On my way to ScienceOnline'09

Once again, I'm sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline'09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati.

I'm going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on "Online science for kids (and parents)". I'll be highlighting a selection of the good content that's out there already, and I'm hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create new kid-friendly science content. Our wiki page is here, so you can play along at home and join the discussion virtually.

In case you're wondering why my posting has been relatively light in the days leading up to this conference, well, I seem to have been channeling Dr. Isis.

Our garage freezer was about half empty, owing to my decision to defrost it in December before our trip to the East Coast. (Fun thermodynamics fact: in an unheated garage, it is much harder to defrost a freezer in December than in July. Who knew?) So, in a fleeting fit of domesticity, I laid in some homemade casserole type things: baked macaroni and cheese, shepherd's pie (veggie, of course), lasagna (baked in four loaf pans rather than one big pan -- so you don't have to commit to more than two lasagna nights in a given week), and this:

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We're calling it the "I Can Haz Casserole" since it was inspired by a "Cheeseburger Casserole" recipe in an old grade school fundraiser cookbook from my youth. This cookbook has some recipes that, to a modern eye, don't resemble food so much as a way to bind excess Jell-O for safe transportation. (More about the horrors contained in the cookbook in a later post.) However, as this offering demonstrates, there were glimmers of culinary hope in 1970s suburbia.

I also made my version of my grandmother's overnight dinner rolls:

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The younger Free-Ride offspring opines that I didn't wrap the triangles of dough correctly. Nonetheless, the younger Free-Ride offspring will scarf down as many as permitted in a sitting.

Hmm ... writing about actual food while sitting in an airport terminal at 7 AM, without actual food in range? Hungry-making.

I'll be offline while in transit, but should be able to plug back into the intertubes tonight.

More like this

The past week or so, I've been on a little bit of a cooking jag. This has not gone unnoticed by the Free-Ride offspring. Elder offspring: Why have you been making us so many yummy things to eat this week? Dr. Free-Ride: I guess I'm going to miss cooking for you while I'm away at the conference…
Sitting here on the calendar between Chinese New Year and Saint Patrick's Day, it seemed like a good time for the sprogs to do some investigations of gambling devices -- in particular, dice. Dr. Free-Ride: Will you roll dice for me? Younger offspring: Can I use the purple ones? Dr. Free-Ride:…
*For Hanukkah this year, the elder Free-Ride offspring got E. coli and the younger Free-Ride offspring got Rhinovirus -- not the actual microbes, but the Giant Microbes stuffed versions. These gifts actually exploited a convenient loophole in Casa Free-Ride's moratorium on new stuffed animals,…
Dr. Free-Ride: Do you guys have a view on which came first, the chicken or the egg? Elder offspring: Do you mean the chicken or the chicken egg? Or just the egg the first chicken came out of? Younger offspring: The first chicken came out of an egg, but it was an egg laid by some other kind of…

that's cruel. pics and no recipe. cruel.
Have a safe trip!

This cookbook has some recipes that, to a modern eye, don't resemble food so much as a way to bind excess Jell-O for safe transportation.

Oh, that line was good for a real belly laugh. I certainly remember having to suffer through a great number of those concoctions at various friends' homes.

BTW, it was the infamous Fannie Farmer who was primarily responsible for foisting all those gelatin salads and desserts on us. She also had such a sweet tooth that each successive edition of her cookbooks called for greater amounts of sugar in the recipes.