Empirical testing and salt

I have come to the conclusion that salt poured into the water before the pasta is boiled does a lot more for the taste of the food than salt poured on top of the food when it is ready. I decided to try to cut down on my salt, and one way of doing this was to skip the pre-salting of my food. This culinary experiment resulted in a tasteless disaster. Having gone without pre-salted food for about a month, and then accidentally switching back the other day, I can proclaim that I have seen the light, and it is salt in the pot before the pasta goes in!
You would think that putting the salt on the surface of the food instead of infusing it into the food would taste more, since your taste buds would touch the surface of the food more than the inside, but apparently that is not the case. Chips and cookies, for instance, have stuff on the outside that will hit your tongue first and trick you in to believing that the entire cookie or chip tastes the way the outside tastes. Things like cookies would be even more unhealthy if they tasted as delicious all the way through.

Salt is delicious, and so is sugar. I can imagine very few things in the world I would be less likely to give up.

Rene's party Shop

There's a tea that I really like. It's from twinings and it's called Apple, Cinnamon & Raisin (can't for the life of me find an English-language site with the correct picture). It's available in any store in Sweden, and I had really gotten used to drinking it (there are some other, more posh, teas from twinings that I like, but whose names I can't seem to remember, since they don't exist here). The problem is that the food stores here don't carry it. All they carry is their store-brand muck they try to pass off as tea. Now, I'm not saying I'm some kind of connaisseur (hell, I even had to ask my girlfriend, who among other wonderful things, speaks fluent french, how to spell it), since I tend to not like the more advanced teas, but out of the normal selection, I know what I like.
I looked over every shop in the Enschede area, but my search was fruitless. I was on the verge of giving up (and ordering it from home) when I stumbled upon Rene's party Shop in my local shopping mall (glorified collection of food and pet stores). Since I found it there I drop by approximately monthly to purchase some more. I thought I was just another customer, but when I went in there today, a man who I can only assume is Rene him self says to me something like "cinnamon and apple again, that's a good tea". Not only id he remember that I'm not dutch, but he remembers what I come in there and buy. We've maybe exchanged 15 words during all the times I've come there, so I was surprised to say the least.
We get to talking and it turns out that Rene has had his party shop in the Deppenbroek winkelcentrum for the last 30 years, "since I was 21" he proclaims.
He tells me (brags) about his son who also happens to be in computer science (which he discovered after tiring of being a dentist), and about his other son who is now at Saxion.
All in all Rene seems to be a nice guy, and I think I'm going to continue doing my shopping there. Maybe even more some of my cheese purchases there, since he seems to have a lot of cheese, and seems like a nice guy.
If you are in the neighborhood, pay Rene a visit.

Family: Rosaceae

I just confirmed a suspicion I have had now for quite some time.
Not too long ago, I started displaying allergic symptoms when eating apples in winter. I didn't think much of it, but after a couple of trials, I simply gave up eating apples in winter. This was painful, as apples are not only delicious, but also healthy (though not for your teeth). Eating apples in spring and summer was no problem, as you will soon see why.
This winter, I also ran in to the same problems with almonds. They would give me the same allergic reactions of an itchy upper lip, and itching on the top of my mouth.
A couple of weeks ago, the same thing happened when I was eating some cherries that my roommate had brought home with him.
This made me very suspicious, but the dime didn't drop until today when I experienced almost the same thing from strawberries. My mouth would get itchy, and my face would get flushed. I sometimes get that reaction to tomatoes too, but that generally only happens when I have a small cut or something in my mouth. To any botanist readers, it should be abundantly clear now what types of foods I can't eat.
If you haven't guessed it already, it is fruits form the family Rosaceae. If you follow that link, you will find that all the above mentioned fruits are mentioned in one of the subfamilies of Rosaceae.
Unfortunately, the subfamily that contains cherries and almonds also contains plums, peaches and apricots, two of which I really really like. Surprisingly, I have never had allergic reactions to peaches or apricots.

Since I have pollen and pet allergies, I regularly take my antihistamines every day from early April to late august or September, depending on which country I am in. This is part or what clued me in to my new-found allergies, as eating apples in the summer presented absolutely not problems, since I was taking my allergy medicines at the time. Also, one small pill taken after the cherry incident completely relieved me of my pains in about 20-30 minutes (which is much faster than the 120 minutes that the box states with regards to pollen).

There is good and bad in this. The bad thing is that I can't eat a lot of the fruits I love anymore. The good thing is that as long as I take my medicine well beforehand, I can eat whatever I want. I just don't want to go from a 180 days-a-year allergy sufferer to 365 days-a-year.

