The Death of the Scientific Paper

I’m sitting in my office at Université Laval, waiting for an opportunity to speak with my professor, and procrastinating revising a manuscript. My procrastination, almost always, is to read the internet, and today I’ve found a new article from The Atlantic, “The Scientific Paper is Obsolete”. 

The main thesis of this article is that the scientific paper as we know it today has outlived its utility. The author, James Somers, opens with a description of the niche the scientific paper was invented to fill: a short, incremental advance published as widely as a book but as readable as a letter, and permanent where a lecture is ephemeral. I’ve had conversations with academics in social sciences or humanities disciplines who express their surprise that books, which for argument’s sake are publications longer than about 100 pages, almost never appear in the list of citations in my scientific publications. I list 11 publications – scientific papers – on my C.V. with me as an author (always one of several, I have no sole-author publications) and I’m first author on 7 of those; this means I did most of the actual writing. I feel this experience gives me some perspective to evaluate the article in The Atlantic.

There are the expected jabs at the style and perceived readability of scientific papers, a criticism so widespread and consistent that I now mostly ignore it. I get it, you don’t get the enjoyment of reading a scientific paper that you get out of reading something else, and you put the blame largely on the abundant jargon and dense prose of typical scientific papers; James Somers also adds some mentions of “mathematical symbols”, which is indeed one major feature of many scientific papers that separates them from written works intended for a wider, non-specialist audience. But that’s the point – the intended audience of a scientific paper is not the general public, it’s other experts in that discipline. Know your audience. I guess James Somers does - scientists and non-scientists decrying the difficult prose of scientific papers to non-scientists is very popular in popular science articles.

This isn’t to say that a scientific paper cannot be or should not be highly readable to non-specialists and other members of  the general public, but to approach a scientific paper as a non-specialist and then complain about the jargon is to miss the point. I think one has to approach a scientific paper from a position of self-knowledge, in that I have to read a paper outside my area of expertise in a different (and more difficult) way compared to reading a paper that might cite my own work.

Another major difference between a scientific paper and something like an article in The Atlantic – and these two categories are of similar word-count, on average – is the abundant citations in a scientific paper. Every fact, every suggestion, every piece of information in a scientific paper that is not derived directly from the study itself will be cited; credit is given to the prior work that established those facts or provided those suggestions (unless the fact or suggestion is obvious or already widely known and established; we don’t cite Scheele and Priestly (1772) when talking about oxygen, for example). I find myself wishing for some citations and outside attributions while reading this Atlantic article because James Somers makes so many claims that I would like to dispute.

For example, here’s the third paragraph of the article:

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data, and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be both so sloppily written and so central to the results that it’s contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way, a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report what you’ve actually discovered, clearly enough that someone else can discover it for themselves.

 Are papers really longer in 2018 than they were, on average, in 1998, or 1978, or 1888? Are they more “full of jargon and symbols”? Are the majority of analytical computer programs “so sloppily written”?

And what replication crisis? Mr. Somers, have you not read the recent counterargument to the crisis-in-science narrative by Dr. Fanelli, recently published by PNAS?  

Moving on, one major criticism is that scientific papers are not a good way to express and describe complex results. Animations, something computers are quite good at, are useful tools for visualizing such complex concepts but are very difficult to express on a static sheet of paper, which the modern PDF (Portable Document Format) emulates. I agree, but I do not agree with the follow-up point that this renders the PDF hopelessly useless. A scientific paper is about the words, not the pictures or other visualizations. It’s about the information. Expressing that information in a way the audience can understand and use is the key skill of writing a scientific paper, and is distinct from the skills that create written material intended to be read by as wide an audience as possible. A scientific paper relies heavily on absolute honesty, and presenting all of the available and relevant information to allow the reader to independently decide to agree or not with the author’s arguments and conclusions. A magazine article pushes a particular interpretation of some phenomenon. A scientific paper pushes the phenomenon and then describes one (or sometimes more) possible interpretation of that phenomenon, usually in light of similar phenomena and potential alternative interpretations. A graph is not data, it's an expression of data. An animation is not an argument, it's one support for an argument.

