Quarterly baking report [Q1 2023]

My cooking is best described as edible, so I wouldn’t entirely trust anything I have to say about dinner recipes, but people at least tell me they like my baking. Here’s a review of what we baked in the first three months of 2023 with some notes.

Linzer cookies – King Arthur Baking – This was a post-Christmas bake (hence the Christmas tree shapes). I’m pretty sure I would have reduced the sugar from 1/2 to 1/3 cup, we may have used one whole egg instead of an egg yolk, and we substituted almond extract for the lemon zest/cinnamon and vanilla. The almond extract we had was quite strong, so maybe be aware of that if you do a similar switch. The cookies come out like a crisp sugar cookie with a finer crumb, and I used jam for the filling. Our cookies turned out well, though very almondy. The dough works nicely, so the rolling/cutting out isn’t too tedious. Would bake again.

Clockwise from top left: Linzer cookies, filled wool roll, Nutella/chocolate babka, cranberry apple galette

Filled wool roll – King Arthur Baking – We may have baked this partly (mostly) because it looked interesting. It’s a sweetened bread, so I think we followed the recipe exactly this time. The base is a Japanese milk bread that’s then filled, rolled, cut, and shaped to give it its form and the filling is a mixture of cream cheese and freeze-dried fruit. This was a fun and tasty bake, but as usual I’m reminded of why I don’t bake bread that often because why does proving take so long?

Coconut shortbread cookies – Not sure on the recipe for this bake, which was done mainly to make a dent in some expired coconut flour. I liked the cookies, though the coconut flour definitely does something to the texture.

Prinsesstarta – The Great British Baking Show: The Big Book of Amazing Cakes – I picked up the book at the library, wanted to make something from it, and had a birthday cake to make: enter, Prinsesstarta. For those unfamiliar, it’s a cake layered with jam and pastry cream, then covered in whipped cream and marzipan. Going in to the bake, I knew it would be a long process, and after having done it, the cake is good, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort for me. I can confirm I’m in the pro-marzipan camp though.

Prinsesstarta

Cranberry apple galette – The Pioneer Woman – For pie day we went slightly off script with a galette. My pie crust is still a work in progress so I can’t say too much about the recipe. Overall, it was more or less edible, and the fruit was great.

Nutella/chocolate babka – Again, I’m not positive which recipe we ended up using. I do know we made a Nutella variation on a babka, and as long as your bread turns out, it’s bread and chocolate so assuming you like bread and chocolate there’s not much to complain about. Same comment as above about proving but otherwise I have no grievances against the recipe.

Home

When I finally made it home (we’re still back in December 2019), I had no plans except to go to Wegmans, bake a cake, and watch the latest Star Wars movie. It’s amazing how successful you can be at meeting your goals when you give yourself two weeks to go to a grocery store and watch a movie. Overall, my accomplishments for Christmas break included the following: 

– baking white chocolate/macadamia nut/Craisin cookies, cream puffs (choux pastry + crème patissiere), and a two-layer cake with whipped cream frosting and chocolate ganache all from scratch

– assembling two 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles

– using Netflix to watch Kim’s Convenience, The Irishman, The Two Popes, Mary Poppins Returns, and The Last Jedi, the last in anticipation of seeing The Rise of Skywalker at the movie theater [It was good. It’s a Star Wars movie, so be prepared for plenty of illogical decisions and departures from the laws of physics, but there are also lightsabers, spaceships, and lasers, which, let’s be honest, are the main highlights of a Star Wars movie.]

Clockwise from top left: cookies, slice of cake, cream puffs, top of cake

– getting dim sum. For all its self-proclaimed excellence, Ann Arbor doesn’t have many options for Chinese food, and none, as far as I’ve found, for dim sum.

– exploring Castle Island and Boston (Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market, the Common, Chinatown) [More on this in a separate post.]

– spending an abnormally warm Saturday afternoon raking leaves leftover from November

– spending a typically cold Tuesday morning (the day before I left) shoveling snow/slush off of the driveway. When I’m home, I shovel the straight part of our unnecessarily long driveway. I have a method, and it exercises both sides of the body equally.

Clockwise from top left: Clouds on the plane ride back to Ann Arbor, sunset over lake,
sunset at home, puzzle #1 (puzzle #2 was an underwater scene)

– going to Wegmans, where I admired their cheese selection and bakery

– ordering Christmas cards on New Year’s Eve. Christmas in January, anyone?

– not losing Monopoly to my brother’s girlfriend and her brother. Turns out if you actually follow the printed rules, the game doesn’t take twenty-seven days to play.

– not burning the church down at the Christmas Eve candlelight service

– watching Jeopardy!

– eating

– eating exactly one box of blueberry Chex

– sleeping

So that was Christmas break 2019.  It was great, and then I had to return to Ann Arbor to finish up another year of grad school. 

Fall Flavors

Another month, another visit to Greenfield Village. This time, one of my college friends was visiting home, and I joined her and her parents for Fall Flavor Weekends at Greenfield Village. It was a cool, cloudy day, but I was still surprised by how uncrowded it was, not that I was complaining. I guess Fall Flavor Weekends aren’t a huge deal compared to some of their separately ticketed events, but I enjoyed it. Mostly things go on in the village as usual, except with more cooking and demonstrations.

When we arrived, we first headed in the direction of the farm, where they were threshing, and later baling, wheat. The thresher was powered by a steam engine that would have made the rounds to each farm as needed and also periodically let out giant plumes of smoke. From there, we visited the mid-19th century Firestone Farm, home to Harvey Firestone, the tire guy. He was friends with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, and apparently the three of them would sometimes go vacationing together. At the farm, they were in the middle of lunch (featuring cabbage, squash, and a bread or cake?), and were making apple butter in the basement.

