The last real, home-cooked meal in this house, anyway. This week will be the Week From Hell as we slide toward the move date. Although I don’t hate moving with the passion of a thousand fiery suns, I don’t consider it to be a fun process, either. Along with the moving issues, I also have two followup appointments with my oncologists, one of which will no doubt be ready to schedule another PET scan to see how we’re doing.

But back to Sunday night and the last real meal I’m making in this house. On tonight’s menu, a trio of items requested by one of my sisters.

Blackened mahi (grilled during a very light rain that won’t do much to assuage our current drought-like conditions)
Stuffed tomatoes (as she missed the first round of these zucchini, portabello, and gruyere-stuff beauties)
Brown rice (not very exciting, but what she wanted)

I also made a remoulade sauce and a mango-papaya salsa, as that same sister had not yet carved up the mango and papaya I had gotten her for some kind of fruit bowl she was going to put together. Before they completely disintegrated into mush on the counter, I thought it might be time to throw together something using them.

Here’s a closeup of the mahi with some of the salsa.

I seasoned the mahi the way I used to eat blackened mahi. I neglected to keep in mind that not everyone likes food as spicy as I do, so my sister and her boyfriend got a bit choked up over their first bites. With a couple squeezes of lemon, some judicious scraping off of the seasoning, and some remoulade, they both enjoyed it (and he took the leftovers home).

And then, the tomatoes. I mentioned that my sister had missed them last time (she was ill). This time, however, she ate hers and then took half of mine, when I could not finish it. It’s quite a tasty dish, and I can see this one becoming a most-requested item.

As everything is being packed this week, this was the last full meal I’ll prepare. I’m considering doing a couple of slow cooker recipes, since there would be minimal prep and no requirement of my full attention. Slap it on a disposable plate, and there you have it: dinner. I must say, though, that I can’t wait to get into the new house, especially because it means I’ll have my own cooking utensils back at my disposal. I still need to buy a refrigerator for move-in, though.

Sunday night also marks almost two weeks since I’ve fed anything down the tube but water, to flush it out and clean it. The problem with this, of course, is that I’m generally unable to eat very much at a single sitting and thus unable to consume as many calories over the course of a day as I am by dumping a few cups of formula down the hatch during the day. As a result, I lose weight fairly rapidly. Stepping on the scale at the grocery, I found myself shaking my head in disbelief: 115 pounds, down from 118 just a couple of weeks ago when they weighed me at my surgeon’s office. No doubt Monday will bring with it a lecture from one of the medical oncology nurses when they weigh me in there as part of my followup, and another lecture on Tuesday from the radiation oncology nurses when I have my followup appointment there. But I did have my daily dose of ice cream!