the beginning, again

Tomorrow I will stop taking all thyroid supplementation and start the low Iodine diet (LID) in preparation for my radioactive Iodine treatment mid-September. You may remember a few months ago when I did all of this the first time. The good news is that my wonderful aunt has mailed me a new cookbook; the bad news is that my doctor has me on a more conservative LID than the cookbook outlines, which means the more tasty recipies are still off of limits.

Let the games begin!

Today I started making this nut mix. If you remember the last time I made a sweet nut mix... and I ate so much of it that the idea of it now turns my stomach. I'm hoping this version gets me through the next three weeks. Although I think the cayenne burned my eyes when it was in the oven.

I baked a loaf of bread, too. There was a bread machine involved, so don't think that I'm Nana's true culinary protegee. I'm just proud that there's bread I can eat on this diet.

Next I made some no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies, which I'm hoping will be better than the brownies I made the last lap through this diet. They were drier than I thought they'd be, and I ended up having to put some applesauce in the batter, too, because it was too dry for the oatmeal to stick. They didn't taste as good as I hoped they would, but when it's the only chocolate choice to be had, somehow you grin and bear it.

My last adventure in the kitchen was to make some mini meatloaves because they were the crowning glory to the diet last time, and they reheat well. It uses salt-free ketchup, and there's one place in town that carries it. We bought some when we went on our major grocery trip yesterday. I was getting my ingredients together before I actually started to mash up the beef, and then I realized that we did not buy salt-free ketchup. I went back to the store, but they don't carry the salt-free version anymore. Drama. I returned home to make my first batch of homemade ketchup, which turned out much better than I thought it would. After I finished the ketchup, the rest of the meatloaves fell into place.

I'll either have oatmeal or some kind of banana smoothie tomorrow for breakfast. Lunch is packed. Supper will take care of itself. And then we'll just have twenty more days to go.

Woo-hoo.