Why didn’t anybody tell me how much pain follows surgery? Here I’d pictured a scary hospital visit followed by a rosy home-bound ever-after in which I didn’t have to work and played with my toys, happy as a wounded clam.
No so much. Visits to the bathroom on crutches have felt like a knife slicing flesh and bone in my inner knee region, accompanied by a dull ache in the place where some deceased angel’s tendon now acts like an ACL for me. Mealtime means crackers because I can reach them from the bed and they settle the stomach from this bottomless cocktail of oxycontin and vicodin I’ve been imbibing.
The crackers are starting to get to me, the crumbs itching my bum in the bedsheets where I lay. Crackers from breakfast to dinner for 4 days straight—until last night, when I finally ate a big dinner topped off with a bowl of ice cream and then popped a pain pill only to wake up near-vomiting in the night.
Surely all this talk of pain and vomit is getting you in the mood for my yummy ginger and rosehip vinaigrette?
But anyway, crutching my way out of my bedroom confinement to vacation in the living room today was like a revelation. It was all I could do to stand on my one good leg long enough while the bum leg burned to throw together a salad—but the light upon Mt. Silverheels was divine, and the salad, my god what a salad that was.
Ginger Rosehip Vinaigrette
I made the dressing using a jar of canned rosehip sauce that dates back to October of 2011 from rosehips (Rosa spp.) gathered in the Steamboat Springs area, and sauce being my operative term for any non-jelled and canned sweet goo in my closet that once used to be a wild plant.
The vinaigrette came out lovely and includes: rosehip sauce, vinegar, olive oil, finely chopped garlic, and finely chopped pink marinated ginger and its liquid. I don’t remember exactly how I made the rosehip sauce originally, probably by simmering the rosehips, straining and mushing the fruit through a strainer, then cooking some sugar into the juice before canning.
Tofu Spinach Salad
For the salad I used baby spinach, raw tofu cubes, and unsalted sunflower seeds, though I long to throw some wild greens into the mix come summer. It was a variation on a pre-surgery salad I made the other night, which I topped with tofu cubes sautéed in the same ginger rosehip vinaigrette and soy sauce, iceberg lettuce in addition to the spinach, and carrot shavings I couldn’t be bothered with now that I am a stork. “This is a really good salad,” Gregg said of it at the time, “and I don’t like salad very much.”
I’ll tell you what, though, even without all the extra froo-froo, that salad was way better today.
Updated 2.18.21
Erica-loo! Sorry the leg is no bueno, but think of it this way, you are now bionic! And your good leg will be super hero strong by the time you are done with crutches, and you will be hopping up the stairs on one leg. By the time I was off crutches after that lovely Mammoth broken ankle I had more than 2 inches in circumference difference between my two calves, my gimpy leg, looked, well, gimpy (and hairy after I got the cast off, haha), and my other leg was all muscle. I’m on skype or email while I am here in China for a few more days if you would like to chat! Feel better soon!
Ouch! Hope you are feeling much better and haven’t had to add to your regime diaper cream to fight the dreaded cracker rash. Your recipe is perfectly timed, MDMNM & I have colds and are incorporating rosehip jelly as often as we can — this will be on the menu tonight! Thank you! And what an excellent recommendation; we’ll turn into ‘sauce’ one of our next batches of rosehips so we can have some non-jellied options.