-: Whether you've been cooking your whole life
or you're just starting to learn, it's helpful to know how
to be safe, efficient, and relaxed in the kitchen.
In this episode, Hadley members Don
and Dia, join us to share their experiences with cooking
after vision loss.
I'm Ricky Enger, and this is Hadley Presents.
Welcome to the show. Hello.
-: Hi Ricky. Hi Don. Thank you.
-: It is amazing to have you both.
I know we're gonna have a really good time
and probably end up being very hungry after the episode.
So I am looking so forward
to learning a bit about each of you
and what you do in the kitchen,
and I think we're going to have a great time
and share some very useful tips and tricks.
And of course, as much as we are able to share
between the three of us, there is no way we're gonna be able
to cover everything, which is why we are so happy to have
so many clever listeners out there.
So if you're listening
and you have something to share about cooking,
we're gonna have info on how to do
that at the end of the episode.
So before we get into talking about your kitchen
experiences, the good, the bad, the in between,
why don't we get a little bit
of information about each of you?
So Dia, I wanna start with you.
You've actually been on a Hadley Presents podcast
before, so welcome back.
But for those of you who didn't hear that first podcast,
let's get a quick intro from Dia.
-: Hi Ricky again. Thank you for having me today.
I am very excited about being here
and talking about cooking, which is one of my really,
really big passions in life.
And it still is even with vision loss
and that I am legally blind.
I have a disease called N-A-I-O-N,
non ischemic optic neuropathy
non anterior.
And it happened in my
left eye in 2019.
And then I was unfortunate enough
to have it happen in the right eye, which is very unusual
as the professionals tell me.
It is basically an optic nerve stroke.
So I had the left eye and the right eye.
As of present, I only have 15% vision.
-: I'm so looking forward to hearing about some of the ways
that you have adapted,
because cooking is such a huge passion for you
and you certainly did not decide to let
that go, which is awesome.
So Don, this is your first time on the show,
but certainly not your first time participating in things
related to Hadley.
You're, you're always on the What's Cooking discussion group
as well as other groups.
And so it's wonderful to have you here.
For people who don't know you,
why don't you just give a quick intro,
tell us a bit about yourself
and as much about your vision loss journey
as you're comfortable sharing too.
-: Okay. My name is Don Pointman.
I'm 61 years old
and I currently work for the Bureau
for Public Health in West Virginia.
My vision loss, it started in 2015,
I was making Oreo mint ice cream
and I saw a shade come down over my left eye.
So the next day I went, I hadn't,
did not have an ophthalmologist at that time,
so I called one and luckily there was one who was willing
to see me the next day.
And then my daughter drove me to the eye doctor
and I said, ah, yes, you have a retinal tear
or retinal detachment, and it's pretty bad
because it's the entire retina that's pulled away.
And finally in February of 2016,
the eye just said, that's it, I'm done.
And it went completely dark,
but I still had my right eye, which was at 2030 vision.
But that was fine until November 10th, 2022
when it decide to detach.
Then beginning of 2024
is when everything went dark for me in that eye.
And that's where it's been
and that's where it's, it's staying.
I don't think of it as a, a vision loss journey.
It's, to me it's a life journey.
I never really looked at it as, oh my gosh,
I'm losing my vision, I'm going blind.
What am I gonna do? I just looked at it, this is my life.
And so I made arrangements when I first
was losing the vision.
I, you know, I would change things on my, mainly my menus
and stuff so I can make 'em more accessible in
case it gets even worse.
But I just look at it as this is another part of my life
and I just have to adjust.
-: I really like the way you frame that
because it's so true that life isn't just full
of good things, where the bad things are an outlier.
It is ups and downs and everyone just has different ups
and different downs.
And ultimately you hopefully arrive at where you are,
where both of you are, which is, I'm excited
to be learning things, everything is okay.
So a lot of times we hear from people
who maybe they have lost some vision
or they're in the process of doing that
and thinking, you know, I never did learn to cook
and so I'm going to start doing that now.
But for the two of you, that's not the case.