Visualization is a technique, a way to take obscure numbers and show the patterns they contain. I struggle with it, constantly. The paper I am procrastinating working on right now has some decent figures* in it and I don’t see a need for a great deal of work on the visualization side of this paper. I have another project I’m working on that is at a much earlier stage and my current activities there are primarily concerned with visualization. I’m at the “data exploration” stage, where I throw the metaphorical spaghetti of the data at the metaphorical wall and see what sticks. That means lots and lots of images, mostly graphs I get my computer to make for me, and some scribbles on paper in my notebook.

*A figure is any image in a scientific paper, a photograph or map or, most commonly, a graph illustrating the mathematical relationship between two or more parameters. I tend to write papers by making the figures first, but that's a personal style and subjective workflow thing, and certainly not universal among scientists.

Back to The Atlantic

It’ll be some time before computational notebooks replace PDFs in scientific journals, because that would mean changing the incentive structure of science itself. Until journals require scientists to submit notebooks, and until sharing your work and your data becomes the way to earn prestige, or funding, people will likely just keep doing what they’re doing.

This is more interesting to me than the preceding description of competing formats for “computational notebooks”. I have seen suggestions from other people that concentrate on changing other aspects of scientific publishing, often the abolition of for-profit publishing companies (e.g. Here), but these suggestions and discussions do not express a dissatisfaction with the basic unit of scientific communication, the scientific paper. What would my job look like if both scientific papers and the way in which they are disseminated were to go away? Would I just be uploading lumps of code and datatables to some institutional server, whenever I feel like my analyses have answered some tiny question? Does my "Literature Cited" section just become a link-dump?

“At this point, nobody in their sane mind challenges the fact that the praxis of scientific research is under major upheaval,” Pérez, the creator of Jupyter [one of the competing calculation notebooks – MB], wrote in a blog post in 2013. As science becomes more about computation, the skills required to be a good scientist become increasingly attractive in industry. Universities lose their best people to start-ups, to Google and Microsoft. “I have seen many talented colleagues leave academia in frustration over the last decade,” he wrote, “and I can’t think of a single one who wasn’t happier years later.”

I had to look up the definition of “praxis”; I think it’s exactly what I was talking about, what does my job look like if the scientific paper and scientific publishing are drastically changed? Dr. Pérez apparently thinks my job would not change much. I’m not so sure.

There’s also a problem in that paragraph with a possible logical fallacy: confirmation bias. Lots of sad people leave, and then you find a few of them later and they’re happier. Well, good! Happier people is a good thing. But to then claim that it was the act of leaving that made them happier, and then extend that by implication that everybody should consider leaving, is to stretch beyond the available information into unsupported (and idealistic) speculation. If the only people who left were the unhappy people, then what about the happy people who stayed? Would they have also become even more happy had they left? Did the people who stayed unhappy, or became more unhappy after leaving avoid talking to you?

At this point I’m wandering away from the discussion about scientific papers. And I think the article did, too. It concludes with a weak suggestion that maybe some new tools will be useful (who could disagree with that? Tools are useful by definition) and that, hey Galileo, right?

I remain unconvinced in the impending death of the scientific paper. What I got out of this article was a description of some computer programmers and physicists with generally poor social skills but good ideas and skills related to generating and analyzing data. And that somehow this means the time I spend teaching ESL graduate students how to write better English that is also in the demanding, highly technical style of current scientific communication is somehow wasted.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #38 Pulled Jerk Pork Sandwiches (pg. 157) - 160217

When I visit Charlie, I tend to buy a nice big piece of meat for her freezer and her slow cooker. This time, it was a pork shoulder. This recipe calls for a 2.5 pound boneless shoulder, but those are hard to find in Regina so we ended up with a 4 pound bone-in shoulder. This worked quite well, and the resulting sandwiches were fantastic. No photos, because apparently I get easily distracted by great food.

This also supplied "roast pork" to the Cuban Pork Sandwiches we made for lunch the next day.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #35: California Black Bean Burgers (pg. 504) - 160215

For my first foray into the Vegetarian chapter of the Betty Crocker Cookbook, Charlie helped me make burger patties out of black beans. The "California" part of the name comes from the salsa used as garnish during final assembly; I gather that such non-standard burger toppings are stereotypically associated with the hedonism of The Golden State.

