Cooking Meals

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Here it is the miracle product:

red copper

This is the Red Copper frying pan you can get in Rite Aid for $20 or so.

It’s easy to clean–you can’t use S.O.S. or Brillo–not a wool pad. Use dish detergent that you scrub with a scrubber sponge and then rinse off.

I had no idea the ubiquitous status of this humble frying pan.

Until I saw the woman who was the spokesperson for Red Copper hawking one of the baking pans for $59 on TV.

Everything cooks quickly in the pan featured in my photo. Eggs especially so you have to watch over them while they’re cooking.

If I remember right this Red Copper pan doesn’t use chemicals to make it non-stick. You can find non-stick frying pans that don’t have chemicals.

I would like to return here on the weekend with a seasonal recipe that I delight in cooking from June through September.

It features zucchini–my favorite vegetable.

I think Greenmarket season is a magical time of year for buying a bounty of fresh, local, and organic produce that you can cook with.

It’s true: the food you eat can boost your mood.

 

 

 

Budgeting for Food

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People who hang out shingles as personal finance experts will tell you to allot only certain strict percentages to categories of spending like utilities and food and entertainment.

I say: that’s bull crap. You can absolutely spend more in one category as long as you cut down and reduce or halt spending in the categories that don’t matter to you.

Case in point: though I’m a single person I spend a ton of money on food each month. My contention is: it’s better to exercise and eat right even if that costs a lot–than to wind up in ill health and have to pay a hospital bill.

Now that the Greenmarket season is here I’m going to reiterate like I do every year: in New York City you can use food stamps to buy produce at Greenmarkets.

This is a great thing. Other people might judge a person who uses food stamps to buy expensive food. That’s not right. Poor people deserve to eat healthful food. Poor people deserve to be healthy too.

Wherever you live you might have an online grocer like PeaPod that delivers food. In New York City FreshDirect delivers food and household items.

This beats walking or driving to a food market, wheeling a shopping cart around, and standing in a long line. Plus you’ll use up a lot of gasoline making weekly trips to a food market.

I’m all for curbing or ending our reliance on foreign or other oil supplies.

In the next blog entry I’ll write about a miracle product that you can use to cook food with.

Say Yes to Mental Health

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I’ve taken this blog entry from my Left of the Dial blog. I’ve posted it in both places.

The Republicans are set to vote into law today the gutting of mental health services enacted under the Affordable Care Act while President Obama was in office.

The Republicans are set to roll back progress by eliminating mental health treatment and charging higher premiums for fewer kinds of mental health service.

The Republicans are set to deny mental health constituents coverage for addiction treatment.

It will become illegal to have an abortion. Yet when your fetus turns 18 and develops schizophrenia or another mental illness or a drug addiction there will now be no treatment available for them. Write your elected officials and thank them for this.

Makes sense right? Makes sense to have voted into power the people who are voting today to eliminate funding for mental health services for the very people who need it.

Cue the sarcasm. Is there an emoji for sarcasm? You know where I stand.

If you live in New York State here are the telephone numbers of the elected officials you can call to tell them to vote NO for the MacArthur Amendment that denies citizens treatment for mental health.

Rep. Lee Zeldin Long Island 202-225-3826
Rep. Peter King Long Island 202-225-7896
Rep. Dan Donovan Staten Island 202-225-3371
Rep. John Faso Upper Hudson Vally 202-225-5614
Rep. Elise Stefanik North Country 202-225-4611
Rep. Claudia Tenney Binghamton 202-225-3665
Rep. Tom Reed Finger Lakes Region 202-225-3161
Rep. John Katko Syracuse 202-225-3701
Rep. Chris Collins Western NY 202-225-5265
Tell your congressperson that:
  • The American Health Care Act would leave millions of Americans without mental health coverage and strip Medicaid funding.
  • The recently-introduced “MacArthur Amendment” would let states get waivers allowing health insurance plans to not cover mental health and substance use treatment and charge people with mental illness more.
  • It’s outrageous to even suggest that mental health coverage is optional and to charge people more because they have a mental health condition.
  • Medicaid coverage is also under threat. It covers important mental health services that help people with mental illness get better and stay better.
  • Please tell Representative_______ to keep what works for mental health and REJECT the American Health Care Act and the MacArthur Amendment. Thank you.

I telephoned my guy in Washington. The line was busy. I’ll call again to try to get through.

I’m posting this same blog entry in the Left of the Dial blog.

Smiling Depression

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Before I go into things from my other books I want to take a detour into talking about a feature article in Women’s Health magazine. Every year the May issue focuses on Mental Health.

There’s a thing: smiling depression. In the May issue you can read about how this silent suffering affects women.

I could relate to having a persona that masks what’s really going on. In here before I wrote about squelching your personality to fit in–and how that can damage your soul.

The Peer Support guideline is: “We judge no one’s pain as any less than our own.”

