Flavor alchemy

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?

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.

Temptation. Sometimes it’s fine to yield. I stumbled on a math problem while writing the entry for TGRWT #5 and I can’t solve it. What is the most efficient way to cut diamond shapes from a square?

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