I took no photos of these burgers, mainly due to the extreme mess that results from trying to force a fairly wet bean paste into a coherent patty. They were also excellent, so I didn't put down my burger to pick up my camera.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #36: Chicken and Broth (pg. 434) and #37 Quick Jambalaya (pg. 433) - 160216

I visited Charlie in Regina over reading break in February, and together we completed enough recipes in this project to add considerably to her store of frozen meals.

Several of the recipes we chose - chosen as we drove back to Regina from Cypress Hills - were set up as prerequisites supplying key ingredients to subsequent recipes. In this case, the Chicken and Broth supplied chicken broth to the Quick Jambalaya; we also added some of the cooked chicken that resulted, despite not being called for in the Jambalaya recipe.

Some of the broth from the Chicken and Broth. I felt like we were using this simple recipe in the way the authors of the cookbook intended - this recipe doesn't produce a meal, or a component of a multi-dish meal, it provides ingredients to further recipes.

We didn't have frozen brown-and-serve sausage links as called for, and our shrimp still had tails, but we substituted regular sausages and added most of the smaller chicken pieces. I couldn't convince Charlie to dive all-in to this project and get instant rice, so we just simmered the jambalaya for longer and used regular brown rice.

Absolutely delicious!

***
 I had to go back and change the recipe numbers when I realized we made the California Black Bean Burgers Monday, and these recipes Tuesday.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #34: Glazed Carrots (pg. 457) - 160207

Hey, look at that! I'm close to two months behind on my blogging already! Oh well. Hopefully I can remember the relevant details for these recipes.

I'd chosen glazed carrots as a way to get into the Vegetables chapter, then felt mildly intimidated by it, because it's pretty far from my "normal" diet. In any case, it was far simpler and took much less time than I had expected, and the flavour was quite nice.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #33: Spiced Corned Beef Brisket with Horseradish Sour Cream (pg. 156) - 160204

I chose this recipe to use up the rest of the very-salty "navel" beef I'd bought for recipe #21. I washed the beef chunks in running water for about 10 seconds to remove some salt. As with nearly everything I put into my slow cooker, everything emerged after 9 hours that same colour of brown, and quite soft.

Despite my slow cooker's tendency to colour everything the same, the taste is more robust. Especially salt. This was still pretty salty. Also, I'm now convinced that I have, at some point, completely ruined my ability to taste the hot/spicy part of the flavour of horseradish. I glopped a huge amount of the horseradish sour cream on this, and it was delicious but completely non-spicy.

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Also! I finally bought a freezer. $60 from a person moving out of a house in Cambridge.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #32: Beer-Cheese Soup (pg. 440) - 160131

After my heavy breakfast with sausages and eggs, I was happy to tick off a meatless soup for supper. Soup generally goes well with bread, anyway, and I'd bought some lovely beer at the local brewery in growlers.

I used Waterloo Dark for the beer, though I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes. The celery didn't soften as much as I expected. It wasn't crunchy, but it was more firm than I'm used to. Of course, most of my celery consumption comes out of my slow cooker, which turns most vegetables into brown paste regardless of starting characteristics.

The last ingredient is "Popped popcorn, if desired". I don't normally desire, but I have a bit of regret that I did not pick up any popcorn in anticipation of this recipe. Presumably there are other recipes that call for this American staple, so I can correct that oversight.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #31: French Bread (pg. 84) - 160131

My first yeast bread from this recipe book for this project! I decided to make this, as well as do some needed household chores, instead of going for a Sunday Drive this week. Every recipe in this book comes with a time estimate, usually broken down by major stages: prep, cook, stand, etc. The totals, however, can conceal a pattern of work / rest with more steps than simply "prep", "rise", and "chill". Betty Crocker's French bread suggests 25 minutes of preparation, 3 hours 15 minutes of rise, 4 hours of chill, and 20 minutes to bake.

These totals are probably accurate (except the bake time). There are three rise stages, each about an hour long, separated by blocks of preparation. I've baked bread a few times before, so I consider myself to know my way around kneading and yeast-handling. The big variant here is the repeated applications of sprayed-on water, and the pan of water in the oven during baking. This helps to develop a crispy crust, apparently.

The baking time was described as "18 to 20 minutes" but I think my oven struggles to acheive and maintain high temperatures, so I left the loaves in the oven for about 30 minutes before they looked the right colour to me.

I goddam love fresh bread. I couldn't wait, so I cut one loaf using an oven mitt to hold the hot loaf and smeared butter on the cut pieces. Fantastic!

