Weblog

I lost a fair bit of weight recently, due in part to intense exercise, but the last 10 pounds mainly to a careful diet. The main rules of this diet were limit carbohydrates after the morning meal, get lots of protein and vegetables, minimize fat, and eliminate refined sugar. This is a reducing diet, not a maintentance diet, meaning I don't have to live the rest of my life so ascetically, but did need to do so for a few months. Here are some tricks I collected to get me through things.

I've been experimenting with how to make chocolate covered cherries for a couple years now. I'm getting better at it, but still get a lot of them leaking the juice from inside. I thought I'd write about what I've learned to date, to record what I've learned and for the benefit of anybody else interested in the topic. I should say that I have no training in chocolate work, so some of my mistakes may seem amateurish - they are. But, I believe amateurs should be able to do cool things and I've tried to learn how to do it with an eye to how a hobbyist would go about it.

Every year at the holidays I like to make a gingerbread house. There's something about creating art with food that's more interesting than inedible art - the charm of it, the magic of how the physical properties of the food make it even possible. Because it's interesting, I'm able to do it (in general I'm not too good at crafts).

October 15, 2007

This is a loosely organized collection of things I wrote to various people when my cat Kofi died. I haven't tried to organize this into a coherent narrative, and probably won't. I just wanted to keep a record of what I was feeling at the time.