Roommate Assisted Dinner

I just made a really delicious dish for dinner. I had had it previously when my roommate had made it, and I decided to give it a go myself. I went out and bough all the ingredients, and under the careful supervision of my roommate, the forging or dinner commenced.
The result is absolutely delicious. And it's healthy too!

It's a dish consisting of mainly pork and rice.
I put the following in to it:

• 500g of pork (500 actual grams, no bone or anything)
• 4 eggs
• 2 peppers (green and yellow)
• 2 servings of rice
• 1 onion
• ½ garlic (5 cloves)
• Soy sauce (Quantum Satis (Mom will absolutely love the fact that I used this word)) (Used in two stages, as we will see)
• Pepper

You'll note that there's no salt in here. I tried to pour some on, but my roommate stopped me and said that soy was the way to go.

I started by chopping everything up into smaller pieces. The pork was about half a thumb in size. I then proceeded to fry the pork in a normal pan, using soy sauce instead of salt to season it. Add some pepper, but not too much. After that the garlic and onion goes in (I should have done one of them first, instead of both at the same time, but I can't remember which one). The next step is putting the pepper in, and after that's been in for about a minute, throw on the eggs.
Just when the eggs look about done, it's time to throw on the rice. The rice needs to be cooked, and a little drier than normal, to prevent it from sticking too much.
Proceed with mixing things up, and adding some more soy and some more pepper.

When everything seems to be nicely mixed, and the rice has taken on a more brownish shade, serve as is with something nice to drink. If you want, you can add half a glass of water to the mix after you put the rice in, to help the merging of the parts, so to speak.

You really should try it. I'm adding it to my repertoire of meals I can cook. I recently had to remove a dish I "stole" from my room mate from the list, as I had grown quite tired it it. (Basically sliced potatoes and mushrooms and sour cream, fried up in some oil with spices. Very farmer, very Russian).

Strange Food Habits

My friend has the strangest food habit I have ever seen. Not only does she drink her coffee almost cold, but she also, get this, puts cereal in her coffee.
I don't know if it's just any cereal, or just the honey coated puffs, but it sure it weird, I'll tell you that.
She is kind of cute though, so I guess that makes up for her numerous oddities.

My Day

So, I got the relatively harmless question "Have you had a good day" just now over icq, and, as I hadn't really had an especially good day, this is how I responded:

actually, up until about 2 hours ago, I've had a pretty crappy day =(
I got up early, had a small breakfast and went to school.
scheduled project work with one guy from 10-12, then from 12 to whenever with my other project.
then when we got done with that project, I call the first guy up, and we continued to work.
you will notice by now, that "lunch" didn't figure in to that description.
I get home around 18, nothing edible in the fridge, so I'm off to the grocery store, still burning my single sandwich that I had for breakfast.
at this time I'm pretty cranky, and quite sure that if anybody was going to give me any trouble, I'd tear their head of and shit down their exposed throat.
so I get to the store, get what I come for, and go home.
When I come home, there's a mountain of dishes. This is not unusual, and really not a problem, except for two things: a) my raging hunger is at the point where any setback seems like world war 3, and b) there is no dish soap in the house
Thus, back on my bike to the store.
I come home with the dish soap, do the mountain of dishes (about 45 minutes or so, I'd guess), make dinner, leave dirty dishes all over the place, and then, I simmer down and watch some tv, and now everything is good again.

how was your day? =)

So, after dinner (curry chicken), some CNN and some Mythbusters, I'm all happy again.

Ohh, and the game store called be about my pre-order for TBC. The store is going to open up at midnight tonight, and I'm most likely going to be there to score my copy of TBC, and then LAGG OUT in the blasted lands all night. Tomorrow's working day might suffer a bit, but I really don't care that much.

Right now I'm selecting courses for next quarter. Currently, it looks like:
- Performance evaluation (I suck at math and statistics, and this is heavy on both. Mandatory, unfortunately. Die Markov chains, die!)

- Mobile and Wireless Networking (Might be interesting. One of my current courses have touched on the subject, and it's mighty interesting.)

- Aspect Oriented Programming. (With my favourite teacher Mehmet Aksit. This guy is the shit, quite possibly one of the best teachers I have had in my entire life. He was on the ballot for the teacher of the year here at twente. I voted for him, but I don't know how it turned out.)

They tell me that performance evaluation is going to be VERY difficult, so I'm going to play it safe and stick to the normal 3 courses per quarter, having done 3½ the last two. Luckily, I have a PhD student in mathematics living in my house, so I'm sure he'll be able to explain things to me if I get stuck.