After 30 days of sunshine…

…IT RAINED!

(A quick note to all of you people who told me it would rain all summer in Seattle: Until the very recent past, the weather NOAA five day forecast looked like this

every day. Never debate weather forecasts with a quasi-meteorologist. That’s right.)

Back to the scheduled program:

FONTS

Fonts, you say? Isn’t this a blog about science, food, and lack of dates? Ah, if only one could remain so focused. Instead, I divert from my usual path to discuss other intensely interesting topics.

Inspired by the infinite wisdom of my mother, I have begun to buy the Sunday New York Times in print on, of course, Sundays to get my newsprint fix throughout the week. This way, I don’t feel distressed by the huge amount of newsprint coming my way every day, but also do not feel sad and alone without the friendly NYT awaiting me next to my steel cut oatmeal in the morning. And let’s be honest, it takes a whole week to read the whole Sunday NYT anyways.

But back to my point. When I picked up the NYT magazine, something didn’t seem quite right. Indeed, as the editor notes in his letter, the magazine is 9% smaller than usual to save on costs and (the more important implication in my book) to reduce paper usage. But yet, magically, the content is not reduced!

How, you demand? Well, the magic is at least in part due to the new font introduced – Lyon Text – that fits more words to a page. We do not often think about fonts (well, some do, but they are probably in a very small minority) but it is pretty cool when a change in font can affect environmental impact.

And this is not the first time fonts have entered the environmental scene: EcoFont was introduced at the start of the calendar year as a font that has holes in the letters (but not so many to reduce readability) in order to reduce the amount of ink used and thereby the number of printer cartridges disposed. While both of these changes are quite small, they show that it pays to think of alternative methods to reducing environmental impact.

FOOD

Sadly, I have nothing exciting to share since the last post. The only home cooked meal that has been produced was vegetables sauteed in peanut sauce over brown rice, which is more than self explanatory.

MATLAB

Today, my relationship with Matlab was threatened by a brief affair with a Matlab alternative, IDL. At first glance, IDL seemed more hip, more trendy, and perhaps more available. However, after my IDL fling, I return comfortably to my relationship with Matlab. And bring you: The Matlab command of the day!

Flipud! Fliplr!

Flip what? That’s right, Matlab has two handy-dandy commands for your use if you want to top of your matrix to become the bottom (flipud) or the left to become the right (fliplr). But, you say, I usually make my matrices the right way, not upside down and inside out – how would I ever use these?

So, one cool application: Imagine you live in a world where you want the low values of your colorbar to be red, not blue. But Matlab has a default colorbar that goes from blue to red! What to do?

Simply:

colorbar(flipud(colorbar))

Success.

DATING

It’s raining! Not men, though – not yet.

Happy Wednesday,

-Karen

Grab bag

Everything that has happened that is cool in the last week:

SCIENCE

I went to an amazing talk by Peter Molnar, who happens to be based out of the wonderful town of Boulder, Colorado and who has done a large amount of research with my thesis advisor, Peter Huybers. His talk was entitled, “The gradual closing of the Indonesian Seaway, El Nino, and the onset of Northern Hemisphere ice age” and any talk that manages to combine that many large themes of course has to be good. While there is a huge amount of awesome and innovative science behind all of his work, what I was most impressed by was the way he presented his research: Rather than giving a dry talk full of acronyms and incomprehensible figures like many academic talks, he told a great story that was both informative and interesting. Given that we face a world where many young people are becoming less interested in studying science and citizens of all ages are deciding that science is not to be trusted, I think it is increasingly necessary for scientific ideas to be presented in a way that appeals to more than those in the Ivory Tower.

And for those who are interested, Molnar argued that the closing of the Indonesian seaway, which led to New Guinea moving from south of the equator to straddling the equator, allowed for the onset of Northern Hemisphere glaciation. How, you ask? The basic idea is prior to the seaway closing, the Pacific was constantly in a state similar to El Nino (although El Nino is inherently temporary) such that there was only a minimal temperature gradient across the tropical Pacific. El Nino conditions lead to a warming in Canada, thanks to teleconnections, and if this warming was continuous rather than temporary, glaciers could not form. In a nutshell. But pretty cool.

