I'm able to have tomatoes, cautiously and selectively, now! Sweet cherry tomatoes are about it, salted. This is more than previous, and pleases me rather a lot. I have been having them with enough open face broiled grilled cheese that we ran out of cheddar yesterday, at least if we don't want to break into the strategic sharp reserve.

Yesterday and Tuesday was about four hours of Zoom, half of which was with med students. They need practice interacting with patients, and Belovedest's alma mater was recruiting people with specific categories of gender identity to play a particular Standard Patient. That was complicated and detailed and a good workout for my acting skills. I got to observe for one session, and got to act for the next one. My call center skills in controlling the conversation got taken out and dusted off too, and the students were properly concerned about the easter egg in my particular portrayal, as well as catching the thing they were meant to in the standard part of the standard case. (We were allowed to bring our own medical history. I chose to be 36 again, pre-yeeterus.)

Nobody in my session did any misgendering, but my bottom line advice for all the students in the plenary sessions was about being aware of interaction with other medical staff and the medical record, and that the time you really need to remember pronouns is talking to other staff about the patient. Which turned out to be relevant. Sadly.

It was really fun and I'm open to doing it again.

(this started life as a comment on Captain Awkward, but may have gone to moderation because I included a link. However, I felt I should keep a copy here too...)

- Ask for both dietary requirements/restrictions and preferences. You can't always please everybody, but asking for preferences as well increases the odds that you'll be able to delight them on purpose.
- Asking for preferences does mean that the guy who likes to eat nearly an entire cow as rare as possible will tell you about it. You will also hear from people who wouldn't have otherwise felt comfortable sharing their strong aversions, non-life-threatening medical issues, and other awkward food stuff. Those are the people you're asking this question to make life easier for.
- Take people at their word. Don't badger them for details. If you need to ask clarifying questions, be respectful. "Can't you just pick them out" is not respectful.
- Don't take any requirement, restriction, or preference personally.
- Ask for dietary requirements/preferences ahead of time and keep them on file, so if there's a last-minute thing you can order with reasonable confidence.
- Ask for dietary requirements/preferences fairly shortly before finalizing each order, with a deadline, so people know when they have to get their information to you.
- Cross-check and update your file every time someone gives you new information. Stuff changes all the time -- new diagnosis, new medicine interaction, change in tastes, burned out on that thing after having it for 5 straight years in grad school.
- Treat the dietary requirements/preferences as somewhat confidential information unless you learn otherwise.
- Prepare a high-level summary of your team's dietary needs that you can give to catering. This protects your team's privacy (the catering crew doesn't generally need to know by name who goes with what preference) and makes things easier on the caterers who honestly probably don't care as long as nobody's getting something they shouldn't have. For example: group of 40, 30% vegetarian, 3 gluten-free omnivores, 1 lactose-intolerant omnivore, 2 shellfish allergies, 1 tree nut allergy (peanuts ok).
- Not everyone is going to want to eat the same thing. That's OK. Not everyone has to eat the same thing! If the group is large enough, you can order smaller amounts of a larger variety of things.
- Be on the alert for intersecting requirements. If the same person is dairy intolerant and gluten intolerant, it does them no good if all the gluten-free dishes have dairy and all the dairy-free dishes have gluten. The plight of the mushroom-allergic vegan is a sad one. I address this with a spreadsheet and a lot of swearing.
- Be on the alert for requirements that can be collapsed together. The main dish which will serve the uncomplicated vegan will also serve the person with lactose intolerance who can't have pork. I also address this with the spreadsheet.
- My spreadsheet is a matrix of people going down, and dietary restrictions going across. I like conditional formatting that highlights red and green to help me visualize. I also have a separate text document with their original phrasing because sometimes that's important. (Sometimes this is when I find I need to ask clarifying questions, such as if someone said "vegan, nut allergy" and the caterer is proposing coconut in the vegan stir-fry, does that nut allergy include coconut?)
- I assume that at least another 10% of people will like the look of the vegetarian entree than who are vegetarian as a restriction. When my group is 20% vegetarian I order for 30% vegetarian.
- Throw yourself on the caterer's mercy if that's a practical option. I tend to give them the restrictions summary and order "chef's special" which results in cost-effective, seasonal dishes which meet the requirements and surprise my team who are used to cafeteria food (plus) although it's a surprise what they're going to be (minus).
- Demand ingredients labels as a matter of course, with special attention for the dietary requirements in your summary. The mashed potatoes might be: Potatoes, olive oil, salt. VEGAN, GLUTEN-FREE
- My workplace cafeteria is so fucking sick of hearing "the stir fry has bell peppers and the menu doesn't say that it had bell peppers in it", but someday the fuckers will learn that they've got to list all their nightshades.
- Prepare a contingency plan for what to do if the catering falls through or somebody can't eat what's there.
- The best $REQUIREMENT-compliant dishes are not the ones that have a substandard substitution for the forbidden ingredient, but ones which were never intended to have any in the first place.
- I have been using http://captainawkward.com/2013/05/15/479-trying-to-be-more-social-when-you-have-serious-dietary-restrictions/#comment-53962 as a guideline on diversifying the menu for a while.

