Of Eggs and Milk

I was happily savouring one of my favourite crab dishes during dinner, making a mental note that I am lucky I'm not allergic to seafood when I almost choked on my food. I looked at the take-away container, I've gone through 80% of the entire dish!

I looked at my hubby and said: "Die! It's crab with salted egg!"

I wanted to stop, but Hubby says since more than half of the crab and eggs were already inside me, I might as well finish it up. So yeah, don't waste food, right? I continued eating and man, was that a good dinner or what.

30 minutes later, my stomach started bloating. There was a dull ache and flatulence followed shortly. *Bells rang inside me* "Allergic reaction!!! Egg protein, you stupid greedy dumbo!" Lucky for me, a little pill called 'Zrytec' worked right after I popped it in my mouth. What wasn't so great was I woke up in the middle of the night with a badly blocked nose, and yep, I sure know what the culprit was.

It's proving to be quite a challenge to 'cleanse' my diet. At the tail-end of another of my 'sinus/throat infection' suffering, I decided to seriously watch what I put in my mouth - i.e. start reading food labels. N the things I discovered, things which I have taken for granted included:

• Digestive biscuits - contains skimmed milk powder... bloody hell
• Corn bread - contains egg... why do you have to put eggs inside this, Gardenia?
• Teh - milk tea... f*** this is one thing I will miss!
• Katsu cutlets - the breaded, crunchy, fragrant layer contains egg white...damn
• 3-in-1 white coffee - in my case, I think coffee powder, sugar and water makes the more relevant equation of 3-in-1
• Fried carrot cake and Hokkien Mee - all cooked with eggs... sigh
• Egg noodles, thus it's going to be 'kuay teow' and 'bee hoon' for me from now onwards
• Indian Paneer - my favourite Indian cottage cheese dish which tastes heavenly with garlic naans
• Sushi -the obvious tamago and all those 'roe' sushi... sob, sob, why me? why me?
• the western soups which contains cream and milk except the bland-I-hate-vegetarian Minestrone soup

Having listed the above (and this is only the food list i came across this week), I also came across 2 articles on alternative calcium sources:

• Dark green leafy vegetables - yum... I'm thinking of sliced beef with kailan and spring onions.
• Fish with edible bones (e.g. Ikan bilis and sardines)
• Nuts
• Calcium-fortified cereal
• Soybean products - this I have to try liking more
• Tofu - ditto (another item under my 'bland' list)

Oh, and if you don't want to reverse your efforts in increasing your calcium intake, avoid carbonated drinks. The phosphoric acid inside is linked to weak bone density.