the_rck | (no subject)

Friday evening, we had dinner at Seva with friends who were in from DC for a christening. Cordelia was bored, I think, but she was well behaved and quiet. The children's menu had a word search, and she focused on that. Scott and I enjoyed seeing Randall and Shawn, and the food was pretty good. Seva is a vegetarian restaurant. I had a black bean and sweet potato quesadilla, and Scott had an omelet. Cordelia had noodles with butter and a bit of parmesan.

I slept badly that night. I think the guacamole was too spicy for me (I don't want to think it was the quesadilla). I had reflux all night and could only drowse because, every time I started to fall into a deep sleep, I'd get a wave of acid.

Saturday, Scott's sister hosted a party for her daughter's birthday. Our niece is turning eleven this week. We arrived about three o'clock. Cordelia started playing with her cousin and the one other girl who was there. Scott played Risk with our nephew and his friend. I hung out with my sister-in-law and her sister-in-law on the other side. After dinner, our niece opened her presents, and we all had ice cream. Scott's sister had bought two ice cream pies, but she hadn't checked the ingredients. She just assumed that one of them would be safe for me, and of course, it wasn't. Both ice creams contained peanuts. Fortunately, she had some other ice cream that I could have.

We gave our niece a game called Dixit (or Dix It?). Several people played it after the ice cream was consumed. It involves cards with strange pictures on them and trying to guess which card belongs to the person who's it. I got the impression that scoring was kind of confusing, at least at first.

Today, I managed a bit more on my Yuletide fic. I've got over five hundred words, and still nothing has happened. It may be that this will be a vignette and that nothing much will happen. I don't know.

We went to the library this afternoon and then went for bubble tea. I did three loads of laundry. Cordelia got frustrated because none her friends in the neighborhood were around when she went out looking for someone to play with. I think, with the weather getting cold, she's going to have to steel herself and start knocking on doors to ask if the other kids can play.

We're showing Cordelia The Fellowship of the Ring now that she and Scott have played through the end of it in Lego Lord of the Rings. I'm not sure how well she's following the story. She seems to be having trouble remembering who's who. The Lego game isn't really catching Cordelia's imagination. I don't think it's as good as most of the other Lego games she and Scott have tried. Too much of it is traveling through places.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think Seva does a great job on being alert to food allergy issues. They understand cross-contamination. And they have a "book of ingredients" that you can ask for, to find out the details of what's in each item. There are tomatoes in their guacamole, and if I remember right tomatoes are a problem for you, so I'm guessing that that was where you ran into trouble.

I just wish Seva didn't use so many alarming ingredients in their food. It's especially bad in the french fries and yam fries, in particular. Sigh.

There was one chunk of tomato in the guacamole. I simply removed it. My suspicion is that there were spices that were a problem. People like to put peppers and spicy stuff in guacamole. I should have known better. I just like guacamole and couldn't resist. There was a bite to the stuff, but I thought it was onion.

Of course, it might have been the quesadilla. I can't know what spices they used there. I don't even know all the spices/herbs that are a problem for me, so an ingredient list won't help before I eat. After, it might be useful because I could compare the ingredients to other times I've had problems. Sometimes, things I can't even taste cause problems (Blue Nile, for example, puts peppers into a lot of things. I can't taste them there, but they give me trouble afterward).

I think there would have been more tomatoes invisibly hidden in the guacamole. I once took a Seva cooking class, and my job in the class was making the guacamole, so I got to be intimately acquainted with the recipe. :) If I remember right, there were both tomato salsa and finely-chopped tomatoes in it -- most of which disappeared invisibly into the finished guac. It *was* some of the yummiest guacamole I'd ever eaten! I have a copy of the recipe upstairs that I can go get if you're interested in knowing what else is in it.

Not knowing which spices/herbs give you problems must be maddening!

Disappearing salsa would likely do it. Next time, I'll know to avoid the guacamole. Ah well.

I tend to be very conservative about herbs and spices. I know a few that are safe, and I tend to stick with those. The weirdest of those I know are problems is oregano. It causes me real difficulty. I think it's oregano, rather than tomato, that gives me trouble with spaghetti sauce and pizza sauce and such.

Interesting!

Just to add complications: I once read that "oregano" is actually a flavor and not a particular plant. Any of several plants can be called "oregano" if the flavor is right. However, I haven't checked into this in any detail, so I could be massively inaccurate on this.

Looking at Wikipedia, oregano seems to be a family of plants, kind of like the mints, with each specific species a little different in flavor and appearance. The variations seem to be regional, by and large, with different strains doing better in different climates.