We continue our discussion from last week about Melody's weight and health journey. She uses the weight gambling app DietBet, and her weight is now the same as when her and Tom began dating. She is almost to the full elimination stage of the Auto-Immune Protocol (AIP). She is reaching this milestone by gradually eliminating food groups that cause inflammation, starting with gluten. Now she is switching her goal from weight loss to healing her gut.

During the quarantine we have been playing nostalgic retro games. Melody recently beat Donkey Kong Country in the SNES emulator on her Switch, and is recalling a lot from playing Super Mario 64. She will be playing Final Fantasy IX next, as she is a fan of turn-based games. Tom has been enjoying nostalgic games on the Switch like Burnout Paradise and Ghostbusters, which he first played on the XBox360. However his nostalgia really fires up when playing Atari 2600, IntelliVision, Commodore 64/128, and Amiga games on emulators; games that really depended on great gameplay. Thinking of the future, kids today might in their adult life look back on games like Fortnite for their nostalgia kick. Tom remarks that the retro-computing scene is quite active, including young people not just old, and new hardware and software is still being developed for these platforms.

For the holidays we made some typical Puerto Rican holiday dishes since many of the starches are AIP compliant. We made pasteles with green bananas, though they are typically made with plantain, cassava, or even rice. We made pernil, which we also put into the pasteles. Tom is from Puerto Rico and reminisced about the fried food vendors along the Luquillo beach; Puerto Rican fried food is the best fried food and Melody agrees. Melody attempted to make arroz con habichuelas (rice & beans) and was delighted to have magically created the quintessential yellow Hispanic rice out of riced cauliflower. She got to make sofrito with culantro, an interesting and new-to-her ingredient. She was struck by the fresh pungency of the plant's aroma and had difficulty sourcing it fresh (even in the Hispanic market). Tom remarked on how his mother would send him outside to gather the culantro leaves in the wild. Despite the many wonderful substitutes for other foods on the AIP, there is not a good one for beans. Melody experimented with diced cassava to mimic the starch-ines of the bean, but the result was disappointing since she mistakenly reduced the sauce too far. We also wanted to make coquito, a holiday drink with similarities to eggnog but quite different. Coquito is very nostalgic for Tom, so we wanted to make an authentic version, but also an alcohol-free and an AIP compliant versions. We did not get to make the alcohol-free one since we could not find enough rum extract in the stores.