FOOD

Sasha and I have been cooking up a storm. Throwing things into pots and pans left and right. Our recent cooking adventures involve tomato-lentil dahl and naan:

and oatmeal scones (to assist in finishing up the leftover lemon curd from our lemon cupcakes):

Once upon a time, I was a fresh-faced, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed food blogger and would have told you the recipes and techniques for these delicacies. But I have already failed as a food blogger (see below) and am now too riddled with angst to provide anything more than pictures. Instead I’ll let you in on a little secret: the internet is an amazing invention. And the vegetarian cookbook, edited by Nicola Graimes, is an inspiring publication.

Tonight, we made our second batch of chili and cornbread. It was delicious. And easy. And will feed us for the next four to five years, approximately.

FOOD BLOGGING ANGST

It was a classic, tragic tale: Two college girls start a food (and science, and other random thoughts) blog during their formative Northwestern summer. Believing in the power of democracy and the internet, they decide to try to post their blog on TasteSpotting. Excitedly waiting for the day when their cupcake recipe will get approved and be shared with the masses, they check their TasteSpotting profile with anticipation. Until the fateful decision is handed down. For TasteSpotting is not a place of democracy, but a place of beautiful food photography. And with nothing but a Sony CyberShot, the girls’ food photography is deemed to have “unflattering composition” and to be “not sharp” enough for the elite of food blogging. We hope you, dear readers, will judge us in a more flattering light.

MY MOTHER

is amazing. She provides me with not only her undying love and affection but also an antique pie edge crimper and two absolutely amazing aprons:

CHOCOLATE

Sasha and I went to Theo’s chocolate factory today, the NW equivalent of Taza Chocolate in Cambridge. In fact, it’s quite possible that they both claim to be the only fair trade, organic, bean to bar chocolate factory in the United States. But I digress. At the chocolate factory, my dreams came true: They sell a chocolate bar that is 91% cacao. And one that is chai flavored. And they have endless samples of every bar. Mmmmmm. It’s quite possible that I ate an entire chocolate bar via samples while there. And by quite possible I mean 95% probability.

MATLAB

Speaking of probability, it’s time for the MATLAB command of the day! Let me preface this by saying: I love MATLAB. It’s truly amazing. Not only does it do everything you would ever want it to do, it does more. Infinitely more.

Recently, I’ve been working with distributions. And given that I’ve never taken statistics, this is a whole new world! When I was about seven years old, we did these cool things in math class called box and whisker plots. Sasha informed me kindly that these plots are not actually left in elementary school but do appear in stat classes, but nevertheless, MATLAB of course can make box and whisker plots.

The function:

***BOXPLOT*** (fireworks! cheering! parade!)

handily and easily makes a somewhat aesthetically pleasing box spanning the 25th to 75th percentile of your data set with a line a the mean and whiskers (if you will) extending throughout the distribution, with little crosses plotted for the outliers. How cool is that, I ask? But no need to answer – I already know.

DATING

Who needs men when you have MATLAB?

And I’m off!

-Karen

Waders, Manjula and salmon stomach contents

Yesterday, after a long day of doping and tagging rainbow trout, I trudged home, wondering what to have for dinner. Karen and I had failed to make a weekly menu plan on Sunday, as we usually do (to the raised eyebrows of our nine-year-old housemate), and the dinner party on Saturday had mostly exhausted our food-shopping and stocking resources. I knew we still had a fair number of complicated cupcakes left, but that was not going to be enough for dinner. I needn’t have worried, though, as when I got home I found the kitchen suffused with the scent of something warm and earthily tangy (woooo how’s that for awkward adjectives?) and delicious. Karen had apparently looked at our meager pantry, opened up a cookbook at random, and found a recipe utilizing exactly the random ingredients we did have in sufficient quantities, namely eggs, sour cream, and onions. The resulting tart tasted like something my grandma would make, which is high praise. I’m about to go eat leftovers for lunch. I love leftovers. I especially love being out in the field and busting out my polenta, eggplant dip, knorpoon, and cupcakes.

