New look

The site has a new look. Barely. Squarespace, the company that hosts my blog, has recently upgraded the templates they provide to users. I have tried to make the new template look as much as possible like the old site. Let me know if you find any hard to read areas or just plain weird stuff.

The new site has a “Share Article,” button under all posts, which should make it easier for those that use social networking tools.

I have also upgraded the software that displays the images by clicking on the thumbnails. Try clicking on photographs and most will enlarge and display a caption. Pressing “x” takes you back to the post.

Mysterious metal taste

For two weeks I had a strange metallic taste in my mouth. It was very strong in the morning, like having an aluminum spoon in my mouth. If I ate a piece of bread or drank a glass of milk, they tasted bitter. Food tasted unpleasant. I had lost the joy of taste!

I Googled it and most sites relate the metallic taste to gum problems, but I had just been checked by the dentist. The only other thing I could think of was that I had eaten tuna sushi at a new restaurant the night before I developed the metal taste. Maybe I had gotten a strange bacteria living in my mouth. Extra flossing, Listerine, and brushing did not get rid of the taste. Two weeks went by and the taste would not go away. At the supermarket I saw one of these new yogurts with probiotic cultures, consumed the whole thing in two days and the taste was gone. It’s been gone for a week now.

Does this make any sense?

Beyond the Gastronomer

Among all the excitement of having Andreas Viestad writing the new Gastronomer column for the Washington Post, I missed the other wonder tucked away in this week’s Food section of the newspaper. Martin has a great post on the new column, which for me will fill the void on the whys and hows of cooking created when Robert Wolke retired from his Food 101 column in the summer of 2007. Viestad’s has promised science-informed cooking and he started out with Hervé This’ chocolate chantilly.

But there was another wonder in the Food section: a cocoa and meat combination in the Dinner in 20 minutes box, the topic of TGRWT #5. It is a recipe for bison steaks with cocoa nib sauce.