A Mathematically-Optimised Party!

When throwing a great party, it's important to provide goodies that all of the guests will enjoy. If you know all of the guests and their tastes, then it's pretty easy to tailor your offerings accordingly. But throwing a larger party presents a fun challenge in terms of making sure there's at least a little something good for everyone.

Since I'm trained as a mathematician and tend to throw parties for mathematicians, naturally I can't help but approach this challenge in a mathematical way.

Specifically, I set out to throw a party in which half of the finger-foods have dairy and half don't, half of the finger-foods have meat and half don't, and half of the finger-foods have gluten and half don't. Thus I prepared 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 different recipes!

Starting from the recipe with none of the above, let's review all of the options I prepared:

Tortilla Chips and Guacamole

❌ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ❌ Meat

This is a perennial favorite and quite easy to make.

Sometimes I make guacamole from scratch, but for this party -- since I was preparing so many items -- I didn't want to deal with the additional cleanup of the food processor, so I just bought some guacamole and mixed it with salsa, plus some hot peppers from the garden for one of the portions of dip.

Bruschetta Toasts with Balsamic Vinegar Pearls

 ✅ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ❌ Meat

Again I went the lazy route and bought the bruschetta in a jar. Since it can be prepared in advance, I could have prepared it myself -- and maybe I should have since I ended up not having quite as much as I wanted. The toasts should generally have a bit more bruschetta on them than you see in this picture.

All you need is some leftover bread (baguette works especially well). Wait until your guests arrive before toasting it because the toasts with bruschetta on them can get soggy fairly quickly -- but they're quite delicious right when they're prepared.

(Toast the bread slices by themselves and add the bruschetta and garnish after toasting.)

I've found that balsamic vinegar pearls are a nice garnish for bruschetta toast. They're a good compliment in terms of flavor as well as color and texture.

My apologies in advance to all of my vegan friends for the rest of this article... you can stop reading now. 😀

Caprese Bites

❌ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ❌ Meat

This is one of those finger-foods that I would call "canonical" -- it's such a standard, obvious, perfect combination that it's generally pictured on the package of the mozzarella balls. (Indeed, I'm not sure that mozzarella balls the size of cherry tomatoes exist for any other purpose.)

Caprese bites are delicious, easy-to-make, and can be made early in the day (so they're not taking up that precious hour just before the guests arrive).

Just get a bunch of cherry tomatoes and an equal amount of mozzarella balls. Wash the cherry tomatoes and slice them all in half and add salt and olive oil. Then slice all of the mozzarella balls in half, and pair each one with a half-tomato -- placing a fresh basil leaf in between -- and attach them with a toothpick.

Sashimi Crunch

❌ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ✅ Meat

This is a recipe I invented myself.

Basically, I like sushi, I like sushi flavors, and I like making sushi for dinner parties. The problem is that getting the rice just right is a time-critical operation, and I don't want to deal with that while trying to coordinate the scheduling of all of the other food preparation.

My solution? Skip the rice.

So it's not actually "sushi", but the preparation of this dish is very similar to preparing maki.

I happen to have a number of these little ceramic/earthenware bowls (?) that some French cheeses are sold in, and I figured I could use them for finger-foods.

The ingredients you need to make 8 of these are the following:

1 long cucumber

~ 120 grams smoked salmon, sliced thin

Sushi nori sheets (about 2 or 3)

Soy sauce

Wasabi

It is very important that the cucumber remain as fresh and crisp as possible, so this recipe should be one of the last things you prepare before the guests arrive.

Peel the cucumber and cut it in half, and cut each half into four sticks:

Then carefully divide the smoked salmon into either 16 or 24 thin strips:

I sliced it into 24 strips in this case because the slices of salmon I bought were fairly small, so I couldn't make 16 long ones, just 24 short ones.

Note that it's OK to kind of piece together some partial pieces -- they don't really need to be perfect.

Then, if you're a mathematician following along, you can probably guess that we'll be adding 3 pieces of salmon to each of the 8 cucumber sticks.

Prepare a bowl of water so that you can get the nori wet with your fingers to make it sticky (as you would do for making maki).

