On NaBloPoMo Failure and Caldo Verde

dear lord this is an ugly picture

I have unsurprisingly failed in my NaBloPoMo quest. This has happened a lot more now than it did before. I think some of it was the encouragement I had when I actually knew other bloggers in Austin. A lot of it is because the seasons in my life have changed and my energy is directed elsewhere. I've been going to data science and machine learning meet ups whenever I can. I've been trying to attend community-building events to learn more about creating a diverse and inclusive culture both at my company and in tech in general. These do not leave much time for blogging, or cooking for that matter. Colby bears the brunt of the domestic responsibilities and I am very glad that he can cook.

I've been thinking about priorities a lot lately. I spend 2-4 nights per week doing after-work extracurricular activities. It's meant that I've been spending a lot of my mental capital on that and not on other things that I used to do (hello, paper crafting). It's also meant that I don't sleep and haven't been to my insanely expensive exercise place in 2 weeks (hello, Crossfit). This results in very quiet weekends. This isn't a bad thing, except that my weekends used to be the most interesting part of my week. Instead, I've been spending a lot of time snuggling with Ramona, watching Bob Ross, and catching up on my sleep.

The best part about quiet weekends has been that it's gotten much colder. This means that snuggling under piles of blankets is not uncomfortable and that soup for dinner is totally legit. This weekend, PBS Create had a soup-centric theme and that was awesome. America's Test Kitchen highlighted a recipe for caldo verde and it was amazing with nothing more than a side of crusty San Francisco sourdough.

Data Science Meet Up Recap

nice picture of the back of someone's head. :) 

My favorite way to interact at conferences is twitter. It's easy to follow hashtags and use @messaging to connect with people. As a result, I often "meet" people on twitter and never really meet them in real life. Today I went to a data science meet up and got to actually meet someone I've been interacting with on twitter since SciPy.

The meet up was basically an intro to data science. We talked about why data science is having a moment, what the data science work flow looks like, and what skills are crucial in being an effective data scientist. We then went through a tutorial using a Jupyter notebook, scikit-learn, and the iris data set. I've actually given a tutorial in a research seminar using that data set, so I didn't really gain much technical insight out of this; however, I did come to this realization:

The amount of machine learning one needs to understand to use SKLearn is very low. This is both wonderful and dangerous. #datascience

— julie k h (@jkru) November 3, 2015

I also got to hang out with Sonya, Michelle and Michael, and some Hackbright grads, while meeting other people who are interested both in data science and building a culture of inclusion in the tech industry. Quality way to spend an evening.

NaBloPoMo 2k15 Meal Plan #1

Can I actually just eat bacon all week instead?

It's November, which means that i get that itch to do something writing-related. i'm not saying that I'll success with NaBloPoMo, but whatever. Made this earlier today because we need to start eating better/cheaper:

Monday - rotisserie chicken, arugula
Tuesday - slow cooker pork, butternut squash in a brown butter and pine nut sauce, swiss chard
Wednesday - mac and cheese, leftover pork
Thursday - pan-fried chicken breast, roasted okra, swiss chard + lentil soup
Friday - chicken + vegetable pasta toss

I'll actually be out of the apartment for Monday and Wednesday to attend various events, so those are actually just for Colby to do while I'm gone.

Poppy Seed Cookies

I decided to make the poppy seed cookies from the NPR story I linked to last post.  Since I didn't have a half cup of poppy seeds and since peanut oil that isn't super refined is kind of expensive, I decided to cut the recipe in thirds.  (Also, I didn't need 60 cookies because, hello waistline).  Below is my slightly modified version to account for standard measurement units.


1 c AP flour
3/4 t baking powder
2 T+2 t poppy seeds
1/4 t salt
1/3 c peanut oil
1/3 c sugar
1 egg
1/2 t vanilla extract

in a medium-ish bowl, sift flour and then baking powder.  You probably won't get all the baking powder, but that's okay because 3/4 t > 2/3 t, which is what would be called for if it were perfectly scaled down from the original recipe.  Whisk in the poppy seeds and salt

In a large bowl, whisk together egg, vanilla extract, sugar, and peanut oil until well combined.  Stir in the flour mixture and chill for at least an hour.

Take chilled dough and form teaspoon-sized pieces into balls.  Pat into circles and bake for ~12 minutes at 350 F.