You've always been very interested in cooking.
So this is one of those things that
as you are losing that vision, you're thinking about, okay,
how am I going to do this?
Am I going to do this?
So I'm curious, and Dia we'll start with you.
Did you ever think, well,
this is probably something I'm going to have to give up,
or was that just never an option for you?
How did you kind of navigate that
-: Exactly?
It was never an option.
I knew I had to adjust
and I knew that adjusting was gonna be a little bit
challenging, not difficult, but more challenging.
And I learned how to make my cooking shortcuts.
And I remember watching my little Italian mama
and pretty much that's how I learned how to cook,
was just observing how she did things.
So I just never, ever thought, I can't do this.
I have several tips on how I remedy
that right now.
It's shortcuts, it's, it's how I improvise
and in the, in the kitchen and just maneuver and to be safe.
That was my biggest fear was, you know, burning myself
or cutting myself.
And that is the challenge of it for me.
-: But it sounds like once you said to yourself,
I'm not giving this up, the rest of it just became logistics
of, okay, I have to figure this out, not,
I can't figure this out.
-: Exactly. Absolutely.
And I never ever thought, I can't do it ever, never again,
it's a mind over matter.
You have this challenge.
And I also don't believe that I have to deal
with being legally blind.
I, I have to deal with how to adapt it's life.
-: And Don, for you,
cooking has always been a passion for you too, right?
-: Oh yeah. I mean, I watched my bohemian mother cooking
and I would just, I would be the one kid in the house
of five kids that would cook and bake.
And then later on when, you know, in high school I would,
I would bake and cook all the time.
And in college I started at a, a pizza place
and then became assistant manager
of the pizza place while I was in college.
You know, that's just the way I did.
And, and so I've been cooking back and forth
and when I started my job, I'd always cook
and bring things to people at work.
I've always enjoyed cooking and, and baking.
-: When you knew that your vision was changing,
was there a point where you were thinking, well,
I'm not gonna do this anymore, we're gonna have
to figure out something else?
Or did you start adapting
and figuring things out immediately
as your vision kept changing?
-: Yeah, I just kept adapting.
I was, there was never a point of, well,
maybe I can't do anything or maybe I can't cook.
It's just what I did decide a couple things is one,
I'm not gonna be cooking
and bringing it to work is I don't have shortcuts.
I have long cuts. Everything takes so much longer.
And so that's what I did.
So, but I said, I'm not gonna do the big cooking
that I did in the past.
And the other thing is I said, I'm not gonna,
for safety reasons, I'm not going to pee why.
But other than that, I still do what I've been doing.
I make, I make some changes on stuff,
but just takes me longer.
-: You know, a lot of times we hear these stories of someone
who has climbed a mountain
or they've become a winner of cooking contest
or they've done something just over the top amazing.
And it feels inspirational in a way
because like, look, this person did this amazing thing,
but in a way it's not relatable
because I don't know about all of you,
but when I try something, there's usually some disasters
before there is the perfection
and we don't always hear about those disasters.
So I wanna change that.
I want to hear
when you were learning to cook
and figuring out your adaptations, share some,
some times when things didn't quite go as planned.
Dia. We'll start with you.
-: Absolutely several since my vision loss,
this is awfully humorous, but
because I could not seed to drain the spaghetti
after it was cooked in the pot, so I brought it to the sink
with the calendar, and I thought
that the spaghetti was in the pan.
It was not in the pan.
I was emptying out a pot of boiling water with no
and funny.
Yeah, it totally is. It's funny.
And I, I stood back and laughed.
I have fried a hamburger patty
with the paper on it.
-: Done that too. -: Yes.
And that, that cracked me up
because when I bit into the hamburger patty,
I ate the paper.
So that was another, I call it funny tragedy, which was,
it wasn't, I've cooked a pizza in, in the oven
with the cardboard under it and tainted the pizza
and it tasted like cardboard
and I couldn't figure out why it was cardboard.
So those are a few of the humorous things
that have happened to me.
I have burned myself. Those are the bad things.