Threshing wheat

We next briefly looked around the Liberty Craftworks area, but it was mostly business as usual for them, though the print shop did print up some recipes for ham. On our way to lunch, we walked through the farmer’s market set up in the pavilion, which I had never seen open before then. For lunch, I got pork and beans with cornbread at A Taste of History, and it was delicious. I still really appreciate that their food tastes like food and not salt and oil.

Barns by the craft shops

After lunch, we wandered through the rest of the houses that were cooking. McGuffey’s birthplace (~1800, Pennsylvania) was making rabbit stew and some sort of English pudding that gets boiled. The Mattox family home (~1930, Georgia) had crackling bread and peach cobbler. Outside near these two houses, they were also making cheese and butter, plus baking apple pies (three of them, cooked in three slightly different ways – how do I get a job that involves more pies?) on an open fire. Then at the Edison homestead (~1915, Canada – this was Edison’s grandparents’ house that Edison would visit) they were having ham, a grape/celery/mayonnaise salad, and something else involving rolled fried spinach. The Susquehanna plantation (~1860, Maryland) was cooking crab cakes and biscuits, and finally, the Daggett farmhouse (~1760, Connecticut) was cleaning up by the time we got there, and had just finished brewing a batch of beer. We learned about some of the different things they used to flavor the beer, and the grains that were cooked into a mash and could be eaten as a sort of breakfast cereal before fermentation.

Overall, I liked the event; it was a different look at the houses in Greenfield Village and they kept it pretty low key. No crowds, a bit of behind the scenes, and food. What more could I ask for?

But wait, there’s more. The last fall flavor is mine. I had been watching The Great British Bake Off again and decided what I really needed to do was bake a cake. Specifically a nice complicated upside down apple cider cake that involved cooking apple slices in cider, melting butter and sugar to caramelize, arranging a layer of apples on the bottom of the pan, baking a spice cake (from scratch) over the apples, and turning the whole thing upside down. It’s a bit of a pain, but worth it in the end, because it’s not like I have better things to do with my time. (Research? What research?)

Upside down apple cider cake

Dinner for One: Grocery shopping and cooking for the single grad student

Last time, I discussed some of my favorite meals to make (including pizza toast; new this year – pizza quesadillas). This time, I’ll talk about some of the skills and things you should learn when cooking and grocery shopping for you, yourself, and you.

First, you should learn how to cut onions into sixths (or any other fruit or vegetable into any unintuitive fraction). My current meal schedule involves a lot of cereal for breakfast, a lot of sandwiches for lunch, and dinner on a three-day rotation, meaning that I eat the same dinner for three days in a row, then switch to a different dinner for the next three days. Sometimes I cook all three portions at the same time, or if it’s a quick meal, I cook each night. If I’m only cooking one portion, I sometimes only need 1/6 of an onion. 1/6 is a third of 1/2, which divides the onion up nicely to fit in my meal schedule.

Next, get used to knowing exactly how many cups of milk and slices of bread you have. Unless you want to make multiple trips to the grocery store every week, that’s got to last you until the end of the week. Additionally, you are solely responsible for consuming any food you buy; nobody’s going to take care of those leftovers for you. On the flip side, at least nobody’s going to eat your cookies when you’re not looking. But on the other hand, if you decide it’s a good idea to try the new broccoli flavored Oreos, nobody’s going to eat those for you when you’re not looking.

On a related note, after some time tracking your bread and milk consumption, you will probably also be able to give a full inventory of the contents of your fridge. [At this moment of writing: 2 cups of milk, 1 stick of butter, 9 eggs, 1/4 of a batch of bread pudding (3 pieces), a can of Sprite, a can of Coke, an old apple, ~1/2 pound of baby carrots, ~1/2 jar of jam, canned wine, a bottle of cherry soda, 9(?)/16 of a pan of pumpkin cranberry bread, 3/8 of a block of cheese, wrinkly grapes, leftover pumpkin, 2 dinners worth of leftover baked chicken/broccoli/carrots/onion/potatoes, and assorted sauces/condiments (ketchup, chili, siracha mustard, Italian dressing, fake hoisin sauce, bbq sauce, and mayonnaise).]

When you go grocery shopping, you should buy family-sized packages of food because it’s (usually) cheaper by ounce, you’ll eventually eat it all, and after all, you are a family. Of one.

Since grocery shopping is also your social activity for the weekend and nobody is waiting for you at home to go to a movie or be driven to a soccer game, feel free to spend some time deliberating in the aisle whether saving 1.24 cents per ounce on generic orange juice is worth it to you. Other things to consider: Is paying 50 cents extra for Frozen-themed cheese sticks a good deal if they amuse you when you pack them in your lunches? Should you buy a Hot Wheels car so you can tell everyone you finally bought a car? How much peanut butter is too much for a single person to have?

Finally, eat ice cream directly from the carton. Because you can.

Bonus: If you also don’t have a car, avoid buying any liquids (bottled water, milk, soda, juice, coffee, alcohol) if possible, because liquids are dense and thus, heavy. Any groceries you buy, you carry.

Bonus 2: In the same vein, shop for pasta by which kind has the highest packing fraction. Space is valuable in your backpack/grocery bag/whatever you’re using to haul all your food home. Shells, penne, and anything spiral shaped takes up too much space. Macaroni is pretty good. You get a higher packing fraction from spaghetti, but spaghetti is harder to eat and doesn’t adhere to sauces well.

Food, Glorious Food, and Denouement [Singapore 2018]

Besides family and tourism, the other aspect of a trip to Singapore is the food. We ate out a lot, because the cost of prepared food isn’t that high compared to the cost of groceries, and there are numerous dishes that you can’t get in America. Or at least you can’t get good versions of them in America. While Ann Arbor has a bar for every day of the month (at least), it’s surprisingly lacking in Chinese food. There’s one place off North Campus that’s good, then a couple American-Chinese restaurants around town, and a Panda Express at the commons. So this was my opportunity to get some decent Chinese food, plus a mix of Singaporean/Malaysian/Indian food, plus the kind of weird stuff.