Betty Crocker Cookbook #30: Mexican Scrambled Eggs (pg. 221) - 160131

I think the easiest recipe in this book is Scrambled Eggs, so I took on the variant, Mexican Scrambled Eggs. This is very similar to the breakfast burritos I sometimes do - scrambled eggs, stir-fried onion & pepper, wrapped in a tortilla with cheese - but with some chorizo sausage added. The sausage wasn't really "chorizo", it was whatever sub-category the sausage the Mennonites sell at the St. Jacob's farmers' market falls into. There are Mennonites in Mexico, and I didn't go for the garlic sausage, so I'm going to call this substitution "close enough".

No photo, so I can't show you how I made a rather large breakfast for myself. I was pretty stuffed.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #29: Broiled Fish Steaks (pg. 243) - 160129

I bought enough basa fillets for about four meals (at least!) so I decided to make more room in my freezer, still lacking a stand-alone unit, and broiled up a trio. I don't yet have a broiling pan, an oversight I covered with my metal trivet balanced on a cookie sheet, but I'll need to get a proper one before I tackle any other broiling / roasting recipes. The variant for this recipe is fillets, and the instructions are nearly exactly the same as for fish steaks.

These were actually kind of bland, but that's not really surprising, they were seasoned only with butter, salt, and black pepper. Still, not bad and nearly as quick as advertised. I'd picked up some sweet-potato oven fries and broccoli at the grocery store, mainly because I had the realization in the frozen isle that I hadn't bought anything that could be described as "prepared food" since I began this project. Frozen pizzas were a prominent part of my diet last year, and I'll probably break down and buy one or two eventually but so far I'm not really missing them.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #23: Chocolate Cake (pg. 101) and #24: Fudge Frosting (pg. 115) - 160124/25

Last Sunday was a remarkably productive day for this project, partly because this cake counts for two recipes.

It's chocolate cake, so I'm not sure how much I can say beyond "Delicious!". Of course.

However, I ran into some trouble with the frosting. The recipe includes heating most of the ingredients to a slow boil, then cooling for 45 minutes before adding the powdered sugar and vanilla. I messed this up, by boiling everything, but I don't think that really bothered the icing sugar. The more serious error was my decision to ice the cake the following day. I had to re-heat the frosting, and then I didn't let it cool enough.

The cake came from my oven. The frosting came from Mordor. Notice in the photo it's attempt to cover the land (i.e. my countertop) with Eternal Darkness. I had to put the whole thing on my balcony to allow winter to stop the spread.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #22: French Toast (pg. 79) - 160124

With bonus Shirred Eggs

Feeling the pressure to keep this project rolling, I threw together French Toast last Sunday before departing for a Sunday Drive. I had meant to half the recipe (but use 2 eggs instead of 1.5 and just fry the excess egg coating mixture), but I added the full amount of both eggs and milk and had to just roll with it.

Three eggs plus 3/4 cup of milk makes for a pretty runny mixture. This is good for coating bread, but when I fried the leftovers - I used 4 slices of bread rather than the full recipe's 8 - it didn't act like normal scrambled eggs. The sugar and vanilla were lovely on the bread, which of course was the point of this meal, but made the milky, scrambled eggs oddly sweet. In any case, this is a pretty standard French toast recipe and was delicious.

PHOTO

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It's not a full recipe, just part of a general-guidelines table at the beginning of the "Eggs and Cheese" chapter on page 220, but the day before the French Toast I baked, or "shirred", some eggs for my breakfast.

I ended up baking them for about 50% longer than the guidelines suggested, and I'm still not sure how to "dot with butter", but they turned out quite well.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #21: Corned Beef and Cabbage (pg. 289) - 160120

I wasn't able to find corned beef brisket as described in the recipe, so I went with "Cured Navel Beef" because it was packed in brine; the recipe specifies beef with brine, and step 1 includes "add juices and spices from package of corned beef". I took this to mean I should add some of the red-tinted liquid my navel beef was floating in. I also did not find a small head of cabbage, so I used about half of a large head of savoy cabbage. Everything went into the slow cooker (onion, garlic, and enough cold water to submerge the beef being the other ingredients) and I went to work.

