I had never heard of Alpine strawberries and — until I bought the plant — I had no idea there even were any other types of strawberries besides the mainstream ones. They are an ancient delicacy that survived into our modern world of industrial agriculture like relics by growing in the quiet corners of people’s gardens.

In Egypt, there is a beautiful church in Old Cairo known as the Hanging Church, or El Muallaqa in Arabic. Leaving the pervasively Islamic environment of Cairo and entering such a beautiful, sacred, Christian site feels like traveling in time, a dissident act of allegiance to the world of a bygone era. Eating these strawberries gives you a similar feeling.

I’ve been growing the plant for 4-5 weeks now, and the fruits are just coming online, although I hear it will keep fruiting for a long while. As part of my adventures in urban food gardening, I’m also growing some basil, garlic, and a tomato. This definitely proves that anyone can grow at least something, because I live in an urban area and have no outside space–this is all going on in (somewhat) sunny corners of my apartment.

My blood sugar was inexplicably high before dinner, and despite a correction dose and a dinner not unusually high in carbs — a chicken and grilled vegetable burrito, sin arroz y sin frijoles — it soared up to 351 before 10 o’clock, when I switched up my relatively new infusion set and took a correction by syringe. Then I started to fall down to 52, where I found myself when I woke up in a totally befuddled state around 1 am. It was one of those deep lows, where you feel like you just have to keep eating, but you can’t really taste what you’re shoveling in your mouth. I woke up again around 6, feeling gross and having rebounded back to 290, despite a small bolus that I took with the food at 1. I find that wrenching up and down like that tends to leave me feeling dizzy for about a day.

What was the problem? Fluctuations in electromagnetic fields? A disconnect in time? I have no idea. My top theory right now is different receptivities to insulin when the pump is installed in different areas of the body.

For the recipe, I went to the Aish HaTorah website – These guys are pretty intense religious Jews, so I figured their challah recipes would no doubt be off the hook. In the end, I combined two of their recipes: the Always Successful Challah (which I chose for obvious reasons) and Bubbie Irma’s Challah (which intrigued me with its use of whole wheat flour, even though I find its name vaguely annoying).

Baking went much better this time. I remembered to grease the pan, so I didn’t have to dismember the loaf to pry it from the pan. I also kneaded the dough with superior acumen, yielding superior fluffiness–though I could still probably have kneaded a little better. I also used all organic flours, eggs, and butter, so the environment can be happy.

There was just one slight mishap/awesome occurrence. Not yet having a good sense for quantities in baking, and also apparently not yet having a good sense for reading, I didn’t realise that these recipes give you about 4 loaves of challah, not just one. So I created only one ginormous, elephantine loaf that my roommates think comes straight out of Giant World, the fourth level in Super Mario 3. So it looks like we’ll be eating challah French Toast/challah-on-challah sandwiches/burning challah for warmth till we work our way thru this beast.

Tip for next time: Use less whole wheat flour and/or add some Splenda to make it sweeter.

Scorecard (no grade inflation):
Appearance: A
Taste: B+
Texture: B+
Ginormity: A+

Ingredients:

• 8-9 cups organic flour (1:1 ratio of whole wheat to white flour)
• 2 1/2 cups lukewarm water
• 1/5 cup of honey
• 1/2 cup oil
• 1 Tbsp. Salt
• 4 tbsp. Fleishmann’s Dry Active Yeast
• 5 organic eggs

Recipe from the uber Jews:

Mix together 2 1/2 cups flour with sugar, salt, yeast (no need to dissolve first), water, and oil. Mix in 4 eggs. Beat in 11/2 cups flour very well. Add 4-5 cups flour until a very soft dough is formed. Add raisins (optional). Knead. Separate challah, if necessary. Refrigerate overnight. In the morning, let warm to room temperature, 1-2 hours. Make balls, roll them into ropes, and braid (see illustration, page 122). Let rise, covered, for 1/2-1 hour. Make egg wash by beating 1 egg. Brush on challah. Bake in preheated oven at 325 degrees F. (160 degrees C.) for 30 minutes. Apply egg wash once more and bake another 30 minutes at 350 degrees F. (175 degrees C.). Makes 4 medium-sized challahs.

Everything was legit at breakfast (blueberries & Kashi), but then I started to feel low blood sugar around 10 am, so I ate some M&Ms to fix that. Then about an hour later I had some trail mix, along with a hit of insulin. This trail mix is quite tasty, if a bit sweet – it’s got raisins, yogurt chips, sunflowers seeds, and a few nuts. From then on, though, I have had high blood sugars all day – 250+ mg/dl and as high as 360 after lunch. (Normal is 80-120, and if you didn’t know that, then it’s a good bet that’s your blood sugar right now.)

I’ve gone through all the usual explanations for high BGs in my head, but it looks like I’ve caught a stone whodunit, like they say on The Wire.

So I switched up my insulin (new bottle), corrected with an injection, and then put in a new insulin pump site and reloaded my pump. Let’s hope all that fixed whatever’s going on – because I fired up some spaghetti, chicken sausage, and salad for dinner…

1. Mixed warm water, sugar, and active dry yeasts together in a bowl. Let these cats get acquainted for ten minutes.
2. Stirred in some butter, salt, and a bunch of white flour till I got a massive clump of dough.
3. Let that clump sit for a few minutes. Looked up “kneading” on Wikipedia. Tried to knead it for 10.
4. Left the kneaded clump of dough in a greased up bowl.
5. Went to the gym. I’m concentrating on hamstring flexibility and building up my shoulders and upper back these days. I got called out by a friend who works at the gym for checking out a medicine ball and then taking it into the locker room with me, but sometimes you gotta protect what’s yours from usurpers.
6. The dough was real swelled up when I returned home. Niice.
7. Put the dough into the baking pan and punched it down. (Can you tell what’s missing from this step?)
8. Blazed the bread in the oven on 420 degrees for 15 minutes, then curbed the temp down to 350 for another 20.

I was duly impressed with myself when out of the oven came something looking suspiciously like a loaf of bread. However, there were a few minor differences. One, the loaf was hopelessly stuck to the baking pan. I slapped my forehead. Two, the bread, once surgically extracted from the jaws of the pan, was a bit too dense and spongy, like wack biscuits. Google suggests this texture is a result of insufficient kneading. Nevertheless, my bread was pretty tasty with some hot, homemade butter.

Recipe Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cups flour (I used all-purpose King Arthur’s because it has fewer additives).
• 1 1/2 cups of water
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp butter