Decisions decisions

One decision – THE decision - that you have to make during the third year of medical school is what type of doctor you want to be for the rest of your life. Our rotation schedule is as follows: 12 weeks of Internal Medicine, 6 weeks of Family Practice, 6 weeks of Psychiatry, 8 weeks of Surgery, 8 weeks of OB/GYN, and 8 weeks of Pediatrics. This sounds like a lot, but there are tons of different specialties and even different aspects of the same specialty to factor in when making this decision. These last 11 weeks I’ve been doing Internal Medicine and so far I haven’t really enjoyed it as much so far. I’ve been in the hospital for the first 8 weeks and I didn't get to interact with the patients much at all. It felt like a lot of micro-managing their electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium, chloride), vitamins, and various other markers of how their organs are functioning. This serves a very very valuable service and I'm glad that I learned how to do it, but the thought of doing that for my whole like was absolutely depressing. I next went up to a local VA hospital and it wasn't much better but not much worse either. The last couple of weeks however I have been at a free health clinic for those without insurance and/or low-income and it's been surprisingly fun for me. You walk into a room with a patient and get to talk with them about their health. Usually there is a specific concern they are following up on, but often it is just a routine follow-up and you have a pretty wide range to explore. I personally believe that if people would exercise more, eat less, eat healthier, and sleep more (as I just ate some ice cream and and stayed up late last night. hmmmm) many of their health problems would go away. The obesity epidemic is just that...an epidemic. Most people know what they need to do and it isn't news to them to stop smoking or lose weight, or whatever. I find that it’s really fun to talk with them and come up with a plan to help them accomplish it. For someone who originally thought he was going to be a surgeon of some sort, this is just as much a shock to me as to anyone. That isn't to say that I've decided to be a family practitioner yet, but it certainly has moved up on the list.

Apples

One thing Melinda likes/dislikes about my personality is that I'm not embarrassed to ask people for things. The most recent case is when a doctor at the hospital that I was working with mentioned some friends who had apple trees that they got some apples from. I asked the doctor (tactfully) if her friend had more apples that she wanted to get rid of would she mind if we came out and picked them. Her friends were a 75 year old couple who didn't pick any of the apples off any of their 4 trees. So we drove out that and got three bags full of apples. It was awesome. We looked up a bunch of recipes and started cooking. Not that I'm sick of apples or anything like it, but at least for the next little while I'm okay for apple stuff.
On to the experiments. The apple turnovers were really good. The only problem was that there wasn't enough apple filling per turnover. Next time we would stuff them to the gills. Overall a great recipe and tasted great.
I don't know how many of you have ever heard of apple butter before, but we hadn't. Essentially you carmelize the sugar in the apples by cooking them in a crockpot for almost 12 hours. We like it okay, but it's definitely not at the top of our list of things to make with apples. Overall something that we like, but we wouldn't make it if we could only make one (or two) thing(s).
The apple pie turned out amazingly. I'm pleased to say that the crust turned out actually looking like an apple pie! Hooray. (My top spot is still pumpkin, but apple definitely moved up a couple of notches). By far the hit of our apple foray was the apple dumpling. I'd never had these before but they looked like such fun to make we went ahead with it. The crust is very similar to the apple pie
crust but it's wrapped around a whole apple that's been cored, peeled, and filled with a brown sugar & cinnamon mixture. The brown sugar filling melts and creates this delicious filling. Our only problem with this is that when the filling melts it oozes out of any openings in the dough and ends up all over the place. The Pie & Pastry Bible's solution is to not core the apple all the way through, leaving a little piece of the core as a plug for the filling. This worked out okay, but it's very easy to punch through the bottom of the apple when trying to core it, and if you don't punch through the core the piece of apple left over is part stem and not something that I'm super interested in eating. Okay, after all those problems I have to say that we did make them three different times and they were delicious each time. They also look very impressive and are surprisingly simple to make. We also made apple crisp a couple of times with these apples, but if forgot to take a picture of them. I have to admit that i much prefer apple crist where the apples have been sliced thin as opposed to cut into chunks because the slices get much softer and more like an apple pie filling. All-in-all a really fun little adventure.
P.S.
If you would like any of the recipes email me at brockmillet at gmail dot com and I'll try to send them to you.