catching up

I haven't updated this thing since March? Really? Only six months? I swear to god it feels like over a year. Well, if you check the posts, it really has been nine months since I've actually blogged about food.

A lot has happened in that nine months, including a couple of pretty decent food experiences that I might just blog about in the near future. Here's a preview:

- A super money friendly recipe for Dal a.k.a. indian lentil soup courtesy of my good friend Frank. Delicious, flavorful, and roughly 50 cents for a good sized lunch portion.

- My top three or four weekday dishes. This includes great black bean tacos, gorgonzola pasta with peas and mushrooms, and homemade pizza. All provide plenty of leftovers and are really easy to make.

- Carrot cake that I just about died over. It's probably my greatest culinary accomplishment.

- I grew herbs!? And it turned into the best pesto I've ever eaten. Now that we've moving, I think I have the space to put together a real garden next summer. I'm talking tomatoes, cucumbers, all the good stuff.

I truly haven't been cooking as much lately as before. My wife getting laid didn't off help at all, as now money is a lot tighter and I can't buy those cool ingredients that I want to cook with. In addition, my bike accident led to a pretty decent pile of medical bills as well as the cost of a new bike. That and school has really picked up for me. I'm committed to getting out in no more than 24 months, and it's going to take a lot of work to make that happen. Pile that on with my newfound love for cycling and learning French, and...well...no time. This probably means I shouldn't be blogging, but I really need something to get it out every once in a while. At this point, I don't even care if no one reads this at all.

So, until my next post, which will be soon, I say au revior...

btdubs

I don't really have enough time or creativity left at the end of the day to blog, so I made a tumblr. It's watered down and it will be much easier for me to keep up with daily. Enjoy:

http://spicysammich.tumblr.com

graphic designer needed...

For this company. Clearly, their current designer is COLORBLIND:

Seriously? If my teeth looked like this, I'd probably go to the hospital thinking I had some funky form of teeth jaundice. I want to go into a teeth whitening office with teeth looking like this and watch the receptionist scream in horror at my freaky radioactive teeth.

getting my hands dirty...

I've recently found an awesome new blog, The Kitchn, which provides at least a few good posts daily.  That's something I can't say for most of the blogs I read (no offense to all of you, btw).  

They've recently been doing a special on how to make your kitchen better.  Better storage, better colors, better cooking, everything.  One special thing was all about renters: how to fix things up without having to pay out the ass in maintenance fees once you leave.  Well, I stumbled upon a pretty cool idea of theirs a week or so ago.  Needless to say, I couldn't help myself:

This peg board was probably one of the easiest and coolest home improvement projects I've ever done.  The total cost was 24 dollars, and that INCLUDED a quart of paint to match what we currently have in our living room.  If you do it without the paint, it's about 12 or 13 dollars.  Since I got a Home Depot gift card for Christmas, total cost to me was a big fat ZERO.  It opened up a whole cabinet of space, which in turn gave me a whole new countertop free to work on.  I need to get a few extra hooks so I can hang up some more utensils and my french press.  Needless to say, it was an easy project that I absolutely recommend if you have a free wall and need some kitchen space.  

something to hold you over...

Since I finally realized how broke I am I haven't really cooked a thing in three weeks.  I'm currently digging out recipes that will allow me to use only the things in my cupboard.  Other than that, I'm limited to buying Chinese Noodles as a healthy (but still cheap) alternative to Ramen for my lunch for the next week.  I've been able to find the supplies for this really good looking rice pudding.

I think I promised a biscotti recipe a few weeks ago.  I made them, but I didn't like the recipe that much at all.  I'm gonna try another one (since I will have the materials for those as well on hand, save the eggs and milk) and I'll try and post that whenever I decide to do it again.  

Another awesome realization I made is that once I do have enough money to buy food again, I won't have any time to cook since my extra money is in taking on two jobs tutoring people.  I'll be lucky to have a wife in six months, let alone time to make a good meal.  

Anyways, since my life has been fairly uninteresting and this has been a pretty dreadful January, here's something from my heart to yours:

www.afterhoursdjs.org

Yes, I like techno music too.  But I'm not a techno snob.  So anything with some good bass lines and some synthesizer of some sort usually does it for me.  If you need background music, this is the way to go.  I remember when I was graduating college and moving to Baltimore, I listened to this station for about 16 hours straight while I packed up my tiny little apartment on Maryland Avenue:

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Anyways, hopefully a few of my readers will like it.  Also, if you don't like what you hear, just wait an hour.  Most of the DJ shifts are one to two hours.  Onto February...it can't get here soon enough in my opinion.  

David Gregory....

You are neither a mafia hitman nor a bookie.  Please do not wear an enormously wide-striped suit:

He looks ridiculous.

wow....

I really only did this so that I'd have some memory of it someday.  I don't think I've had to go out in cold like this in my life:

What you may not know is that the iMac camera reverses everything.  

I wrote all of that shit backwards.

As I always tell everyone, this will only make us appreciate summer and spring that much more.  Just keep telling yourself that.  

P.S.  Realfeel is a term used by Accuweather.  Their iPhone app is a million times better than any other weather one and their website doesn't have those creepy dancing people home loan ads that weather.com does.  Just a suggestion.  

Double dinner sunday

Keeping in tune with my resolutions for the year, I made a beef dish for myself on Sunday along with a vegetarian option for elle. Both I thought turned out pretty good, however you'll have to ask elle about the vegetarian one because I was so stuffed after eating mine.

Both came from Giada's amazing book, and neither failed to deliver on everything she talked about with both dishes. The first was tagliatelle with short rib ragu sauce. I've never made a ragu, but pretty impressed by how easy it was. The only downside was the time it took (about 3 hours), but it's the only way to really get the short ribs nice and soft and the sauce good and thick so it sticks to the pasta. Here's some pictures of the process:

Process tomato, onion, carrot, parsley, garlic, 

rosemary, thyme, oregano, and tomato paste.

