I decided to bake a chocolate cake a few days ago but turned out not to have all the ingredients; fortunately, I remembered one can buff up a lackluster chocolate batter with a bit of coffee.

Turns out using a bit of coffee doesn't just buff the cake, it buffs it more the more ingredients you substitute.

It is a bit tricky to balance a scoop of icecream on the rim of the mug though.

I recently started a recipe I'd seen somewhere, vaguely thinking I probably had the ingredients on hand, which is sometimes the case generally. Turns out I didn't. "No problem" said I, I'm an experienced home cook, I've read McGee, I'll just perform some substitutions.

Turns out I actually had almost none of the ingredients specified.

Why yes, the results sucked, why do you ask?

Banana bread is a U.S. standard way to get rid of overripe bananas. Since they sell them cheaply in large bunches, you often have that. My freezer has a whole supply of them now. Mostly they go in my morning smoothie but gluten-free banana bread recipes do exist if I get ambitious enough.

Day three of our parking lot resurfacing. I hope to retrieve my car from my friend's house tomorrow. The water main construction out in front of my building goes on all night to avoid shutting down traffic lanes during the day as the city violates its own night time noise ordinance. I checked the decibel level of the machine-hum in my bedroom and found it to be 40 to 50 Db, just at the top of the acceptable "don't try to sleep with this for too long, it's bad for your health." zone. Life goes on.

There’s also cherry cobbler (from the greenmarket) which is a bit disappointing, I have ice cream and chocolate sauce to fix that.

Their apple cake is great, so I had high hopes. Oh well.

Ship of Theseus

Exactly, @Kenny Chaffin—or potentially not ; )

We are usually buried in citrus - Eureka, Meyer's lemons, Bergamot, Mexican (key) and Persian limes.... (but no oranges.)

So we do a lot of lemon cakes. (Had a Meyer's based on just the other night for my un-birthday.)

India Joez and I collaborated on a bergamot cake - those things are super intense!!!! So we only used bergamot zest in the icing. It was still strong enough to send ears flying and make hair stand on end.

today is payday 🥳 and I have my eye on some gf goodies at Sprouts—last week's purchase of gf breaded chicken patties generated a $10 off $25 coupon for frozen stuff

gluten-free banana bread recipes do exist if I get ambitious enough

Pamela's baking mix is your friend 😁
it's one of the things the new overlords didn't ruin when they took over the company

we buy it in the shrinkflationed 4-lb bags that used to be 5-lb 😒

add chocolate chips or chunks (I get the latter from Aldi) and/or nuts, you won't be sorry

it also makes good blueberry muffins

I usually avoid having dessert when dining out. Yes, I know that you can have three bites of any dessert (typically! not if you have dietary issues!), so maybe sometimes I will share one.

This is not because I don't love dessert, or because I'm trying to save money, but just because I try to avoid sweets, and I can really savor them on the rare occasion. Thus, I have a rule: if they have peanut butter pie, I will have that for dessert. If not, I will most likely not have dessert.

After one particularly nice dining experience (orchestrated by Mrs. Dean for my birthday - that whole trip is just one wonderful anecdote after another!), the waitron was reeling off the list of desserts: ice cream, chocolate cake, creme brulet, Reese's mousse, rhubarb pie, ...

"Wait a minute", I said. "Back up a bit. What is Reese's mousse?" I was sure I already knew the answer.

"Sort of a peanut butter pie, made with..."

I interrupted. "One Reese's mousse for me!"

Is this time to recount my story about how we went to a seven-course all-dessert lunch - 14,000 calories (actually kilocalories - that's 14 million chemistry calories.)

14,000 kcalories is enough energy to boil water or launch a Big Mac to the moon. (Well, not that far, but maybe high enough to bother an airliner.)

When we had our first company and it was doing more than merely well, we held a party on the top of the Grand Arche in Paris. We bought 100 kilos from Maison du Chocolat - I just checked their current price: Price per kilo: $508.57/kg Yikes!!!!

Here in Santa Cruz, we have a fantastic chocolatier - Donnelly's. When we go into the shop my nose explodes. He makes all kinds of unusual mixtures, some of which are downright pepper-laden. But I think those special mixes are available only to those of us who can walk into the shop. (Which is right next to the best guitar and mandolin shop in the city.)

donnellychocolates.com/

@Jodi - I am seriously considering having another party at the house catered by India Joze. Last time we did he almost burned the house down with his giant wok (for squid). He and I created a bergamot cake - that was INTENSE!!.

Joe wears a belt from which hang at least two dozen knives. Amd he dances and twirls as he cooks - with the knives swinging outward like the blades in some Edgar Allen Poe nightmare.

His style is a mix of Indian, Middle Eastern, and Indonesian - and lots of squid.

He closed his quite famous restaurant because he felt that it was too expensive and served only the upper classes. So he opened a hole-in-the-wall place - and much was not on the printed menu, but was available, as were belly dancers.

One of my favorites was a variation on the "24 blackbirds baked in a pie" nursery rhyme. It was, I think, quail, in a pastry. I also remember a beef with apricots creation. (I don't eat eggs, so a goodly part of his menu is off limits to me.)

