I'm not very good about remembering to bring my camera, and I'm even worse about sharing my pictures. Anyway, in early May I went to Monterey with T. I borrowed his camera and took a lot of pictures, mostly of seals. They had just had their babies and were nursing them on the beach.
Here's the link. In my all-google email/blog/document suite, I've added Picasa to my repertoire. Let me know what you think.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
North American Catalysis Conference/My Encounter with Swoops the Attack Blackbird
I went to the North American Catalysis conference last week. Conveniently, it took place in San Francisco. At the last minute, I had to give a poster and a talk. My co-worker Margarete broke her ankle so I agreed to give he poster for her, and then a few days before the conference, the poster got upgraded to a talk.
It was a good conference. There were usually two or three talks that I wanted to attend at any given time. My talk went ok but the subject matter really was on the periphery of the main focus of the conference.
My company had a booth at the conference. On Thursday, I had to be a 'booth babe'. No, I didn't wear a bikini and drape myself over our reactor. By that point, everyone who would've wanted to visit the booth had already done so, and my main job was to guard the reactor from the prying eyes of our competitors. It was pretty boring.
It was a good place for a conference. The hotel was on the Embarcadero, right across the street from the SF Ferry Building, which has a lot of restaurants and gourmet food stores.
On Thursday, I was walking around and a bird attacked my head. I thought it was a pigeon trying to land, but later I found out that there is a blackbird who lives there and dive bombs pedestrians. He's been nicknamed "Swoops" and has made it all the way to local and national news, because last week was a slow news week. People like to eat their lunch near Swoops' lair and watch him dive bomb unsuspecting people. Here's a link to the Swoops blog. So far I haven't seen any video of myself being dive bombed, but it's probably out there somewhere on the internet.
It was a good conference. There were usually two or three talks that I wanted to attend at any given time. My talk went ok but the subject matter really was on the periphery of the main focus of the conference.
My company had a booth at the conference. On Thursday, I had to be a 'booth babe'. No, I didn't wear a bikini and drape myself over our reactor. By that point, everyone who would've wanted to visit the booth had already done so, and my main job was to guard the reactor from the prying eyes of our competitors. It was pretty boring.
It was a good place for a conference. The hotel was on the Embarcadero, right across the street from the SF Ferry Building, which has a lot of restaurants and gourmet food stores.
On Thursday, I was walking around and a bird attacked my head. I thought it was a pigeon trying to land, but later I found out that there is a blackbird who lives there and dive bombs pedestrians. He's been nicknamed "Swoops" and has made it all the way to local and national news, because last week was a slow news week. People like to eat their lunch near Swoops' lair and watch him dive bomb unsuspecting people. Here's a link to the Swoops blog. So far I haven't seen any video of myself being dive bombed, but it's probably out there somewhere on the internet.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Recipe Geek (Yuppie Food Snob Edition): Brioche
Recently, I was reading an online advice column, and someone wrote in about her formerly cool bohemian friend who started dating an investment banker and turned into a boring yuppie food snob who preferred eating homemade brioche to hanging out on the couch drinking beer like she used to enjoy doing. So, if any of you wrote in about me and just threw in the part about the investment banker to throw me off, knock it off!
I admit to being a foodie and occasionally a food snob, but so far that hasn't hindered my enjoyment of hanging out drinking beer with friends. Besides, I've never made brioche until now.
Brioche is a rich bread, with a lot of eggs and butter. You can bake it in loaf pans or in a fluted pan, or as rolls. You can also roll it out and fill it with chocolate chips or use it a the base for more pastry-like stuff such as cinnamon rolls, or coffee-cake. It's a little bit unusual in that it both has a lot of gluten and a lot of butter. The dough is kneaded extensively prior to adding the butter, to really let the gluten develop. Taste-wise, it's like a cross between croissants and challah.
