December 15 – Bolognese senza pasta

My basic bolognese sauce, liquified, thinned with a bit of v-8 juice and some red wine, eaten without pasta. Excellent!!

Wine is very unpleasant to use for swishing caught food particles out from between your teeth. Partly it was the alcohol getting in the cuts in my mouth from the wires and screws, and partly it was just the mildly astringent feeling on my teeth. I substituted coca-cola for the wine and all was good.

I have begun to develop a system for producing tolerably liquified “real” foods – you thin them with something that approximately matches. I’m not sure how much of the ‘match’ is color, texture, or flavor, but – for example: baked beans are pretty good to thin with beef stock; I wouldn’t consider using milk or ice cream. Ice cream is good to thin with milk (it’s called a “milkshake”). Indian food is good to thin with V-8 juice, as is spaghetti sauce, etc. Come to think of it, I guess the method is color and acidity, in that order.

December 14 – Baked Jack Whizz

This one is a bit out of left field: baked beans (Bush’s homestyle) thinned with beef broth and a jigger of Jack Daniels. Pureed in the blender, heated in the microwave.

Not bad at all!

December 10 – Le Goo

Le Goo

The goo actually smells very good, but it’s more or less inedible. I started off with some flavored rice, added shiitake mushrooms and chicken stock then cooked it down, threw it in a blender, and sampled it. Here’s a problem: blend something made with rice, and you’re going to wind up with sticky paste. The Japanese call it “mochi” – and it’s delicious stuff but not something you can suck up. Making it was a mess and a waste of time. But it made the kitchen smell great.

My fallback was to liquefy some of my old chili and add a bunch of chicken stock to it, to make it drinkable. It’s weird how being blended completely removes the flavor and the interest from a food. Whatever. it’s calories and I need them right now.

I’ve been eating protein/energy drinks and a lot of veggie/fruit blend juices (carrot mango is my favorite, so far!) This has been a serious problem, since I am a) still losing weight and b) went into some kind of calorie deficit coma yesterday where I got incredibly weak, passive, and stupid.

I’ve been reading Iain Banks’ “Hydrogen Sonata” which is surreal, interesting, and beautiful in that weird deadpan way of Banks’. It feels like he was just hitting his stride when he died.

December 5 – Mashstash

A mountain of mashed potatoes the size of YOUR HEAD

If I make mashed potatoes buttery and smooth enough, I can suck them between my front-teeth like some kind of filter-feeding whale. Whatever. It works.

The only problem is the dreaded:

Mashstash

See, getting stuff all over the front of your mouth is something you usually don’t notice. You sort of lick your lips or schmuggle them together and presto – the food is gone! When your jaw is wired shut, you can’t lick your lips. In fact you have to eat with a roll of paper towels handy so that when your teeth get blocked by a chunk that’s too big to fit through, you can huff it out into the paper and blot the potatoes off of everything that now has potatoes on it.

I always wanted a desktop covered with mashed potatoes.

November 27 – experiments with tomato bisque

Tomato bisque is pretty, um, blah. If you eat it a couple times, you’ve experienced all it has to offer.  Normally I load it up with saltines but that’s not happening now.

Instead, I added about a tablespoon of butter, garlic vodka and some sriracha. This is really good!!  Om Nom Nom!

November 26 – Experiments with my chili

My Chili, Whizzed

I make a large batch of chili once a year, then vacuum bag and freeze it. Today I broke up one of the bags of frozen chunks and threw some of them into a blender with some chicken stock.

The result is! Not bad at all! In an act of major defiance, I ate with a spoon instead of a hose. The delicate composition of flavors that I try to achieve in my chili was gone – it was all blurred to a uniform sameness by the mighty power of my blender. Gone was the hint of burned meat, the great big  chunky beans, the cloves and other spices. There’s probably a metaphor in there but I’ll just leave it for now.

Yesterday, I attempted to make egg drop soup. Or, rather, I succeeded, but the soup was too hard to eat. I started sucking it through the hose and the little bits of egg quickly built an impenetrable barrier along my teeth. I couldn’t get anything else in, until I finally went downstairs, sucked up a bit of tea, put my head down in the sink, and blew. Uck.

November 25, 2013 – experiments with chili

I made an experiment for breakfast this morning: chili

Chili Con Chicken Stock

I took some chili that I got at Whole Foods, cut it 50/50 with chicken stock, put it in a blender and liquified it. It wasn’t bad! All flavors tend to get reduced to a dull background constant so there wasn’t much that distinguished one hose-suck from the next, but it was food.