( Reasonably tasty food, badly behaved equipment. )

Concert was good, though. Am suddenly and madly in audience-to-performer love with Alexander James Adams; did not actually buy the duet-with-Heather Alexander album, but it is on my List. "He of the Sidhe" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR6Dl3LoxJU (which was presented without the same introduction, but the lyrics did enough with the context) did not quite make the tears spill over, but it was close. "Creature" ... ohhhh yeah. SEX IN BOOTS. Also the Beltane fire song. <3

1:53 AM 2/27/2010
It did me good to hear some good old-fashioned pagan music. My life needs more of that.

2:01 AM 2/27/2010
Hilariously, the Tantus Vamp came up in pre-song patter for a werewolf song.

Drew a Ravens In The Library sketch, because my mind very clearly saw all the havoc.

2:11 AM 2/27/2010
I suddenly find myself in need of a userpic from the cover of The Rowan, for use regarding psychic powers, the relevant era of my life, and that particular avenue of fashion choice.

8:14 AM 2/27/2010
My cellphone makes a cute little chime when unplugged or plugged in. So very charming to hear it when I'm on the other side of the room. (Hi, California unstable power. Nice to meet you.)

I have an abundance of cat-5. In the absence of the wirelessness of my cablemodem/wireless router behaving properly this morning, I have broken out some of it.

8:18 AM 2/27/2010
If someone has said a hilarious but slightly awkward turn of phrase to me once, I may wrap my brain's tentacles around it and never let it go. I list "imperfect English" as an interest for a reason. It is an interest, and not just a like: sometimes the crazy things people say make me run and hide, but nevertheless I can often figure out what was trying to be conveyed. My brain spins on "why on Earth" and "what the fuck".

( Read more... )

2:02 AM 2/28/2010

I have a bad habit of answering questions of the form "How did X happen?", "How do you do X?" or "How did it get to be X?" with "Carefully." -- even when this makes absolutely no sense.

Makes sense:
"How do you get an iguana into your carry-on baggage, anyway?"
"Carefully."

Does not make sense:
"How did it get to be 2 in the morning?"
"Carefully."

This does not stop me from thinking it is hilarious.

3:13 AM 2/28/2010
"...WEARING CLOTHES, OKAY?" Depression is hard. Disability is hard. Other assorted things can be hard. Sometimes, I'M WEARING CLOTHES, OKAY!? is what one has got. They are clothes. My face may not look like I want to talk to humans, I may have no lipstick and my Impossible Hair may have decided to colonize its immediate surroundings, but I'M WEARING CLOTHES. WHAT THE HELL ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO ASK FOR. (Shorthand between me and MissKat for those scenarios where, well. WEARING CLOTHES.) Useful for one's own self, and one's expectations of others. ("Yes, he has no sense of style and his sweatpants are backwards, BUT HE IS WEARING CLOTHES, OKAY?")

9:58 AM 2/28/2010
(from a comment elsejournal, a realization:) A worldview with "X is the Right Thing and cannot be wrong, and if signs of damage are present and correlated with X, well, that means we are just not doing X enough/hard enough/long enough" is pathological. One must at least, if X is correlated with damage, examine the premise that perhaps X is the wrong thing, or being applied incorrectly, in this particular case, even if that premise is later rejected. (Inhaling the cough syrup does not help, in other words, and g-d help you if you have an allergy.)

5:58 PM 2/28/2010
Best friend was at D&D game when I called earlier, and apparently had not taken over the world with a zombie army, or some such thing. The peanut gallery (the other gamers) had commentary, in the form of "Today! He hasn't done that *today*!" Ahh, my dear sweet fiendishly-scheming best friend. :D

( Juicy mediumish steak. )

(from theferrett's What is the best cake you've ever had? post, expanded somewhat)

Mama made almost all our cakes, from scratch. I wasn't even particularly aware that they sold cake mixes until much later. For the longest time, the traditional birthday cake was golden layer cake with white buttercream frosting, and/or whipped cream, and strawberries, until I expressed a preference for chocolate. Then it became chocolate cake (from the recipe on the back of the Hershey's cocoa powder box) with chocolate buttercream frosting.

Mama's relationship with baking cakes was complex. They were always delicious, but sometimes they fell apart. There were superstitions about how to get a cake to come out right, including "It's just a home cake," said in the cake's presence before turning it out of the pan, as a home cake was almost always perfect, and a cake to take somewhere else often came out with craters. (One frosted them back together, put the nicest layer on top, and took it anyway.)