Yet the women in the May issue were told in essence to buck up–that they had done great things so shouldn’t be depressed.

One woman’s friend told her: “You’ll feel better if you pray.” Yet prayer doesn’t cure a person’s mental health issue. The woman’s Pastor had the good sense to tell her to see a therapist.

That’s the toll it takes on a lot of us to live in hiding. Our therapists are complicit in telling us not to disclose at our jobs. Good advice. Yet that’s precisely why we need to find our own tribe of kindred spirits to talk to about what’s going on.

Smiling depression is a thing. It deserves our attention. Those of us who have smiling depression deserve our compassion.

Go subscribe to Women’s Health if you want to–it’s a great magazine and I read it every month. I like Self too–yet I think Women’s Health is even better.

Reclaiming Ourselves in Recovery

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Keep on taking action in the direction of your dreams. A goal is a dream with a deadline according to a fortune cookie message I cracked open.

I’ll be 52 soon. I can tell you that the future can be better. There’s no crystal ball to peer into to predict what will happen of course. Yet it makes sense to have hope.

Each of us is capable of having our own version of a full and robust life.

As I get older I remember the city of my youth that has been long gone. You’re only young once. Yet it’s possible to have a youthful outlook your whole life.

I want to publish three other non-fiction books in addition to this second one I’m writing now. What I want to write in here in the blog now is about some of the topics of these other books that await wings.

Reclaiming ourselves in recovery is possible.

I will always maintain that I succeeded despite my time in the CMHS–Community Mental Health System–not because of it. Today we have more and better options and we can create our own options too.

The goal as I see it is to be happy and take joy in living. Sometimes  you need to have a Plan B when what you wanted to do isn’t working out. It takes guts to give up one thing and start to do something else.

Yet the older I get in my life I see the beauty in focusing on the elemental: having a core set of values that determine what you prioritize as being meaningful work you want to do now.

Get rid of the extraneous things and the negative people that weigh you down. Do only what suits you. My motto is: be bold. Be innovative.

To that end I have created another idea about goal-setting that I’m testing out now to see if I want to include it in a book.

In the coming blog entries I’m going to talk about some of the things I’ve written in the next three books.

 

Nutrition Action

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I want to talk about food and nutrition again. We’re coming up on Greenmarket season in New York City. Here you can use food stamps at a Greenmarket and there’s even an incentive for doing so. I think you should if you get food stamps buy fresh produce at a Greenmarket this time of year. Or year-round if a market is available in the winter.

The pasta is fresh angel hair pasta. The mussels are Newfoundland rope organic mussels. I order from an internet grocery that delivers. I had splurged for Mario Batali tomato sauce yet won’t do that again–it cost a ton of money for one jar.

I sloshed the mussels in red wine. You can fill a large saucepan with just enough water and place the mussels in the water. The water shouldn’t be so high that it goes into the shells. Steam the mussels for 25 minutes or so. Pour the wine over the mussels halfway through.

One time I was eating mussels in a restaurant. As you might know I’m Italian. So I’m eating the mussels and the woman at the table next to me tells the young girl with her: “Italians love their mussels.”

I was astonished. There I was Italian and I’m eating mussels.

The table decor is the spring tablecloth and vase and candlesticks. I firmly believe in changing your table decor at the start of every season. It can give a lift to your spirits.

I eat mussels. I have muscle. I doubt the two are connected. Yet enjoying good food  can improve your mental health too.

 

15-Year Advocate Anniversary

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This year I’ve been a mental health advocate for 15 years.

In this time it feels like I’ve been preaching mostly to the choir.

I’ve been attacked when I claim that most people can recover.

This fall I’ll have been in recovery for 30 years. In the summer I’ll have been in remission–that is symptom-free–for 25 years.

I’ll be 52 in two weeks. I’ve taken some kind of pills for these 30 years. Today I take Geodon which has been a miracle drug. Before that I took Stelazine for the first 20 years. Neither drug caused weight gain.

I credit that fact that I recovered to my mother’s one courageous act to drive me to the hospital within 24 hours of my break. Luckily, I was admitted and given medication. Three weeks later when I was released the symptoms were gone.

In the time I’ve been an advocate since 2002 there has been some progress–thought most of us would think the progress has been limited.

Wherever I go when I give a talk it’s an honor and a privilege to connect with peers and family members who share common struggles.

I’ve been in the vanguard in terms of what I’ve written and spoken about recovery. No one else has quite yet reiterated what I’ve championed.

I credit having made fitness my number-one priority as having made all the difference in the last six years of my life.

On the cusp of 52 I believe fitness must rightly encompass body, mind, spirit, finances, relationships, and some kind of career–even if it’s just working on your recovery and not a paid job.

For years now I’ve hailed the work of the cheerful cashiers in Rite Aid. Unlike most people, I don’t care about status and I don’t think we should judge a person by whether they’ve achieved traditional markers of success.

