For Science!

Watch as I fall off the internet again.

Labmate S seems to have come to his senses, in that he is asking to send off plasmid in test tubes this Thursday. This would not have been possible had I not already done my magic, so logic-win for me. Still, MW and Panda make the point that I need assertiveness training. This proves to be a problem, since assertiveness training this term conflicts with my TAship. $$$ > training, because I need one of them to live.

In the meantime, it is no longer holiday. This is a good thing, as we'd had too many holidays. But they, and almost the entire first month of the Jewish year, is done. Now nothing until Khannukah, which is only really eve a thing because Christian advertisers wanted to show how not-anti-semitic they were. They just failed to do the research, so I don't think the message came out quite as they intended.

[flashback]
Tuesday was the day of flying home. First we stopped at Zieman's bakery to pick up the cake I had ordered . . . only there was no cake. Someone flubbed the order. They sold me some day-old but I was still so pissed.

Then I went to the airport, got on a plane, got to LAX, got off the plane, and called people to tell them I had arrived safely. While I was doing this, there was a call . . . to tell me my cake was ready. I chewed that moron out. Not like I won't make the attempt to buy one more such cake the next time I am in Detroit, but it is so frustrating. I told you to have it ready at 9:00 AM for a reason, and the reason was I was leaving the state.

Then I slept on the bus ride home, and did laundry, and went to sleep. That's the end of my wedding adventure.
[/flashback]

Now I am wrestling with my prof's computer, which ought to be plug-and-play but isn't. Grr. I will get this worked out before the term is done though. I will.

Today is the forty-seventh day of the Omer, which is six weeks and five days into the Omer. And two days until Cheesecake Holiday. Also, JJ came up this weekend. Since he doesn't have an electric blender-mixer, we made some cheesecake bars for him to take back and eat on the appropriate days.

( Cheesecake )

So I had a craving for pie. MW had made a pie on Friday, but although we left it half-finished that evening, it was mostly gone when we came down in the morning. The Midnight Snacker, aka JJ, had been at it again.

But we had a pie crust, and an enormous bag of frozen blueberries. This time, I took notes.

( Recipe Under Here )

That was pretty much my only accomplishment yesterday. On the plus side, pie.

This is how I cook.

So, we are in the run-up to Passover. There are lots and lots of prohibitions involved in doing a Passover, but practically it means that right about Purim, we stop buying food. Everything from then on is just eating up what is already in the house, or going, "Why do we have this fuzzy green thing in the fridge, and when did it get there?" and then tossing it.

We had, in the freezer, two pie shells and massive bag of frozen blueberries. Also we had bits of leftover brown sugar and some flour. Clearly, this meant pie.

So I made the filling. First I dumped blueberries into a pan, and added sugar until is was just sweet enough to taste. Then I cooked it down until I could not press a spoon down and get only liquid, and added sugar until it was actually sweet. Then I added potato starch, which caused it to gel right up. The whole goopy mess went into the pie shell, and the oven at 350F. It stayed in the oven until bubbly, and then I put crumble top on.

(A thing about adding starch, which I think should be in the section of the cookery book titled "basics," along with how to bloom yeast* and why you need to let the meat rest. To add starch, take an equal amount of starch and a liquid, and mix them in a small cup or bowl. The liquid is orange or grape juice for a sweet thing, tomato juice for a savory thing, and water if you don't have anything else to hand. If you have a recipe, use that amount. Otherwise, three tablespoons of starch and another three of liquid generally works. The starch will immediately form a moisture-proof barrier, which is why this mixing is best done with a knife. After stabbing if for maybe thirty seconds, it will do some non-Newtonian magic and suddenly become almost milklike in consistency. This slurry is what you add to your gravy, or pie filling, or whatever else you are thickening; but whatever you do, do not just dump the starch straight in. And now you know.)

(Crumble top is made thusly: cut some butter/margarine with an equal amount of flour. That is, 1/2 cup butter needs 1/2 cup flour, 1 cup needs one cup, etc. You mash it together with a fork or a cutting tool, if you have one, and you get something that looks like dampish sand, stuck in clumps. Then you add brown sugar to make it sweet, and your choice of ground cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, etc. You sprinkle it on top in the last 10 minutes or so of baking. Do not do this too early, or the fat melts and the top just drips off of the pie. Boo.)

