The Fisherman caught this fish and smoked it and sealed it up tight and froze it. I kept it until my refrigerator sold and then let it thaw in a styrofoam cooler with ice. All in all, it was an intense sensory experience, the feel of it, the intense color of it, my olfactory sense is quite sharper now since taste and hearing are minimal. I have been practicing eating and drinking some each day, started more in earnest when ERJ came for the Summer because I figured it would be safe to do with someone near by. I had made some progress so I continued after she went back to skewl. So the fish was given to me with this in mind: having some remnant sense of taste though I was told a year ago I would likely have none; and, secondarily, practice in chewing and swallowing. The latter is an entirely mixed bag which requires tons of rinsing and often ends in an hour of sputtering and hacking. It isn't a prime time show yet. The good news on that front is that the knife-like pain is gone leaving behind only the burning, searing pain. Which is a huge improvement. But, as I suggest, the sense of taste is not at all a disappointment. I know it is fairly dim and some things I try do not taste at all like I remember them, but I am satisfied nonetheless. It is surely a "something is better than nothing" situation. So I embarked on this smoked fish experience with the taste part in mind primarily. I was not prepared for what happened last evening when I gave this a try. I think this is actually good news, sort of like a forest fire may be good news for a forest overall in an ecologic sense. First, the fish was very tasty. The downside (but maybe an upside, actually) is what must have been salivary gland pain that had me hollering and jumping about and had Chloe coming to check on me. Think mumps to the 7th power. It was either because the cells are firing up or because wherever the stuff comes out is blocked. I did not know this until recently but it is not currently understood why salivary glands stop working when irradiated. I think that is so interesting. Since it isn't easily understood why they stop working, it must partly be that as far as things are understood there is no good or obvious reason why they SHOULD stop working the converse of which is that there is no good reason for why they could not start working again. So while the smoked fish experience was miserable to say the least, it may also have been a signal of eventually being able to eat again. Of course saliva is only part of the picture. Nearly 50 muscles are also involved in swallowing successfully along with various nerves. But, hey, this is planet Earth, where adaptation is all.

This was a crazy cake I made last year in a class by Marina Sousa and Dawn Nemec during the Oklahoma State Sugar Art Show. This was my first (and, so far, only) class and it was also Marina and Dawn's first class to teach. I loved every second of it, although I did not have enough time (in two days) to finish my cake. Their original design had a cup of coffee hanging off the top of the box and the whole thing was supposed to be just covered with all kinds of sweet treats. Since this was a two-day class and people had traveled to OSSAS from all over the country (actually, there was even one Canadian), the parts that would have been real cake are styrofoam. We made the ice cream cone from gumpaste and the ice cream is chocolate that we forced to seize with a tiny bit of water, then stirred in dried cranberries. That was cool! The blueberry pie -- mine was a disaster -- was all hand-rolled fondant blueberries covered with piping gel dyed blue. My favorite thing was the marzipan fig. I obsessed over it way too long. It was also fun to make the little tarts and saucers. This is the best photo (sorry so crummy) I ended up with and I snapped this in the hotel just before I dismantled the entire thing.