Brioche is a rich bread, with a lot of eggs and butter. You can bake it in loaf pans or in a fluted pan, or as rolls. You can also roll it out and fill it with chocolate chips or use it a the base for more pastry-like stuff such as cinnamon rolls, or coffee-cake. It's a little bit unusual in that it both has a lot of gluten and a lot of butter. The dough is kneaded extensively prior to adding the butter, to really let the gluten develop. Taste-wise, it's like a cross between croissants and challah.
So of course, being a boring yuppie foodie, my first response to the advice column was not that the friend was a boring yuppie foodie, but that I'd been meaning to make some brioche in my new mixer. I used the recipe in the book that came with the mixer. It's a two-day process. I started it last night. The recipe calls for a LOT of mixing (30 minutes). I would not want to knead it by hand. That's why I've never made it before. You make a sponge, then add a bunch of eggs and flour and beat the crap out of it with the mixer. I was distracted and forgot to add one of the aliquots of flour at the right time, so mine got even more mixing. After that, a ton of butter is added, a few tablespoons at a time. You then beat the shit out of it for a few more minutes, then let it rise. While the mixer was doing its thing, I wrote my previous blog post, talked to my mom on the phone and drank a Mike's Hard Lemonade (see - there's hope for me yet!). The mixer held up great and didn't overheat.
After it rises, you put it in the fridge overnight to cool off. After a few hours in the fridge, it had risen a lot. I punched it down. This morning, it had doubled in size again, even though it's pretty cold in my fridge. There's some serious gluten action going on in this bread, due to all the mixing and also due to me using bread flour instead of all-purpose. I punched it down, divided it into three portions, and froze one of the dough balls. (All the recipes in the mixer book are sized for the big mixer, so the one I used was 1 1/2 times bigger than the one on the web.) I shaped the other two dough balls and set them in loaf pans and let them rise for about an hour and a half or so. I then glazed them with an egg yolk wash and put them in the oven.After about 15 minutes, they had doubled in size (again) and were starting to get glossy and brown on top. Ten minutes later, they had risen even more, hit the oven rack above, and sagged down on one side. D'ohh! I shouldn't have let them rise so much! After the loaves were done baking, I let them cool. They shrunk a little bit but not much. It was very tasty - eggy but not too eggy, and very buttery. Nonetheless, I'll probably go with fewer egg yolks/more whole eggs if I make it again. I'll probably also use all-purpose flour.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Queen of the Crevices
I went gold panning with T this past weekend. We went to a different claim than usual this time. It's still early in the year, and the water would've been too high at the other claim. The water was lower at this one, ranging from ankle to waist deep. This claim featured a mine, although I didn't go see it. It also allegedly featured a lot of gold.
It was a bit of a scramble down the hill to get to the creek. My knees did OK, but I couldn't have done it a few weeks ago. Once we got to the creek, we had to walk upstream about 40 yards. This was partly in and partly out of the water. Even though it was still early, the rocks were already slippery with algae. At the other claim, the water is a lot higher and moves faster, so it doesn't get slippery until midsummer. I did OK, but my balance isn't back to normal yet. My legs were shaky by the end of each day. Although I didn't injure myself or tweak anything, my knees were both sore or the first part of the week.
No skinny dipping for me this time. Due to the possibility of bears or of me getting injured, I stayed closer to where everyone else was working
Gold panning has a lot of amusing terms. I creviced, which means I scraped dirt/rocks/moss/etc out of likely looking crevices, put them in the pan, and then washed/sifted it to lose all the plant matter and lighter rocks. At the end, you're left with a mix of gold, black sand, and possibly a little orange sand, not necessarily in that order. The gold is then sucked up into a snuffer bottle, which looks like a between a hair dye bottle and a lab squirt bottle. It's all about density. The gold flakes sink because they're so much denser than everything else.
To get stuff out of the crevices, there are an assortment of crevice tools. heh heh. I've only been doing this for four years and i still snicker when i say crevice tool. They range from tweezers, a turkey baster, a brush, a little garden trowel, a crow bar, pick axe,and some scraping tools. The idea is to find crevices in the bedrock where (hopefully) gold has sunk into as the river washes over it. Tree roots by the rivers edge are also considered good, although I don't like to work the roots to much because of spiders and snakes. Some crevices are best left alone. I just got gold flakes this time.