Santa Cruz kinda partially started the California Cuisine movement way back in the 1970s - Alice Waters came from here. (I used to go to Rossolinni's Other Place in Seattle, another of the sources of that food movement. But, too, has gone away.)

indiajoze.com/

got my sprouts goodies—had mini cheesecake for breakfast today—all 3 food groups, fat protein & sugar 😁

super pissed off about some expectations that no one bothered to tell me about

thanks for reminding me why I make do with the pension instead of working

in a Persian restaurant I discovered the cuisine is full of flavourful, goes very well together type of combinations

we used to live near a Persian buffet... we no longer live there, and it's no longer a buffet (i.e. easy to try different things), covid pretty much put the end to that... I'm glad we got to experience the glory days

goodie update: one of the things acquired from Sprouts was a gf cake I'd been wanting to try... it was marked down

let's just say I'm glad I didn't pay full price 😐

a different variety than common pepper/spearmint

cilantro is also a form of mint IIRC?

What weight loss? Wegovy not working

all the side effects, but no results? woof 😬

@jodi - There is an Afghan restaurant here in Santa Cruz that makes a wonderful chicken with pomegranate. Afghanistan is right next to Iran/Persia.

By-the-way, I meant Moroccan Mint.

specialtyproduce.com/produce/M…

@jodi - There is an Afghan restaurant here in Santa Cruz that makes a wonderful chicken with pomegranate. Afghanistan is right next to Iran/Persia.

By-the-way, I meant Moroccan Mint.

specialtyproduce.com/produce/M…

@jodi - There is an Afghan restaurant here in Santa Cruz that makes a wonderful chicken with pomegranate. Afghanistan is right next to Iran/Persia.

By-the-way, I meant Moroccan Mint.

specialtyproduce.com/produce/M…

I was with some friends in a coffeeshop (yes, that kind) in Amsterdam once, and the proprietor offered some mint tea, really praising it. I opted for another cappuccino (which would surprise nobody who knows me). But I sure did regret it. When the tea came out, the surface of the cups was a film of mint oil from the leaves, or whatever water-insoluble flavor stuff was in the mint leaves.

Since then, this is how I make mint tea: grow lots of mint in containers far from any soil in the ground, take handfuls of fresh mint leaves and stuff them into a cup until you can't cram any more in, pour boiling water over that until it reaches the top. Wait a few minutes. I usually dig the leaves out with a fork or slotted spoon or something, but that's not strictly necessary.

When I was living in Germany, my balcony was overrun with mint. For some reason, now that I've been back, I haven't gotten my mint shit (or, really, any shit) together. Gotta look into that.

I prefer vegetable meals. But, I often can't go to vegetarian/vegan restaurants because they frequently go heavy on the capsicum, peppers, chillies, and paprika spices (all part of the same family of plants). These are seriously bad for me.

Also, I just like vegetables. I don't need stuff added.

Sometimes I complain at these places, "Don't you even like vegetables? If so, then why do you need to smother them in so many other things that you can't taste them?!"

Just give me a carrot to gnaw on Bugs Bunny style! ❤

grow lots of mint in containers far from any soil in the ground

I may have mentioned this, but our first house had mint in the ground

ye. gods.

we built a raised garden bed over top of it... didn't help

come to think of it, the concrete front porch didn't slow it down a whole lot either

@Karl Auerbach

When we had our first company and it was doing more than merely well, we held a party on the top of the Grand Arche in Paris.

Now that's classy! Definitely a good way to build special memories during one's career.

@Richard We had several really great party locations - we had the Air and Space museum on the DC Mall for a night, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Howard Hughes Penthouse in Las Vegas, white water rafting in western Pennsylvania - and also one blowout party that lasted three days at my house. (In an earlier life, the company I worked for would rent Disneyland for an evening every year in late September.)

(I also remember that our typical evening bar bills in Tokyo greatly exceeded $10K.)

That was during the era when we all were doing start-ups, some going public, others getting acquired, and money kinda flowed like water. I remember one ski trip to Whistler, (British Columbia); some folks in our party were founders of a company that was doing its "going public" thing while we were on the tip - the hotel's poor fax machine nearly burned out. I remember seriously considering going in with a friend to buy a C130 (we didn't) or the Lost Boy's House here in Santa Cruz (we didn't - and last time I saw it it was turning into a ruin.)

What much of that experience taught me was that making a lot of money is at least, and possibly more, good luck than it is talent or hard work. My wife and I haven't done badly, but we are still "middle class". I have turned down at least one, perhaps more, opportunities that probably would have put me into that class of people we love to hate, the $billionaires. Oh well.

@Karl Auerbach I don't love to hate billionaires. Coping with hate is destroying me inside and out. My liver says 'Hi' BTW. ;P

If deeply mentally ill, drug addicted, child raping, fascist billionaires wouldn't stick their faces into our peaceful productive lives, I'd go back to my default indifference. I don't care about billionaires, their funny money, and their personality defects. As long as me and mine can have enough plus a few treats and luxuries I'm good.

If billionaires operating under the principals of noblesse oblige were willing to wage merciless war against the aforementioned write-offs of humanity to maintain peace, productivity, and order my opinion would definitely improve.