Cooking

We finished the last of the potato salad yesterday.  It was good, but there's too much egg, potato, and mayonnaise in it for me to make on a regular basis.  Last night I baked some potatoes for dinner but I didn't get a chance to eat mine until I got home from knitting.  I took the last loaf of French bread and made banana chocolate chip bread pudding with it.  It took longer than I expected to finish baking - by the time I took it out it was 12:30am and I had a 7am dentist appointment to make.

At the dentist, I got a temporary crown on my tooth.  I'm going back in about 2 weeks for the actual crown.  I'm getting used to the dentist now.  I think the only times I really tensed up were when he put the needle in my gums, but even that wasn't that bad.  It's weird that they had to put thread between my tooth and my gums in preparation for the crown.  I can feel the swelling in the gums around the tooth compared to the other side of my mouth.

Tonight I want to cook up some of the vegetables we have in the fridge to make a soup - tomatoes, carrots, celery, onions, cabbage, napa cabbage, and then maybe throw in some noodles in there.  Or I could stir fry the noodles with the cabbage and carrots.  I could pick up some pork or beef on the way home to throw in as well.  OH right, I totally forgot I also wanted to make some Chinese cold celery salad with my celery.  It's super simple - blanched celery cut into short long slices are tossed in sesame oil, and other seasonings of your choice (e.g. soy sauce, salt, sugar, ginger, cilantro, rice vinegar).

I need to stock up on some additional Chinese kitchen basics~

- dried shiitake mushrooms
- dried scallops
- rice wine
- rice vinegar
- MSG

- green onions (perishable)
- ...

I already have~
- corn starch
- soy sauce
- sesame oil
- various sauces & pastes (sesame paste, oyster sauce, bean paste, chili paste, sweet chili sauce, hoisin sauce)
- ginger (perishable)

dentist

Wow, my dentist wrote me a letter welcoming me to his office and also a thank you letter to Lawrence for referring me.

So, a couple weeks ago I went in for a teeth cleaning. It was my first time at the dentist's office in probably 3 years. One of my molars was experiencing pain and sensitivity to cold and pressure, so I knew something was up that I needed taken care of. Turns out it was a large cavity. I scheduled with them to get it cleaned out after my trip to SF.

On Thursday I went in and they cleaned out the cavity and infected areas and put in a temporary filling. My dentist said that I needed a root canal, which we scheduled for this coming Saturday. After that, I'll need a crown on the tooth. It would have been a lot scarier, but my dentist did a good job calming me down. With the anesthetics, I could barely feel a thing. It was my first time seeing a dental dam being used, but it really helped because I didn't have random bits of things flying around my mouth. They even put goggles over my eyes to protect them. Because of the fear I had expressed over the procedure, the dentist was very careful to make sure I was numb and not feeling any pain. He even gave me headphones so I could listen to the radio and not think about the noise of the drill.

The bad news...dental work is expensive. I just hope I won't need more done for a long time.