i can't even get one together.

Oh man, the lack of caffeine around here is beginning to suck, look at that post title. Maybe one will come to me.

One wakes up rather hungry after not eating since 6pm the night before. Hungry yet unpleasantly bloated. And fucking stinky, remind me to elaborate maybe. Nonetheless, we continue to press on. This was late breakfast today, it looks scarier than it is.

It was really good and something I never ever would've made without this diet. So, thank you, you bastardy stink-making bloaty insomnia-exacerbating piece of shit detox diet.

And remember, why does everything have raw onion in it this week? That's right, to remind us we're alive.

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smoked salmon, avocado, grapefruit, tarragon.

100gr smoked salmon

1/2 red grapefruit, flesh extracted

1/2 ripe avocado

1/4 cup sweet onion, chopped

1 tbsp fresh tarragon, minced

2 tbsp cider vinegar

1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

black pepper

maybe a little coarse salt, depending on your salmon...mine didn't need it.

Serves 2.

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stealin' courses.

Hilarious picture, I think you can tell I'm working on music at the dinner table.

Stole another KK recipe today, the cucumber thingie. Except added two peeled and chopped kiwi instead of sugar, used cider vinegar instead of white, and added a dash of cloves, all 'cause my diet said to. As someone who is hot and cold on cucumbers, this one makes all the right moves.

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I also made the red cabbage thing again today, and it was even better than yesterday. I would probably make it again tomorrow, but I think I'm supposed to be varying my intake a bit more.

Plus it's not the lowest-fat thing on the planet. But the dressing is a knockout. If you make it by hand like I did yesterday, it's great, for sure. If you emulsify it in a little blender thingie like I did today, it whips right up into a thicker, very mayo-like consistency in about 10 seconds, which is quite different, but maybe (as I said) even better.

After I put the majority of it in the slaw, I cut up some, eh...batons? of granny smith and kohlrabi and used them to scrape every visible remnant of dressing out of the food processor bowl. I would totally serve that to someone. Probably not in the used food processor bowl though, etc. Also, I personally would only serve it to the female kind of people...no way am I man enough to whip this one out for the boys.

Oh yeah, of course I had to try some other things with it: an extra dose of onions, just to make me feel alive (successful); a couple of currants for a bit of sweetness (great); a couple of pistachios for color and nuttiness (mwah, not bad, but not the perfect nut). The thing I would really like to try with it a big pile of lamb shoarma, but...I guess we know that's not happening.

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Wanna hear about something that makes me a little sad lately? Maybe I'm just in a vulnerable mood, I should probably be having another emotion. In looking at the Facebook profiles of girls I went to high school with, you know under "Interests"? I saw someone today, a very sweet and cute and vivacious girl in high school, always ready to laugh, whose second Interest was "Organizing Things". Organizing Things.

Another girl, under the "Favorite Books" section, wrote "Never Really Got Into Any Books" (I think the capitalization is automatically done by Facebook). A third, in the Favorite Music section, only has one artist: Susan Boyle.

It goes on, girl after girl. As James Coburn said in Affliction (it's become a bit of a catchphrase around here), "it makes me sad."

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stolen moments.

Seems wrong to go back to light and fluffy kitchen notes after all of the angsty Deep Thoughts of the past few days, but as we say around here, it can't always be magic.

I made Klary's red cabbage and tahini slaw for dinner, and yep, she's right, you should totally make this. I'll probably make it again tomorrow. I made a couple of small alterations based on my current diet (no creme fraiche) and my personal taste (raw onion), so I'm just jotting down my proportions here (it's still your recipe Klarykins!)

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red cabbage and tahini slaw.

2 cups finely shredded red cabbage

1/2 cup sweet white onion, sliced very thinly

3 tbsp tahini
1 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp water (or less, or more, depending on your tahini)
salt

1 tbsp cilantro, chopped fine

1 tbsp dill, chopped fine

and if you're not on my diet, a little sriracha to taste

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Semi-inspiring challenge to work with ingredients you don't normally use. Kiwi. Grapefruit. Research reveals unexpected flavor partners for these two: kiwi and anise seems to be popular (a cold kiwi and anijsmelk smoothie?), and I've also found a couple of Korean recipes with kiwi subbing for apple or Asian pear. Maybe this means an experimental steak-free bibimbap later this week. Pistachio, lime, cilantro, and avocado also show up as friends of the kiwi, which sounds like a salsa verde of some sort to me.

For grapefruit, most of the focus seems to be contrasting the bitterness with sweetness or with fresh herbs like basil and mint. Champagne and butter also seem popular, but are not within the specs of this program. Allspice and ginger each make appearances, and here's an interesting salad that could work maybe subbing in smoked salmon for the soppressata?

