How to ‘Guesstimate’ Christmas Dinner - A Surprisingly Unspecific Recipe
Imagine reinforced conditions. Not only is your mother stressed about the amount and heat of food, not only does grandma criticise everything, but your pancreas eliminates all insulin production and you have to do its work in regulating your blood sugar level.
A preferred method of survival (because the only at hand) for people with a faulty pancreas is subcutaneous injection of insulin.
To ‘guesstimate’ is a well-known term for a person with diabetes; it illustrates the process of carbohydrate and sugar estimation in the food to inject the right amount of insulin to cover the food intake. The factors to be considered – thus adding the ‘guess’ to ‘guesstimate’ – are stress-level, state of body and exhaustion (.i.e has previous to dinner run a marathon/ been a couch potato all day/ plans to weight-lift after dinner or continue couch-potato career/ has a cold and is on painkillers/ all of the above combined…), level of hunger, a general question of luck and the good grace of some higher being.
Ingredients
1 Christmas dinner
possibly a (pocket) calculator
1 glucometer or flash/continuous glucometer
1 injection pen with filled insulin cartridge /-or 1 insulin pump
1 needle (to fit on pen) /-or 1 catheter connected to pump
a dash of nonchalance and the nerves to deal with questions or notoriously unnecessary statements (‘doesn’t that hurt?’, ‘I could never do that’ etc.)
(Witty comebacks to these questions)
4 cups of luck
Preparation method
First, inspect mother’s cooking. Count the potato dumplings you will (most likely) eat. Consider the crust of the duck and its sauce. Ask mother whether she added juice or any other sugary ingredient (jam, apples, industrial sugar, honey etc.) to sweeten the red cabbage. Consider the amount of cabbage you will have. Consider the size of your plate and put it into relation. Take a moment – if you like take your hand and put it on your belly – and ask yourself ‘How hungry am I’? and ‘Is there gonna be dessert?’ If so, inspect dessert. Calculate amount of carbohydrates for round about 527387564 minutes; if needed take pocket calculator for assistance. Begin again because grandma secretly added sugar to the sauce. Finish calculation and put to rest.
Take glucometer or flash/continuous glucometer and find out actual state of blood glucose right now. Incorporate into calculation. Calculate again because dad wants to go for a walk with you after dinner. Take injection pen/pump, add needle and adjust insulin amount. Consider all of the aforementioned and foresee future for the next 1-4 hours.
Find belly. Inject insulin. In a large mixing bowl (your body) stir together insulin and blood. Let sit for 10-20 minutes (depending on the amount of sugar grandma sneaked into that sauce possibly longer). Don’t let sit too long because missing food intake will cause low blood sugar quite fast. Meanwhile pray or mix in those 4 cups of luck.
Lastly, take off the number-goggles and look at the food in front of you. Be grateful to be able to relish in that greasy sauce of orange and elderberry covering the crunchy crust of a perfectly cooked tenderloin of duck. Enjoy the piquancy of the juniper berries hidden between the purple strings of red cabbage and genuinely taste the palatability of these zesty pieces of apple mingled in the red cabbage. Notice a tone of cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg. Feel the mellowness of these savoury potato dumplings as your fork parts them in halves and soak the malleable balls in the mauve sauce of the red cabbage. Appreciate every bite.
Apply to any meal. Once the method has been repeated several times a day, calculation process will likely take less than a minute.
Take glucometer and find out if calculation worked.