Allow to hang out on the baking sheet for a minute or two after removing from the oven and let cool. 

These were freaking fantastic.   I'd really like to play around with the recipe a bit to perhaps use brown sugar for a richer caramel flavor and something other than poppy seeds because I'm basically out now.

Food-filled NPR linkstorm

There are so many reason for which I am glad that the election is over, but one of the biggest is that now I can listen to NPR without the heart palpitations.  My stress response to national politics is not new; during the debt ceiling fiasco last summer, I had a dream that John Boehner was some evil villain and had taken over a library I was in and he was planning on having everyone in there killed.  I blame it on the combination of overdosing on political commentary and crazy pregnancy hormones.  Due to my renewed appreciation for NPR, I've heard a whole bunch of food-related stories too good not to share.

You Can Thank a Whey Refinery for that Protein Smoothie
It's about making protein powder, but I thought that this was the most interesting part of the entire piece:

Lactoferrin is common in human breast milk, but there's not much in cow's milk. From the 1.6 million pounds of milk that go through this factory every day, the equipment in this room captures just 120 pounds of lactoferrin. "We're just stripping out the single molecule, collecting it, processing it, and drying it into a powder," Opper says.

J.R. Ewing and a Found Recipe for Poppy Seed Cookies
It includes a recipe for cookies that I'm definitely making soon and links to a the website of the Brass Sisters.  I'd never heard of them, but now I can't wait to get my hands on Heirloom Cooking and Heirloom Baking.

Sandwich Monday: The Angry Whopper
It's the Wait Wait... crew's take on Burger King's latest offering and a great quote from Peter Sagal:

I love that bacon is the food equivalent of lighting a candle in the bathroom.

NaBloPoMo: I fail, but here's a recipe

Oh hey, day two and I already screwed up NaBloPoMo.  I'm not surprised, as I didn't have high aspirations for this, but I wanted to come here and use the blog as I originally intended.  At first, it was just an attempt to log what I'd been making as I taught myself how to cook.  We just had stir-fry and I'm getting closer to a stir-fry sauce that I can reliably make and really like.  Recipe and notes below:



1 T olive oil


1/2 large-ish lobe shallot, finely diced
6ish cloves garlic, crushed

2 t sambal
1.5 t honey
1 t powdered ginger

6 T soy sauce
5 T rice wine vinegar
kosher salt

Place a small sauce pan over medium heat.  Add in olive oil when hot and saute shallots with a pinch of salt until soft and translucent.  Add in garlic and stir until fragrant.  Add sambal + honey and stir all to incorporate.  Add in soy sauce and vinegar and bring to a boil and then turn off the heat.

You can reduce the sauce to get it thicker, but I really like sauce-drenched rice, so I didn't really reduce it.  In the future, I may try it with fresh ginger (~1-2 T finely minced) and add that in with the shallot and perhaps a drizzle of sesame oil in at the end off heat.  This was highly adapted from a recipe that appeared in the Penzeys Spices catalog.

Ordinarily, I would wait until I've perfected this and have a highly photogenic meal in which to document.  That may happen, but Ramona actually grabbed the catalog, ripped a bunch of pages out, and drooled all over it.  Suffice it to say, I'm going to throw this out, but I wanted to document it because I wrote my crib notes on the catalog.

Ahh.  Such is the life of a cooking parent.

NaBloPoMo: Again!

I'm sure I post this about six times a year, but I can't believe that it's already (fill in the blank).  In this case, it's November.  It doesn't feel like November outside and considering that we still have the decorations up from Ramona's six month birthday party (which happened in early September, by the way), it still seems like the end of summer.

However, it IS November and every November brings the official NaBloPoMo challenge.  I've been pretty light on the posting lately.  There are so many reasons, but it boils down to having a mobile baby and trying not to get kicked out of grad school.  Only one of these things is awesome.  I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to guess.  Regardless, I'm going to try this whole NaBloPoMo thing again.  No guarantees that I'll make it through the month, but I miss blogging and now seems as good of a time as ever to start again.

The End.

This is the last day of NaBloPoMo and I'm extremely excited about that.  I'm surprised that I was able to keep up with it this time, but that was due partly to the fact that other members of AFBA joined in on the daily posting fun.  This experience has definitely brought me back to blogging.  Not only did I challenge myself to post every day, I also wanted to make sure that I was posting real things.  Sure, there were a few days that got super lame posts, but for the most part, I think I upped my content, mostly by including pictures.

So how did I actually make it through all of November posting?

1) Not all of the posts are about food.  I think I've come to terms with the fact that this blog is going to evolve into more than just what I'm eating/cooking/drooling over, because I don't have infinite things to say about food and I have the cutest little baby ever.  Oh and because I'm going to have a baby in March. ;)

2) Most Mondays I posted menus and most Sundays I posted pictures.  It's almost like a cheat, but I tried to make sure that the pictures were good and the menus were, mostly, followed.

3) This is probably the real reason why I could stick with it: I prescheduled a lot of my posts.  If I had multiple ideas for posts, I'd write them all up at once and then schedule them out.  Usually this ended up being a few posts at a time, so it's not like I had the entire month scheduled.


So will I ever do this again?  Possibly.  Probably not any time soon, though.  I'm planning on easing up on the posting, especially right now.  I have a talk to give about a carbon-enhanced metal-poor r+s-process enhanced star (say that three times fast) in about 20 minutes, a ginormous pile of papers to grade, and a committee meeting in a week, where I have to tell one of my committee members that I am, indeed, having a baby, which is probably going to cut my spring semester productivity in half.  Oops.

So for now, here's a piece of pie for you, because I think we've all deserved it by sticking with me for this long.  Also, because I can't eat it due to my newly-discovered pregnancy-induced insulin resistence, but more on that later.

Image from Stu Spivack because my phone is choking on the giant picture of pumpkin pie from inside my faraday cage.  I mean office.

Peanut butter blues

My Koeze peanut butter is almost gone, which is sad but weird on the street is that I don't have to travel all the way back to Michigan to go to Zingerman's to get it.  Apparently, Antonelli's carries it. Hurrah!

Also, this talk is happening tomorrow at noon.  Which is, again, why I'm not making real posts.  Perhaps I should make up for it in December.

science. ugh.

This is why you don't get a real post today:

Actually, I have to give a talk on Wednesday about this, which is for realz why.

Silent Sundays: Kimchi's Thanksgiving

home brewing

me: are you excited?
he: for what?
me: cider!
he: oh, yeah.  Are you excited?
me: for what?
he: to play pretend.
me: pretend what?
he: pretend we know what we're doing

After seeing a Slow Food Austin talk by the Argus Cidery dudes, we decided to try to brew hard cider to give as Christmas gifts.  It seemed like it was going to be mostly easy, and after two trips to Austin Homebrew Supply, we came home with about $50 worth of supplies and way more confusion than when we first walked in the door.  Hopefully this works and we don't end up giving our families a lot of vinegar.  I'll update later when we know if it worked or not.  And no, the irony of being pregnant and brewing alcoholic beverages isn't lost on me.

cider supplies, including airlocks, campden tablets, and a bunch of other stuff

Bottles that are (still) awaiting cider.  Colby and Dustin "made" them in a weekend.  Anything for the cause, eh?

Sanitizing everything

The game plan

sulfated cider ready for fermentation

Colby putting the cider in its home for the next couple of weeks.  (And yes, this is going to be the nursery, but it's not like we're using it right now.)

Ciders with their airlocks and yeast. Look at that yeast bloom in the upper right corner!

It bubbled!  Success!

Black Friday

We went out on this morning at midnight to see what Black Friday was like.  Neither Colby nor I had ever had the full experience, so this was more anthropological than shopping.  I did see some deals that looked good, but waiting for hours to get into a store+getting trampled on+waiting for hours to check out didn't seem that appealing.  This is what the scene looked like outside of Target:

No, that's not the line to get into Target, that's the crowd that gathered to watch the line to get into Target.  At about 12:05 AM.  

Here's the line to get into Target:

And then at around 12:30, we meandered down to Best Buy, and they still had a line, complete with security guards.  It was kind of nuts.

Needless to say, we didn't buy anything, but now that my curiosity has been sated, I'm content with spending my future Black Friday Eves basking in the glow of a food hangover, rather than contend with crazy crowds of motivated shoppers.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Them's the rules.

So the results are back and dun dun dun... I don't have gestational diabetes!  But I'm apparently developing pregnancy-induced insulin resistance, so I still need to follow a gestational diabetes diet (basically low carb).  There's a class that I'm supposed to take next week (pending my insurance) that talks about how to properly diet and exercise to make sure that the baby doesn't grow hugenormous, but until I attend the class, I was given a list of rules to follow:
Avoid Sugar and All Sweets

Avoid fruit in the morning
NO FRUIT JUICE
Eat small, frequent meals
ALWAYS include a bedtime snack
Each meal and snack must have carbohydrate, protein, and fat
If you are hungry between meals & snacks, eat low carbohydrate foods

So basically, no more fun.  I ended up getting the Eggs Francisco at Kerbey Lane (and only had half of the english muffin).  This kid better be the coolest thing ever, because this is a pretty huge sacrifice.

scrambled eggs, tomato, avocado, and bacon on an English muffin, covered in queso

Flat sprite

I spent Friday morning sitting in a doctor's office getting my blood drawn four times over the course of three hours.  By the time I finished, it had been 15.5 hours since I had eaten anything, aside from chugging a 100g dextrose solution 3.5 hours before.  The next time someone tells me about the joys and blessings of pregnancy, I'm going to stab them.

eww.

All of this was for the 3 hour glucose tolerance test for gestational diabetes.  I took a shorter test earlier in the week and my blood sugar came back elevated.  It was a pretty big bummer, but not unexpected.  A couple years ago I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).  Nearly 50% of women with PCOS get gestational diabetes.  This is the same syndrome that Kate Gosselin had, which is why she opted for in vitro fertilization and ended up with 8 children. 

Since we didn't have an extra $50,000 to throw at IVF, I dismissed the notion of having kids and totally came to peace with the idea of being able to travel the world, buying expensive shoes/meals/electronics, and generally enjoying my disposable income.  Colby was less okay with this (I guess he's not nearly as into Swedish Hasbeens as I am), and so we went to a fertility specialist to see what our options were and to get further testing.  Upon an ultrasound examination of my ovaries, the doctor commented that I had just ovulated and was either going to get my period or was pregnant.  We all had a good chuckle and I went to get a CT scan a couple weeks later because my sinuses had been fucked up since December 2010.  Oops.

Fast forward five months and now I'm awaiting my results from the GTT.  The GTT requires a 12 hour fast, chugging this ridiculous sugar solution in <5 minutes, and then getting blood drawn once an hour for three hours.  The last sugar solution tasted like flat orange pop, which is not nearly as tasty as you'd assume.  This solution tasted more like flat sprite and was only mildly more palatable.  The worst, though, is that they don't let you drink much water because that interferes with the results.  My suspicion is that I do have gestational diabetes given my risk factors and the first glucose tolerance test.  If that's the case, then the recipes I post here are going to be of a decidedly more meaty nature.  In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the last  yummy carbs I'll be allowed to eat for the next 15 weeks.

Thanksgiving week menu

Menu planning for this week is made easier because Thursday is already planned out for me.  


Monday
chili

Tuesday
slowcooker lasagna (hat tip to Austin Gastronomist)

Wednesday
eggs, pan sausage (with possible recipe to come), biscuits

Thursday
Thanksgiving dinner at 24 Diner (we're going to go out to eat for this so I can concentrate on getting work done)

Friday
roasted chicken, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed sweet potatoes (like Thanksgiving, but decidedly easier)

Silent Sundays: Venetian Hot Plate, Port Aransas, TX

Silent Sundays are like Wordless Wednesdays, but on Sunday because, um, I'm sleepy and don't have much to say.

bread and dipping sauce

olive oil, balsamic vinegar, red pepper flakes, garlic, black pepper

misto mare: clams, mussels, oysters, scallops, shrimp, in a butter+wine sauce

salad with balsamic vinaigrette

Mama's lasagna

fresh gulf snapper with artichokes, capers, asparagus, and mashed potatoes

all done

tiramisu

Wherein the posts get a little thin towards the end of NaBloPoMo

I should probably post something, eh?

I don't have too much to say, except that for once, I'm okay with the University of Michigan not screwing up a game because Michigan State is going to the first Big Ten championship game.  Yay!

we picked a name!