So then there was pie, made of my favorite fruit. It is the best pie I have ever made, I think. The filling was gelled enough that instead of oozing when cut into, it stayed where it is, allowing you to remove the pie slice with no mess. The crumble top was indeed crumbly, but only after being forked, so it wasn't making crumbs everywhere. The pie crust was flaky, not so much tender, but delicious all over the place. Altogether, a successful pie.

But no recipe. I don't need no stinkin' recipe.

* To bloom yeast: to take yeast from the fridge, which is both alive and dormant, and wake it up. To do it, you get warm, not hot, water, and mix in the yeast. It takes two minutes, but if you are nervous about the water temperature, it will start foaming after about ten minutes if the yeast are alive.

I'm not a vegetarian. I do, however, keep Kosher. The nearest Kosher butcher, from Santa Barbara, is two hours away. For this reason, I do not often get meat while at school.

But the Hillel House had a barbecue today. There were hot dogs and Israeli salad, plus hamentaschens for dessert. I'm not sure why, it is the wrong season, but there you go. So I ate meat and hamentaschens and all is good.

Two today.

Recipe the First, for Toronto Fish. When I was young, JJ was allergic to all the things. He had every nut allergy, molds and mildews, and egg whites. You know how hard it is to find food without egg whites in it? Thus, he thought in general that flavor was some kind of travesty, and would not eat anything he couldn't drown in ketchup. Up to and including Cheerios.

So, this one time, we were in Toronto, and my parents could not get any protein into him. To be fair, the available protein was cheese or fish. We went to this restaurant, where MW got the salmon and coaxed JJ to try some. Then he ate it all. Then MW got more and he ate that too. Then MW went up and got the recipe from and incredibly accommodating staff. The recipe they gave was like, "put in some of this and some of this and some of this," but it worked, and from then on we had a fish that JJ would eat. It is called Toronto Fish because that is where we got the recipe.

( Toronto Fish )

Recipe the Second, for no-bake peanut butter cookies. This is written on the back on a napkin, and I want it someplace less . . . loosable. I have never made these myself, but I have eaten them and can tell you they are pretty fantastic. They do have a tendency to glue your mouth shut, though.

( Peanut butter cookies )

I live in a grad-student apartment complex, which in theory means that everyone understands that you don't play the loud thumpy music at two am and in practice means listening to the girl in the next room have sex. But there are perks.

One is that they will often attempt to put similar people together, although at least some of it was by luck. So I room with Liz, who drinks tea, and Lulu, who is from China and drinks tea, and now Poornima has joined us from India; she drinks tea. The first thing any one of us does when coming home at night is to fill up the kettle and put it on to heat, and then there is hot water for all.

Tonight, I was still chilled, so I put some tea on. Poornima also made some, and the Liz came out because she heard a teapot whistle. Then we had a conversation that went:

Liz: I wish there were good tea shops in Santa Barbara. Here it's either K-mart or the really snooty places.
Poornima: I know. I mean, tea bags are great but it works out to, like, $30 a pound for tea that isn't even that good.
Liz: But at least they are convenient.
Poornima: Yeah. Making real tea is such a hassle.
Me: You just need a tea ball.
Poornima: . . . a what?

Liz and I then explained what a tea ball is (a little mesh ball with a hinge and a chain, so you can make a reusable tea "bag" out of good loose-leaf tea). Then we demonstrated the size of the mesh with a strainer. Then Poornima wanted to know where she could get one. I do not know, but if I spot one at the store I shall buy it for her. They are useful devices.

Also, I discovered I lie Bengal Spice tea. Who knew?

So, tonight for dinner, we went to Tierra Sur. We were still owed a dinner for MW and Panda's silver anniversary, plus MWs birthday was Saturday, plus JJ's in on the 17th, plus I'm starting grad school, so we wanted to celebrate. When we want to celebrate in a very big way, we go there.

