Thursday morning random

* Well, Brookshire's assures me there is no celery or celery seed in the "natural flavoring" of their tomato sauce. So I don't know. Maybe this IS just mold allergies. That's good and bad:

good, because it means it's almost impossible for that type of allergy to go to anaphylaxis (with food allergies like celery, they can get progressively worse and go there precipitously)

bad, because it's impossible to avoid mold and I know my campus building has mold in it.

I am going to bring it up with my doctor (I have a checkup very shortly) and see if she has any ideas. It's more an annoyance issue than a danger issue, I think, but it's an annoyance I'd very much like to be rid of.

* When I get the occasional hive-around-the-eye (which is less scary than it used to be to me, and now that I think of it, this was how this entire mess started - way back in 2010 or thereabouts, I had swelling around one eye. I thought I had got into poison ivy while gardening (never mind I didn't see any) and didn't think any more of it. But I guess that was the warning shot.)

Anyway, when I get the occasional eye-hive these days, I find myself wanting to do the Veronica Lake things with my hair (train one lock of it to fall over my eye so no one can see the hive). For those of you not into old movies: Veronica Lake, though there aren't really any good photos of her iconic hair thing over there. (And she had kind of a sad life, including undiagnosed or poorly treated mental illness...)

Or, I suppose a more modern and childish variant of the hairstyle: wear a big lock of hair over one eye, like Fluttershy. (There's a fan comic out there where the main gag is "What Fluttershy sees" is just a mass of pink, from her hair down over her eyes).

The good thing is they usually develop late in the day, worsen overnight, and then go down rapidly once I get up and take my allergy medications, so usually they are not that noticeable. (And yeah, I think those are mold exposure: I got a big one the day we took the Christmas tree in the house at my parents, and live trees are known moldboxes.)

* I started a new thing, a "scarf" that is actually a cowl-type of thing - It's called the Purl Ridge Scarf. I wound up having to rip it out and restart because it got mobiused (the cast on got twisted) and I didn't know if it being mobius would be a problem in wearing it (there are some circularly-knit scarves you intentionally do that to, it's a feature, not a bug). This time I knit the first couple rows "flat" (without joining to work in the round) and that solved the issue - I'll just have to use the tail from casting on to sew that little bit up.

* I found a new favorite way to fix cauliflower: The Pioneer Woman's cauliflower stir fry.

My mom is a big fan of the Pioneer Woman and watches her show (I like it too, but it's usually on when I'm busy). One of the episodes we saw over break featured this recipe and I decided to try it.

I made two small changes: first, I parboiled the cauliflower for 5 minutes before stir-frying it, because I don't really like "crunchy" cauliflower, and also, cauliflower that's not totally cooked is harder to digest.

I also used coconut aminos instead of soy sauce. Coconut aminos are a soy sauce substitute; they taste similar but have no soy and, importantly for me, are lower in sodium. I first found out about them from an article in Eating Well or somewhere about someone who had to change how they cooked after a family member was diagnosed with some food sensitivities (one of them being soy).

Except for the fairly-tedious task of breaking the cauliflower down into tiny florets (and it's messy, I was sweeping dropped cauliflower bits up off the floor later), it's a pretty fast recipe. And it's GOOD. Cauliflower is kind of bland on its own so it does well with a strong-flavored seasoning. (Cauliflower is kind of the tofu of vegetables, I guess).

I find I like Sriracha sauce much, much better than I anticipated I would. Formerly, I did not like "hot" things at all, but I find that my tolerance for and enjoyment of "hot" foods (at least in the chili pepper sense) is increasing over time.

The sauce on this is a  lot like the "garlic sauce" a Chinese restaurant near my parents uses - they have a special "steamed" menu that they CLAIM is low sodium as well as low fat; I've eaten it a couple of times and I really like the garlic sauce.