Why am I not at work right now, you ask? I did extra hours on Sunday so I decided to go in a little late today, during which time I made dough for naan. I’ve never done this before, and I used the recipe provided by Manjula. I just peeked at the dough, and it hasn’t risen appreciably yet but looks all smooth and serene in its mirrored bowl. We’ll let you know how it turns out.

Fish

Two amusing bits of lingo: “puking the fish,” which refers to performing gastric lavage to get salmon stomach contents for analysis, and “dunking your waders,” which refers to falling over in the stream in such a way that water gets into your waders. The latter has not yet happened to me, but it’s only a matter of time, I imagine.

Dating update

Still no dates. What the heck, Seattle? No rain, no dates? What is this?

-Sasha

Let the dinner parties begin

After living in Seattle for two weeks, it was high time for our first dinner party. The menu contained inspirations far and wide, and featured delicious items like fresh, local, organic asparagus and lemon curd. Mm.

While we at first thought we could start cooking for our dinner party at 5pm and be done by 7, it soon became evident that, between shopping and cooking, we would be preparing all day. But it was delicious, and therefore worth it. We started out with eggplant dip and black bean dip with carrots and baked pita, moved onto baked polenta with asparagus, zucchini, mushrooms and Parmesan cheese, supplemented with local red leaf lettuce salad with dried cranberries and goat cheese, and finished up with lemon cupcakes filled with lemon curd and topped with meringue frosting. While, in theory, I would have pictures of each of these items, our cooking experience was frenzied to say the least, and so I mostly just photographed the cupcakes. Because cupcakes are infinitely photogenic.

The starters

Sasha and I truly owe most of our success to a friend from school who provided us with the best recipe for black bean dip ever. In a food processor combine black beans (still in liquid) with stir-fried onions and garlic (two onions and four cloves of garlic per liter-ish of beans) and cumin and lime juice to taste.

For the dinner party, we expanded our dip expertise to include eggplant dip. And I actually don’t really know what we did, because Sasha made it. But I do know that, ideally, it involves exploding eggplants. Before making the dip, you have to put the eggplant in the oven (directly on the rack is fine) and bake it at a reasonable temperature (350, 375, etc) to make it delicious. Sasha claims that you should bake it until it explodes, but unfortunately our dear eggplant never reached that stage due to my perpetual impatience. Stay tuned for the next eggplant dip that should feature the actual explosion. Anyways, you take the skin off the eggplant and put the flesh in a food processor (can I emphasize again the joy that food processors bring me?) with garlic and probably olive oil and definitely cumin to taste until you get a delicious dip.

I was too obsessed with the cupcakes to have photographic evidence of any of this. We served the dips with whole wheat pita bread baked briefly in the oven and cut up carrots. (Not baby carrots. Those are the worst invention ever. Cut up normal carrots. It’s not that hard.)

The meal

To begin: Salad! It’s easy and delicious. Red leaf lettuce + goat cheese crumbles + dried cranberries, dressed with a sesame balsamic vinaigrette:

And the slightly more complicated part: Polenta, vegetables and cheese.

There are many parts of cooking that consistently amaze me. Making polenta is one of those many. To make enough polenta to feed a small army (recipes will say that this is enough for six. We fed nine with perhaps half of the polenta), boil 8 cups of water and add three cups of corn meal. When you add the cornmeal, aggressively whisk the mixture (seriously) so your polenta doesn’t end up chunky. Then just stir on medium heat for 15-20 minutes, and your cornmeal + water mixture will become a thick batter mixture. Take that and spread it out flat on a baking sheet or in a casserole pan so it’s about 1/2 inch thick. Let it cool for an hour and then cut it up into super exciting shapes (we did triangles) and bake for 30 minutes at 350.