First, some background information:

For reasons that I have always considered entirely spurious, the crazy black-hatter Jews don't consider wine Kosher by definition, like sane people. (For those of us keeping track: it's a fruit by-product which involves no animal products at all.) The rabbis prohibit the consumption of wine which was produced as a sacrament for another religion, but at no point in history would this ever have been the majority of wine being produced. Basically, they don't want the non-Jew cooties getting on them. Therefore, the establishment of such fine Kosher wineries and Mogen David and Manischewitz, which tastes at best like alcoholic cough syrup.

And then there is the Baron de Herzog winery, which produces actual wine. It is the Kosher winery. In fact when Panda needs to say Yahrzeit (pronounced your-tzite; it's a kind of memorial prayer said on, for example, the anniversary of one's parents' deaths), he goes over there because they have enough people for a minyan (minimum of ten adult males required tosay certain prayers, such as the Yahrzeit). Which they have on the wine cellar floor, surrounded by aging wine in great barrels . . .

Anyway. The is a restaurant at the winery, and this is Tierra Sur. That website will tell you about their locally-sourced ingredients, and their fantastic chefs, and their award-winning food. It will not, however, tell you the thing that makes this restaurant the So-Cal destination for visiting Jews: everything at the restaurant is Kosher.

I ate my first venison there, and do you know how hard it is to get Kosher venison? I've also had duck there, and steak, and lamb. It's never less than awe-inspiring, and that's not even starting on the desserts. Considering that the next closest place to get Kosher food is two towns over and the next place to get decent Kosher food is and hour and a half away in Los Angeles, having our very own Kosher gourmet here is amazing.

If you're ever in the area, and have a huge chunk of money to drop on a meal (I said it was good, not it was cheap), call me. We can do lunch.

Yesterday, I was going to go the Ventura fair, but JJ instead wanted to go to drum circle. In all fairness, he's been trying to go to a drum circle for months, so he had the better claim. We went and drummed for ~90 mins. It left me with a definite need for drum, so . . .

I've been listening to Pata-pata-pata-pon! Didi didi didi dididi! Fayaya fiya fiyaya fayaya fiya fiyaya! FEVAAAAAH! That's a game I would totally play if it were not exclusively on the PSP.

Tonight for dinner I made fish tacos. Only I didn't make the slaw, I just chopped up some onion and lettuce and tomato and olives for people to add to their tacos as they wish. And I made "shack sauce," which is really just two spoonfuls of mayo and enough lemon juice to make is zingy and creamy and some cilantro and some chili powder for heat and paprika for color. It was good, all the people ate it and went nommy. Although in the future I'll cook it in the oven, the grill was a pain for not much extra benefit. It was pretty easy, though. So I have learned a new recipe. Maybe soon I will have enough experience to level up XD

Bad, bad tan! Dropping off the face of the earth yet again.

So I will start with the awesome that, to my jaded mind, work surprisingly turns out to be. I say surprising because, of course. work at Gigantic Car Company often ignored the fact that as a chemist, something kind of, y'know, chemistry related would be nice. Whereas at Tiny Cute Company, they have me doing chemistry stuff all the time. Mostly by playing with supercritical fluids. For some reason, they are orange O.o

Also, MW has successfully achieved gainful employment \o/ She was starting to get mopey and depressed, but I had faith. Now we are presented with a new problem, which is to say that no one has an appreciable "after work" to cook in. Does anyone have any quick, delicious recipes? We needs 'em.

But I did not reappear from the aether to explain about the jobs, no I did not. I came instead to talk about the wedding of Meir (about halfway between may-ear and mayor) Graff to his now-wife, Itta (eat-ta). Itta is so thin I'd worry about anorexia, except that she'll have babies soon.

Now, as we all know, the wedding is supposed to be funded by the bride's family. Meir, however, is the only son of Jacob Graff, and he certainly wasn't going to let the wedding of his son his son his only son be anything less than a a Graff Affair. It did not disappoint.

The pre-wedding "snack" included, in addition to a full-size sushi bar and a Mongolian barbecue (with beef!) to entire dead animals to a tandoori oven.

