After going through a series of non-stick teflon pans during the past decade, I wanted to try out using a cast-iron pan. They supposedly last multiple lifetimes if taken care of, so I wanted to see if I would enjoy using one.

The current state-of-the-art cast-iron pan is the one from Lodge, which is only $17 at Walmart, but costs £50 here in the UK. So I decided to go with the Utopia, which is £20 on Amazon and had some decent reviews. Unfortunately the criticism in the Wirecutter article of the Utopia is true: While it looks very similar to the Lodge, the seasoning is very thin and doesn't actually prevent things from sticking to the pan.

Utopia recommends starting off with some bacon to improve the seasoning, and even though I've made a lot of bacon on the pan this week, the eggs I made this morning still stuck to the pan. I've gone through seasoning the pan again twice, which involves coating it in vegetable oil and baking it in an oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes.

Maybe I'm just not patient enough? Maybe I should go through another round of seasoning before I try baking eggs in it again?

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For dinner tonight I finally made that vegan mac & cheese I wrote about a while back. I was a bit surprised by how easy it was to make and that I actually enjoyed eating it. The toddler ate his very enthusiastically (or maybe he was just very hungry) and my wife ate at least half her plate.

I'm not planning on going vegan anytime soon, but it's good to know that there are alternatives to things like cheese that taste acceptable. I can't say I've found any good meat alternatives yet.

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I really like a good steak. To be honest, I probably eat a lot more meat than necessary, in terms of required nutrients. Given the massive environmental impact of meat production, I thought I'd give some vegetarian and vegan recipes a try and see if I can eat less meat.

I recently came across a vegan mac & cheese recipe. I find the cheese substitute, deactivated yeast, very intriguing. Is it possible that it could even remotely taste cheesy? Well, I managed to get hold off deactivated yeast at a health shop today, and I'm going to give it a try and report back here.

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I love coffee. As a graduate student working on my PhD thesis I remember coming across a quote that went something like this:

A programmer is a tool for converting coffee into code

At the time I very much felt like a tool for converting coffee into academic papers. We always had a thermos filled with coffee in our PhD office, and whoever emptied it would immediately make a fresh pot. To this day I still very much enjoy filter coffee, but have accumulated some other methods for making coffee too.

My introduction to the Aeropress was this video:

While I don't think that the coffee it makes is worthy of the term espresso, it does make a decent, very drinkable coffee with very little fuss. It does make quite a strong coffee, so I usually won't have more than one of these per day. Throughout the rest of the day, if I'm making coffee just for myself, I'll make a moka pot.

I've used my moka pot so many times that I had to have the rubber seal replaced. I first ordered the wrong size off eBay. I then resold the three seals separately on eBay, even making a very tiny profit. After replacing it with the right size seal, it's as good as new.

If I'm making coffee for more than one person, it doesn't get really any better than just using our regular old filter coffee machine. Why change something that works?

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