T and his buddy Ray have a dredge, so they got in their wet suits, fired up the dredge and fed it rocks/sand from the areas that they thought looked promising. However, it took them most of a day to figure out what was wrong with the dredge. At the end they panned out what was left in the dredge. It wasn't much, this weekend. In terms of hobbies, it's not the most lucrative way to spend one's time.
When we got back to the campsite on Sunday afternoon, a bear had bitten a hole in a full 5 gallon gas can. It also chewed on the kerosene can but didn't manage to bite through. Meanwhile, a few feet away there was a grocery bag full of garbage that it totally ignored. Definitely not smarter than your average bear, but, as my friend Margarete put it, Yosemite is grad school for bears and this one obviously hadn't been there yet for advanced bear training. Nonetheless, I'm glad we didn't have an encounter with it.
I may go up to the main claim later in the summer. It's fun on an occasional basis, but I have yet to get gold fever and go crazy. It's mostly an excuse to go play in the water.
It was a bit of a scramble down the hill to get to the creek. My knees did OK, but I couldn't have done it a few weeks ago. Once we got to the creek, we had to walk upstream about 40 yards. This was partly in and partly out of the water. Even though it was still early, the rocks were already slippery with algae. At the other claim, the water is a lot higher and moves faster, so it doesn't get slippery until midsummer. I did OK, but my balance isn't back to normal yet. My legs were shaky by the end of each day. Although I didn't injure myself or tweak anything, my knees were both sore or the first part of the week.
No skinny dipping for me this time. Due to the possibility of bears or of me getting injured, I stayed closer to where everyone else was working
Gold panning has a lot of amusing terms. I creviced, which means I scraped dirt/rocks/moss/etc out of likely looking crevices, put them in the pan, and then washed/sifted it to lose all the plant matter and lighter rocks. At the end, you're left with a mix of gold, black sand, and possibly a little orange sand, not necessarily in that order. The gold is then sucked up into a snuffer bottle, which looks like a between a hair dye bottle and a lab squirt bottle. It's all about density. The gold flakes sink because they're so much denser than everything else.
To get stuff out of the crevices, there are an assortment of crevice tools. heh heh. I've only been doing this for four years and i still snicker when i say crevice tool. They range from tweezers, a turkey baster, a brush, a little garden trowel, a crow bar, pick axe,and some scraping tools. The idea is to find crevices in the bedrock where (hopefully) gold has sunk into as the river washes over it. Tree roots by the rivers edge are also considered good, although I don't like to work the roots to much because of spiders and snakes. Some crevices are best left alone. I just got gold flakes this time.
T and his buddy Ray have a dredge, so they got in their wet suits, fired up the dredge and fed it rocks/sand from the areas that they thought looked promising. However, it took them most of a day to figure out what was wrong with the dredge. At the end they panned out what was left in the dredge. It wasn't much, this weekend. In terms of hobbies, it's not the most lucrative way to spend one's time.
When we got back to the campsite on Sunday afternoon, a bear had bitten a hole in a full 5 gallon gas can. It also chewed on the kerosene can but didn't manage to bite through. Meanwhile, a few feet away there was a grocery bag full of garbage that it totally ignored. Definitely not smarter than your average bear, but, as my friend Margarete put it, Yosemite is grad school for bears and this one obviously hadn't been there yet for advanced bear training. Nonetheless, I'm glad we didn't have an encounter with it.
I may go up to the main claim later in the summer. It's fun on an occasional basis, but I have yet to get gold fever and go crazy. It's mostly an excuse to go play in the water.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Recipe Geek: Homemade Bagels
I'm still doing the low-processed carb thing, but decided to take a night off from it and try the homemade bagel recipe. I'll be taking some of them up to Missy when I visit her tomorrow, so that's my other excuse.