When I came home, my apartment smelled as good as I expected - slow cookers tend to release delicious aromas, almost regardless of their contents. I nuked some potatoes and settled in for my supper.

SALT!

After mentioning the brine, I'm sure most of you are completely unsurprised that this meal was basically salt with meat and salt and salt. Once I got past the SALT the flavour of the meat was quite nice, and the slow-cooked cabbage was interesting and not at all bad (the onions and garlic had basically dissolved, as is usual for the slow cooker). I ended up throwing the rest away because I couldn't bring myself to eat any more, especially after the fat congealed as a floating paste in the 'fridge. I only used about half of the navel beef, and I found another recipe that specifies soaking the salt out of the meat before cooking. 

No photo this time, I forgot to grab my camera while I was chugging huge amounts of water.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #19: Apple Oven Pancake (pg. 77) - 160117

I had planned to cook Popovers (pg. 76) on Sunday afternoon (I definitely slept in, well and truly, on Sunday, having gotten up rather early on Saturday) but my errand-running on Saturday afternoon had not netted me a popover pan. I trust the internet will be able to supply these extra-tall muffin tins.

This is a variant on Puffy Oven Pancake, prepared with a layer of apple slices and brown sugar on the bottom of the pie plate; the batter is poured over and into this layer and it takes a little longer to bake.

My plan while I was making this was to eat 1/2 of it for breakfast on Sunday, and have the remainder Monday. However, I wasn't really full after 1/2, and I ate it all. I can rationalise this (easily, I ain't gotta justify nothin', really) by considering the ingredients - 2 eggs, a little flour, milk, and sugar, and one apple, is about the amount of food I'd have for breakfast, typically.

***

To have a hope of completing this project in a single year I would need to maintain an average of a little less than two recipes each and every day. Some days and recipe combinations are easier than others, for example the two or more recipes that can be combined to make a solid square meal. However, to keep up that pace requires a greater committment than I can really spare. At the beginning, I was on vacation with Charlie, who provided support and encouragement for that critical launch phase. Now, though, I'm back at work and generating more leftovers than I can eat in each following-day lunch. So, I'm pushing the deadline back to two years. I'm pretty happy with the pace I'm keeping now, a bit ahead of one recipe / day, and this will allow me to relax and enjoy this project rather than feeling pressured to keep cranking out exotic (to me) food.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #18: Skillet-Fried Chicken (pg. 321) - 160116

Highly unusually for me, I got up early on Saturday morning. I took a co-worker to the St. Jacob's farmer's market because she wanted to find a source of meat and eggs that she could trust - she would rather not eat factory-farm raised animals. Fair enough, and I'd been meaning to check out this locally-famous farmer's market anyway, for deals on large amounts of fruit to make into wine.

The market turned out to be a bit overhyped, I actually prefer Kitchener's farmer's market, it's less obviously trendy-and-bourgeoise. But I bought a chicken! From people wearing slightly-more-traditional-clothing! Plus some sausage, from a woman wearing a bonnet! When in Rome...

Preparing to cut up the chicken. The steel bowl is for good parts as they come off, the prune yogurt container for garbage (in this case, mostly skin and fat; the spine and ribs went directly into the garbage can. I have no need, and no space, for more broth at this time).

I was happy to go to the farmer's market and buy a whole chicken because I feel like I'll never gain skills like "cutting up a whole chicken" if I don't practice them often enough; too long an interval between such attempts and I'll have to start over.

I think the bird I bought was considerably heavier than the 3- to 3 1/2-lb chicken this recipe calls for. A long time ago, I read a kind of write-in trivia-answers thing that I remember mentioned trends in chickens. Apparently, many (American) cookbooks were originally written in the middle of the 20th century, when typical whole chickens at local butchers were under 4 pounds (about 2kg). By the end of the century, average whole chickens for sale had increased in weight, leading to a mismatch between recipes and real-world experience. I experienced that mismatch, this took a really long time to cook!

The basic idea is to "shallow-fry" (my own term; a continuous layer of oil boiling in a hot pan, insufficient to submerge the food) the cut-up chicken pieces, first for 10 minutes skin-side down, then 20 more minutes skin-side up. My chicken didn't fit in the pan, I only managed to get about 2/3 of it in for the first round. And that took around an hour to fully cook! The remaining 1/3 took less time, but still more than the 30 minutes the recipe suggests.