Unrelatedly, I have got to get me some kelp noodles. Anyone seen these in Amsterdam?

OK, commence recipes-in-progress.

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salmon with grapefruit and miso + almond pesto (totally untested).

600gr salmon filets
1 garlic clove, minced
3 tbsp white miso paste
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

1 tbsp ginger juice

1/4 cup grapefruit juice

1 cup good almonds

1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp water
1 tbsp honey
1 tsp sambal oelek

1 cup fresh basil, mint, or cilantro leaves, haven't decided
salt

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salmon, grapefruit, tarragon, champagne vinegar, lemon zest, olive oil, apple. mustard?

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salsa verde with kiwi, pistachio, avocado, and lime.

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maybe this.

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verbal remedies.

If you don't blog, i can imagine that it might seem a bit histrionic or otherwise attention-whoreishly self-indulgent to be publicly wrestling with barely-formed philosophical questions about motives, criteria for success, and other esoteric causes or effects of blogging. Trust me, in "real life", I'm the guy at your dinner party who volunteers to do the dishes or go out on a beer run b/c "i'm a little shy"...attention is not my thing.

And indeed, I didn't start writing VDuck in 2005 for it to be read by a public, or by anyone other than my wife and mother (two different people, BTW); VDuck happened because the two of us were emotionally and philosophically wiped out by the immigration process as a whole, expensively opening and closing a retail business, contracting autoimmune diseases, etc.

In terms of our creative lives, I would say that we had devolved to somewhere between "dormant" and "deceased". I started writing because I felt completely empty musically, and blogging was a convenient way for me to be creative about something that still made the moop and i both happy: food.

So, now, five loooong years later, lots has happened, and this blog has evolved along with my writing, but at its root it's still a real and critical form of therapy for me, as well as a way to publicly document my obsessive mooplove, opinionize on shit I know nothing about, experiment with hilarity technique, work through some other mildly annoying shit, and yeah play with the one language I can speak in whole adult sentences, and just generally try to achieve a satisfying presentation of "what's happening to me".

The huge problem with this is that in five years VDuck readership has fucking QUADRUPLED (yes, eight) to include all manner of friends and family and people not yet met. The problem: in "real life", you don't give all of your friends and family the exact same version of "what's happening to you", do you. Naw you don't, you censor, you embellish, just make shit up, whatever, etc. based on how you want that friend or family member to see you, or whether you're concerned about upsetting or angering them, killing them, etc.

Ze blog, she no work this way. Everyone get same version. And my current creative tension is coming from the fact that, again for "therapeutic reasons", I want/need to start working with a "more real picture", writing about some less hilarious and uplifting aspects of ze life and seeing if This Blogging Thing can still be a way to Get Peaceful. But you know, I also don't necessarily want every random person who stops by for an okonomiyaki recipe to know that I've got a vial of crack stuck up my ass. Or whatever that week's drama is (do they even use vials anymore? I don't think so).

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If there are questions to be asked, it seems like they remain 1) what's the purpose of this blog today and 2) how exactly is it succeeding or failing at that 3) what could one do to fix it.

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I'ma just make a list of things I found.

• I initially thought this Sandhill Trek post was not going to be good, but the sheer volume of answers and the variety/repetition therein seemed to help clarify the differences in my perspective.

What? It's a short list so far. Leave me alone.

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my flaky summer diet xiv.

Above: cinnamon rolls on the stove in Shetland. MoopCam strikes again.

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Let's go back to nice, easy obfuscation for a moment before we ask any more explicitly hard questions. The basics of MFSDxiv are: mostly raw fruit and vegetables. A little fish. Very few grains. Very little fat, other than walnuts, almonds, olive oil, and avocado. No dairy. No sugar if I can help it, so this means that not all fruit is OK. Watermelon is OK, so all is not lost. Four or five quite small meals a day, the biggest being lunch. Nothing at all goes into the duck after 10pm.

This sounds pretty sane, right? I'm going to do it for a month. It's not just about weight-loss, I'll hopefully elaborate on the other goals soon.

So today, as you would, I started thinking about breakfast. Fruit, right. I had a basil plant that needed using, and some dried figs. And some walnuts. It turns out that if you slice a dried fig in quarters, attach one quarter to a walnut half and stick a basil leaf on top, chomping on a few of these make for a totally acceptable breakfast.

