Gogo. Not as healthy a dish as I could have made, but what the heck, they tasted fabulous. We've been going out to top up groceries really often, so we are eating good food. This morning Patrick brought me breakfast in bed with tea, fresh pineapple chunks and a "McMuffin" sandwich with vegan sausage patties and melted Daiya cheese. I have been making veggie fried rice lately, a mixture of onions, veggies, jasmine rice, sesame oil, olive oil, and Braggs in a frying pan, and sometimes some World's Best Meatless Chicken Breast thrown in. Delicious indeed. Hummus and pita chips got me out of a few desperate hunger pangs this week, bought at the farmer's market.
The one vegan pregnancy book we've invested in is "The Everything Vegan Pregnancy Book". While quite a bit of this information is stuff I've already come across before, either from reading on vegan nutrition or pregnancy, it is nice to have a resource that contains both in one. With info on how much of each important vitamin I should be getting and listing food sources for them, it definitely reassures me that my diet was fine to begin with, and with a bunch of recipes at the back it gives me some great new food ideas to punch it up.
While everything is going fabulously, there is one small issue we have started talking about. Since I have an RH negative blood type, I have been told I need to get a shot of RhoGAM, an Immune Globulin treatment that would prevent my bloodcells from creating antibodies against a future baby's potentially RH positive bloodcells (not this baby). I was told by my doctor that I will need to get a dose of it at 28 weeks, and then again after the birth. We began wondering yesterday about this drug and the possible side effects, and it turns out there is a lot of controversy surrounding RhoGAM and its possible side effects on the internet, and some RH- women opt to not get the shot during the pregnancy to protect the baby. This is what we are leaning toward, but we need to do more research before making a decision, which I will cover in the next post.
Until then, sleep tight and keep kicking, tiny one! You are now the length of a mango.
A dim, breezy world greeted me this morning as I opened the deck door to let the pup out for his business. As I sipped my hot chocolate and the orchard came into focus beneath an arrangement of dark and swirly clouds, I realized once again how magical 6:30 am is. Especially this time of year, when tree leaves get crispier and change their hues, and the wind cools down. It seems more likely than ever that faeries hide in the woods and everything breathes with renewed purpose. How fitting that it should be the first day of fall.
Keeping in theme with the harvest, the “plum” has grown rapidly in the last week, and should be 2 inches in length now, according to my research. I now like to think of it as a tiny peach or one of those big Brussels sprouts. The l'il peach knows how to swallow now, and it practises- it was my great amusement to learn just now- by swallowing the amniotic fluid. Good job, crazy little one!
How much energy it must be taking to form this little life! I find on my days off my fatigue catches up to me and slaps me in the behind, making me sleepier the more I relax. On work days I get caught up in the rush of things and notice the tiredness less, if that makes sense. Speaking of sleep, one weird symptom I’ve been experiencing lately is incredibly bizarre and vivid dreams.
As one needs to eat more calories at this point in the pregnancy, (the one and only secret to staving off any nausea, I have learned!) I have been trying to come up with breakfasts and snacks that don’t involve too much bread. It is so easy to just make toast or a sandwich when I need more food! But even though I take a prenatal multivitamin, it is important to me to avoid wheat overload and make sure I consume a wide variety of plant foods. Ideas that have worked great for me:
-Oatmeal with almond milk, maple syrup and cane sugar
The good thing about a lot of these, such as oatmeal, soups and salads is you can make them ahead and keep them in the fridge for multiple uses.
I shall now feature the recipe for the “Chickpea Melts” I made the other day. They are way more appetizing than perhaps they look (it’s a Blackberry photo). I am honestly quite addicted to this stuff.
1 15oz can Chickpeas, rinsed well
3-4 Tbs Vegenaise (vegan mayo)
2 tsp Fresh Lemon Juice
1 tsp Mustard
1 Tbs Nutritional Yeast
1/2 tsp Paprika (sweet, hot, or smoked)
1/2 tsp Salt
Fresh Cracked Black Pepper
Mash all the ingredients to form a chunky spread.
Spread the chickpea salad on slices of bread. Top with your favorite vegan cheese, and bake at 350º F for 10 minutes. Broil to finish, serve immediately.
