Current free thing that people will send you: a sample of True Lemon, Lime and Orange if you go to http://www.truelemon.com/sample.html. I have not yet tried True Orange, since I haven’t seen it, but I’ve used True Lemon in my water and been favourably impressed, and True lime, mixed with a little pepper, is actually really good if you’re wanting something fast in a fajita (chop up chicken and veggies, throw into a frying pan until they start releasing a little liquid, then sprinkle the pepper and lime over them and finish cooking them. Then pile them in with salsa and sour cream into said fajita wrap).

Killjoy cooking with the Dungeons and Dragons crowd

I have read the new Better Joy Cookbook and I am devastated to my very core. Their macaroni and cheese recipe, the very macaroni and cheese I’ve been making since I was in college, has been ravaged and disfigured and left bleeding on the page. Where once it contained only cheddar cheese, now the recipe calls for a mix of cheddar and Colby. It may contain macaroni, and it may contain cheese, but it is not macaroni and cheese. This is a slap in the face and a knife in the gut. You have lost me, Better Joy Cookbook. I would bid you goodbye, but I wish you nothing but the pain and rage you have delivered unto me.

1. Diet Coke has an expiration date for freshness or something.

2. It’s usually about a year after it was packaged.

3. Within about a month before the expiration date hits, I can in fact taste the change. It’s not bad, just different.

4. About a month after the expiration date hits, it’s noticeable enough that I can’t actually drink it anymore.

5. I am not a supertaster or anything. I just know Diet Coke really well (ok, I can also often identify the flower a honey is made from, but that was culturing the palate, like with wine, and anyone else who wanted to do it could learn).

waybetter than not being your bitch, bitch.

Aside from a couple of Jonathan Coulton shirts (a Code Monkey one and a Welcome to Beautiful Skull Crusher Mountain one), I have no shirts that declare any of my fandoms. I never wear the Code Monkey shirt, and the Skullcrusher one is actually just so hip it doesn’t look fannish.

That said, I need this shirt. Seriously. Until I have it, this’ll be all I want for Christmas.

It’s nearly time for one of my favorite annual events, one which involves camping and the making of ice cream using liquid nitrogen. I have a few stock annual flavors of ice cream and sorbet, but I also like to make one or two experimental flavors per year.

Past experimental ice creams and sorbets at this event have included Old Bay Spice, ceviche, liver, and gorgonzola-prosciutto-balsamic fig. As for me, well, I prefer my ice cream less…challenging. Still, I do like unusual flavors, and some of my past such efforts have included avocado-rum and Chinese 5-spice ice creams and roasted orange pepper and basil-mint-ginger sorbets.

Tonight I am in the middle of freezing my experimental batch of butternut squash and amaretti cookie ice cream, and so far I have to say that I think it is successful. I found a recipe for butternut-rum ice cream online, left out the rum, and just about doubled the amount of squash it called for, then added crushed amaretti at the time of freezing. The mix is extremely thick and rich and really needs thorough chilling prior to the freezing process.

The mix tastes very sweet even with all the extra squash, but once frozen it tastes less like “OMG SWEET” and the butternut flavor really comes through. The bits of crushed amaretti provide nice little nuggets of cinnamon-almond flavor. It’s kind of like butternut ravioli in ice cream form. I am pleased. When I make it for the event, I will keep the extra squash and add either more amaretti or perhaps a touch of almond extract or amaretto liqueur. Mo’ flavor = mo’ better!