zen.org Communal Weblog

Linked from Slashdot, a great article on what is encryption?

Most people reading this will know that our son, P, has food allergies. Not severe, thank heavens, but present and uncomfortable for him. Once he was diagnosed, his doc said that we had to be incredibly strict about what he eats, and that he has a good chance of outgrowing the allergies. What we had to do was be vigilant about what he eats. No dairy of any type, eggs, tomatoes, strawberries, shellfish or nuts. Til he’s 3. Which meant for the next 17 months. I’m still nursing him (not too often, we’re at about 2x a day), so that means I’m off all that too. And if that’s the case, then B might as well be off it. So we try to not have anything in the house that would make him break out.

It’s much easier to do here (Ireland) than when we are in the States. The ingredients on ready made foods here look something like this:

Contains: Wheat flour, sugar, whole egg, skimmed milk powder, natural flavourings, E122, E723

Where in the States, a package of bread has more chemical names than everything I learned in chemistry class put together.

So we’ve learned how to read food labels really well. It’s interesting, you learn a lot from those labels and a bit of research.

We don’t really do much takeout anymore (tomato and dairy avoidance means no pizza, egg and nuts mean no Chinese, tomato and dairy also means no Indian, shellfish means….). The chipper around the corner does us well, once a week when we’re just freaking tired and don’t want to think anymore.

Most of our food is homecooked. And it’s pretty good. I’ve always liked cookbooks, I read them like regular books. So we’re learning how to adapt recipes using soymilk, Rice Dream rice milk, egg replacer and fake butter (as I call it. Most margarines still have dairy in them, we’ve found in Ireland that Pure doesn’t and is deeeelish for both spreading and cooking). Most recipes have turned out okay. Some we haven’t even tried yet. Toad In The Hole (sausages in mini Yorkshire puddings) even works decently. Any recipe that uses more than 2 eggs is out tho, the replacer doesn’t work for that.

Funniest thing we’ve found: Boland’s Custard Cream Biscuits don’t have custard or cream. And generic Double Stuf Oreos don’t have any dairy in them.

Adam Curry put an audio comment I did for him into the DSC yesterday. Wheee 🙂 Meant to create our first podcast last night, but the fates were against us. Today, hopefully, since we don’t have anything pressing today. Other than grocery shopping. Urk.

The Accidental Cook

I think I’ve gotten the audio blog stuff to work. Now I just have to figure out how to post it for those of you interested in listening to it. Probably not many people, since I haven’t given out the URL of this yet.

Basically, I used the Engadget way of doing things. Pretty easy, overall. One small hiccup in the import and convert in iTunes…I couldn’t change the bit rate and the sample rate to make the comp happy. So I blew off that part, and it sounded better. But then it compressed down to 1.4M. I don’t know if that’s big or not, for about….44 seconds of audio? I guess I need to know what the hell I’m going to talk about before I start it…make every bit count .

I’m getting addicted to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. (Hmmm…just hit a bug. When using WordPress to create the above link, the link itself was under the parameters of the typing window…so it jumped back to the top of the entry.) Anyway, Adam’s funny, and geeky, and all that I look for in a man. Eerrrrrrr…all that I look for in a podcast. Yeah, that’s it. Any guy who will sit there and say “boooiiiiinnnggggggg” for 50,000 people…what a freak. In a good way. I think he’s like Howard Stern used to be when I was 10 and listened to him on AM radio in New York. So Adam’s influenced me enough to try podcasting. And I’m gonna do a cooking show. Somehow. Maybe I can do a videoblog, with separate audio if you need to watch. Or just rant about being a mom. But who the hell would listen to that? Ah, well, *you’re* reading this, so you’re not objective.

So I’m still trying to figure out how this blog is different from the LiveJournal blog. I guess it’s just the overall difference of not having the little community. But it’s good, cause I gotta learn to do things on my own, right? RIGHT?! 🙂

B and I are listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, which is his podcast. I love podcasts, they’re great. I don’t seem to have time to listen to the ones that I’m really into tho. But Adam’s is fun.

Adam just said something about plastic knives and forks on the airplane. It is stupid, considering that a lot of the time the first class does crystal glasses. Which would be a bit more dangerous than a metal FORK.

I’m going through some mini hell trying to make my phone be able to connect to my vodafone email and download it to my mobile. It shouldn’t be hard, right? Wrong. I keep getting SSL connection failed, no matter what I do. Of course, trying to log into my email over their per-minute charge wap interface gets me closer (at least there I’m asked for user id and pw). They don’t really make it clear which user id and pw you should use tho. I hate that. So I’m tryin all these different combos to make it work. Thankfully, I think I got a decent guy on the help line…who just told me we have to go to the shop to have them test my (2 week old) SIM card. Argh.

Argh! I wrote an entry, and it ATE it!! I should know better than to change to another category when I’m in the middle of something, but still. Shoot.

I was talking about the kick butt food scientist Shirley Corriher. Just found out that her agents are the same agents my parents have!! Whoo hoo!! And she has a new book coming out sometime called Bakewise, to add to Cookwise.

Crap. I just remembered I have cinnamon roll dough in the bread machine!! ACK!