We had satay a couple times. I like the meat, but as you may have guessed based on the three hundred peanut butter and jam sandwiches I eat every year, I’m really in it for the peanut sauce. One night we met up with some of my father’s friends for dinner at a Peranakan place and got chicken curry. Another night we had dinner with a couple of my aunt’s and one of my mother’s cousins and had dim sum and duck. There was a lunch with family friends where we just got dim sum. We had variations on noodles, bao, chicken rice, porridge, kaya toast, egg tarts, pineapple tarts, Pop-Tarts – wait, not that last one. There was a lot of food.

Clockwise from top left: Duck, dimsum, satay, curry

And then there were green worms, tentacles, and the obligatory I-went-to-a-tropical-place coconut. The green worms are pandan-flavored noodles, and are part of cendol, shaved ice topped with coconut milk and palm sugar syrup served with the noodles. You can also add other ingredients, like red beans, durian, corn (. . . why?). It’s good. Then probably the most unusual thing I ate was the tentacles (cuttlefish). Tasted fine to me. But the first time I ate blue cheese I didn’t realize it was blue cheese until three-quarters through the meal, and I’ve had the assorted-body-parts-and-fungus-soup at Chinese restaurants, which was also fine. The coconut was a coconut.

Clockwise from top left: Cuttlefish, cendol, crab*, and coconut

*Soft shell, dry ice for theatrical effect

Now, to end this series of posts. To summarize, we went to the following:
Day 5: Singapore Botanic Garden (with National Orchid Garden) and Southern Ridges
Day 6: Gardens by the Bay
Day 7: Sentosa – Trick Eye Museum and S.E.A. Aquarium
Day 8: Jurong Bird Park and Night Safari
Day 11: Asian Civilisations Museum
Day 12: Sentosa – Fort Siloso
Day 13: Singapore Zoo and River Safari
Day 15: Bukit Timah Hill
Day 17: Singapore National Museum (same link as the Asian Civilisations Museum)
Day 20: Hong Kong

There’s nothing we saw that I would categorically tell people to avoid, but your enjoyment may vary depending on your idea of fun. For example, if you hate sweating, Singapore is the wrong country for you, but if you find yourself there anyway, you may not want to haul yourself up Bukit Timah Hill. Or if you have a phobia of coral, the aquarium is probably not the right place for you. But if you like flamingos, go to the bird park.

Within a little over two weeks, I managed to see ~85% of my extended family, including 13 out of the 14 great-grandchildren on both sides of the family; eat a slightly ridiculous variety and quantity of food; and visit over a dozen quality tourist attractions. I’m glad I made the trip when I did. It’s been awhile since I had a big vacation, and it was a good time to go. Grad school vacation days are probably more flexible than real job vacation days. Hopefully it’s less than eleven years until I see my relatives again.

With that, we return to regularly scheduled posts about the Revolution (new season, same old losing record¹), grad student life (why do I have one-sixth of an onion and two dozen eggs in the fridge?), what I’m reading/watching (we got Netflix), and Ann Arbor in winter. Because if you guessed that snowstorms, negative thirty windchills, single digit temperatures, and black ice were absolutely no deterrent to me going to work, grocery shopping, or trekking through the Arboretum, you’re right.

Singapore skyline at sunset

¹Except, unbelievably(?), worse than usual.

Taste of Home

One week, faced with eggs that needed to be used up, half an onion leftover from making beef soup, and pineapple leftover from pineapple chicken, I made fried rice. I cooked up rice and chicken, added frozen vegetables and all my leftovers, and it was almost like a meal from home. To be completely like a home-cooked meal, the chicken would have had to be leftover too. But it was enough to remind me of home. It’s funny, how the smallest things can remind you of other things, and how certain smells, tastes, or sounds are inextricably linked to particular times or places.

The Lindseth climbing wall at Cornell, before it was renovated, smelled of an unmistakable mix of chalk, sweat, damp climbing shoe leather, and a hint of wet concrete. There’s nothing like that smell and I have yet to conduct very scientific experiments at other climbing walls to verify that statement.

Last day at Lindseth before renovation

When you’re the first to walk into Lynah Rink before a hockey game, you can still smell the fresh ice. It’s different from middle-of-the-game fresh ice and open-skate fresh ice. Really.

Almost empty Lynah pre-hockey game

After fourteen years in various bands, a lot of other things remind me of band. Snickers (the candy) because the pep band always got them at men’s hockey games. 3 Musketeers (also the candy) because I would buy them from the band parents during our lunch breaks at music festival in high school. Hearing the vibraslap always reminds me of playing “Caribbean Rondo” in ninth grade. (The vibraslap is an important part of the ending.)

Catalpa trees – my seventh grade leaf project, in which I also identified different species of elm, oak, maple, and sumac, among others. Plus I learned that ginkgo is spelled with two g’s. Chickadees – one particular bird that sang what sounded like four notes of “The Star Spangled Banner” at absurd hours of the morning at our campground in Bar Harbor, Maine. Orange slices – halftime of soccer games. Hoodsie cups (with the wooden spoon) – elementary school birthday parties. Tuna sandwiches – picnic lunches on road trips. Also vital to road trips: at least one playthrough of our 1980s John Denver CD.

I could probably come up with absurd connections for dozens of other things, because that’s how my mind works. I’ll end with this obscure one: the color red and a particular university located in Ithaca, NY.