I’m thinking that some things that are kind of soupy (chili, indian food, um…) might be soupable with the addition of chicken stock. Things that are kind of juicy might be soupable with the addition of apple juice.

WordPress is Ridiculous

WordPress must be “web 1.0″ technology that has evolved to “Web 1.5″ and then “Web 2.0″ and finally to “Byzantine Piece of Crap”

I’ve discovered that sometimes if I tell it to start a posting, I get this complicated dashboard of options, other times I don’t. I don’t care whether I get it or not, just please don’t make it random. Other times I get a panel flipping out from the side, which I can’t get rid of. My first attempt to post this went onto the wrong blog, entirely (my “mjranum” placeholder) because there was no indication what “new posting” is attached to.

This is really laughable – it’s what happens when people write some solid basic code then go feature-mad for years trying to compete in pointless feature-races with other writers of pointless features. The result has no intellectual consistency – no central metaphor for publication – you just push and poke your way through pointless menus. Apparently, that must be how the code-monkeys at WordPress design software, too, which is why the system works this way.

November 22, 2013

My surgery was relatively uneventful, so I didn’t write much about it.

Basically, I got to the surgical center, took my clothes off and put on the stylish robe, then sat there. I talked to nurses and the anaesthesiologist and the doctor and filled out paperwork and read. Eventually they wheeled me into the operating room and sometime in all the bustle of getting me arranged on the table, the anaesthesiologist must have started a drip of something into my feed, because I was unconscious and I remember nothing of the transition.

When I came to, it was a matter of feeling woozy for a while, then being in the car with my parents, then getting into bed and everything got warm and Zzzzzzz….

All in all, as non-traumatic as surgery can be.

Before they started on me, I had to sign a consent form, in which the doctor’s assistant ran me through a list of all the stuff they were going to do – and might do – to me. So it started off with:

• closed reduction of mandibular fracture
• orthostatic immobilization
• possible open reduction of fracture

I helpfully translated those for the assistant as:

• Push it back in place
• Wire it together so it doesn’t move
• Possibly, you get a pirate scar

As it happened, I didn’t get the pirate scar.

November 24, 2013

The last few days have been relaxing in a daze of percocet and books. I finished Patrick Rothfuss’ second in the king killer series and it’s really, really good. If you enjoy some beautifully-crafted swords and sorcery, it’s about as good as it gets (I’m normally leery of books with covers that say “awesome!” all over them but in this case it appears to be justified. Besides, John Scalzi liked it.) I also blew through the latest of the S.M. Stirling “change” series, which is beginning to seque into boring military fan-fic. Now I am working on a biography of H.L. Mencken, which is a bit more down to earth (i.e.: depressing) One thing that is nice about being at my parents’ house is that you cannot run out of books to read. It simply isn’t possible. Last night I got sucked into a biography of Caravaggio and passed out halfway through, then woke up remembering very little of it. Opiates do that to me.

Should I fear becoming boring? Soup appears to work.

Food is not too bad a problem but there are occasional surprises. If you sneeze while you’re eating, stuff flies horizontally out through your perforce clenched teeth. Even small particles in your food stick in the wires and you can’t get them out because your normal means of extracting stuck food usually involve working your jaw so you can move your lips or tongue – oops – that’s a non-starter. I woke up in a mild state of panic because in my dreams my mouth was blocked. Little things like that are a constant low-level stressor. But not too bad. The trick is to just stay cool and not panic.

The ice cream I got has been pretty good but I have to let it melt to the soup-point then suck it up my hose. I’ve been eating a great deal of tomato soup.

I hate to admit this but two-three weeks doesn’t really look like a very long time to me. I am considering just being boring and subsisting entirely on Trader Joe’s cream of tomato soup. Simply because I do not want to waste a huge amount of time figuring out how to eat.

Yesterday I did an experiment and took some beef chili that I bought at whole foods, and mixed the squishier bits in with my tomato soup. I finished it, eventually, but it was a disaster. Even the teeny-weeny chunks of beef were able to jam behind the wires and stay there until sluiced away with 2 mugs of tea and a great deal of poking with a sharp toothpick.

I am learning that there are: things that melt, and things that don’t.

A chunk of chocolate caught between your teeth melts and vanishes. Chocolate chip ice cream milkshakes are acceptable and present no problem. A chunk of beef caught between your teeth settles in for the long haul, and laughs at your feeble attempts to dislodge it.