Slice three strips of nori and place them (shiny side down) on the first three strips of salmon in such a way that the bottom of each nori strip aligns with the bottom of each salmon strip, and the top extends beyond the salmon:

Then get the nori a bit wet with your fingers and place a stick of cucumber across the top ends of the three strips and roll the three strips of nori (along with the salmon) onto the cucumber.

Note that it is very important for the nori to be sliced like this so that each cucumber stick has 2 or 3 separate bands of nori/salmon on it. This is because it is impossible to bite through the nori. The objective is to allow the guest to dip the cucumber in the soy sauce & wasabi and eat it in multiple bites. The bites of nori need to be separate for this to work.

Once you have prepared all 8 cucumber sticks in the same way, you can put them in the fridge for a little while -- just be sure to separate them from each other using cellophane or equivalent.

I generally mix some soy sauce with wasabi in advance of the party so that it is very easy to assemble these appetizers just before the first guests arrive. Just pour a bit of soy sauce & wasabi in each bowl and place the cucumber stick across the small bowl as pictured above.

These have gotten rave reviews, which makes up for the fact that they're a little more labor intensive that some of the other items in this collection.

Of course if you would like to spend more effort on a different finger-food and you'd like something super simple for the "meat-but-no-dairy-or-gluten" category, the "canonical" choice is, naturally, prosciutto e melone:

I did not actually make this for the same party as all of the other recipes, and I assume I don't need to explain how it's done since it's pretty self-explanatory. 

Filled Mini-Pastetlis

✅ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ❌ Meat

These little pastetlis can be purchased pre-made. Then, when the guests arrive, you just need to warm them briefly in the oven and fill them.

There are tons of different options for fillings. Typically one would use a soft cheese as a base (gorgonzola, mascarpone, or ricotta) and maybe add another food to stuff them with such as a half walnut (the suggestion on the package), or something like I've done here, stuffing some with artichoke hearts and others with stuffed olives.

I feel like this was probably the least-successful item I made for this party because I didn't really test and come up with a good flavor combination in advance. So I used mascarpone mixed with garden herbs (especially sage) and then the stuffing items you see above. This flavor combination did not work.

First of all, I found ricotta was better than mascarpone with the olives & artichokes, and the sage was just really wrong, so it's better to leave it out entirely. But when using ricotta alone with the olives and artichokes, they result is too bland. Maybe mixing the ricotta with a bit of tomato paste and chopped basil would be better...? Anyway there are a lot of possibilities, so this dish is still a work-in-progress.

Salami & Sbrinz

❌ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ✅ Meat

This is another "canonical" one: It's really easy to make because the flavors of a couple of simple ingredients complement each other so perfectly.

Basically just get a whole Salami Milano and cut it into cubes, and get a block of Sbrinz and cut it into cubes of about the same size as the salami cubes. Then stick them together, two to a toothpick.

I always put the salami cube on top because Sbrinz is a hard, crumbly cheese, which will crack in half if you try to stick a toothpick all the way through it.

You can potentially use a different cheese -- indeed, a less-crumbly one might be easier to work with -- but I think for the flavor combination you can't beat Sbrinz.

Tortilla roll-ups

✅ Gluten, ❌ Dairy, ✅ Meat

These are quite easy to make, they can be made a bit in advance (earlier in the day), and they are surprisingly tasty.

Basically, I just take some soft, wheat tortillas and spread each one with some sauce. I found that (Thomy) Truffle dip works really well for this recipe, but there are lots of other possible sauces or condiments that would work as well.

Then, on each one, I put two slices of prosciutto across the middle and place some fresh lettuce.

Ideally the lettuce should be crispy and crinkly. For this party, I used lettuce that I grew in my garden.

After placing the lettuce, fold one flap over the lettuce, but don't align the two edges (otherwise the inner lip will extend beyond the outer one when you roll it).

Then roll it into a somewhat-tight roll starting from the fold. Once it is rolled, insert 4 toothpicks to hold it closed, and slice it into 4 sections, as pictured above.