For one of the birthdays of my teenage years (this may have been 1996), Mama had the standard two-layer chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream icing. As a joke, she had frosted it with white buttercream chicken tracks and a Hershey's kiss, because we had chickens (the batch of four Egyptian Fayoumi, teenaged) in the bathroom at the time.

We had been out all day at Suzuki Institute, and came home to see that the entryway was *trashed*, with chicken droppings all over, and the chickens sitting innocently in their box in the bathroom, with the netting pushed to the side. Who, them?

The wreckage proved to be mostly confined to the square of light from the bathroom door and a bit up the stairs. The cake was untouched, and was now doubly hilarious.

Another excellent cake was the Enterprise. It was huge, and kind of weird-shaped, and lumpy, and blueish where it should have been grey, but it was nonetheless awesome. My virtual aunt made it, although for whose event I can't recall anymore.

Mama made the wedding cake for my virtual uncle and his (now ex) wife. It was some lovely golden cake with wild Alaskan cranberries in it, the sour kind that leave you spoiled for any domestic cranberries ever, with cream cheese frosting and little garnishes of fresh cranberries. I decided then and there that screw bakery cakes, I wanted this at my own wedding.

Then there was The Year of the Two Birthday Cakes (2005, in point of fact).

Grandma was going to the nursing home, so we were cleaning out the ancestral home. This was around the same time as my birthday, and my family decided that a late celebration was in order. I went out with Dawn for breakfast the day that the celebration was planned, and while we were out, I decided I might as well pick up a cake.

Now, Guide Dog Aunt is notorious about health food fads and general clean living, so I decided that I'd go for as healthy as possible a cake, and picked a gorgeous tart covered with fresh fruit (and glistening with sugar syrup, as it turned out). We returned, cake borne proudly, just as my aunt returned, proudly bearing a swanky bakery box.

We looked at each other, looked at our own parcels, and busted up laughing, then compared cakes. She'd got something that looked truly decadent, with a very smoothly frosted chocolate top with a chocolate fan garnish, and sides that had been browned in a checkerboard pattern. She'd been thinking of my tastes while I was thinking of hers.

We cut into both cakes that evening, and we had enough people that it was good we had as much cake as we did. My tart turned out to be filled with gooey and delicious custard, and her expensive fancy cake turned out to be dry and disappointing aside from the lovely chocolatey bits.

Day 1

I had a (small) slice of the Bacon Explosion with lunch today: on top of a hamburger. It's the same general principle as bacon on a hamburger, just with both bacon and sausage. Tasty!

My cousin is making pizza tonight, and has laid claim to the rest of the Bacon Explosion for pizza toppings. I expect this will be delicious.

I gave my Bacon Explosion Report to the guy in the meat department. It was actually his boss's bright idea, as his boss saw it on the internet and immediately had to try it. We were the only ones to have bought it so far. There's one lonely Bacon Explosion in the meat case still. androshd, it may have your name on it. ♥

Bacon Explosion at

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Tuesday, 0136: Feeling in-general much better.
• Tuesday, 0955: I turned up the brightness on poor Thalia the laptop here, and SUDDENLY I CAN SEE AGAIN!! (Weirdly backlit living room is weirdly backlit.)
• Tuesday, 1002: ... the internet gave me homework.
• Tuesday, 1004: @Celtic_Maenad Yeah: sea-kittens = "has lost all touch with reality"; this = "and has started to dig"
• Tuesday, 1044: What went wrong in Australia? Nature is a fucking bitch in Australia. http://blamebrampton.livejournal.com/70890.html
( read the other 29 )

Follow me on Twitter.

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2008/03/candied_bacon_i_1.html

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2007/07/making_ice_crea_1.html


My cousin and I are toying with the idea of making bacon ice cream. Possible limiting factors include:

My aunt will not be all about that
There is no ice-cream maker
There is not much room in the freezer
The original recipe my cousin was thinking of has vanished from the forum it was in
I have never made ice cream before as one of the cooks


However, there is bacon, we have recipes, and we are resourceful.

If bacon ice cream happens, there will be pictures, and since I suspect tupshin would take a dim view of these things happening in his jurisdiction without sharing in the bounties, we'd have to save some and schedule a visit to LJ Central.

• 08:00 @ursamajor My tomatoes hath a vine; they are thus not recalled; I recalled them to my memory. NOM NOM NOM. #
• 15:59 'k. I think I have identified the crazy fangirl, & by crazy I mean phrases plot wishes for already written book as demands ... to author ... #

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I experimented with tea last night. I got myself some tapioca balls on one of our shopping runs, and last night I boiled some up and put them in tea. My undermind wants them in chai. Nice sweet spiced milky chai with tapioca bits in. I got the straws, too.

Unfortunately, what I had last night was not spiced, and was only made milky with a healthy shot of "lite" whipped cream. It was still pretty good.

I have been fairly reliably informed that the boba is all mine, with no need to share.