Eating Ann Arbor, Part 2

Here are the rest of my Ann Arbor restaurant ratings (part 1 is here and includes my rating system):

8. No Thai (Thai) – I overheard a very heated conversation about this place last semester. The consensus was that the food is Not Thai. It’s not. When I went with my parents, we ordered pad thai and green curry. I’m not sure what we actually got, but there was a lot of it, and it was edible.
Rating: 1.5/5

9. Palio (Tuscan – Italian) – I paid this restaurant a visit with some ChemE friends during Restaurant Week when they were doing two meals for $28. For $14, we got an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert to share. The tomato soup I started with was good, but nothing too special. For the entree, I ordered the veal tortellini, which I really liked. There were mushrooms, I ate all the mushrooms, and I don’t even like mushrooms. Then dessert was Nutella bread pudding. Nutella. Enough said.
Rating: 4/5 (This was the most satisfying meal I had all month. Meat that wasn’t dry chicken, dessert, free bread, and special pricing.)

10. Panera (American) – I am aware that Panera is a chain restaurant found across the United States. I like Panera. They make good sandwiches.

11. The Lunch Room (American – vegan) – Did not pick this place. Did not realize it was vegan until after lunch even though the cream cheese in my bagel tasted nothing like cream cheese because it was cashew cheese. I also accidentally ate blue cheese once, so that should give you some idea of how my brain reacts to my taste buds. As long as you don’t expect the vegan substitutes to taste like their animal counterparts or insist on meat at every meal, you’ll be fine at The Lunch Room. I’ve heard their desserts are really good though I haven’t personally tried any.
Rating: 3/5

12. Tomukun Korean BBQ (Korean) – Ate here after the Ford Museum. I don’t know if it’s completely authentic, but I liked it. They have a variety of soups, noodles, stir fries, and hot pot, as well as bbq. If I remember right, we ordered an appetizer, an entree, and one order of bbq.
Rating: 3.5/5

13. Tomukun Noodle Bar (noodles) – Ramen is pretty good, though the noodles and ingredients come swimming in a sea of broth that’s on the salty side. It’s also a bit lacking in meat and vegetables. I’ve had better ramen back home in New England. I’d go here for an easy meal but would otherwise try another place since there are so many restaurants nearby.
Rating: 3/5

14. Zingerman’s (American) – On one hand, they make really good sandwiches. On the other, they’re just sandwiches. That cost as much as a fancy meal at other places. Zingerman’s is Ann Arbor’s famous restaurant, and they do sandwiches and everything else really well, it just feels overpriced because I can make a peanut butter and jam sandwich¹ for less than a dollar and be only slightly less satisfied.
Rating: 4/5 (food), 3/5 (value – still worth going to so you can say you’ve been to Zingerman’s, but some of their sandwiches cost more than half of my weekly grocery bill)

Overall, excepting whatever was going on at No Thai, I haven’t paid² for a bad meal in Ann Arbor. I’m not super picky about authenticity, except if I’m trying to get closer-to-actual Chinese food³. I also don’t eat out that much so I don’t mind paying a little more for my meals occasionally ($15-$20 – I'm a single grad student with no car on a stipend, so money's not tight, but I'm not running around throwing $20 bills around like confetti either). So far, I’ve been happy with the variety and quality of restaurants in Ann Arbor. The only things missing are Dunkin Donuts and a waffle place, then I would be completely satisfied⁴.

¹With good ingredients, by which I mean not the super economy sized jar of hydrogenated fat peanut butter, high fructose corn syrup jam, or low volume fraction white bread.

²We had these research ethics seminars last semester and one of the times they gave us pizza, it was pretty lousy pizza.

³Pro tips: Cheese is not a traditional ingredient in Chinese cooking. Throwing bean sprouts (or water chestnuts, or bamboo shoots) over eveything doesn’t make it Chinese. And spaghetti is not noodles unless you’re a desperate college student.

⁴With my eating-out food options. I still have plenty else to complain about, because I’m a chemical engineer.

Eating Ann Arbor, Part 1

Without a meal plan for the first time in four years, most weeks I fend for myself for twenty out of twenty-one meals. Meal number twenty-one is usually a shared meal after church. About once every other week, though, I’ve eaten out at one of the numerous restaurants in Ann Arbor. Similar to Ithaca, you can get a wide variety of cuisines in Ann Arbor, ranging in quality from late night drunk food to unaffordable on my stipend. The following is my rating¹ for every restaurant I’ve eaten at so far. Keep in mind that I’ll eat almost anything, I’ve probably had a sandwich for lunch for about 170 of my 180 days in Ann Arbor so far, and I don’t mind eating the same thing for dinner for a week straight.­ I also tend to rate everything starting at a 3 and move up or down as necessary.

1. Bewon (Korean) – After (yet another) homework session, a couple friends and I went out for dinner to celebrate Chinese New Year. I had the bibimbap, which was served with warm (purple) rice and mostly cold vegetables, including cucumber, bean sprouts, carrots, and spinach. The overall portion was large, but it was a little short on meat (beef) and it got cold by the time I finished. Still, it was good, and the rating gets increased a bit because they served us a variety of sides and tea that had taste.
Rating: 3.5/5

2. Cardamom (Indian) – For whatever reason, Ithaca has at least three Indian buffet places, two of them next to each other, and I’ve eaten at all three. At Cardamom, there wasn’t a buffet, but I enjoyed my meal there nonetheless. It’s pretty standard Indian food. They do have a naan that’s filled with nuts and other things that was really good.
Rating: 3.5/5

3. Evergreen (Chinese) – I’ve been to this restaurant twice. The first time we went for a quick meal and ordered off the lunch special menu, which was like every other Chinese lunch special menu ever.² The second time I went with a larger group of people and we ordered family style. Surprisingly, the food was not drowning in sauce, salt, or oil, and we left satisfied with the quality, quantity, and cost of the food. They also have the honor of making the first eggplant dish that I’ve liked.
Rating: 3/5 (lunch special menu), 4/5 (traditional menu)

