Name Change

So my name change has gone through at the university. Perhaps I shouldn't have agreed though, when the administrative assistant who grabbed my form checked "so you're only changing your last name". Despite me providing a copy of the marriage certificate as proof of name change, I am still listed in the computer system with the courtesy title of "Miss". (And yes, I had to choose a courtesy title. The only way I can think of in which this isn't ludicrous is if I accidentally checked off the wrong courtesy title. In which case it is funnier, but not to me).

Hopefully Relevant!

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=482
(the last panel)

It looks like I get to travel all the way to... Toronto.

But still! Coolness! (assuming it works out).

Lime-flavoured Pancakes

I can explain. Really, I can.

It started innocently enough. I was intending to follow the recipe in one of our wedding cookbooks. Well... except that I wanted to add raisins and chocolate chips to the pancakes. I mixed the dry ingredients. And that's when it started. Because of my milk allergy I use soy milk instead of milk. Which, as far as I'm concerned doesn't really count as a change most of the time.

Because soy milk only comes in small cartons, I tend to like mixing it from soy milk powder (aka soy flour, apologies to anyone who tried using it instead of wheat flour). A trick I discovered was to mix the flour in with the dry ingredients, and then just measure water out for the soy milk. I've never had too much liquid doing this. What does get really odd is when the recipe calls for buttermilk. I know that soy milk won't sour like milk will, but I have discovered that adding the lemon juice to the milk, or water, will allow me to make recipes that call for buttermilk. Now, this recipe called for buttermilk and, because I was trying to follow the instructions very closely, I decided to use my lemon-and-soy milk trick. But when it came time to add the lemon juice I discovered that I didn't have any (I think I left some extra in the pantry when I moved out that I had intended to keep, hence me being convinced I had some). Not having lemon juice isn't a big problem. You can also use white vinegar. The white vinegar had the same problem as the baking soda. I had some. But it was for cleaning.

I was rapidly running out of options. Had I properly checked for ingredients beforehand, I could have just omitted the baking soda and not added any acid. But who checks for lemon juice? It's a staple. It would be like not having peanut butter. You always have it, because when you start to run low you buy more. Lime juice was chosen as better than any of the vinegars. I didn't really want to risk wine-flavoured pancakes.

So, because I decided to follow the recipe closely (and use a buttermilk substitute instead of just omitting it), I ended up with lime-flavoured pancakes. They were actually really good with the excess of chocolate chips. But this really says a lot about my cooking skills. One of these days...

Yes, it's probably sexist

But isn't "womengineer" the best title ever?? It was for a phamphlet from the group in the states that handles accreditation for engineering and technology programmes, back in the 1970s, i.e. when women in engineering where a new big thing.

Speaking of women in engineering, in how many other fields can you hear your office mate using the feminine pronoun, and be fairly sure that he's talking about you?

Rabbit Food!

Well... not literally rabbit food. Just the green crunchy stuff that gets referred to as such. My mom once was picking up food for the rabbit, and a friend commented that "normally when people say they have to buy rabbit food I don't believe them".

Back on topic...

So this evening I was in charge of putting together a salad. Allan had already chopped up some of the interesting stuff. I looked at how much he had done, and then chopped an appropriate amount of mushrooms. And then went for the lettuce...

One dinner for two people, and two packed lunch-size (i.e. huge) salads later, I have come to the realisation that there is no way to make a small salad. In fairness, this was partly because I was using two kinds of lettuce, and not just because I needed to match the lettuce to everything else, but salad is always significantly larger than you expect.