Harvesting and hives

I'm back inside this morning after a half-hour of checking out the garden and harvesting a half-gallon of this and that. We're in for four (and I hope the final) hot days, so I won't be doing much out there until Friday. Got the lawn mowed on Saturday and canned yesterday while it rained.

Good news first. I'm making headway on canning. Here's most of what I have so far, less what I've given away:

That's (naming from the back) tomato sauce, tomatoes (lots of yellow ones), bread and butter pickles, dill pickles, and ground cherry jam (or, as it didn't set terribly well, ground cherry syrup), Tomorrow I'll can some chow-chow, a sweet relish, with mixed veg: cucumbers, yellow squash, onions, peppers, and green tomatoes of a type I don't like when they are ripe (so this is a good use of them). I'll use up my half-pint canning jars on those. (I should have bought more pint canning jars! -- for a single person, that's a more reasonable size than quarts.)

I believe that will be the last of my canning, though. A lot of what's yet to ripen is "root cellar" storage. I don't heat my living room in winter, so it's the perfect root cellar for winter squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. The last of the tomatoes, I'll chop and put in zippered freezer bags for use in soup and chili.

And now the bad news. I've eaten so many of some vegetable or other that I developed an allergic reaction to it. At first, around Aug 10, it began as itching on my scalp (I thought for a while I'd grown allergic to my shampoo, but that wasn't the problem.) Then I got bunches of hives, and I'd often wake up around 1:00, itching like mad:

But I love my vegetables, and they're all ready for harvest, so I kept eating them. I was eating little meat, as I had so many other great dishes based around veg to eat, many with cheese as the protein. In no way was I trying to become a vegetarian, but I was eating fresh wholesome veg while I had it.

Then after four weeks, a few days ago I had not only hives but a swollen chin and lips. I figured I was one more dose of whatever away from being in the ER with anaphylactic shock, so I'm now on an elimination diet. NO VEG AT ALL. Just bread (which I hadn't had much of, so I knew wasn't the allergen), rice, and chicken. Gah. BORing. A few more days of that, and then I can try re-introducing first cheese and then the veg, a new one every three days, until I find the culprit. The possibilities are:

• Tomatoes. NO NO NO NO NO! I love tomatoes. I love tomato sauce. No more BLTs ever? Expect me to become seriously depressed if this is the one.
• Cucumbers. I like them but I could live without.
• Bell peppers. Doubtful--few are ripe yet, so I haven't had many. I love ripe bell peppers, and I'd hate to lose them, but I honestly don't think they're the one.
• Squash. Also doubtful, as I don't believe that I had any when this all began. I do now--I have loads!--but while I'd be happy to eliminate this food from my menu, I don't think it's the one.
• Eggplant. This is what I'm hoping for. For one thing, I've never eaten this much eggplant. I've had it, once a year as ratatouille, maybe every other year of my life for the past 30 years. But this year, for six weeks, I've been having it probably four meals per week. I could easily give this up, so I'm crossing my fingers that this is the problem veg. Eggplant doesn't particularly taste like anything--it just absorbs the flavors around it--so it's not something I even could miss a whole lot.
• A combination: Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes: those are all nightshades. It could be that I'm ODing on nightshades, or on one of the components in all of them added up. Nicotine, for instance, is in all those. Perhaps I've been taking in toxic levels of it. I might be able to eat some of those things, but not 2-3 times a day in big servings, as I have been doing this past month.

I'll probably have this mystery solved in a few weeks, and I'm hoping the solution doesn't make me cry. It might.

And yes, I appreciate the irony of obeying the "vegetables are healthy, so eat a lot of them!" instruction and ending up with occasional diarrhea (which high-fiber foods like kidney beans also give me) and now with hives. (Everything I've named we call a vegetable, but botanically they are all fruit.) Apparently, vegetables aren't THAT healthy. At least not as the primary basis for a diet, and not for me.

Sigh.