We topped our polenta with stir-fried asparagus, zucchini, mushrooms and onions, seasoned with salt and pepper. We served the vegetables atop the baked polenta, and topped that with grated Parmesan cheese. But the possibilities are endless for polenta toppings: other cheeses, tomatoes/tomato sauce, broccoli, let your imagination soar with excitement.

The dessert

Based on the number of photographs I took, this is the most important part. We made lemon cupcakes with lemon curd filling and meringue frosting, and they were quite enjoyable. In fact, I think one of our guests may have had 4.5 of them.

Note: This recipe is more or less stolen from another food blog. But I can’t find it anymore, so I can’t link to it. Ah well.

For the actual cupcakes:

3 cups flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 3/4 cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup strained freshly squeezed lemon juice
2/3 cup whole milk

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt, and set aside. Using a mixer of some sort, beat the butter and sugar together until you have a light and fluffy mix. Add the eggs one at a time, such that one is mixed in completely before you add the next one. Then add the vanilla and lemon products. Finally, alternate adding the dry mixture (add 1/3 at a time) with adding the milk (add 1/2 at a time).

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes or so, or until they (1) smell delicious and (2) are golden at the edges. You should get this:

Now for the lemon curd and meringue!

Ingredients for the curd:

4 egg yolks (reserve whites for meringue)
1/3 cup cornstarch
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup lemon juice

Whisk egg yolks in a medium bowl and set aside. In a medium saucepan, combine cornstarch, water, sugar, and salt. Whisk to combine. Turn heat on medium and, stirring frequently, bring mixture to a boil. Whisk until your mixture looks like thick melted plastic. Seriously. It happens. Another amazing cooking phenomenon. Remove from the heat, and slowly add to egg mixture, and then put everything, fully mixed and whisked, back into the sauce pan. On low heat, add the lemon juice and butter, and mix until all the butter has melted and mixed in, and then 2 minutes more. Take off the heat, and refrigerate until use.

Ingredients for the meringue:

4 large egg whites
Large pinch of salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup honey or agave nectar

Half fill a saucepan with water and bring to a boil over medium heat. Combine the egg whites, salt sugar, and honey in the bowl of an electric mixer and whisk by hand, just to mix together. Regulate the heat under the pan of water so that it boils gently and place the bowl on the pan. Whisk gently just to keep the mixture moving until it is hot and all the sugar is dissolved. Place the bowl on the mixer with the whisk and whip the icing until it has cooled and become white and fluffy. A third sweet cooking magic trick.

And then you combine into one delicious product! Excavate a cavity in the middle of your cupcakes, and fill it with lemon curd, and put part of the excavated part back on top. Then top that with frosting:

Then eat!

And the two important parts of all my posts:

Cool MATLAB command of the day

MATLAB is almost as magical as cooking. And has commands like the ever useful

PRCTILE!

If you are good at inferring missing letters, you will be smart enough to know that this command will give you percentile values of a matrix or vector. It’s pretty great. So say you have a matrix that you have cleverly named MyMatrix and you want to find out the 5th and 95th pecentile values of it. You put into your command line prctile(MyMatrix, [5 95]) and, voila! You get what you want.

Dating update

Still no dates, but Sasha has informed me that she hasn’t touched lots of cute fish yet, only some. She will be touching lots on Tuesday though, so get excited for that update.

Happy Sunday!

Karen

Peaches and other delicious things

As Sasha prophesied, I indeed met the Man of my Dreams at the Peaches concert. Or should I say – TACO MAN OF MY DREAMS:

This picture, unfortunately, does not do him justice because it does not capture the full body component of the taco suit. But rest assured, the taco shell extends to the upper thigh and therefore serves as a complete body cover. After our early evening encounter, we diverged to rage separately, and I came to the unfortunate conclusion that this man of my dreams is, indeed, flamingly gay. Ah, such is the life. Perhaps a straight man in a taco suit will come along one of these days.