Not everyone can and should aspire to become a J.D. or a famous writer. The peer support guideline tells us: “We expect a better tomorrow in a realistic way.”

I’ve learned in the last 15 years from some kinds of failure that expecting a better tomorrow in a realistic way is indeed the way to go.

Lynn Tesoro is quoted at the end of the Bobbi Brown book Living Beauty. I’ll end here with what she said. Tesoro doesn’t waste time focusing on what’s not achievable.

That wisdom if you ask me is the secret to success in recovery as well as life.

It’s far better to focus on what you can do and be and have.

Choosing Goals

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It’s clear to me that you and I won’t succeed if we succumb to thinking we have to do what other people tell us is the only right thing to do.

It’s 2017 and we have more and better options for living in recovery.

You’re only going to make yourself miserable and have ill health pretending to be someone you’re not just so you can please other people.

We should not be puppets–either of our government or of anyone else who attempts to pull the strings to get us to conform to a so-called norm.

We will only succeed if we are invested in the goals we set and have the starring role in deciding what we want to do with our lives.

When a person says another person has a ton of self-determination that really means that this individual had the courage to go after getting what they wanted without being deterred by whatever obstacle they faced.

Self-determination sounds like a fancy word however as I define it it’s simply the right of everyone living on earth to determine how they want to live their life and the direction they want to go in in their life.

No other person should be telling us what to do without soliciting our feedback on this course of action. Any treatment plan needs to be created with our input.

Choosing our goals should be up to us first of all. Yet really we shouldn’t set the bar so high that we can only fail. The dilemma is that historically for people diagnosed with mental health conditions the bar wasn’t set at all. We weren’t expected to be able to do much of anything.

2017 is here. It’s time to challenge this status quo. It’s time to speak out on the things that matter to us.

I say: engaging in goal-seeking behavior can make all the difference in a person’s recovery.

Choose your goals with care and attention. Choose goals that make sense to you.

Discarding Goals

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I firmly believe that everyone living on earth has the potential to do some kind of work.

For one person this might simply be doing volunteer work or working on their recovery. For another person yes this could be getting a JD.

We are not to frown on those of us who are less fortunate than we are in this regard.

In two months I’ll be 52 years old–and the older I get it’s become imperative to prioritize what I want to do. You too will turn 52 hopefully at some point if you haven’t gotten here now. Prioritizing goals at mid life is the way to go.

In keeping with setting priorities each of us should know that it’s okay to discard a goal or goals that don’t have the chance to be achieved.

At 52 life is getting shorter thus the requirement of choosing wisely what we focus on.

At 52 I’ve discarded a number of goals that used to burn brightly in my mind as things I really really wanted to do in my fifties.

You like I did will plan at 40 what you want to do in the future. Yet the view is different 12 years later at 52. Thus the beauty of discarding goals that weren’t meant to be.

This doesn’t mean you’ve failed just because you’ve quit wanting to do something. You can only fail at something you’ve actually done that didn’t turn out right. You can’t have failed if what you wanted to do you didn’t try to do to begin with.

Bingo–that’s the difference in succeeding at goal-setting–especially at mid life. When we give up focusing on one thing we can replace it with another thing.

Recovery is the gift of a lifetime that we give ourselves in which to heal and be whole and well and happy.

We cannot rush or cut corners when it comes to achieving our life goals. Better to have entertained a goal or two and not acted on it than to sit home throwing ourselves a pity party and not even trying to set a goal because we think we can’t.

Banish the word “can’t” from your vocabulary I tell you. Replace it with “I’m willing to try to see if I can do this.” That’s more like it even if not everything we try will always work out.

I want to continue to talk about setting goals. What I’ve written here is the short version. A book years ago was published that talked about the benefit of quitting.

The difference is: quit when it’s not to your advantage to continue. Persist when the goal is so life-changing that to not risk trying to achieve it would fill you with regret at “what might have been.”

The quote is: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

The view from the cusp of 52 is grand.

Changeology

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I’m in the middle of getting my second non-fiction book ready to publish soon. I hope to be able to publish this book within two years from now.

For now I would like to talk again about goal-setting.

It’s going to be spring soon and I think new season is the perfect time to make changes.

To this end I’d like to recommend a book–Changeology–about setting and achieving goals.

It’s a 5-Step process that has been scientifically documented in research as being effective in getting results.

The only drawback I find to the book is that it focuses only on changing negative behaviors like smoking and drinking and bad parenting.

You CAN use the book to create other behavior changes that are positive. You just won’t find your particular behavior talked about in the book. Yet you can still use this proven 5-Step process to execute change.

Using this system might indeed help a person stop smoking or drinking or overeating or whatever their unproductive habit is.

I will continue to talk about goal-setting in here in the coming blog entries.