For presentation, naturally, it's nicest to stand up the segments on the plate:

For the final category -- the one that combines all three restricted items -- I used a very unusual and imaginative recipe that I got from the Betty Bossi "Apéro & Fingerfood" cookbook, p. 20:

Cervelat-Tortellini-Spiessli

✅ Gluten, ✅ Dairy, ✅ Meat

 

This picture is from the preparation stage. The picture after it's cooked is below.

Here's how you make it:

Get a pack of 2 cervelats. If you do not have cervelat in your country, you might be able to substitute bratwurst or some other sausage, but I doubt it will be as good.

Peel the casing off the cervelats. In the picture in the cookbook they actually look like they're not peeled (though the instructions say to do it), but if you don't peel them, this snack is very difficult to eat (I made this mistake the first time I made this).

Take a package of fresh tortellini. In this party I used the recipe's recommended tortellini (filled with spinach and ricotta) -- which worked very well in terms of flavor combination. The cookbook seems to imply that other fresh pasta could be used in place of tortellini, but I tried it with ravioli, and the edges burned. Use tortellini.

Take 100 grams of Gruyère or Emmentaler and cut it into cubes, and slice the cervelats into rounds. The objective is to have essentially equal numbers of cheese cubes, tortellinis, and cervelat slices so that they can be stacked and attached (with a toothpick) as shown in the above image.

These can be prepared early in the day and stored in the fridge, and then they can be cooked after the guests arrive. Add some paprika and olive oil to each one and cook them for about 10 minutes in a 180C oven.

I unfortunately didn't get a good picture of these after they were cooked -- I guess I was busy throwing a party or something -- so my one photo kind of looks like those "nailed it" images of attempts to make beautiful foods found on Instagram. 😂😂😂

But another problem was that I used a somewhat larger/cheaper bag of tortellini, and most of the tortellini were kind of misshapen and didn't sit nicely on the cervelat slices.

The next time I make this recipe, I'll make sure to get the highest-quality fresh tortellini.

And I will definitely make it again, because this always gets lots of compliments. It's very rich, though, so be sure to serve lighter fare alongside it, as I've done in this mathematically-optimised collection!

And I'll close with a couple of pictures of my garden (before I harvested the lettuce and basil and sage and mint (for the Hugos)), plus a photo of preparing for the party:

As you might have guessed, the party was a big success, and we'll be sure to be throwing more soon!!

State of the Me: 2021-2022

This blog is essentially defunct, yet somehow I like to continue using it to keep track of my goals and aspirations from one year to the next...

As usual, I'll divide this into a few major categories: Job, Projects, and Family/Home.

Job

I've passed so many years in which my job has been a constant and massive source of stress that I hardly imagined I would ever get it into a good state. But, amazingly enough, I feel like I've finally settled into the job I want: (1) I'm working of a company that is entirely focused on combating climate change, and (2) I have an expert-level position with a lot of responsibility and corresponding autonomy.

Plus I'm really lucky to be reporting to someone who is great at both tech and management. As I've said before, the #1 factor that distinguishes a fantastic job from a living hell is your immediate supervisor -- and my current supervisor is one of the best (if not the very best) I've had.

I am currently working as a DevOps Engineer and Cloud Administrator with a major focus on Kubernetes. After working in every part of IT, I feel like this is the part of the stack where I most want to be: helping multiple teams get their projects deployed and keeping everything running smoothly.

The Kubernetes certification I worked hard on last year was hugely stressful but it has really paid off: I feel like I know Kubernetes well, I know how to get it to do what I want, and I enjoy working with it. And now in the spring I'll be giving a couple of workshops on it for the women-in-tech club I'm in.

If things continue to go well, I could absolutely see myself staying with this job for the rest of my career. It has been less than a year so far, though, so I don't want to speak too soon.

Family/Home

This has been a pretty good year for my little family. Léo passed the Bac, so we're done with school. Nico and Léo have both moved on to an institute where they're studying video game programming -- which is nice because now they can focus on what they want to do and are good at.

The other bit of good news is that our Swiss citizenship is in the final stages of being secured. Nico has already gotten a letter confirming that he is now Swiss (his application was processed separately as he was already over 18 when we started this process), and the rest of us are almost there.

