I'm trying to get consistent with meal prep this term. Busy weeknights usually find me floundering at the thought of actually cooking and resorting to the straightforward but actually somewhat time-consuming fried-egg-and-rice. Instead, I want to avoid the dilemma altogether and cook a large quantity of real food once a…

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, affectionately known as the Notorious RBG, is a soft-spoken, eighty-five year old woman who stands just an inch over five feet tall. She's a widow, grandmother, and also a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Plane rides are where I catch up on the…

I'm usually suspicious of recipes with click-bait titles like this one. "Simple" and "easy" and "N-ingredient" baked goods have been around longer than click-bait itself, masquerading as genuine homemade desserts in my grandmother's cookbooks and on Betty Crocker's website today. Consisting of ingredients as authentically American as cake mix +…

It was 10pm on a Sunday night, and as I'd been lazing around all afternoon, I decided to drive up to a nature park to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. I pulled into the empty parking lot and gingerly stepped out into the dark. Leaves fluttered in the breeze, birds…

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in a dorm kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech. I absolutely love peanut butter. Whether on toast, in oatmeal, in smoothies, or spoonfuls straight out of the jar, I love the rich, creamy…

Wouldn’t it be neat to look at something magnified to tens of thousands its normal size—so much that you can see the individual hair follicles on an ant (and realize it’s just as furry as a dog)? Or to fabricate an LED from scratch, doping the semiconductor and etching out…

A year ago, I was an excited prefrosh savoring the sweet scent of orange blossoms as I explored Caltech’s campus with my family. We’d come during finals week, so most classrooms were empty and hallways were quiet. However, outside, we ran across a professor and group of students testing small…

I blogged about my trip to Joshua Tree National Park once already, but it was totally the bee’s knees, so here’s round two—in photos. Lizard. Bee. Tree. More Bee.…

Freshman year of Caltech is over, and—besides friends, clubs, and maybe classes— there’s one thing I’ll really miss this summer. Every weekday morning this school year, I awoke to the promise of the cool, tangy juice of plump red raspberries bursting in my mouth. Their sweet morning greeting motivated me…

I didn’t know that liquid oxygen is blue until last Friday, when my physics professor brought it to class and let us play with the three-hundred-Celsius-below-zero substance. A bar magnet (ferromagnetic), liquid oxygen (paramagnetic), andliquid nitrogen (diamagnetic) I did have a vague recollection of being told before that liquid oxygen…

Last weekend I slept in a tent in the desert with three friends, squeezed together side by side like sardines, while infants’ wails rang from the tent in front of us and snoring blared from the one behind. The one of two campgrounds with running water in Joshua Tree National…

Today, for the first time, my friends and I cooked Korean food on our own. My mom is Korean, and when she makes Korean food, I’m typically assigned the task of chopping vegetables or mixing salt into rice or some else mundane. The most pivotal role I’ve played in Korean…

It was a fun Sunday evening. First, there was dessert. Then there was dancing. Brioche is French butter bread. It has a soft, velvety texture and a rich, slightly sweet flavor. My friends and I had purchased some from Trader Joe’s after being tantalized with samples. We really didn’t want…

Meal planning, among many other things, is difficult when you’re indecisive. It’s even more so when you have a big book of four-hundred recipes out of America’s Test Kitchen. Thanks to my sister for this neat cookbook! And excuse the messy desk... After flipping through the book from front to…

At the end of my last post, I was riding the bus towards camp and dinner. That night, after a hearty pasta dinner, we explored the camp. Behind our cabin was a hill, which looked like it'dhavea really nice view of the mountains behind, so after eating, we set out…

I never planned to take geology in college. I knew nothing about earth science and was perfectly fine leaving things that way. I was just never interested in rocks. In fact, I dodged the earth science part of middle school curriculums when I switched schools in seventh grade. My mom…

What type of plant is prickly and ugly—nothing but a nuisance? Not cacti, I’m now convinced after visiting the Huntington Gardens. Only a fifteen-minute walk from campus, Huntington contains twelve themed botanical gardens, one of which has a conservatory full of succulents both soft and spiny from deserts in Africa,…

When I was choosing a college, there was one aspect of Caltech which I could not get out my head. It wasn’t its rigorous academics, its world-renowned research, or even its number one rank by Times Higher Education. In fact, the strongest pull I felt from Caltech had nothing to…