I have cut myself
and I have spilled significant amount
of stuff in the kitchen and that has aggravated me
and it's very frustrating.
But I pick myself up and I shake it off and I continue.
So I'm not giving up that.
And when I talked about shortcuts earlier, what I meant by
that is I no longer have a huge family surrounding me,
as I did when I was newly married.
And in the course of my marriage, I should say,
where the kids were home
and I made pasta sauce from scratch,
and now I do the shortcut, I use the jar sauce,
or I do olive oil
and garlic in a saute pan with fresh parsley.
Those are my shortcuts instead of beginning from scratch.
And it's okay, it's okay that I open up a jar
of pasta sauce, let's say.
That's okay. And I would do that if I had company.
Probably the most important thing is I don't do shortcuts on
my specialty items.
So I still do that all from scratch.
But I have definitely slowed down to make sure
that everything I'm doing, I'm doing adequately
and slowly so I don't make a mess
and I don't mess up the recipe.
And the recipe is not in a, in a paper.
All my cooking is in my head.
-: And how about you, Don?
I bet you have some disasters to share as well,
or maybe everything has always been
come out perfectly for you. I don't know.
-: Well, it doesn't come out perfectly, so I'm different from
where Dia does it all, you know, cooks by her memory
and the recipes are all in her head.
Mine are all recorded.
They used to be in books and now they're all in in the
computer database where I could locate them, find them.
They're all organized nicely begins with, I put the source
of where I got the recipe from, it was from mom,
or if it was from a website or a book.
If then I put in there, if I make something
and I, I find something new like, oh,
I should have done this or maybe I'll change this.
I put notes in, in the beginning of the recipe of
what I did last time, what worked, what didn't work.
And so that's what I've always done.
And if something doesn't work, then I may,
I'll turn it around to make it work.
But I had some of the non-stick pans
and I would put a little cutout circle from the rubber type
of shelf liner in between so they don't scratch.
And I left one in there once
when I was making bacon and onion jam.
And at first it just, it was like, well,
there's something sticking to the bottom, this is weird,
but okay, it'll loosen up.
And then I realized
after a while what it was, now I could have thrown it off,
but it's bacon, onion jam.
So I scraped. You were not
-: Letting that go -: To waste.
I scraped it off and threw the, the liner out.
You know, it's bacon, onion, jam,
you can't just throw it out.
And then there was one time that just happened
the other day, I make a lot of Thai peanut sauce
because I love Thai peanut sauce.
And apparently I grabbed something
and it was the wrong container.
It felt like the same container and the same consistency,
but it happened to be some sweetened condensed milk.
And I dipped my celery in that
and I'm like, this doesn't taste quite right.
It's still good, but,
but you've been working with knives all my life.
So I've never cut myself in the kitchen.
I have not burned myself. What I do is we have a gas range.
And I said, well this is gonna be tough.
So I no longer use the gas range.
What I do is I put a cutting board on top of the gas range
and then I put on a single burner induction range
and all this stuff I had
before I lost my vision, I bought that
to see if we were gonna get an induction range
or just a regular electric oven range in a previous place
that we had to replace it with.
And so I said, well, I'll try it.
Well, so now I cook on that exclusively
and I use, my two main pots are enamel coated,
cast iron, 12 inch skillet,
and a 10 inch five core dutch oven.
And what's great about those is first you don't get heat
coming up the sides, the top parts with handles are,
don't really get that hot
because of the, the way the induction range works.
And in the beginning I could see the inside
because it was white, so that really helped out.
But I can also stir with one hand, pouring with another hand
and it's not gonna spin around.
They're heavy. But you know, that's
what I use mainly for my cooking.
So I don't get the burn.
And my oven was nice enough to come with.
It has the two, you know, three shelves.
I only use the one because I only cook one thing at a time
and it's, even if it's in the oven,
it's just one thing at a time
and the shelf pulls out like a normal shelf, you know,
you kind of wiggle in the, but it also has little rollers on
it and it has another shelf right on top of that.
So you slide that on the rollers. So that was great.
But I only cook one thing at a time.