Personally I have been spending time trying to learn Swiss German, but it's tough going. It is weirdly difficult to find the one simple best thing I've found for learning a language: a series of audio dialogs with a transcription and translation into some other language that I understand.

The boys have their own projects that they're working on: stories, video games (developing as well as playing), and video story series (for private home screening only, so far). Nico even organized a new Halloween tradition for us -- having each person tell a scary story -- and the first iteration of it went great!

All of the isolation surrounding Covid has been a breeze for us -- we've been so happy in our little pod watching films together, playing games, and traveling when possible. I almost worry that we're too comfortable in our isolation, but I think it's better than the alternative in which we're dying to get away from each other.

And, unfortunately, we're still drowning in clutter. I've marked all of the days of the cargo tram and electro tram on my calendar, though (this is the opportunity to dispose of large objects), and I've set a goal to try to dispose of at least a bag or two of the long-term clutter every week this year.

Projects

The third section of book 1of my comic book is still not done!! But it's close. I basically just need to draw some fantasy machinery and wrap up a little more than a page. Then I want to clean everything up and make a proper publisher-pitch-portfolio for it.

I don't want to rush this (as much as it sounds crazy to say that after all of the years this has taken), but I would like to be sure that -- if and when this gets picked up by a publisher -- I would be in a position to focus on this project and get the other two books done.

Regarding other projects, I worked on a mini-project of writing a python program that would generate music in XML format to be played by the linux program lmms. I think it turned out pretty well, but could have been better -- in part because the free instruments that are included with lmms are not that great. I might try to search for more instruments for it online.

Otherwise, I'm leaning towards maybe taking some online courses on using software for drawing, animations, and music. Naturally, I only want to use tools that save projects in a parsable, text-based format (like xml or json) so I can do my own custom manipulations, but it's likely that I can make more progress if I don't always assume that I have to program all of my tools myself from scratch.

Of course the project I'm most excited about is -- a new comic book script! I honed the idea for it during our pleasant family weekend in Scuol, and I finished writing it last week. It's not related to my current comic book, so I lean towards using what I learned from drawing my current comic book to try to start from the beginning with better tools and improve my style. I think this new one might  work better distributed online rather than through a publisher, and I'm really pleased with it, so I'm looking forward to drawing it when I have time.

Also, Main Street Plaza is alive again. We're actually doing the Brodie Awards again, which is cool. I find it increasingly challenging to write about Mormonism, though. This is for two main reasons:

Firstly, while it was great fun working on Main Street Plaza while it was relatively popular, it was also a huge amount of work to build up even a small amount of interest, community, and name recognition. Blogging about Mormonism was basically my main hobby for about a decade, and -- while I did get some traction (I'm pleased with some personal essays I got published in a book and a magazine) -- it never really took off to the point of being properly famous even in the tiny pond of online discussion of Mormonism. It's exhausting just thinking about it.

I feel like I've said essentially all I have to say about Mormonism. I came up with some really good analysis of various aspects of the religion and culture -- and I tossed it into the grand chasm of the Internet where it was read a bit and then forgotten...

Secondly, I've lost patience with Mormonism. And, yes, I will continue to call it "Mormonism" rather than whatever euphemism the current CoJCoL-dS would prefer us to use, because this movement is bigger than and not wholly owned by the corporation of the president. (Also because they didn't even try to provide a workable alternative.)

Anyway, about my patience, or loss thereof. Over the years that I was writing about Mormonism, I actually had a rather upbeat attitude to the whole thing despite being a non-believer. I felt like it was actually kind of cool to have been a part of this unique movement. And, even more, I felt like the church was more of an obstacle that I'd climbed over -- getting stronger in the process. So I saw it as, on balance, something interesting that we learned from and gained wisdom to pass along to our community.

Now, for reasons I can't state on a public blog, I feel like a key part of that progress and good will has been erased, at least for me. And it makes me feel sad and tired. I'm glad there are people still talking about it and helping the people who are currently hurting from their connection to Mormonism, whatever it may be. But one can hardly blame me for feeling more drawn to the positive items on the list above.