In the end, though, very tasty bird and the cutting-up process went pretty smoothly.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #15: Date Bars (pg. 175) - 160110

I forgot to take a picture of these rather tasty and easy sweets, and then nearly forgot to blog them! Not much to say - the recipe is pretty straightforward once you get the butter soft enough to mix with the brown sugar. I took to smearing the butter chunks against the bottom and sides of the mixing bowl, that seems to have been more effective than the chopping / stirring I was doing at the beginning.

They were popular at the first lab meeting of the semester, but I still had lots and lots of leftovers. Oh well, like I said, pretty tasty!

Betty Crocker Cookbook #12: Blueberry Muffins (pg. 67) - 160110

Muffins are, not particularly surprisingly, reasonably quick and easy, and while I was not particularly pressed for time on Sunday morning, I was eager to get out of the house with enough daylight to spare for a bit of a Sunday Drive. The downside of this recipe, and how this cookbook arranges and categorises recipes, is that there is now little point for me to try a variation on muffins-for-breakfast because other than Bran Muffins (and their variant, Date-Bran Muffins), all of the muffin recipes here are variants on the one I've just made. I plan to eventually try more muffins, this recipe worked extremely well, but such enjoyments won't count towards this project's completion goals.

I did not scale down the recipe from its target of 12 muffins because it calls for a single egg; eggs are often the limiting integer for recipe reductions, because I'm not interested in keeping fractions of whipped eggs in my 'fridge. No substitutions, either. I found I comfortably ate four muffins each morning, with a quick smoothie (yogurt, banana, frozen fruit, milk; not a recipe in this book) and a couple of cups of coffee, so this batch of 12 gave me breakfast for three straight days. Very convenient in a "daily life" kind of way, not so good for grinding through this project.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #10: Asian Noodle Bowl (pg. 365) - 160108

There are numerous other "Asian-inspired" recipes in this book, but I find it amusing, as well as telling of the background of this cookbook, that a single recipe stands in for the vast diversity of noodle-based dishes created and consumed by the billions of people living on that continent - to say nothing of the spectacular range of such cuisine available in the Chinatown of any major Western city. Also, the photo for this recipe includes a pair of forks, but no chopsticks.

This recipe is in the Pasta chapter (subchapter: Noodles), possibly as a reminder to the reader that there is a world of pasta beyond Italy. It could just as easily fit into the Vegetarian chapter, because it contains no meat at all, though I confess I am unsure of the ingredients of hoisin sauce.

(with apologies for the residue from a dropped onion piece on the table)

No substituions, though I did cut the recipe in half and I might have messed up a few of the relative proportions. In any case, this was very good. My chopstick skills need more practice; I gave up the painfully slow process about 1/2 way through my first bowl-full.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #5: Chicken (Pork) Salad Sandwiches (pg. 452) - 160105

So far, this project is a remarkable 5/5 for successes. Charlie has been keeping me motivated during the launch stage (the first few days) of this cook-everything-in-a-big-cookbook project, and we ate Pork Salad Sandwiches for lunch today as I drove her to Ottawa’s airport. No photo this time because I forgot to take any during preparation, but I suspect it’s remarkably difficult to take a good picture of pork (or chicken) salad sandwiches as they are being created.

Substitutions this time include pork (obviously) for the recipe’s called-for cooked chicken (or ham, egg, or tuna in the published variations), using the slow-cooker pork we prepared in the Old Year (around December 30, if I remember correctly). And, instead of regular bread, we used pita pockets that we’d bought in expectation of regular lunches over this vacation. A typical daily schedule that included rising from bed around 11:30am precluded the use of most of our lunch supplies, but today’s pita-pocket sandwiches were excellent.

Betty Crocker Cookbook #4: Eggnog (pg. 62) - 160103

This ain’t your grocery-store’s eggnog!

This is excellent. The basic idea is to mix custard (milk and eggs) with whipped cream, rum, and nutmeg, plus a helping of sugar and some vanilla. It’s a liquid dessert, reminiscent of Crème brûlée in a way that the litre of eggnog we drank last week that came from a grocery store in Waterloo could never be.

Charlie and I are enjoying this – with the cookies from yesterday, dipped – and she has just informed me that we are both going to get diabetes. Tonight.