avablog » Meals

Moment of cuteness

map — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:22:13 +0000

G.G. is in town this week to spend some time with Ava, who has a week off camp. Yesterday, the two of them put together a nice picnic lunch and met L and me in the park next to our office, where we dined on sandwiches, chips and fruit under a cloudy sky. It was very nice. Because I can’t just live in the moment without taking a photo to commemorate each second, I snapped a quickie of the girls.

L, of course, thinks she doesn’t look good here. If this is “not looking good,” I don’t think I could deal with good looking. I mean, really. WTF?

Gutted

map — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:23:14 +0000

I tend not to stand on tradition. No set way of doing anything is so hallowed in my world that I won’t abandon it in a heartbeat if it’ll make my life easier. And I tend to think of myself as unsentimental (ask my wife). Still, I was looking forward to hosting a Thanksgiving meal at our place this weekend for my family, even if most of the food was coming from Hy Vee.

My dad’s mother and father (but mostly his mother) used to work pretty hard every year to put on an elaborate Thanksgiving meal featuring a lot of food. And the whole family would be there, real Norman Rockwell stuff. But I ain’t all about that. You won’t catch me spending hours in the kitchen before and after a meal that lasts 37 minutes. As I walked up to the deli counter at one of the 15 Hy Vee locations in my town today at lunch, I was feeling pretty good about being able to hold on to the tradition of a Thanksgiving meal while dispensing with all that bothersome cooking.

The attendant I spoke with was suitably friendly and accommodating while fielding my questions about amounts of turkey and dressing and mashed-potato-to-gravy ratios, but I was unprepared for the mind scrambler she was about to lay on me. Turns out Hy Vee offers an entire Thanksgiving meal pre-packaged. Nothing less than warm-and-serve portions of dressing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and gravy. As I ran my fingers over the front of a gorgeously-labeled container of corn bread dressing, I could feel the memory of my grandmother at the stove in her apron slipping further from my mind. The label was nowhere near as beautiful as my memory of the tremendous portions of grandma’s dressing I’d heap on my plate to the exclusion of every other dinner item. But I’ll be thinking about grandma when we sit down to eat this Saturday afternoon, as I always do this time of year, and I’ll hope that Richard Dawkins is right about my grandmother not looking down at me from on high with a disapproving frown.

Wanted to post this before lunch

map — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:54:22 +0000

“Interesting” story today in the WSJ about the consequences of broad spectrum antibiotic use. My favorite bit? I’m so glad you asked.

He added some healthy mice who hadn’t been treated with antibiotics to live with those that had been treated. Mice practice coprophagia—which means they eat each other’s feces.

Compared with mice that didn’t have a healthy cagemate added, the diversity of the gut microbial community in the mice that ingested normal feces was restored to normal.

That seems to echo findings of a retrospective study on humans in 2003. The study looked at 18 patients over a nine-year period who had recurrent C. diff and who had stool transplants performed.

In this case, doctors took stool from a person close to the patient, such as a spouse, and inserted it through a tube into the patient’s nose and from there to the stomach.

The study found 15 patients had no more recurrences. Two patients died of unrelated illnesses and one patient had a single recurrence of C. diff after the transplant.

Moment of [video] cuteness

map — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:01:22 +0000

Out typical Sunday lately usually involves a trip — ordinarily on foot — to Lou Henri for breakfast. Their huevos diablo is really everything a man could want in a breakfast, particularly when ordered with a side of their insanely golden hash browns and a cup of joe. Ava orders the Mickey cakes, seen here:

You ask, I answer

map — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:03:02 +0000

“But Mark,” I hear you saying, “If that’s not the way to sell hamburgers, just how does one go about it?” Praise Jeebus, I’m glad you asked. Really. FYI: This is what Hardee’s does to vegetarians: