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.

Hackbright Day 16: Sessions + More Flask

When I transferred high schools way back in 2001, I joined all the extra curricular activities that I could in order to meet people and make friends. Some of them turned out to be life-changing (Hi, Ms. Maciolek!) and some of them turned out to be a huge waste of time (that would be you, softball). One of the things that sort of fell in between those extremes was the literary journal *thing* that I did one year. One of the first orders of business was to pick a name for it. My suggestion was "Sessions". They ended up going with "Harbinger". Speaking to the incredible content of my character, I basically lost interest once my name wasn't chosen.

Fast forward 13 years, and now I finally get to talk about sessions.

Sessions, in this context, are about storing information on the server side of a web app. In Flask, the session is a dictionary that you fill with information like, for instance, the user name. For websites where you might buy something, everything you'd add to a shopping cart would be in the session dictionary.

Our assignment today was to make a webapp. The skeleton for the app was already in place, but we needed to add things to it to make it functional. We ended up using Flask, the python framework for web apps, SQL, html + css, and jinja (which is a way to inject a little bit of python into the html). It was a lot of fun, actually, and we were able to make a functional app with a log in page and an account page.

I had a meeting with my advisor today and at his suggestion, I'm going to try to work on a project on my own to create an app, mostly to practice all these new skills that we've been talking about in class.

apt-get install ROBOJULIACHILD 

So my intent is to create a recipe-generating bot that is based on a few different recipe "structures" and will then randomly select things that would go with it. I've sort of sketched out an idea of how to implement it. The working name is cook roulette, but robojuliachild is my favorite. My biggest thought is to make the recipe structure a class and then have the different kinds of recipes (e.g., quiche, risotto, etc.). This works because I'm probably not going to make anything that's too fancy, but doing this with classes makes it modular so I could come back to this easily. What's also nice about this is that I can get more experience with classes without having to go back to that horrible game exercise. (I should definitely probably revisit that at some point.) I'm thinking that it would be interesting to add baking recipes to this because you could calculate the required ingredient amounts based on the ph of different ingredients.

We also talked about how the internet works and now I think I want to run my own server to deploy my own apps. And then I brought up cookie clicker because I'm totally a winner like that.

Slow Cooking

She is way cuter than an ugly slow-cooked meal

To say that things have been tumultuous lately would be a vast understatement. The uncertainty of the future combined with the incredible stress that comes with finishing a thesis would be bad enough, but having to maintain some facade of sanity so as to not terrorize my 2(!) year old, makes it a lot more challenging. One thing that is abundantly clear is that we need to really start saving money because my last guaranteed paycheck comes in May.

We've started using the slow cooker a lot more. We actually have two of these, and they've mostly sat in the pantry neglected, only to come out during the holidays to warm whatever alcoholic beverage we're serving (think spiked hot chocolate or mulled cider). My main issue with the slow cooker is something that I still don't understand. If you have a recipe that cooks in 6 hours, how exactly do you time your slow cooking so that you don't come home to a giant mess of over-cooked food or do you just eat at midnight?

I thought that I'd link to a few recipes that we've tried with some notes, mostly for me.

Chicken Philly Sandwiches
This recipe calls for "Dale's Steak Seasoning", which I gather is basically just Maggi with some other things in it, but we didn't have any and neither did Central Market, so I used ~3T or so of Pecos 83 BBQ Marinade. I also added some Zehnder's Chicken Seasoning (although I have the one with MSG in it because yum) because I somehow have two bottles of this stuff and I have no idea what to do with it. This turned out really well.

Barbecue Pulled Chicken
I'm not even sure that this is the recipe I used, but it's close to what we did. What you should NEVER do is use Sweet Baby Ray's. That shit is a) nasty and b) way too high in sugar to slow cook because it burns. I'd probably use that Pecos 83 BBQ marinade and try to make this again.

Beef and Farro Stew
Admittedly, slow-cooking is the opposite of pressure cooking, but I'd been watching a lot of old school AB lately. We had almost all of the ingredients on hand, minus the beef, so I figured we'd give this a go. I substituted farro for the barley because we have a lot of if and I have no idea what to do with it. I also subbed in sage and thyme because I hate rosemary and we don't have any marjoram and obviously, I used prepared beef stock. At the end, I added a big dash of porcini powder and some frozen corn that we had on hand. The first day I was super disappointed because it was so one-dimensional (i.e., it was like tomato stew with other things in it), but after sitting in the fridge for a couple days, it made for great leftovers.

San Francisco Day 2

So this is what we did today:


View Larger Map

We met up with my friend who drove all the way from Santa Barbara (!) at the Velo Rouge Cafe.  She got a coffee and we made our way up to Clement Street to pick up some dim sum from the Clement Restaurant.  We took our spoils to the Presidio (or it might have actually been Mountain Lake Park) and ate lunch at a picnic table in the park and then walked over to the playground area and let Ramona burn off some energy.

Afterwards, we made our way to Green Apple Books and then back to the Velo Rouge Cafe where my friend left San Francisco back home so she could go to work tomorrow.  Colby, Ramona, and I made our way to the Rossi Playground on Arguello where she burned off some more energy and then we headed towards Golden Gate Park to walk around the Japanese Tea Garden, which was sort of disappointing because they were cleaning out a lot of the ponds.  After that, we walked around some more and headed over to the Koret Children's Quarter Playground and then walked to Little Star Pizza to get deep dish pizza and garlic bread.

Afterwards, we tried to get back to our hotel, but were diverted off three buses because the downtown area was closed off due to the Superbowl and got into our room right about the time that the game ended.  I was really glad that we got in before the rioting started. ;)

A Very Colby Christmas

My crazy night/day schedule is still ongoing and it still sucks, but I figured I'd use some of this quiet time to write a post.  Colby doesn't really read my blog unless I tell him to.  Usually this happens around the time I make my annual birthday list.  If he did read my blog, it wouldn't matter if I posted this because the list at the end of this post is likely fictional.

Colby's birthday is 9 days before our anniversary and 15 days before Christmas, so it gets lost a lot.  Most years he gets a big birthiversarmas gift and this year is no exception.  We just dropped a lot of money on a new dishwasher.  It's pretty and it has a sanitize option, but most importantly, it's EIGHTY times quieter than our old dishwasher.  It's money well spent, but it also put a big dent in the Christmas gift budget.  So below is my list of what I'd totally get Colby for his birthiversarmas this year.

1. Boston terrier print - duh
2. Essential Pepin - Colby's favorite chef
3. Basketball hoop - because we just bought a basketball that Colby torments Kimchi with
4. The Greatest Hoodie - there was a Slate article about this. The tl;dr version is that it's expensive but made with better materials + techniques and made in the US.

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.

Grad things

I haven't posted about grad school in awhile.  Basically, it's hard.  I mean, it's not like crazy hard in and of itself, but it's really hard to try to figure out how to balance being the best parent I can be and being at least an adequate grad student.  I've recently discovered the What Should We Call Grad School tumblr and it's hilarious and totally true.  I've crafted a little story that may or may not be based on true events.

post-qual

that constant feeling about grad school

when I realize all my other friends have jobs

two projects at the same time

every meeting with my PI

how I feel for choosing academia

why I don't socialize at socials

liberal arts

when someone asks me when I'm going to graduate

Food Links: Stuff I Want to Make

Do you ever look at a recipe and decide that it's time to tweak it and you know for certain that it's going to come out and be the best thing ever?  And then you try it and you're like hm... maybe I should have stuck with the recipe.  These are mistake muffins.  Don't get me wrong, I truly believe that pumpkin oatmeal muffins can be made to be delicious, but these aren't it.  They are, however, pretty.  Here's a list of links to things I've been reading around the interwebs that I will definitely try to make but will likely end up tweaking because I'm antsy like that.

Slow Cooker Shredded Korean Beef Tacos I was looking around for a slow cooker bean recipe and stumbled across this blog.  This recipe looks like a good way for me to use up the bison stew meat that's been hanging out in my freezer for awhile.

Sweet Potato Biscuits These look awesome and perhaps something that you can actually do with butternut squash instead.

Hot Pepper Cranberry Relish Even though we decided to go out to eat for thanksgiving this year, I'm still drooling over holiday recipes. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be making this (and also stuffing) at some point in November.  Plus, I can use the jalapenos from my garden.

NaBloPoMo Take 6

Hey look, it's that time of year again... you know, the month where I try to blog for every day and inevitably fail around day 17 or so.  Some of the Austin Food Blogger Alliance members decided to participate for this month, so I thought I'd give it a try. It looks like I've attempted this about 5 times, so perhaps the sixth time is a charm.  Given that I usually post menus every week and that posting every day is hard, I'm going to pre-admit defeat and not try to make every post about food.  I'll tag the food posts as food, though, so I can make sure that I've written about it at least twice this month.

I've been sort of upset with google lately.  Though the abandonment of buzz was sad but predictable, I was a lot more surprised that they took away the share functionality of Google Reader.  I've been using Reader as my feed reader for a couple years now and I look forward to reading may of the shared items from some of my friends.  I guess now the idea is to +1 everything to google plus, but it seems silly that I can't read the +1 items from my friends in reader.  With that in mind, here are some articles that I would have shared.  And to keep with the spirit of being annoyed, most of these articles are about things that I find disconcerting, irritating, or horrifying.  It's like halloween, but real and actually scary minus the candy.  So kind of not like halloween at all.

Slavery Footprint of Your Kitchen - I've read about the plight of tomato pickers in Florida, and we've tried to limit my consumption of out of season tomatoes, but it's still hard.  I've also read a bit about the child labor that goes into most halloween chocolate candy as well, and I've mostly avoided that this year.  What I didn't realize was that there are so many more areas beyond food in which to be concerned.  Definitley food for thought.

Gay Man in Texas Viciously Attacked - I don't even have words for this.

After Soldier's Death a Chinatown Family Seeks Answers - A young soldier was either murdered or committed suicide, but the military won't really talk to the family.  Oh and he was Chinese.  And he was subjected to racist attacks.  I sort of wonder how my (Korean) brother is going to fare in the Marines.

Asian American Students Are the Most Bullied in Schools - Again with the bigotry against Asians.  This isn't so surprising, considering my experiences in grade school, but this is in stark contrast to students of other races.

Spring Break Posting

I've been busy and lazy, hence the posting has vastly slowed down.  This doesn't mean, however, that I've abandoned the internet.  Here are some interesting links from the past couple of weeks that I've been meaning to share.

Universal Wrapping Paper - Too cool!  And I'd totally get/make some if I actually wrapped my presents. ;)

Redesigned Recipes - New and (mostly) interesting ways to represent recipes.  I really like the Choose Your Own Egg Adventure

I Don't Need a Hug - This is basically my mantra.

Mapping Gangs and Cupcakes - this is mostly just interesting, but Colby just came in and said that it was stupid. :(  Asshole.

And there you have it.

Hello, December.

It's been awhile.  It seems like I've been blogging a lot lately, but that's just because I've actually kept with my research blog posts.  Thanksgiving was a blast.  It was only Colby, the babydog, and me and we never left the house.  Our turkey was delicious and I highly recommend heritage breed turkeys for those of you who actually like to eat turkey with flavor, not to mention the fact that these turkeys have pretty okay lives for something bred to be eaten.

Since Thanksgiving, though, we haven't been cooking much.  Our kitchen is still recovering.  It's kind of a sad state of affairs.  We've either been eating out or eating things that require little to no effort.  I'm under the gun on this paper that I'm trying to write.  I need a draft in the next two and a half weeks, so it's going to be kind of nuts.  In addition, I've started to try to run again and let's just say that there's a reason why I run at night when everyone else is asleep.

And now my new goal is to have either a picture or a link in every post.  This might get challenging for my recipe posts, but it might also mean that I figure out how to use my camera phone to its fullest potential.  Or something.

Found on facebook: Medical Researcher Discovers Integration

Stuff I'm doing that's not related to food.

Hey, so it's been awhile.  I've managed to come down with the sniffles, start a new blog, and lack a third interesting thing to mention. 

The congestion is pretty straightforward.  After having to administer late tests to a bunch of different undergrads that missed the test because of illness, I've seemed to have caught something.  Orrr I'm just having allergies.

The new blog is less interesting than the premise of a new blog sounds.  Basically, I'm using this as a notebook.  Most scientists keep some sort of notebook to remember what they've done or, in cases where people run experiments, document their work for posterity.  I can usually manage to take notes for about a week, two if I'm really motivated, but then I forget, or get lazy or something.  I've tried keeping them electronically, but the same happens.  I'm hoping that by keeping a blog, it'll be easier for me to keep up with them and then they're searchable.

In light of my missing third "interesting" thing, here are some links to stuff I find interesting that I've found from facebook, twitter, and random internet surfing.

Winter Squash Warts and All. (NY Times) This is more than you'd ever want to know about winter squash, but now I want to grow my own.

Gold and the Periodic Table of Elements. (NPR) Too cool!  As someone who deals with the periodic table on a daily basis, this is a neat (and different than neutron capture) take on why gold is so interesting.

America's Worst "Chinese Meals". (Angry Asian Man) As a food blogger and a pseudo-Asian, I found this hilarious.  But sometimes you just gotta have the orange chicken.

The United Plates. John Holcomb has a set of prints that represents each state with different food.  And of course I want the Michigan one.

How Smartphone Users See Each Other. (Android and Me) This is almost entirely accurate, but I see myself more as a Marie Curie type than an Albert Einstein. ;)

Lemonade, Detroit. You can buy a frame of Lemonade, Detroit for a dollar and become a producer.  This film is about the people who are in Detroit and working to turn it into something more than just abandoned buildings and the national mascot of the recession.

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography. (video!) This is super fun to watch.  The words are from Stephen Fry on language.

flu sites

I have the death. And by "the death" I mean the flu, I think. I'm spending the day on the couch with hot tea and the Winter Olympics. It's been suggested that I drown my flu in Nyquil, but that's tantamount to going on a dextromethorphan+doxylamine succinate-induced vision quest. In celebration of my, um, anti-emetic victory, here are links to things I've been reading lately:

FoodWhirl - It's a really great, brand-spanking-new food blog with more than just an aggregate recipe+picture site, but also tips and stories written by actual people.

Giant oarfish filmed in Gulf of Mexico - harkening back to the days when we all wanted to be marine biologists.

Are you an email addict? Yes, yes i am.

Cthulhu Crochet and Cousins - While I don't knit or crochet (or even sew, really), this site is super cute and filled with adorable interpretations of the elder gods and other geektastic knitting projects. (thanks to Randi for finding this!)

Assorted thoughts

For dinner I heated up some leftover chicken and made couscous stuffed red bell peppers. It was pretty good and Colby ate like 2 cups of couscous because Colby:carbs::black holes:matter. I'm also in the middle of making a crustless quiche and sipping on homemade hot chcocolate. I'm also not the least bit motivated to post recipes, so I thought I'd share links to things that I think are noteworthy.

First and foremost, I've mentioned on twitter that Aiming Low is one of my favorite blogs. It's funny and relatable and gives me something to read on the bus... or, you know, anywhere I have my phone. In the past two days, the founder of the blog, Anissa Mayhew suffered a massive stroke and is in the ICU. The writers at Aiming Low have started a page to keep updates on her condition and started a way to send help, but mostly are asking people to keep them in their thoughts/prayers(if you're into that sort of thing). Most people who read this blog probably don't read Aiming Low, but I wanted to share this not just because I'm a fan of the site, but because I sort of understand what their family is going through.

On a lighter note, The Delicious Life is posting a lot again (yay!) and has compiled a list of assorted recipes from Thomas Keller's book Bouchon.

And now thanks to Chris, my new favorite blog is On Becoming a Laboratory and Domestic Goddess, written by "Dr. Isis". She's funny and has an awesome taste in shoes and is a must read for all you female scientists out there. (Do I know my audience or what? Hello people from the astronomy department! ;) )

And finally, here's a visualization of the risks associated with the HPV vaccine. Seriously, you should probably get it if you're female, single, and plan to be sexually active between now and t = infinity.