If I'm, you know, the sides are either pre-made and frozen
and then thawed or they're cooked
and put into a warmer while I work on something else.
But yeah, because if I make more than one thing at a time,
then when I put something down,
I'll go to do something else.
I'll have no clue what that, that item was
that I just put down on the, on the table.
-: And that's actually a really good tip.
That's something I do too, is when you're in the kitchen
and you're doing so many things at once, it's easy
to lose track of something
and maybe you're accustomed to glancing over
and seeing where it is when you've lost that ability.
Now suddenly, if it's a matter of timing
and there's something that you've gotta get to quickly
and then there's something else going on too,
that can be a little bit nerve wracking.
So just taking that time to say,
I'm gonna concentrate on one thing at a time
and it, it makes it easier.
-: Yeah. And I cook everything like it's a stir fry.
So I, everything that I'm gonna add
to something is already put into a bowl measured out
because I measure everything
or I don't use measuring cups,
I use the weight on everything except for measuring spoons
for spices stuff.
But everything else is done by by weight.
And so I have all that stuff lined out
and finger bowls are bigger bowls and it's all in a line.
So when I start going, I just put all that in there
and I don't stop and grab something off the shelf
because again, you're trying to do that
and you got something cooking.
So I just, I don't know, it's just like a robot.
-: I love how everyone has different approaches to this.
And so one tip that Don just gave is
to have everything ready to go before you even start.
And that way you're not frantically hunting
around in your kitchen to try and find something.
Dia, what about for you?
What would your tips be
that have really helped you the most in terms
of figuring out how to stay relaxed, have fun,
and get what you need to get done in the kitchen?
-: As Don said, I also put everything out on the counter
as I know what I need.
All my spices, all my refrigerated items,
and I keep those on the counter and then I add those.
So that's one of the things I line up everything.
So my three items that I absolutely love, love, love
are, I have a lot of countertop lights that I work with.
I have a light, a gooseneck light that is mobile
and I can point that over the pot on top of the stove.
So it helps me to judge if I'm making soup, I know
how much liquid
or oil that comes to the surface, I have
to skim off my lights are my life.
I adore them.
And I have at least 10 lights around the counter right now.
And they're always on during the day.
They help me to see where I'm walking
and also especially when I'm cooking.
So that's the one thing.
And the second thing is I use my hand a lot.
I feel, I feel what's on the counter.
I use my hand for measuring.
And that's something that my mother did that I never did a
when I had vision and now I'm using that again.
And that's really interesting that, you know, it's kind
of a full circle thing.
And then my third thing is I have an electric stove,
which I'm not fond of.
And I keep the electric burners on low
and then I slowly turn them a little higher
and I stand over the item that I'm cooking.
I don't walk away and it's pretty boring.
But I have to do that.
I have to slow down
and learn that I can't walk away like I used to.
Somebody told me this, which is quite interesting.
If you lose your sight
or you lose any of your senses, your other senses kick in.
So my hearing kicks in
and my tastes kick in a great deal more than they did
before when I had vision.
So that's usually what works for me.
As I said about the lighting, that's so, so important.
And then one of the most important things that I am finding
is to take inventory in your cabinets.
Instead of buying another olive oil container,
look in the cabinet, you probably have one
or look in the cabinet, you probably have garlic powder.
I have like four garlic powders right now
and I keep buying them because I didn't know that I had them
because I can't see them.
So that's kind of another little tip.
-: Yeah, it's just to keep that running inventory.
And sometimes that's easier said than done
because it's how do you organize things,
how are you labeling things?
And sometimes if you're anything like me,
I should be more organized than I am.
So I too have three chili powders and so on.
For you, Don, do you have some tips, tricks
that you would share that have kind
of made things a little easier or more efficient for you?
Or things that you didn't used to do but you do now?
-: It's changed a little bit.
And so my first one was my spice rack, which is
60 items in a spice rack, which is a lot.
So I brailed those
and I brailed them in a special way
so the braille doesn't fall off
and someone whose side, you can still read the labels.
