Refried Beans 2.0

Laura continues to experiment with cooking here. She's trying to fit the available ingredients and the available cooking facilities (our kitchen) together to create dishes that we are familiar with in the US that are hard to find here. For example, refried beans are just not available here. Laura found some pre-soaked pinto beans and some pork fat and made her own this morning:

It's easy to find tortillas and cheddar cheese here, so I made a couple of bean burritos and they were good! Bean burritos are a staple for me back in WW, so it's nice to reconnect, haha. Laura also has managed to find the right combination of sugar, flour, eggs, and M&M's to make cookies. The too taste really good and are close to what we're accustomed to in the US. The challenge is the oven, which doesn't keep a very consistent temperature (as is indicated by the two batches of cookies below that baked for the same amount of time):

Also, there aren't any cookie pans here in our flat, or in Sevilla, so she uses one of the weird metal trays in the oven.

Today was a walk day (instead of a run day). Creature of habit that I am, I mostly just walk or run along the river each day unless there's some particular area of Sevilla that I want to explore. Today was a river walk. Rowing is a popular sporting activity here. Here is the inside of one of the many boathouses along the river here:

That's a lot of boats.

Today I took a break from doing new math and worked on writing up some existing results. I also took some time to continue to write detailed summaries of the machine learning courses I've been taking on-line from DataCamp.

Also, every other Wed is vacuum and mop day here in the flat. It doesn't take long, but it's good to have it on a schedule.

Finally, every Wed is talk to Emily on the computer day. I usually end up calling her around 9am her time (6pm our time). Always good to catch up with her. She reminds me each week how much I prefer being a mathematician to being a materials scientist (sorry Em, haha, ).