Not long after this, lunch rolled around. I started thinking, hey...arugula. I'm supposed to be eating arugula. Could I make a pesto, or actually, what would I have to do make a lowfat arugula pesto? Without cheese. Maybe not.

Beets. I'm supposed to be eating beets. I just saw a beet-tahini recipe somewhere that sounded good. Cabbage is on the OK list as well. I'm envisioning a raw cabbage leaf wrapped around something dipped in beet tahini. But what. Tuna + diced apple + diced carrot + green olive + onion. Necessity is the mother of invention. Could be hideous. Haven't tried it yet.

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casting our feelings into words.

This is an actual photo Mara took last week.

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I'm trying one of my flaky, rarely-successful health experiments this summer, and maybe I'll even write seriously about what the motivations for it are.

But probably not, as VDuck is not really a platform for that kind of writing. It might seem like it could be, I mean we talk about some personal stuff here, right? Not really. VDuck is a tightly-controlled and meticulously-obscured representation of life here at 100M that is almost never as serious as real life is. It's like The Matrix of Amsterdam food blogs.

But what if we wrote a truly serious sentence, like this: I'm discovering that this relationship between 1) allowing people social access to me/us, and 2) my firm control of that access is turning out to be one of the defining influences/issues in my adult life, and the entire process of denying that access is getting to be exhausting in its boringness, or possibly vice versa.

Serious questions abound. Does it have to be this difficult? Do I really need to obscure everything I say out here? What would happen if I didn't? It's not just the blog, I'm pretty difficult to get at in real life as well. But what am I gaining from this? Mystery? Scarcity? Am I afraid the real shit's not interesting enough? Am I afraid to be disappointed in people I think I like?

Huh. We'll just let that sit there for a while and see if it survives The Deletion Process. Up next: My Flaky Summer Diet XIV.

P.S.: I'm so hilarious. The next thing I did after this public moment of existential angst was to completely un-ironically turn on comment moderation, essentially controlling people's access to me, etc. Seek help!

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flattened.

Accidental, that's what I'm talking about. I could be exaggerating, but seriously the whole thing happened so fast and with so little input from me that it truly is just luck that I didn't seriously bust up my dome permanent-like.

I was standing on this chair to get something, and in my haste to grab the thing I stood on my tiptoes, and the chair immediately saw the potential to escape, so it took off (make bullet ricocheting sound) and I have no idea what happened next, other than about one big slow-mo second of me thinking "oh you dumb piece of noooooo£$%&*o". The mid-air contortions required to save myself from serious harm have left this duck in a world of ouch.

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I don't spend any time on eGullet anymore because most of the interesting characters or topics have gone, or gone silent, and the moderators have begun following some random and/or sinister policies about "decorum and topicality".

Some smart person somewhere knows what this phenomenon is called, right, when critical mass stops feeding something's positive evolution and finds something better to do, and the thing just stops growing in good or productive ways and slowly dies from inertia and being ignored, or by actively being watered down into mediocre boring irrelevance. For some reason OS/2 springs to mind.

This all has something to do with Mark Athitakis's post about Advancing Genius, but I'm too fatigued by cognitive surplus to research what the applicable term is here.

So anyway, as I said I don't read or contribute to eGullet anymore because it's not very compelling or inspirational or creative, right. But like once a month I optimistically click my eG bookmark and see what's happening.

I did this today, and was all hey, cool, pleasantly surprised by the goodness of a newly active topic on Lebanon. Great photos and informed, passionate commentary that made me want to go to Beirut immediately.

It reminded me favorably of the weekly foodblogs that eG used to have, these usually-awesome little microscopic documentations and dissections of people's daily foodlives from around the world. In fact, it reminded me so favorably of the ol' foodblogs that I made a post on the Lebanon topic to that effect, upon where it was deleted by a moderator as being "inappropriate", which seemed like an awesome feat of impersonal cluelessness, deleting a post that tried to constructively explain why I don't post there anymore, so I whined about it here, and then after I got all the badness out of me I deleted my own whining.

And in doing so I may have just stumbled on a solution to this whole Cognitive Surplus thing: lots of deletion.

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waste not.

Look closely at the Waste Not Permitted list. There is one item that quickly reveals the source of this foto, yes it's dead sheep and that means that this is obviously a MoopCam pic.

I just spent two hours making some not so great food. Considering my motivation levels today, this was quite a lose-lose. Hard to say what went wrong really, other than the fact that I don't really love green beans. The whole reason that I even try to cook green beans these days is that A) they're a vegetable and B) Andy makes some really really good green beans. Should probably get that recipe.

What I did instead was the opposite of effortless. It's OK, but fuuuuuuck. It should really be better.

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