So what I do is I program my A lady to tell me
where my spices are and I just ask her to say, find AEG note
and it'll tell me what row
and what column it's, so that's very nice.
I cut it down to 48
and now I'm starting to put in mixes with, so I can only
take one one spice jar and, and put it in there and,
and instead of taking out four of them,
so I already have them premixed now.
So that, that was a very helpful
and that's one of the first things I did
because I knew that was gonna be a problem
and that's when I could still see.
But my daughter helped me with putting on the braille
and stuff like that, so that was very nice of her.
And then for the inventory,
now I have a couple different pantry things that I use.
I have spice pantries
and you know, leftover that I don't have a lot
of canned goods, but I have, you know,
your basic canned things of your diced tomatoes
and your coconut milk and stuff like that.
Well those, I always had 'em in rows
and I, I could tell what the cans are
or the bottles were the easiest.
But now I have a computer database so it'll tell me,
I can say, okay, where's my tied chili sauce?
And it'll tell me which row, which shelf
and which row it's in and how many are there.
And when I use it up, I take it off the, the list.
Same thing with my freezers.
My upstairs freezer just has the meat and I buy it in bulk.
It's Sam's and then I vacuum seal it
'cause I don't tip the store a lot.
And so I freeze my meats.
And then I clip certain, like in the, for chicken,
it's clipped in the middle, there's one clip
for chicken breast, two clips for chicken thighs,
beef is clipped on an end.
And then I also put them in separate bags.
So there's one bag of chicken thighs, one bag
of chicken wings and and so on.
And then my other one has all my pre-made stuff, like i'll,
I'll pre, I always have mac and cheese premade
and vacuum sealed and put in there.
Same thing with corn cheese and sweet potato casseroles.
So those I can take out in and thaw and use.
But those again are put into the computer a which shelf
and what kind of container they're in.
So that's the way I label my stuff.
Instead of putting labels on everything,
I just use the computer.
But I've always done that on other things like storage bins
in the house and stuff like that.
So I just started using that for the cooking.
-: So you already had some things that just, they were,
the way that you approached
how you organized things in your house already, it just
so happened that it was kind
of a universally useful thing to do.
So once you started losing your vision,
you didn't really have to make much
of a change on some of those things.
-: Correct. And, and it's, again, I just adapted some
of the things that I did, you know, the freezers,
I would just put things in I, but I still,
after a while you can't tell what's in there.
So I'd write it on the vacuum seal bag
or you know, I put a lot of things in the court jars
and vacuum seal those, put those in the freezer
so I don't get the freezer burned.
But now I, I record where it is on the computer
so it's very easy for me to locate
and they'll say, shoot, I wonder if I have Italian sausage.
I thought I did and check.
And sure enough I do have some,
some bulk sausage and I know where it's at.
-: So when it comes to devices,
I think everyone has their favorite little gadget
or device or measuring thing
or you know, for me it's my air fryer in my instant pot.
I love them so much
because there's a lot that you can do
where you can walk away
and clean the kitchen while they are doing their thing
and not standing over it.
So you know, those are mine.
But I bet each of you have those things too,
whether it's utensil that you use for measuring
or a device or a talking scale or whatever it is.
So I'm curious, we'll start with you Dia.
Do you have certain things that have just become,
you couldn't live without them in the kitchen?
-: Absolutely. As I heard you speak about it,
the biggest corin on my face was back in the seventies when
Tupperware was big.
I have the yellow calendar, the yellow Tupperware calendar,
and I have all kinds of cool silver calendars
imported from Italy.
And I can't give up my little handle yellow calendar
and it's my go-to for, you know, draining pasta, rice,
any kind of things that I need to drain.
So that's one thing.
The second thing I can't live without is my toaster oven.
I do incredible amounts in my toaster oven.
And when I'm doing a shortcut, let's say I am, I'm gonna
make french fries and I don't have any of the fancy gadgets.
I don't have the air fryer
and so I do everything by hand, which it works for me.
So I take out the frozen french fries
and I put them in a dish in the microwave
and I defrost them right from the freezer.
