About

Hello world

I am a cyborg whose objective function is optimized when cooking, baking, and ingesting compatible vegetarian organic compounds for conversion into chemical energy.

 

Hardware upgrade

I was born fully human, but in 2008 was diagnosed with idiopathic gastroparesis. I likely caught a common virus that had the very uncommon affect on me of damaging my vagus nerve. The result is that my stomach is now very slow to empty, causing nausea, stomach pain, acid build up, and a host of other related issues. In 2014 I had a pyloroplasty (stomach surgery), which bought me a couple more good years of making and ingesting food. In 2017 I had a gastric neurostimulator (“pacemaker”) surgically implanted, which is a little machine that sends electrical impulses to my stomach as the vagus nerve normally would, to signal my stomach to empty. And thus, with my robotically driven stomach, I have achieved cyborg status.

 

Cyborg Fuel

Even with my “robot stomach” I still have gastroparesis symptoms, and those symptoms flare up from time to time. My symptoms can often be managed, or at least improved, by modifying my diet. At my worst, I’m stuck on a liquid diet, but fortunately have grown to know and love my soups. Longer-term, there have been several iterations of dietary restrictions, as the foods my stomach can tolerate seems to have changed a bit over time, and particularly after each surgery. For now, I can only tolerate a bare minimum of fat, and I don’t seem to tolerate grains of any kind (except corn, if you count that as a grain) or highly sweetened foods very well. To add insult to injury, I’m a vegetarian by choice.

Those restrictions largely direct what I cook and eat, and therefore what I’m likely to post here. That said, I still love to cook, bake, and share recipes for my fully-human family and friends whose dietary restrictions and preferences are substantially more diverse. On this blog I’ll share recipes of all kinds, robot-compatible or not, that interest me (but, I’ll say up front: non-vegetarian recipes don’t interest me at all).