Being from California, I'm not a bagel snob. Genuine Montreal bagels, New York style bagels, supermarket bagels stored in my freezer for several months, it's all good as long as it's toasted and has cream cheese, butter or peanut butter on it. However, this recipe intrigued me. It sounded so easy. Besides, these are Parisian bagels. I've made bagels once, back in high school. I remember it being a lot of work and the bagels were dense like hockey pucks. My brother and I ate them anyway.
I dumped the ingredients into my handy dandy mixer, set the timer for 12 minutes and let it mix/knead. It's a pretty simple dough - flour, water, salt, sugar and yeast. I then placed the dough in a gretased bowl and let it rise for an hour while I talked on the phone to my mom. At that point, I preheated the oven and brought 3 quarts of water (with a hint of sugar) to a simmer. I divided the dough into 12 balls, flattened them slightly, poked a hole in the middle and then stretched/shaped them until they were bagel shaped. At this point you're supposed to let them rest for only ten minutes. I waited a little bit too long before the water bath. As a result, the bagels did not sink when i dropped them into the boiling water, which allegedly leads to slight texture differences which I'm sure I will not be able to detect.
Anyway, I dropped the bagels into the simmering water and cooked them for about a minute, flipping them over once. I then drained them briefly on a towel, placed them on cookie sheets, and baked them for 30 minutes. My house smelled like a bagel shop. When the bagels were golden brown, I took them out. I may have baked them a little bit too long since I was distracted by writing this blog. As you can see they're pretty dark but not burnt.
Taste test: They're very tasty hot out of the oven. They have a chewy bagel texture and flavor and aren't too fluffy or too dense. They're a bit salty, so the next time I make them I'll reduce the salt. I'll also stick with the recipe instructions for sizing the bagels - I made 12 instead of 10 and some were kind of puny.
Overall, it was easy and entertaining. The whole process took just over 2 hours. I won't be getting up at 6 AM to have them ready in time for breakfast, but it is a nice project for a quiet evening.
Being from California, I'm not a bagel snob. Genuine Montreal bagels, New York style bagels, supermarket bagels stored in my freezer for several months, it's all good as long as it's toasted and has cream cheese, butter or peanut butter on it. However, this recipe intrigued me. It sounded so easy. Besides, these are Parisian bagels. I've made bagels once, back in high school. I remember it being a lot of work and the bagels were dense like hockey pucks. My brother and I ate them anyway.
I dumped the ingredients into my handy dandy mixer, set the timer for 12 minutes and let it mix/knead. It's a pretty simple dough - flour, water, salt, sugar and yeast. I then placed the dough in a gretased bowl and let it rise for an hour while I talked on the phone to my mom. At that point, I preheated the oven and brought 3 quarts of water (with a hint of sugar) to a simmer. I divided the dough into 12 balls, flattened them slightly, poked a hole in the middle and then stretched/shaped them until they were bagel shaped. At this point you're supposed to let them rest for only ten minutes. I waited a little bit too long before the water bath. As a result, the bagels did not sink when i dropped them into the boiling water, which allegedly leads to slight texture differences which I'm sure I will not be able to detect.
Anyway, I dropped the bagels into the simmering water and cooked them for about a minute, flipping them over once. I then drained them briefly on a towel, placed them on cookie sheets, and baked them for 30 minutes. My house smelled like a bagel shop. When the bagels were golden brown, I took them out. I may have baked them a little bit too long since I was distracted by writing this blog. As you can see they're pretty dark but not burnt.
Taste test: They're very tasty hot out of the oven. They have a chewy bagel texture and flavor and aren't too fluffy or too dense. They're a bit salty, so the next time I make them I'll reduce the salt. I'll also stick with the recipe instructions for sizing the bagels - I made 12 instead of 10 and some were kind of puny.
Overall, it was easy and entertaining. The whole process took just over 2 hours. I won't be getting up at 6 AM to have them ready in time for breakfast, but it is a nice project for a quiet evening.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Recipe Geek: Homemade Yogurt
Yes, I like fermenting milk, as you may've figured out from my post on kefir. I made some homemade yogurt this week. I was inspired by an article in Slate in which the author tested making various kitchen staples at home, and then compared the result to the commercial products in terms of taste, ease of preparation, and cost. Yogurt was one of the winners. I was a little bit dubious - my mom had a yogurt maker back in the 80's. She used a mix of skim milk and dried milk powder. The resulting yogurt was very tart and not very good.
