This is getting old...

Dear Readers:

Another forced hiatus, directly related to the earlier one. The entire episode, which should be over in another week, can be summed up in two words: Infection and pulmonary embolism. (OK, that's three.)

Musta been the calzone.

Calzone!

Home-made calzone, fresh from the oven. I made one last night as a way to celebrate the return of my appetite, which had been kind of knocked off course or blunted somehow after a few days in hospital.

This is also a very delayed response to Rob Hardy's one-word comment on a long-ago one-word post on this blog (for a recap, go here.) Rob has posted pictures and recipes for home-made bagels, bread, and some other goodies, so this post was inspired by him and by the fact that I finally found some long-lost calzone photos.

One of the problems in our house is that the children each have strong and differing preferences about software, so we have several photo-editing and graphics packages, several web browsers, several music storage and editing programs, and dozens of utilities about which I know very little. Files, especially picture files, get saved in what seem like random, illogical places -- the digital equivalent of nooks and crannies and loose floorboards and old boxes and musty steamer trunks. I stumbled across the calzone photos while looking for something else. Lucky you.

Food and Place, volume 11 (Hospital Fare)

(Note: This is a something of a warm-up blog entry. I’m just pitching simulated games here in the bullpen while on the DL. The TFIM team doctors say I’m not quite 100%. I tell them I never was.)

Tapioca

The quintessential hospital food is tapioca pudding. I don’t believe I have ever encountered tapioca pudding outside a hospital.* In the latest instance (which I hope will be the last for a very long time) it was hidden beneath a generous heap of whipped cream, so I’d taken a couple of bites before I realized it was the dreaded tapioca.

I have always hated tapioca pudding. It looks like it's staring back at you. Or like it's not quite done yet -- an unbaked cake. I understand why hospital kitchens favor it because it fits into any of a number of enticingly-named special diets: the bland diet, the soft diet, etc. But, please!

* Except perhaps in a prison.