And then I put little olive oil and a aluminum pan
and I bake in the toaster oven and then I change it to broil
and I get the best french fries with a little bit
of olive oil, not a lot, and a little bit of salt
and whatever spices you would like to use.
So that's, those two things are my go-to,
my slotted spoons are my lifesaver.
I think that's the beginning of it off the top of my head.
-: Awesome. And what about you Don?
-: Well, my scale, I have a talking scale now
'cause I weigh most of my ingredients.
And then I do also have my thermometer, which is for meat
and talking thermometer for meat
and obviously baking, you know, for
to know when my cakes are done, bread
or done, I mean I can touch 'em on the top,
but I, I'm afraid to do that a little bit
because I may miss the top and hit the glass casserole dish
or something like that and not gonna burn.
I don't wanna burn myself. So those are my two big ones.
I do have a nice toaster oven, it can do all sorts
of things, but I use it solely for toasting and for baking.
And I do have my instant pot and my, for making like ribs
and, and soups and stuff like that.
And also crumble. I'll make that in the instant pot.
And then my air fryer is my friend.
The one I have is a ninja foodie, air fryer.
It can do a lot of things in it,
but I use it solely for air frying.
But it is a clamshell design, like a George Foreman.
And so in the, the plate
that you put the stuff on is elevated.
So when you're heated it heats all the way around.
You don't flip things over and you cut your time in half.
But I can cook two Turkey legs in it.
-: So I actually do have the ninja foodie.
And one thing I love about it is exactly that for me,
flipping things over, that's my nemesis,
especially if it's smaller things,
I feel like I'm never gonna get them all flipped,
but if I can just give them a good shake halfway through,
that's perfect.
-: Yeah, and the other nice thing about it is if,
let's say I'm making bacon wrapped shrimp, that I have a,
a date stuffed with blue cheese in it, I can go ahead
and take that the, the basket out, put it on a tray,
and while the ninja foodie is heating up, I can go ahead
and place all my shrimp in the basket while it's a cool
basket and then I can open it up and drop it in there.
And that works out real well.
And instead of trying to put it in with it, you know,
after it's been heated up,
but at least the inside is hot, so, so that,
that works out well and real well.
And everything's nice and crispy and stuff.
But yeah, I mean I have a lot of things
that if I didn't have, I would just do it a different way.
But the air fryer and, and the bumps are important too.
Those are the low tech things for,
for putting bumps on things so you know where
to push and where to turn on.
-: Yeah. 'cause a lot of that becomes difficult to memorize
after a while.
And dia I think your,
your tips about light really come in here too,
because if you do have some vision, making sure that
what you're doing, if you don't want
to be squinting at things when it isn't necessary to do
that, make that area either easy
to see or make some of those things easy
to feel like rather than leaning over to look at
what your oven or your burners are set out.
You can mark those
or do what you did dia,
which is have it starting low
and then turn it up little
by little till you get to where you wanna be.
-: Well, and also I am, I'm totally night blind, so for me
to look in my freezer
or look in the cabinets, I need a flashlight
because I'm blind in the dark.
And that helps me.
And I do use the bumps also on different bottles
and so forth and different items.
But being that the lighting helps in,
let's say I open the freezer,
I cannot see anything that's in that freezer.
I need my light. So not only do I have the counter lamps,
I have flashlights also
that I have magnetized on the side of the freezer
or the refrigerator that I can grab easily
and look in the freezer.
Now if the freezer isn't organized according to
what I know it to be, if I have a helper that comes in
and she may load the freezer for me, I have to ask her
where she put everything
and then she organizes it like, you know,
the pork in one line and the fish in the other line
and the freezer and so forth.
So that helps me also, if it's changed,
I'm all messed up.
I have to reorganize it
and that, that's another challenge.
But I can do it as long as I have the lighting.
And you know, another example is in a restaurant I cannot
see a thing when I walk in into a restaurant, first of all,
restaurants are usually very dark
and I have my cane of course,
but still ordering from a menu is extremely difficult.
