Yeah, our choices are not good either. That is why ranked choice voting of various kinds is needed.

Oh, and for your amusement, dreams last night included a new reality show - Judge Judi Dench.

Food: I baked halva chocolate-chips cookies to bring to the office tomorrow (my birthday's on Wednesday and Thursday [according to my two-calendars system] and I won't be in the offices), instead on studying. I'm a good co-worker. I'm also one step from making this recipe entirely vegan (just need a good egg replacement for this. And egg replacements are harder to find here).

In addition, discovered the magic of adding cashew to salads last week, and never looked back since.

(Edit: you know those tiny parts of posts or conversations that you sometimes leave behind because you're a bit all over the place - those parts that would actually help others to understand your intentions better? I seem to forget them about 80% of the time).

Don't remember the details, but believe you can make a good egg replacement from apricots. Are apricots hard to find in Israel?

Depends on the season. And it's their season now, but I don't think this will work well with the recipe (which originally was based on tons of butter, sugar and halva). I'm thinking maybe bananas would work, but it's not the season.

I was told by one vegan that you don't necessarily need to replace the egg in some baked goods, but I have no idea how one figures out when an egg replacement is or is not needed.

HIl could probably answer.

Some recipes, the egg is really just there for moisture, and there are tons of things you can replace it with -- soy yogurt, apple sauce, apple sauce plus oil, almost any kind of dried fruit pureed with a little water, a ton of other stuff. If there's just one egg in a big recipe, you can sometimes just leave it out and the recipe is fine. For something like a cake that's supposed to rise, it's more complicated.

Now I have a steroid spray. This is the most exciting sinus infection ever. IOW, take my head, please.

Well, blood was shed today. But I did it to myself. Wasn't quite careful enough with the razor scraper. I think I'll be okay with a couple of butterfly bandages. It did bleed excitingly, though. I'm in the post-adrenaline just slightly woozy phase. Gotta figure out something easy for dinner/lunch.

Belatedly for Shir. [link]

If you are trying for the holding power of eggs, according to the above web site two tablepoons of corn starch or arrowroot powder or potato starch will work. If you want something fattier 1 tablespoon milled flax seed + 3 tablespoons water. My experience with flax is that gives you a bit of flax flavor. Have not tried any of these. I'm guessing that in the kind of recipe you are doing that the corn starch would be best, maybe with a little oil. But this is not something I've tried. I can't improvise with baking the way I can with other types of recipes. Just don't do it enough to have the kind of feel for it a decent baker does. But I bet rice flour would work well too.