4. Frita Batidos (Cuban) – Be forewarned this is not where you go if you want a light meal. That said, the frita part of the name comes from Cuban-inspired burgers made from chorizo. The batido is a milkshake . . . and you can add rum to it. So we did. We had a passion fruit milkshake with rum, then for dessert we got churros. It’s something different from standard pasta/burgers/sandwiches, and worth trying at least once. (By the way, Google Translate tells me the name together means “fried batter.” Like I said, not light fare.)
Rating: 4/5 (because alcoholic milkshakes and churros)

5. Kang’s (Korean) – Basic Korean restaurant, decent food. I ordered the spicy beef and it could have come with more vegetables, but otherwise the taste was fine. This is probably the only place on this half of the list I wouldn’t go to if I wanted a nicer dinner, and it’s starting to push the top of my price range for lunch, but it’s another option for Asian food.
Rating: 2.5/5

6. Madras Marsala (Indian) – Another Indian restaurant. I had the chicken biryani, which I might have ordered a little spicier than I should have. I know authentic biryani involves over a dozen spices (meanwhile, the entirety of my spice rack (okay, it’s a box) in my apartment is eight spices, and that number includes salt and pepper), but it turned out over-flavored. It would have been okay if I’d been eating it with other dishes, but by itself it was a bit much.
Rating: 3/5

7. Neopapalis (pizza) – Average pizza place with the option to choose your own toppings or order pre-set pizzas. The pizza we ordered was a bit oily but tasty. (Cornell dining makes surprisingly good pizza, precisely because it tends to be on the drier side, though they sometimes solve their “crap, these vegetables need to be used up” problems with the pizzas. And giant bins of shredded carrots in the salad bar. And carrot cake, heavy on the carrots.)
Rating: 3/5

¹My ratings can be described as follows:
0 – Don’t eat here unless someone pays you a significant fraction of your annual income.
1 – If it was free, it would still be a toss up whether I ate it or not.
2 – Food is edible, but I wouldn’t choose to eat here if there were better options.
3 – Solid choice, would voluntarily go back.
4 – Very good food, would definitely recommend to other people.
5 – Best meal of any given month.

²My cooking goal is to be able to make subpar knock-off versions of any dish you’d find on a Chinese lunch special menu. So far I’ve made orange chicken, teriyaki chicken with pineapple, General Tso’s chicken, kung pao chicken, and beef and broccoli. And also tacos, but those aren’t Chinese unless you add soy sauce. I basically make the same sauce base for every single one of these dishes and add one or two different ingredients.

Apples, Chowder, and Chili

What do these three foods have in common? They can all be found on the Ithaca Commons at various times of the year – there's Applefest in the fall, the Chowder Cook-off before winter break, and the Chili Cook-off in February. And yes, I went to all three this year, because senior year.

I went to Applefest with my roommate and an honorary apartment member. We got there a couple hours after it opened for the day so it was already crazy crowded. The line for apple cider donuts was slightly insane, so we skipped it. Besides, I’ve had fresh apple cider donuts made at a cider mill, and while I wouldn’t turn down a donut if offered, I wasn’t about to stand in line for an hour for one. Besides, there was so much other food.

Applefest on the Commons (and adjoining roads)

I got some peanut butter fudge and an apple bread but also got to taste some apple dumpling and apple crisp that my friends bought. And now I want more apple baked goods.

A couple months later, I returned to the Commons for the Ithaca Ice Festival and Chowder Cook-off. This was mere days before my grad school applications were due but I thought I would be okay timewise since I had already written my personal statement and started filling out the other sections with my name, current address, home address, cell phone number, home phone number, recent lucky numbers from fortune cookies, and other things like that. I was partly wrong*, but I’m more glad to have gone to the Ice Festival than I would have been to finish my applications a couple hours earlier.

I went with a former roommate to see the ice sculptures and eat chowder. Of course, on the one winter day it needed to be cold, it was in the forties and sunny. It made all the ice sculptures look very shiny though. At least before they melted. We ended up trying clam chowder, vegetarian chowder, seafood chowder, jambalaya, corn chowder, and haddock and bacon chowder. The only chowder that I was unsatisfied with was the “New England” clam chowder. I’m from New England; don’t mess with my clam chowder. Though it could have been worse. It could have been Manhattan clam chowder.

Sea horse ice sculpture on the Commons

After winter break, I made my most recent trip to the Commons for the Chili Cook-off, this time accompanied by my current roommate, a former roommate, and a former suitemate, among others. Again, we tried a variety of the foods being offered. There was sweet chili, spicy chili, tomato-y chili, chili with lots of vegetables, and meat chili. And then there were chili calzones and chocolate chili. And hard cider.

I guess that brings it full circle – back to apples. I’m definitely glad I went to all the food events on the Commons this past school year. That’s one piece of advice I would give people – check out local events whenever you can. Sometimes you don’t have to go far or spend much money to have a whole lot of fun. And eat some good food.

*I finished all my applications on time, and didn’t feel seriously rushed for any of them, but I ended up submitting my last application at 9 pm on the day it was due.

Here Be Dragons

In this edition of Summer in Ithaca, I walk five miles to see boats and eat noodles, take a bus going in the exact opposite direction of Cornell, and sprint to catch another bus back to Cornell, all in under five hours. The day began bright and early with a walk to Cass Park, where the 9th annual Ithaca Dragon Boat Festival was in full swing.

My best description of a dragon boat is a less streamlined crew boat with less efficient paddles. It does, however, have more people crammed into it. I met up with some friends, some of whom were rowing and some who were just watching, watched a couple races, and then a friend and I decided that we should walk over to the Farmer’s Market. The Farmer’s Market is less than two hundred yards from Cass Park. Unfortunately, those two hundred yards are covered in a not insignificant amount of water, i.e. the river.