During what I will for the sake of humor call snack time, we had the bedecking. This is a quaint Jewish tradition that has his origins in that biblical fiasco when Jacob agreed to work seven years and then marry Rachel, and his father-in-law Lot decided to substitute Leah instead, thus forcing him to work another seven years. Therefore, a short while before the wedding, the groom and his entourage dance on over to the bride and her entourage, so that the groom can check that this is, is fact, the woman he agreed to marry. (She was).

So everyone marched to the place where the khuppa (no equivalent English sounds) was set up. A khuppa is a canopy, like a tent with four poles but no walls, under which Jewish couples marry. This one was decorated with white roses, and was very pretty. I am given to understand that, usually, the groom's family sits on one side of the aisle, and the bride's on the other. At an Orthodox Jewish wedding, it is boys and girls instead. Seats were found, music played, the groom waited for his bride.

And waited, because the (very extended) Graff family had to walk up the aisle first: Meir with his parents, Jacob and Pnina (you do say the p); all of Meir's married sisters, and their kids; all of the bride's married siblings, and their kids; and finally, the bride with her parents.

Then a quite famous and honored rabbi read the ketubah (keh-tuba). A kehtuba is a written wedding contract, in the legal sense of what the husband paid for the wife and what they owe to each other. (That is, above and beyond the fact that the husband owes the wife home, food, clothing, and conjugal rights. Yes, Jewish women can divorce their husbands for not getting enough. It is in the Torah.) Signing it in the presence of two reliable witnesses constitutes a marriage. Just as a point, the ketubah was signed beforehand. This was just a rabbi reading the thing at the ceremony.

Next came the seven blessings. These are . . . well, blessings. The first one is the blessing over the wine. Because at a Jewish event, there is always wine.

The rest of the blessings are things like "may the couple experience all joy together" and "may they make tons and tons of Jewish babies together." Okay, I made that last one up, but the gist is there.

Finally, they broke their cup. This is a Tradition: you break a glass cup. Their love is to fade when the glass is repaired. I've never personally seen the difficulty - it's glass, just melt it and make a new one if you really want to - but there it is.

So, okay, the wedding was over. To celebrate, there was dancing, including the always-terrifying chair dance. This is when the bride and groom each sit on a chair, which a group of friendly schoolmates of the groom lift into the air and dance around with. Yes, while there are people sitting on it. Like I said, terrifying.

And what can I say of the food?

First we got guys running around handing out bread to everyone who wanted. I wanted tea, and I got my own (cute!) little teapot, a box full of the good kind of tea bag, with actual leaves inside, and a tiny little jar of honey. Every time they brought me more tea, I got another honey jar. Although it is sad that my Crohn's precludes imbibing alcohol, and so I could not take advantage of an open bar stocked with every alcohol ever, this very nearly made up for it.

Next there were the straw onion things in the salad, which have now replaced bead sprouts on every recipe ever because they crunch but taste like mushroom as opposed to bitter. There was this tiny little shot glass thing, but it contained gespatcho. There was a miniature quiche, topped with cherry tomatoes tossed in balsamic vinaigrette. That was the "soup and salad" portion of the meal.

To describe the main portion of the meal, I must ask that you imagine a marshmallow. Now imagine a beef. Now imagine that the beef and the marshmallow had a beefmallow baby together. I ate the beefmallow baby, along with carrots and green beans and pan-fried potatoes. Nom nom.

More dancing! I went and talked to various relatives that I hadn't seen in forever, including one I had not seen since Cool Cousin Tamar's wedding. Cool Cousing Tamar's daughter is now preparing for her Bat Mitzvah. It was great good fun.

Then dessert: Mini pies! Mocha mix not-ice-cream! Moussettes (shot glasses full of mousse)! Mini flans topped with gold foil! Mini cheesecakes! Sheets of brittle so thick there were hammers with which to break it! Tiramisu! Pudding! Every kind of fruit! And more!

( Every Kind of Fruit )

Then, stuffed, we went out. On the table that, on the way in, had held our seat assignments, there were now stacks of Khumashim (khoo-mah-sheem), which are books containing the Pentatuach, Haftorah, and other annual readings. As it's a nice book, with the English translation on the page opposite the Hebrew, and complete with commentaries, Panda took one.

Morning today came much too early, but it was all right. We'd been to a Graff Affair, and those are Always Worth It.