Pancetta with some olive oil.  YUM.  Fry this for 

3 minutes and get put the pancetta aside.

Flour your short ribs.  Those get browned in your pot.

Add it all together.  Simmer 1.5 hours lid on, 1.5 hours lid off

Remove short ribs from bones (they fall off anyways) 

and shred short ribs, add back in

yumyumyumyumyum.  Rich, fatty, and awesome.

For elle I made a vegetable pasta bake. This smelled just as good as the ragu. Looks like a very very hearty dish, kind of soul-warming if you know what I mean. A great thing about this dish (which Giada mentions), is that you can put it together essentially whenever you want to, then put in the oven about a half hour before you want to serve it. Makes it a good dish if you're having a bunch of people over and doing a few courses. This can be made in the afternoon, then you can spend your time drinking with the guests preparing appetizers.

Making this dish helped me to discover the deliciousness of smoked mozzarella cheese, which I will undoubtedly be using much much much more in the future. This is another easy one. Also, if you want to work on your knife skills, this is the perfect dish to do so with. I had to cut up two zucchini, two squash, an onion and some mushrooms. One mistake I made was leaving this in the oven too long, but it actually hardened the top just a little bit, making for an unexpectedly yummy crunchiness:

Drizzle these with olive oil, salt, and herbs de provence.  Bake for 15 minutes

Top it with cheese and some butter cubes.  

Let that shit sit AS LONG AS YOU NEED TO

This is worth baking only for the smell.

Hopefully I'll have the energy to do this a couple of times.  I was in the kitchen for a good four to five hours making these two, but it was worth it.  I haven't had to make a lunch or dinner yet this week, and it's looking like I won't need to.  

My next project?  Biscotti.  They HAVE to taste better than the ones I buy from the Bucks down the street.  

some science...

All of you who knew me knew this was bound to happen:

I work with a lot of inorganic complexes, meaning they contain metal centers of some sort.  Well, since the world was built the way it was, it commonly means that I get some stuff with really pretty colors.  Here's just one example:

Beautiful color.  I want to bottle this.

The little white chunks you see in the bottom there is sodium metal, which is explosive in the presence of water.  This property also makes it very good at getting rid of small bits of water in organic solvents (small bits means no explosions).  The clear stuff is THF, which is a typical solvent t=hat I use to dissolve a lot the compounds I work with.  Many of the compounds I work with are very sensitive to water, meaning that even a small bit can pretty much ruin whatever I'm trying to do.  This picture helps to avoid that.  By placing the sodium metal into the flask filled with THF, we can eliminate any traces of water that might be present, ensuring we're working with water free chemicals.  The blue color is from benzophenone, which is just another organic chemical.  What's special about it is what happens when it reacts with sodium:

When it makes that thing on right (called a radical for those with some chemistry experience), it turns blue.  If there is water in the THF (water eats up radicals really really well), it won't turn blue, meaning there's too much water for the solvent to be used.

The bad part about working with these things is that they're pretty dangerous.  If someone messes up and gets a significant amount of water in the still, it blows up like a bomb since THF is very flammable.  Yup, that's how I roll.

a room without a view...

Just to give you a little window into my work world, I wanted to show you my desk:

Don't laugh, the periodic table actually helps...

Notice the complete lack of a window.  The closest window is three desks down, just in the right place so I can't see out the window whether I'm at my desk or doing chemistry at my bench and hood.  Thank god the view from the window is so great:

Paradise

Anybody else out there with awful desks/views?  The only thing I'm lucky about is that my desk is huge.  I never have to worry about space.  But that's about it.

my resolutions

I think a lucky seven is good:

1) Get back in shape - I was in great shape before the wedding, but it's kind of gone down hill from there.  This is a popular one.  For me, it's really just about convincing myself I have the energy when I get back from work to go work out.

2) Find a place to live in for more than a year - I'm tired of moving.  As much of a fan as I am of my current streak (which looks to make it to a full 10 years), I hope to move only one more time. It's gonna have to be a cheaper, two bedroom apartment though.  Elle and I need space to grow into, and one bedrooms are simply too small for a married couple who are starting to accumulate "grown-up" furniture like couches and bookcases.  That and I want an office type area, especially if we stay here once I get my Ph.D.

3) Make it to Europe - I don't think this is gonna happen (see my last post), but I'm gonna try.  Even if it's some "easy" place like London.

4) Read somewhere between 10 and 20 books - I have a stack of literature that I really want to get through (The Blank Slate, Guns Germs and Steel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Capitalism and Freedom included).  They help keep me centered too; reading too much chemistry literature puts me in a bad mood and makes me antisocial.  I'll take any good fiction suggestions as well.  I tend to not like fiction, but I've really been enjoying New Yorker fiction pieces.  

5) Cook more red meat - This is a tough one since Elle doesn't eat it, but I need to move in that direction as an aspiring cook.  I have enough pasta and chicken dishes mastered that I can whip something up really quick for Elle that she can eat.  I'm salivating at the thought of things like braised short ribs, pot roast, and pulled pork.  YUM!

6) Publish the equivalent of one full first author paper -  I say the equivalent because two small "communications" usually equals one full paper.  I'd say I could do one full and one communication, but the review process takes FOREVER for some of the journals we publish in.

7) Get outside more - There's been times in the last few months where I've gone into work in the morning when's it dark outside and left at night when it was dark outside.  Lab sucks because I ALWAYS need to be inside and my desk is in the corner of our lab with NO WINDOW.  I'm gonna do whatever I can to get at least a little bit of fresh air every day.  

I think this is plenty for 365 days worth.