Before I get to Peaches, I must say that I never expected that at any point in my life I would end up at a concert with a band (or should I say random Scottish man) called Drums of Death. Especially if the band/dude did not use drums, and featured extensive skull face painting. But I digress. Peaches was amazing. There was raging. And the band has mad skills. But given that this is supposed to be a science + food blog of sorts, I will just provide the best picture that my camera could get given the dark/crazy/smoky setting:

And back to the food:

I have been derelict in my food picture duties, so I will attempt to describe in delicious detail the current culinary adventures.

Last night we had a dinner picnic on the front porch with a couple of Sasha’s co-workers (amazing thing #59378 about Seattle: it is light from much much before I wake up to around 10pm at night). As per inspiration by Foolish Craig’s, I made vegetables (broccoli, asparagus, zucchini, onions, carrots, and the ever exciting purple potatoes!) stir-fried with peanut sauce in crepes.

The stir-fry is easy enough:

1. Sautee onions in olive oil

2. Cut up veggies

3. Throw veggies in, add peanut sauce to taste

As for the crepes, they are amazingly easy too. I consistently forget the recipe and make up a new one every time, but here is the one I used yesterday.

1. Whisk two eggs

2. Add 1/2 cup flour

3. Add milk until a consistency somewhere between pancake batter and water is obtained. I used about 3/4 of a cup.

4. Melt butter in frying pan and put about 1/4 cup of batter into the pan, rapidly spreading it out such that the crepe is thin but covers the whole pan. They only need to cook for 10-20 seconds or so; flip once the heated side is medium brown and fry the other side. Repeat lots and lots of times.

Fold veggies in some way in crepes, and enjoy. Yumskies.

Cool MATLAB command of the day

So Sasha keeps showing me up with cool science stuff, because I find that, although I’m super into climate models, the average populace would rather hear about the biology in their streams than a gridded global climate model. Nevertheless, I bring you the cool MATLAB command of the day.

Drumroll.

SQUEEZE!

As I was analyzing the data from the climate model I am studying, I came across the annoying issue that I was dealing with four-dimensional matrices that I was averaging over at least one dimension. But after averaging, I would still get 4D matrices with a few singleton dimensions. Then I discovered squeeze. And my life changed. Squeeze a 30 x 20 x 1 x 1 matrix and you magically get a 30 x 20 one instead. Sweet.

Dating update

Despite the promise of taco man, still no dates. Sasha has touched some cute fish, though.

Signing off!

Karen

I, too, am a blogger

The peony I bought two days ago at the farmers’ market has opened up to become bigger than my head and is exuding the scent of fairy romance or something. It is 75 degrees and sunny this evening in Seattle, as it has been since we got here. Needless to say, life’s good. So is food.

Food

I had leftover quiche for breakfast and leftover vegetable chili and cornbread for lunch, consumed, to everyone’s awe, with this utensil. The tag calls it a spork, but those in the know call it a knorpoon. (Actually, nobody was particularly awed by it. Philistines.)

Dinner was simple and lovely. Karen stir-fried zucchini, broccoli, asparagus and garlic, and we had it with Gruyere left over from the quiche and spaghetti. We had to have a quick dinner because Karen and her friend were hurrying to a Peaches concert. They are going to have a frightening and wonderful time, so stay tuned for the update.

I didn’t go to the concert because tomorrow is my first day doing field work so I need my rest. As Karen mentioned, I’m going to be studying salmon. I’m not going to talk specifics of my work on the internet, but enough people have given me funny/pitying looks upon hearing that I’m going to be studying salmon that I feel the need to briefly explain why salmon are important.

