Yes! Come down and we'll all pretend to get educated but mostly make heart-eyes while also getting educated.

Ooooh! Possibly. We are going to Utah for a bike ride on June 1. If I survive that...

Meringue update! I made some with way less artificial ("natural") sweetener and some raspberry puree, and I think they are OK. At least I'm not embarrassed to have my family eat them. Still, I cannot with the flavor of these sweeteners in actual food (I tried before when I was on Atkins), which surprises me, given how much I like diet beverages.

Not sure why you are making those , but I can't eat foods with artificial sweetener in them, they taste wrong to me. I just eat less sugar and use less when the recipe allows

My mother's at the beginning of South Beach, and it's her birthday. So I'm trying to help!

I don't mind splenda or even aspartame, but I can't stand the taste of stevia. Glad you managed acceptable meringues! The addition of raspberry sounds so good.

I've decided to try to eat up some of the stuff that's been hanging around my pantry/freezer for way too long, so I've got baked beans in the oven, heavy on the salt pork, light on the beans (because I had 3/4 lb of salt pork in the freezer and only 5 oz of dried beans in the pantry and using things up means using things up), and full of tomatoes both sun-dried and in paste form. I'm interested to see how it turns out.

I've hated splenda desserts before, so thought I'd give the stevia a shot. To me, they are about the same. Anyway, the bulk of the thing will be the strawberries and sugar-free cool whip, which seems OK.

Ooh, those beans sound good.

Mmm, strawberries and cool whip = yum!

I made a giant quinoa salad for a birthday party today (adult birthday party = indoor go-karting!): big giant amount of quinoa, plus corn, black beans, and tomatoes in whatever amount seems tasty, and pepper, salt, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar to taste. (I love balsamic vinegar, like A LOT, but since I was cooking for strangers, I decided to give them a break.)

Yum.

Avocadoes would probably be really good in that, but I didn't have any ripe. Boo.

You just reminded me to check my avocados! I had them in a bag to ripen for like 3-4 days and I didn't check them. They are READY.

I am watching DVDs of the early 1960s detective show Surfside 6, and the longstanding prejudice against TV acting & writing versus their film counterparts makes much more sense to me now. Everything was just so stiff and unnatural, a disconnect that I've never felt from watching movies of that period. Troy Donahue and Margarita Sierra were particularly cringeworthy.

However, the producers rightly surmised that the best use for Van Williams at this point in his career was lots and lots of time spent in a bathing suit.