Oral Surgery = More Baking

Wisdom teeth extraction sucks. The worst part, though, is not the pain, or the swelling, or the nagging feeling that you have four deep suture-bound holes in your mouth. The worst part is that, for days afterwards, you're haunted by the visions of food-you-can't-eat.

Day 1: Trying to come to terms with the fact that half of your face is numb. Once the gauze situation is under control, protein shake and apple sauce is about all you can handle. Taking pills is a difficult operation.


Day 2: You go to town with the frozen fruit and yogurt you stocked up before the operation. Lacking a blender, you use the food processor. You uncover a talent for making smoothies.

Two smoothies later (strawberry banana and blueberry-banana-peanut butter), you can't stand the sight of smoothies.

By dinner time you're dying for something savory. You heat a can of tomato soup for dinner, and slightly craved with hunger and pain killers, you throw in some ancient potatoes that you've uncovered from the fridge. The oxycodone acts up an hour later and makes you want to puke all night long. No more tomato soup for you! Ever!


Day 3: Another protein shake for lunch. It's okay, because you know what's coming for dinner.

The first bite of real food is amazing. Tofu rocks.

And then, out of spite for traditional post-oral-surgery foods, you bake a blueberry browned-butter pound cake.

Day 4: You graduate to hummus for lunch. Your friend gives you rhubarb. Beautiful, firm, fresh-from-the-farm-stand rhubarb. So you grab some tiny organic strawberries and make this:

Which turns into this:

Your coworkers will have a field day tomorrow. And then maybe, just maybe, they'll all end up at the dentist's.

For the strawberry rhubarb cobbler, use the same cobbler dough as here, except bind a pound of chopped rhubarb and 6 ounces of strawberries with 1 1/2 tsp of cornstarch and 1/2 cup of sugar. I topped mine with crunchy Turbinado sugar.