Again, the lights
that I carry in my purse help me, I bring 'em out.
-: And that's just figuring out different ways
to do the same things rather than saying,
well I'm just not going to go to a restaurant anymore
or I'm not going to cook anymore, or whatever.
It's figuring out ways to keep things organized
and make them work for you.
And I love that both
of you have totally different approaches
and yet they're both completely valid.
You know, Don, you approach this like a scientist idea,
you approach this as a, you measure things
with your heart kind of thing.
There's no no measuring spoons involved.
And Don, you have tactile things, dia you have light
to look at what you're doing
and in the end you're still doing exactly
what you wanna do in a way that works for you.
And I think that's really important.
So I think that's what I would say to anyone
who is thinking about learning to cook
or wondering about how they're gonna continue to do that
with vision loss.
There's no wrong way to do things.
It's about finding the way that works best for you.
So what advice would you give to people
who are in this situation
and not sure if they can do it
or just feeling a little bit of fear,
whatever it is. Dia we'll start with you.
-: Well, I would say just give it a try
and start slow.
That's a huge part of this.
To start out slow, use your microwave for some of the things
and then use your toast oven
or use your oven, whatever you're more comfortable doing.
You can use your crockpots, you can use all of your,
you know, gadgets as Don mentioned.
And yeah, it, we are totally different cooks
and I, I admire his technical skills.
That's, that's incredibly fun
and interesting, I would say to people that are scared
to start to just to start slow.
And if you have a helper
that will also give you more confidence to point out things
and to show you things that would make it easier
for you to be confident about booking.
-: That's great. And Don, what about you?
-: Well, you start out slow and you see what can I do?
How can I work? And if it doesn't work,
is there a way I can make it work?
You know, how, how can I do this differently
that I can do this safely?
And you just have to think about it, you know, it's,
it's not just thinking outside the box,
it's also thinking inside the box.
You know, what do you have available for you, you know,
all the stuff that I have except for the,
the two talking elements that I already had
and I was using since, you know, I was 17 years old.
But yeah, you, you just think about it
and don't get frustrated.
If you get frustrated with it, just stop
and say, okay, let me try something different.
Sure, it's a little sloppy, but it still tastes good.
I had this of course also
before I, I lost our losing my vision.
It is a light that goes on a headband that tilts
and is also motion controlled.
So you'll tilt it to where you want, need it to focus,
and then you can turn it on and off
and you can also make it lower high with the,
with a wave of your hand.
So I use that at work quite a bit. Those are incredible.
And like I say, they're all hand
controlled if you get the right one.
So you don't have to touch up, you know, by your head
with a dirty hand or something, you just swipe your hand
and so, and it goes right where you need it.
-: Don, I, I appreciate that I have that. And you know what?
Im extremely vain. It messes my hair up.
I think if we make some humor out of this,
we can get through it even quicker and better and easier
and more confident.
We have to keep our humor, we have to laugh.
-: I think you're so right about keeping the humor in things,
being able to laugh at yourself.
And Don, you said it too, being able to,
if you get frustrated, stop, try a different way.
Ultimately it's about knowing
that the important bit is kind of the end result.
And it may take a little more time to get there.
There may be some frustration along the way,
but those are learning experiences
and I think it's well worth giving it a try.
And now to all of our wonderful virtual neighbors
who are listening, what's working for you?
What's keeping you comfortable, safe, efficient,
just less stressed out in the kitchen.
If you would like to share those things with the community,
we would love to hear from you.
You can call our podcast line
(847) 784-2870.
You can email us podcast@hadleyhelps.org.
We'll have that in the show notes as well, along with a link
to a page where you can just record right from our
website and send it to us.
That way. I can't wait to hear what you all have to share.
Don, Dia, thank you so much for sharing your time
and your expertise
and I will definitely be calling on both of you for recipes.
So there you go.
-: Thank you Ricky. Nice to meet you Don.
-: Same, same here dear.
Thank you very much for listening to my humor
and giving me some tips.
And Ricky, as always, you're wonderful.
-: Thank you. Thank you both got something to say.
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