Why Salmon Are Important

Because they are delicious and healthful, duh. Marine fish are an important source of protein and magical omega-3 fatty acids for humans. Wanting this, but not intelligently managing the rate and methods with which we harvest, people have been overfishing the oceans for centuries, leading to widespread ocean ecosystem collapse. (In general, overfishing is an issue that I have no idea why people are not more freaked out about.) As we realize how disastrous industrial-style agriculture has been for human health, the environment, and the economy, the loss of wild food stocks in the ocean is one of the things we’ll regret mightily as a species. (And farmed fish are a whole nother can of worms.) Currently Pacific salmon species aren’t among the most dangerously depleted stocks, but they tend to have downward population trends and are of high concern for management.

Salmon in particular are important because they’re a link between marine and terrestrial ecosystems. They feed in the nutrient-rich oceans; when they come back upstream and die, their carcasses fertilize rivers and feed land mammals and birds. The research I’m helping with has to do with restoring stream habitats to help bring salmon populations back up to some semblance of historical levels.

So that is why I’m spending my summer identifying and measuring half-digested insect larvae from fish stomachs. Field works starts tomorrow, which means snorkeling in what looks like an astronaut suit. So excited! (Also, I have no idea why I’m still single.)

Dating update

Still no dates. Maybe Karen will meet the man of her dreams at the Peaches concert. I would laugh very hard, and be very jealous.

Cool plant I saw today

The bigleaf maple. Its leaves are REALLY BIG.

-Sasha

Welcome to Seattle

And so the Seattle adventures began – eight days ago. The blogging begins better late than never.

In brief, at least from my perspective: Sasha and I are both working with NOAA for nine weeks in Seattle. Sasha will be studying salmon and other awesome biology things as well as doing field work that involves dry suits. I will be studying the effect of climate change on severe weather events, but will not be wearing dry suits. We will both cook delicious food items, and this blog will document adventures in science and cooking, as well as our lackluster dating life.

To begin with, Seattle is marvelous. For instance, Seattlites install signs such as the one below at their free music festival, Folklife:

I have to respect anyone that uses the words zither, kazoo, and frolic in one phrase.

We went exploring in the Cascades for the first time today, along with the vast majority of the city of Seattle. While the trail up Mount Si was more than a bit congested at some points, we were rewarded with fabulous views at the top:

Most importantly, however, we made a quiche and (serendipitously) a fruit tart at the end of the day. And so begins the food blog portion. To preface: Quiche is more or less the food of the gods. Delicious buttery flaky crust, quality gruyere cheese, stir fried vegetables. And every single farmer in the Seattle area is selling asparagus right now for ridiculously low prices. And so, a mushroom and asparagus quiche was born.

You, like 95.7% of the American population, may be afraid of making pie/quiche crust. Since I’m feeling generous, I’ll tell you that it’s not that hard. And here’s how you do it:

Crust

Step 1: Get a food processer. Requirement. If you don’t have one, give up now.

Step 2: Throw 1.25 cups of flour, salt to taste, and 6 tablespoons of butter into the food processer. Process.

Step 3: Slowly add ice water until the crust coagulates into crust texture. The end.

Other stuff

Grate about 1.5 cups of delicious Gruyere cheese, and throw it in your newly created quiche crust. Yum.

Now the exciting part. Sautee your chosen veggies with an onion, and put on top of the cheese layer. Mushrooms and asparagus worked like a charm for us.

On top of the vegetables goes the egg custard layer. In a separate bowl, mix together four eggs, 1.5 cups of milk, three tablespoons flour, and salt, pepper and whatever other spices (basil? mustard? cumin? the possibilities are endless!) to taste – probably around 1/4 teaspoon each.

And then throw it in the oven at 375 for 40-50 minutes! Awesome! (PS – we aren’t actually amazing enough that we came up with this recipe ourselves – it’s a modified version of the quiche from the excellent Moosewood cookbook.)

BUT NOW for the innovation. With just enough quiche crust left, we made an apple + cherry tart. We sauteed the apples in butter and honey until tender, and added the cherries at the end, before putting them both into the crust and baking until it smelled good enough that we couldn’t wait any longer.

And now, back to reading scientific papers.

- Karen