Jane's First Birthday

Jane's First Birthday
Originally uploaded by HeathSeal

Zucchini Bread's Got Legs!

OK, so one Mr. John Connolly (sp?) was kind enough to give John and me a large assortment basket of veggies from his garden, including a massive zucchini that clearly lay in the background hiding out all summer long until someone noticed it. It wasn't baseball bat sized just yet but you could tell it would have been in another week or two. I steamed some of it, but decided the rest just had to become zucchini bread. Sure there was a recipe floating around somewhere in my notebook but I hit Epicurious.com instead and used this one: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/109568

I made a few alterations, namely switched out 3/4 cup of All-Purpose flour for Whole Wheat flour, cut back on the cinnamon, and upped the allspice while adding some ginger as well. I thought it was finished baking as the tester came out clean but alas there was some wetness still on the bottom which probably should have been cooked out. Next time. I did use the shredding blade attachment on the Cuisinart, which I highly recommend as grating all that zucchini by hand would get old real fast. After making the bread (bread? or just "large muffin"?) I had a small amount of leftover shredded zucchini. Put in a ziploc bag, add lemon juice, soy sauce and sesame oil, seal it up and shake it up et voila, you have a lovely, healthy, raw salad. It was actually the most delicious bit of zucchini I've had in ages, and it was super easy too. You could probably get all fancy and add garlic or red pepper flakes, but really the basic was pretty damn good for an afternoon snack.

It is a cool thing though to see a big, gawky teenager of a vegetable that quite frankly is more something you eat because you think you should, not because you love it, become this hot little number that everyone wants a piece of. While I was making it I kept thinking about that video for the ZZ Top song, "She's Got Legs" where the nice dorky girl with glasses gets a make-over courtesy three frankly odd looking dudes and becomes the cutest babe on the block with pink high heels, lace-edged socks and fingerless gloves (hey, it was the 80's). Change pink heels for allspice and you have your zucchini loaf. Serve with cream cheese if you have it.

Businessweek article on Pregnancy and MS

Nicole was nice enough to share this with me via email. Hopefully I will have half an hour to read it sometime this week and fully understand it. Meantime, enjoy and feel free to tell me what you think it means -

Businessweek, April 16, 2007 issue
Cover story is about Mittal Steel, has picture of father and son

Pg. 69, the SciTech - Developments to Watch page
Treatment column

"How a Female Hormone Impedes MS"

One tantalizing observation about multiple sclerosis is that it goes into remission during pregnancy. The degenerative disease occurs when the immune system attacks nerve cells. And it's known that pregnancy hormones such as estriol turn down the mother's immune system to protect the fetus from rejection. So could estriol—a form of estrogen—also be a treatment for the disease in women?Rhonda Voskuhl, director of the MS program at the University of California at Los Angeles, decided to try. In a small study four years ago she showed that the hormone—available as a pill—brought a dramatic reduction in the brain inflammation that is harmful in MS.Estriol "may not only help bring the immune system under control," says Patricia A. O'Looney, vice-president for biomedical research at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, "but it may also stimulate cells to make more myelin," a protective sheath that helps nerves carry signals but that breaks down as MS progresses.That's why Voskuhl is embarking on a larger, two-year study with previously untreated MS patients to see if estriol's benefits translate into improved health. Even if the hormone proves no better than current treatments, it has two big advantages: It's cheap, and it can be taken orally instead of being injected. Although men aren't part of her estriol study, Voskuhl is researching whether testosterone might have a similar effect in male MS patients.

By John Carey

Jane has arrived -

Click here for photos and further details:

http://www.janebreslin.com

March 22, 2007, 7:32am

We have another member of the new baby club! Please put your hands together and welcome little Jordana Isabel Ross, my friend Rachel (Gould) Ross' daughter. Born yesterday morning at 7lb, 11oz, she is clearly a little stunner like her mother already. Here is a link to her first on-camera appearance: http://www.box.net/shared/static/0fbzeka7yf.mov. Guess I am the last belly standing!

Cupcakes for Zander

So these are some of the cupcakes I lovelingly rendered for Zander. They were just basic chocolate with a cream cheese frosting but I went all Martha Stewart on the decorating and monogrammed them. I think this may have been my most successful frosting decor attempt yet. I am learning - who thought it was possible? Also I can't say enough good things about using gel based food coloring instead of the watery tear-drop shaped bottles. Far easier to control how much color goes in, and if it gets on your hand, far easier to get off. The key for nice shapes in the star-tip is to add more powdered sugar than you think is reasonable.



These are the beautiful flowers that Fleurs Bella created for Kate. I just love the little basket shape and the color combinations. What with all the snow on the ground, it's nice to be able to pretend that it is in fact spring already if only while we're indoors.

And this is just a picture of John practicing being a daddy. Not yet, not yet!

Photo mystery partially solved

I received a nice comment from Kim Maffin on my flickr photo set letting me know she'd linked to one of my pregnancy/copaxone pictures (here's the entry: http://www.todmaffin.com/blogs/ms/2007/03/13/change-is-in-the-air/) so that explains some of the traffic. I think someone else linked directly to one of the other pictures but as of now I am still in the dark about how to track those links down. Considering my computer skills are becoming worse and worse by the minute these days I don't think I will ever be able to find it completely. In any event, it was very cool and exciting to see that someone was inspired by the picture, but it was even more exciting that it was Kim since I have been listening to her and her husband Tod's excellent MS Podcast for ages. Yay! Gotta love reciprocity; they've given me a lot of info on trials of different drugs so I'm glad I could return the favor.

We just finished a very nice St. Patrick's Day dinner with both sets of parents at our house replete with the good china and the good tablecloth and adult beverages. I realized that this was the last "grown-up" party I'd be having for a long time, so it was a lot of fun to do. We made the same corned beef recipe we did last year from Bon Appetite, a marmalade-whisky glaze. You can either use pre-cooked corned beef from the deli or just buy it raw from the supermarket and boil it ahead of time for three hours, which is far cheaper. My mom brought some colcannon, and my mother-in-law provided a salad and a green-coconut cake. I made the brown bread and the soda bread with extra raisins. All very excellent and good, and a nice way to celebrate the impending arrival of that large bump in my stomach. Plus I had a teeny glass of Guiness - yum! So ready for bed now, but I'm sure I'll be up at 5:00am again in which case I'll post the photos of the cupcakes I made for Zander on Friday.