A little over half an hour (and two miles) later, we made it to the Farmer’s Market, where we had an unimpeded view of the whole dragon boat course. We sat on the dock, saw some close races, and waited for Cornell to race. Before Cornell raced, we got to see Harvard race in the lowest division finals. Not only did they lose to Cornell earlier in the morning (which I regrettably missed), but they proceeded to lose their finals race by more than an entire boat length.

When it was Cornell’s turn, they started out well, then the other boats started to catch up. By the time they were crossing the finish line, it was so close we couldn't tell who won, especially from our viewing angle. As it turned out, Cornell did, by a fraction of a second. So a satisfactory end to that set of races.

Cornell’s next race wouldn't be for some time and I wanted to get back to campus to get some work done hide out in my room so my friend and I went to get lunch at the Farmer’s Market. We got peanut lime noodles and corn fritters. The noodles were very good; the corn fritters were good, though a little expensive, though not as expensive as a meal I had in Collegetown that 1) was already expensive, then 2) I had to pay tax and tip, and 3) I was still hungry right afterwards. Considering that I can often get two meals out of a single dish at other moderately priced restaurants, this was worse than not worth it. So I would get the corn fritters again but I will not be eating at the Collegetown restaurant unless someone wants to buy me dinner, in which case I’d probably still choose a different restaurant.

I also got a strawberry lemonade (also good, but all the sugar . . .) and a chocolate chip raspberry shortbread bar. . . . It was not a health food kind of day. After lunch, we wandered around a little more, then went to catch the bus back to campus. The first bus that showed up was heading to the Ithaca Mall, the opposite direction we wanted to go. We got on anyway. The way to the mall did include a nice view of Cayuga Lake, so that was a plus, though I don’t think that made up for the fact that we started the ride two miles from campus and ended the ride two miles from campus.

We got off the bus, started walking to the stop where we could catch the bus that was actually going to campus, and ended sprinting to the stop where we could catch the bus that was actually going to campus. And fifteen minutes later, we made it back to campus.

Dinner for One

My culinary skills are about as varied as a picture of a polar bear in a snowstorm, but I do occasionally manage to muster up the energy and brainpower to cook something other than pasta with tomato sauce. I make up my own recipes mainly because I don’t know how to use spices because I’m a pioneer in the field of the culinary arts. At the end of the summer, I think I’ll write a cookbook and call it ChemE Cooking: Dinner Engineered. All the recipes will take less than five ingredients, cook in less than twenty minutes, and taste just like all the ingredients have been thrown into a frying pan/pot/oven and then had the life cooked out of them. No salmonella here!

As a preview of my soon-to-be-bestselling cookbook, here are some of the featured items. First off is lemon chicken paired with baked carrots. To make this highly sophisticated recipe, one simply slices carrots into thin strips, coats them in oil and salt, and dumps them in the oven for about fifteen minutes. Remove them from the oven when they look shriveled. As for the chicken, that is fried in oil for a couple minutes, then a mixture of water, lemon juice, and sugar is added. The liquid is allowed to boil off and reduce until the chicken is in danger of being dried to a crisp cooked and tender.

Next is a classic American staple reimagined for a ten-minute cook time: pizza, in toast form, also called pizza toast. In this dish, one toasts a couple slices of bread in butter in a frying pan, then adds tomato sauce and cheese.

Finally, for those nights when one wishes to have a light but elegant dinner, I would suggest the fruit and cheese plate paired with a clear wine. The sweetness of the grapes contrasts with the saltiness of the cheese and crackers specially imported from the United States while all flavors are enhanced by the clear wine, nicknamed by scientists Le Solvant Universel.

Other recipes from this high-class cookbook will include overcooked broccoli, omelets with random vegetables in the fridge, and the peanut butter and jam sandwich.

Carry On My Wayward Son

Or daughter. I have to confess that after only a month of being in charge of my own finances and groceries, I went out and bought this:

Yes, that is both crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam with seeds in it. Two things that will not be found in my home (New England home, not Cornell) because my father does not like having little things to bite through in his condiments.

Other things that will not be found in my house since I left for college: dairy products including milk, cheese, and a 32 ounce container of yogurt. Apparently my parents have decided to try out soy milk and almond milk instead of cow milk. Both of the dairy milk alternatives aren't bad – I tried them when I went home at the beginning of the summer – but almond milk feels like drinking nuts and soy milk tastes less sweet than cow milk to me. Naturally, I decided to solve my non-dairy milk problems by mixing almond and soy milk, which tasted pretty good to me. Back at Cornell, I've returned to cow’s milk, which I like the taste of, so don’t even try to tell me about how humans aren't supposed to be drinking milk after the age of two or whenever.

As for the cheese, I like cheese and I like dishes with cheese in them and I currently have one and a half blocks of cheese plus a few cheese slices in the fridge. I even tried making macaroni and cheese the other day and it was good. Apologies to my parents who can’t imagine how something cheesy and creamy can taste good.

And then the 32 ounces of yogurt. It’s just cheaper to buy it that way, plus now I can have yogurt all week. One final note: don’t worry, I haven’t stooped to eating raw broccoli yet.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2013 edition

In case I haven’t said it enough, this fall was really, really busy. Between AAIV, Cornell Productions, pep band, rock climbing, and, oh yeah, actual classes, I didn't have a whole lot of time to sit around staring at the walls. With all the eventfulness came a fair amount of excitement, which leads us into this semester’s list of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell.

1. Madison Square Garden: My first time at Madison Square Garden, I not only got to see Cornell’s men’s hockey team play, but I also got to play with the pep band at the game. It was quite an adventure.