Conclusion

On balance, I'm making slow but steady progress in the direction I'd like to go. I hope to have many years ahead in which to accomplish my goals -- and I plan to enjoy those years along the way with my one true love and our two adorable sons.

State of the Me: 2020-2021

Hello 2021! I've got to admit it's getting better... but I'm not quite where I want to be just yet.

Let's start with my career since that's the facet of my life I've focused the most effort on lately. 

In August, I passed my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. I'm proud of this accomplishment because I haven't taken a timed exam this difficult since graduate school, so I was stepping outside of my comfort zone a bit. But I worked hard at preparing myself, and it was a lot of stress, but I succeeded.

It turns out that I was absolutely right to prioritize passing this exam. Engineers with this certification are the hottest, most sought-after group in IT at the moment. Kubernetes is already on its way to becoming the industry standard for running software in the cloud -- so every company wants to move in that direction. But it's so new that very few people have any significant experience with it. Hence this certification takes the place of years of experience when finding professionals with real Kubernetes expertise.

Armed with this credential, I finally landed a new job back in the climate change / carbon reduction sector! I'll be starting on the first of February. Everything about it seems to align perfectly with what I've been looking for in a job, in terms of the type of company it is and the types of projects. I'll even be back to working at Zürich's startup central -- Technopark -- which should be fun!

I just hesitate to take a victory lap before I've gotten a chance to see how it will go. When I accepted my current job (the one I'm leaving), I figured it would be less stressful than my last one since the management and business strategy are someone else's problem. Management can do any crazy thing they want -- as long as I can carve out a comfortable little niche for myself, I'm fine. Yet somehow I wasn't quite able to do even that, for various reasons that I will analyze at length once I have the luxury of viewing it in hindsight.

So, yeah, another year, another job. I guess that's the worry -- if I couldn't make things work out the way I wanted in these last two jobs, will I ever succeed? OTOH, I have high hopes that this time I've triangulated in on the job I had wanted from the beginning, one where I can do work that I'm proud of and feel good about. To be really useful, as all the good little engines want to be.

Then, of course, since all of these career challenges have eaten up all of my attention and more over the past few years, I still haven't been able to get where I want to be with my creative projects. My comic book was supposed to be done by the first half of 2020, and it's still not done. I'm happy with the parts I did this year, but the process is just too slow. I think I can speed it up by addressing some technological challenges. (My tablet is too small and has some problems with responsiveness.)

I think if I can just get to the point where I'm not constantly stressing out about my job, then I can finally enjoy working on my comic book and get energized about some fun, new creative projects that I'd really like to get to work on. And if that succeeds, maybe I'll even have some time to declutter my apartment.

Regarding the world at large, I'm happy that Trump will finally be leaving the White House. As I've said before, I don't agree with the people who said that voting him out is the "right" way to get him out -- he should have been impeached and convicted within the first year of his presidency. Whether the president is above the law is not a question that should be up for popular vote (or some weirdly-derived subset of the popular vote). If the US system can't eject a president for constantly and openly breaking the law, then the system is broken. But this band-aid is better than nothing. The bare last line of defense has held firm against the deadly march of fascism -- when there was no guarantee that it would. Hopefully this victory will help turn the tide and encourage the people to make serious changes and fix things for real.

In my own little family, things are basically on track. The four of us are closer than perhaps we've ever been. Now that the kids are adults, or nearly, we can share ideas and have conversations where we're on essentially the same level. Nico is doing well in his game development studies, and Léo is planning to apply to go to the same school as Nico next fall. Hopefully by then they'll be able to attend their classes in person and have more opportunity to meet other people their own age, but I think it has actually been helpful for Nico to start his studies without the extra pressure of socializing.

And we're all on track to become citizens of Switzerland soon!

So I guess I don't have a lot to complain about this time. It's good to take the time to write it all down and remind myself of the big picture while I'm stuck sitting around the house feeing annoyed about getting older (and all that entails) as I approach 50. But I'm far from done with what I plan to do in life -- and if I've succeeded in getting my career back on track and if I can finally dig into my creative projects productively in 2021, I do believe I'll be OK.