Anyway, this recipe was pretty simple. Heat a half gallon of milk to just below boiling. Let it cool to 110 F or so and add 1/4 cup plain yogurt. Stir it to mix, and then cover the bowl and stick it in a warm place overnight. I put it in the oven with the light on. The next morning the yogurt had firmed up. At this point you can either put the yogurt in the fridge or strain it for a thicker, greek-style yogurt. I opted to strain it since I am in low carb mode now. Besides, it tastes better. I put an old pillowcase in a colander and then poured in the yogurt. When I was sick of waiting, i scooped out the yogurt into a tupperware container.
The next day, I had a taste test - my yogurt vs Fage non-fat greek style yogurt, which is one of my favorites. My yogurt won, although it wasn't an entirely fair contest, since I used lowfat milk. In any case, it was good enough and easy enough that I will definitely make it again.
Stay tuned for the next installation of Recipe Geek, when I will test the other clear winner in the Slate test - homemade bagels. It may be a while, depending on how long I stay in low-carb mode. Or, if you can't wait, here's the link. I expect a full report if you do test it, though ;-)
Anyway, this recipe was pretty simple. Heat a half gallon of milk to just below boiling. Let it cool to 110 F or so and add 1/4 cup plain yogurt. Stir it to mix, and then cover the bowl and stick it in a warm place overnight. I put it in the oven with the light on. The next morning the yogurt had firmed up. At this point you can either put the yogurt in the fridge or strain it for a thicker, greek-style yogurt. I opted to strain it since I am in low carb mode now. Besides, it tastes better. I put an old pillowcase in a colander and then poured in the yogurt. When I was sick of waiting, i scooped out the yogurt into a tupperware container.
The next day, I had a taste test - my yogurt vs Fage non-fat greek style yogurt, which is one of my favorites. My yogurt won, although it wasn't an entirely fair contest, since I used lowfat milk. In any case, it was good enough and easy enough that I will definitely make it again.
Stay tuned for the next installation of Recipe Geek, when I will test the other clear winner in the Slate test - homemade bagels. It may be a while, depending on how long I stay in low-carb mode. Or, if you can't wait, here's the link. I expect a full report if you do test it, though ;-)
Monday, May 11, 2009
Banana Slugs
I haven't blogged very much lately. I haven't done very much else either. I've been a total slug ever since I got back from Detroit. I've been exercising more and that has sapped all of my spare energy.My knee is getting a lot stronger, but there are times when it's pretty sore. It didn't help that the antibiotic I was taking caused joint pain. I've been able to take long walks. Last weekend I even hiked some hills and clambered over some small rocks on the beach. It was ok. Tonight I walked/ran on the treadmill for an hour. I only ran for a total of 10 minutes, in 3 segments. I went pretty slowly and I'm sure I shuffled a lot, but it felt ok. This was the first time I've run since before my surgery, and it's practically the first time I've run since I injured my knee last October.
I went up to Mendocino with T last weekend. He was teaching an abalone diving class, and I went along for the food. We stayed at Van Damme State Park. It's right across Highway 1 from the cove where people dive for abalone. While they were out diving, I went for a walk along the Fern Canyon Trail . As you can see, it's aptly named.
It snakes along the river for several miles. When the trail split, I wanted to take the shorter trail to see the miniature trees in the pygmy forest. However, it had rained a lot recently and I would've had to wade through the river. I took the upper trail and didn't make it all the way to the pygmy forest. Nonetheless, I still hiked a total of 8 miles or so.
I saw a lot of banana slugs. For those of you who've never seen one, they really do look like slightly bruised bananas. This one was about six inches long.
I also saw a lot of columbines and wild irises. That was probably more interesting than a bunch of small trees, anyway.
I'll try to blog more about the trip later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)