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 week. Today, the first day of winter term, I kicked off this resolution today by making seven servings of chicken curry.
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 + pudding + oreos + jello + whipped cream, these recipes seem like they’d be as shockingly sweet as they are simple.
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 chirped, and tiny footsteps crinkled dead leaves on the ground. Not going to lie, the footsteps part freaked me out a bit. But if there were coyotes, I’d see glowing eyes, right? While I stood next to my car, asking myself if this was a good idea after all, a bright flash streaked across the sky. Wow, maybe the 60 meteors/hr rate I’d seen online wasn’t an exaggeration after all. I regained some confidence, set up my camera and tripod to try to catch a photo of one, and waited. An hour later, I’d only seen one more (and missed it with my camera), and it was getting cloudy, so I went home.
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 texture and salty-sweet flavor. It’s perfect in every way but one—it needs to lighten up. It’s a little too dense and sticky. (This is especially inconvenient when eating it out of the jar.) I’m happy to announce that I have a solution to this peanut butter problem: pair it with pumpkin puree. The resulting spread is whipped and airy, with a light sweetness and hints of pumpkin flavor added to the classic peanut butter taste. The method is simple—just beat together equal parts peanut butter and pumpkin puree with a fork until light and fluffy. Cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg can be mixed in to enhance the fall flavor.
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 the contacts, all to be rewarded by a tiny yet brilliant red light? Or to design a microfluidic device, drawing it in AutoCAD, making the mold out of a silicon wafer, and after producing each polymer layer, watching blue ink flow through the tiny channels?
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 boats. The boats floated on plastic bottles, with Styrofoam cups and a rainbow of wires heaped on top. We watched them whiz around on the water for a bit. The demonstration made me think that Caltech’s coursework couldn’t be “too theoretical” after all. In a few days, I was back home, and a month later, I decided to make Caltech my future home. Then, this past term, I took that class.
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.
Freshman year of Caltech is over, and—besides friends, clubs, and maybe classes— there’s one thing I’ll really miss this summer.
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.
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 Park seems to be pretty popular for Memorial Day getaways. At 4 a.m., our tent was the obnoxious one. My alarm chimed loudly enough for the occupants of all twenty campsites in our area to hear while I fumbled through my backpack to silence it. After savoring a few more moments in our cozy sleeping bags, we climbed out of the tent and craned our necks upward. There, a faint stripe ran from the horizon up across the sky—the Milky Way. The rest of our group emerged from their various tents, and we crowded around the physics majors, who identified constellations in whispers.
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 food prep up until today has been spreading rice and vegetables on a sheet of seaweed and rolling it up to make kimbap, the Korean lookalike of sushi. Even then, my aunt was working beside me, bestowing frequent advice: don’t spread the rice all the way to the end of the sheet, or it’ll splurt out when you roll it; put the spinach and radish in this order to make it look prettier.
It was a fun Sunday evening. First, there was dessert. Then there was dancing.
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.
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 for the top. It was nearing dark, but the distance looked mild. I had no doubt we’d make it up in fifteen minutes.
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 taught earth science, and seeing the ordinary, dusty specimens of her students’ rock collections assured me that I hadn’t missed anything.
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, Mexico, and more. Some were so adorable I wanted to pet them; others were whimsical, even fantastical, as if spawned in the imagination of Dr. Seuss. There were succulents with spines like silk and flowers like fire. Some were spherical, others were angular, and one was lumpy and tubular like a brain. Most plants were arrayed in little containers on long tables, but others dangled upside down from hanging pots. Here are a few of my favorite sights from the conservatory.
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 do with education at all. I was in love with the plants.
It was a dark and stormy night, and I had a research proposal to write and two electronics projects to complete. The pileup of work was somewhat self-inflicted, but it seemed hopelessly heavy. On the way to dinner, I stopped at the mailroom to check if a book I’d ordered had arrived. Instead, there was a flexible, lumpy package. Confused, I tore it open, and out peeked the frosty gleam of a Ziploc bag over the caramel brown of… cookies?! Yes, chocolate-chip cookies! There was also an envelope holding a pink polka-dotted card crammed with handwriting I hadn’t seen in months: my sister’s. The sudden splash of sweetness over my sad state made me sappy. I felt ready to cry. That night, I slept five hours too few and ate five cookies too many.
Geese are not silly. They are savage. Last weekend, my friend and I spotted some by a pond. One was curled up cozily on the ground, its velvety black head resting on its back. It looked so elegant that I had to get a picture. Squatting down, camera in hand, I inched toward it. Hesitantly, it began to lift its head and wings, but if I could just get a step closer without frightening it away, I could get a better picture… So I took the step and squeezed the button, my eye pressed up to my camera.