2. Unsupervised baking: As the semester wound down, some friends and I managed to get together and do some baking. So far we've made lemon bars and mini apple pies, and I made (not very cheesy) cheese crackers all by myself. The main thing about cooking in college is that you want recipes with as few ingredients as possible. Everything also has to be done by hand with basic tools. Pastry cutter? Don’t have one. I don’t even have salt, but flour has taste by itself, right?

Mini apple pies

3. Mariinsky Orchestra: This was part of the Cornell Concert Series at Bailey Hall, and I was working backstage for Cornell Productions during the concert. They played Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, Isle of the Dead by Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5, and they were very good. Besides putting away the hundreds of chairs and stands, we also helped to load their truck. It takes a lot of wardrobes to clothe an entire orchestra.

4. Small group: Here’s how the story goes. At the end of summer one of my friends emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in being a core member for her small group. To be a core member I “just had to show up.” I said okay, because showing up isn't too hard once you commit your time to it. Sometime in the middle of the semester, my friend asks me if I’d like to prep for small group with her. I said, yeah, sure, because it would be good to see how preparation for small group goes. As we’re going through the passage, she asks me if I’d like to lead that week. Well, then. So much for just showing up. [I did end up saying yes and leading. And it was a good experience.]

5. First ChemE presentation: At the end of Mass and Energy Balances, we didn't have a written final, but we had to make a group presentation about our efforts to reduce the flow rate of carbon into the atmosphere. I was working with my Intro to ChemE group from last year and my current roommate. Apparently it isn't enough for chemical engineers to take all the same classes. We also do homework together, have meals together, and live together. It’s great.

Quite frankly, I can’t narrow down an entire semester to a few events and call them the most exciting things that happened to me in the past four months. I went hiking and saw waterfalls, helped to plan several AAIV events, got to use the very nice sound board the Bear’s Den has while working for Cornell Productions, spent hours yelling at Cornell sports teams, spent more hours hanging upside down at the bouldering wall, stayed up past midnight way too many times arguing with Mathematica or writing essays the morning they were due, trekked a couple hundred miles across campus, complained about anything and everything, and generally had a phenomenal time. And I get to do it all over again next semester.

Everything I Needed to Know

I fortunately did not learn on the internet, however, I have occasionally come across useful information/recipes/dating advice.

For one, I got the idea for hot dog corn muffins, which were surprisingly good. By the way, cornbread should, as a rule, be sweet. Just saying. I’ve also turned to the internet to determine what is acceptable to put into a strawberry banana smoothie (basically, strawberries . . . and bananas), and since the recipe had to specify that you should peel the bananas, there may be people more pathetic in the kitchen than I am. On second thought . . .

Then there was the time I was on one of those newfangled internet chat forum things and

Over Thanksgiving I found out that you really shouldn’t refrigerate tomatoes. I had a box of grape tomatoes (that were surprisingly good) that said “Do Not Refrigerate” on the lid. I discovered this the third or fourth time I took the tomatoes out to eat . . . from my fridge. Turns out refrigerating tomatoes breaks down the membranes in the cell walls, making them mushy and powdery.

Moving away from food, the American Dental Association officially says that it’s okay to floss your teeth before or after brushing. However, they note that flossing before brushing may help the fluoride in toothpaste get between teeth.

People seem to disagree about the definition of Morton’s Toe. Some say your second toe just has to be longer than your big toe while others say it’s the lengths of the actual metatarsals that matter. My second toe is, in fact, longer than my big toe on both feet.

The highest scoring soccer game ever was played in 2002 between AS Adema and Stade Olympique L’Emyrne. The final score was 149-0. To protest an earlier refereeing decision, Stade Olympique L’Emyrne scored an own goal every 36 seconds. There were several suspensions and bans handed out for the “unsportsmanlike conduct.”

But first and foremost: If you freeze a banana and throw it in the blender, it comes out tasting like ice cream. This may have been the discovery of the summer.

It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like . . .

Thanksgiving. I know, Thanksgiving was two weeks ago, but hey, we should be thankful all year round, right? Also, I’m behind on blogging as usual. Two problem sets, a project, an essay, and two finals in two weeks can do that to a person. [On a tenuously related note, my latest attempt to increase productivity while writing essays – my average speed is just over three words a minute – includes copious amounts of music without words. To get through my history of science essay I went through three or four hours of the Piano Guys and the Vitamin String Quartet, Schumann’s Kinderszenen (played by Horowitz) twice, Strauss’ Alpine Symphony, and the entire soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Note that there are words in the Lord of the Rings soundtrack; however, I don’t understand Elvish.]

Anyway, Thanksgiving break began after class on Wednesday. After a last lunch in the dining hall, I was responsible for feeding myself for the next twelve meals. Food was actually the main concern of the weekend, since we still had shelter, heat, electricity, water, and most importantly internet connection in the dorms. There were a lot of peanut butter and jam sandwiches, some throwing of things into the oven, and a little boiling of water. It turns out cooking takes a lot of time.

I made my sandwiches more fun with one of my two cookie cutters.

And there was this dinner that included all the food groups.

What happens when you only have one bowl-like dish
(look at what the red cup is)

When I wasn't watching water boil, there was always p-chem homework. A friend and I got most of the assignment done between Thursday and Friday afternoon. Even with all that done, it still took another three hours at office hours to finish the problem set up.

Saturday I went with the pep band to Madison Square Garden for Red Hot Hockey. There were only a dozen or so people on the bus ride down, so it was a real party bus silent most of the way into the city. We got to Times Square early and decided to walk to Rockefeller Plaza to see the tree. It was absolute madness. Plus the tree wasn't lit. If I wanted to see an unlit tree I would have gone hiking. The person to tree ratio is much lower as well.

We returned to meet the bus and the rest of the band at the bowling alley where some alumni were having an event and wanted the band to play for them. Apparently there are high class bowling alleys, because that’s what this was. They fed us dinner in the barroom (just the fact that they had a bar should say something) and instead of overdone pizza and a jug of soda there was actual food. Things like sliders and chicken strips, but it was still good. That may also have been because we couldn't actually see what we were eating. Lighting was reminiscent of a film developing room or a highly inappropriate club.

After we played a few songs, we made the trek to Madison Square Garden. Ten blocks at Cornell is a twelve minute walk sprint to get to engineering classes from North Campus. Ten blocks in the middle of New York City during Thanksgiving with fifty instrument-carrying band members is a marathon-length ordeal. You could cartwheel from your dorm up the slope during a snowstorm faster than we were walking. Because besides the crosswalks every fifteen inches, there are people who think it’s a good idea to walk into the middle of a group. And then stop. Some of them even act confused when they get hit by limbs and/or instruments. You didn’t notice the giant instrument carrying herd of Waldo’s in disguise? Really? (Our pep band shirts are red and white striped, but most people were wearing jackets.) And then we finally made it to Madison Square Garden.

The Beautiful Game

Living in the West Campus house system has, so far, been great. Besides having a dining hall two floors below my room, I've also gained the opportunity to participate in a variety of events ranging from concerts to cookie decorating. Because what I really need is to jam more things into my schedule.

I haven’t been able to attend a lot of events (between AAIV, Cornell Productions, pep band, and p-chem problem sets, I don’t have any free nights) but two things that I have done are soccer and house dinner. House dinner is every Wednesday from 6-7 in all the West Campus dining halls and during that time, only residents of each house can eat at their dining halls. As the food is even better than normal, I make it a point to go to house dinner whenever possible.

A couple weeks ago, they served us salmon as well as cake to celebrate the anniversary of the opening of the house.

Counterclockwise from the roll: salmon, beef with noodles, green beans (in the back), potatoes, and salad

House dinner also merits tablecloths and cloth napkins.  Fancy, I know.

As for the other house activity that I've participated in, that’s where the title of this post comes from. Soccer is known as the beautiful game, and I have now become acquainted with the beauty that is intramural coed soccer. In an effort to keep teams balanced, we play 8 v. 8 with four males and four females on the field for each team. This leads to the three questions of coed intramurals:

1) Is the game still scheduled to be played? [Forfeits and bad weather shortened an already short season for our house team.]
2) Are there enough girls to play?
3) Has the other team showed up?

If the answer to the above three questions is yes, we then get to play 40 minutes of soccer. It takes us a good fifteen to twenty minutes to walk to the field. One way. It’s still completely worth it. I've gotten to play in a couple games, and I've come to realize that I've missed playing soccer. It’s true that coed intramurals are about as uncompetitive as you can get, but that doesn't mean it’s not a lot of fun.

One more note on the beautiful game: the New England Revolution are continuing their playoff push with a home and home series against the Columbus Crew. They’re currently still 7th in the Eastern Conference, but the teams in 4th, 5th, and 6th are all only one point ahead, in part due to a Revolution victory over the Montreal Impact last weekend.

Food Tours, part 1

With a greatly relaxed schedule throughout study week and finals, a few friends and I have been taking the opportunity to eat at some of the cafés and other dining establishments scattered around campus. Cornell has ten dining halls and around twenty other places to buy food, not even counting the vending machines, which means you could eat somewhere different every day for a month. I’m pretty sure that’s more dining options than in my entire hometown. Then again, my hometown’s population is around (less than?) Cornell’s undergrad enrollment. . . .

In just two semesters, I've managed to eat at a fair number of different places. I've gone to almost all of the dining halls (one of the 161 Things every Cornellian should do). What’s good about the dining halls is the variety (usually) of food and that if I feel like eating watermelon with my roast pork followed by yogurt, nothing’s going to stop me, assuming they made roast pork. If, on the other hand, I go to an a la cart place, they will most likely not be selling any dishes consisting of watermelon and pork. Probably because I might be the only person to buy it. Ever.

But I’m actually going to talk about some of the options at the a la cart places I've visited so far. First up, Ivy Room. Ivy Room is on central campus and is pretty much directly across from Olin Hall. If you happen to be spending long hours in Olin, your options usually come down to Ivy Room or the vending machines in the basement. Anyway, I have to confess that I almost always get sandwiches since I don’t eat a lot at a time. (I eat every two hours or so instead.) The Ivy Room’s grilled cheese sandwiches are pretty good, and some of my friends would recommend the salads and noodle bowls. I wouldn't know; I've never ordered them. . . .

Moving on . . . Probably the most interesting thing I've eaten that’s an actual dish and not meat-with-fruit (aka dinner at the dining halls) is chicken on a waffle at Hughes, way down by the law school and Collegetown. I would definitely recommend that everyone tries this at least once, because how often do you get fried chicken on top of a waffle? (I also recently ate a waffle with yogurt and peanut butter. In case you haven’t noticed, I have little to no qualms about mixing food groups.) Plus, they use paper for their tablecloths and provide crayons for you to color.

If you’re looking for something more normal, they make sandwiches and wraps over at Goldie’s in the Physical Science Building (PSB). I've had the chicken panini. The chicken can be a little dry, but the spinach and tomatoes usually make up for that. Fun facts: PSB was built right next to Baker; the two buildings share a wall and there’s a lamppost inside. Also, we watched a lab safety video in General Chemistry last semester. They did a shot where they panned across the outside of Baker and PSB wasn't there. That’s right; the video was made before PSB was even built. To be fair, PSB was completed in 2010, but this video was very obviously filmed around the 80s. No mouth pipetting, guys. Just, no.

Tune in next time/week/in awhile for more enthralling commentary on Cornell Food and Life in General. I know, you’re thinking I should have my own food network show. Cornflakes with pudding and yogurt, anyone?