i'm trying to distract myself from the collapse of our country with all of the below

In addition to those recently linked recipes, here are a few other things I'm loving lately:

Reading: East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I finally read this (or should I say inhaled? I can't believe how quick of a read this was for me), and it was so good. Beautiful, moving, just the right amount of sad, I'm going to need to read this again.

Watching: Howl's Moving Castle by Hayao Miyazaki
I watched this on Mother's Day by myself, which sounds more depressing than it was. It was fun! This movie is magical and lovely and now my phone home and lock screen are pictures of Howl and Sophie so you know I'm a fan. It also reminded me that there are still so many Miyazaki movies I haven't seen (and aren't available on the holy trinity of Netflix/Hulu/Amazon), and I totally could've checked them out from the library, and I DIDN'T. Now my greatest regret from my time at Penn.

Listening: United States of Eurasia by Muse
I don't know why I love this song so much, but I've listened to it approximately 10,000 times and that Middle Eastern-y part never gets old.

More listening: The Bon Appetit Foodcast
I walk 25 min to/from lab every day, and this podcast makes it go a lot more quickly. The format is conversations among people from Bon Appetit (and often guests) about recipes, culinary techniques, the food world, etc. It's informative and funny and makes me really hungry for dinner when I get home.

MORE more listening: The Alison Show Podcast
I'm a big fan of this podcast, too. I initially thought it might be a little over the top for me (Alison is kind of out of control but in a good way!), but she actually gives a lot of practical, concrete self-improvement tips that put me in a better mood, even if I'm not intentionally focused on implementing all of them.

And finally, sidenote: I'm leaving for Paris and Rome in two weeks from yesterday. (Yay!!!) As a lover of spreadsheets and advanced planning I've already put together itineraries, but if you've been to either city, what was your favorite thing you did/place you ate? Don't want to miss something and have another thing to regret!

better than hot ham water

Hi! I found some good recipes recently:

vegetable soup
I didn't make the basil pistou or the garlic bread, but the soup alone is delicious. Light and healthy without tasting like deprivation.

curried shepherd's pie
This was a great twist on shepherd's pie, but we used our favorite mashed potato recipe (boil the potatoes whole! peel and rice, add butter first, then add way more milk/cream than you think you'll need, salt generously)

red lentil soup with lemon
So much flavor coming from so few ingredients. It's pretty amazing.

Also: I am currently in denial that we are leaving my beloved Philadelphia in less than three weeks. Even though all of my extraneous pieces of furniture are disappearing and my guest bedroom is filling up with boxes, it still doesn't feel real. It's not happening!!!! You can't make me leave!

odds and ends

I figured out what my ideal form of humor is, and it's computers writing nonsense:

a computer-generated list of new My Little Pony names via artificial neural network
We start at Sprinkle Cherry Bolt and rapidly descend to Deader Pony, Dunder Dort, and Tracklewock Packin. It's GREAT.

a Harry Potter chapter written with predictive text
I tried to pick a few lines to excerpt, but it's just all too good. You have to read it in full.

I made some food I liked recently:

These salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread cookies are really weird, but they're also delicious. Very similar to these chocolate sable cookies (and similar potential pitfall with crumbliness-don't despair, just use a sharp knife when cutting and smoosh it back together).

I also made this chocolate babka wreath over Christmas break, and it turned out just as beautiful as the website pictures for once (and so delicious people ate it stale the next day).

Here are some science-y things I recommend reading:

Most of my scientific expertise is knowing how to make and work with proteins. This was a cool article that explains why proteins are cool and how scientists are designing new ones not found in nature.

I also really liked this article, on keeping a cosmic perspective + the Voyager golden record:

"I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us."

Not really science-y but I've been thinking about this, too: preserving white space in your daily routine (found via CoJ). Almost all of my dead time is full of looking at my phone (waiting for/riding in the elevator, waiting for an experiment to finish up, standing in line at the store, eating lunch, etc.), and I don't think that's a good thing.

I'll add that to my list of things to work on in 2018, joining learn basic Italian phrases (we're going to Europe this summer!!!!) and bake more cakes. Only appropriate, given that zucchero is inexplicably one of the first words Duolingo taught me. 

all my heroes are little girls

Like this paragon of magnificent confidence (and glasses!):

Jessica, who loves everything about her life:

(I think I've linked to this before, it's still just as great 7+ years later)

And this supposed third grader, poet extraordinaire:

I mean: I am a rich pie strong with knowledge. I will not be eaten. 

I AM HERE FOR THIS. All hail our eight-year-old queen!

did you need to watch something pretty right now?

I've got just the thing:

After I watched this, I looked up the song and then listened to it four times in a row. What can I say, when I find something I like, I COMMIT.

(It's To Build a Home by the Cinematic Orchestra.)

playing favorites

I have three things to tell you about that I am loving lately:

1) These sandals from Target. I actually bought them last summer for our trip to Mexico and then proceeded to wear them out completely. So I bought another pair of the exact same shoe this year because I love them that much. These bad boys have been well-tested for comfort with my mile and a half walk back and forth to school every day, and they pass with flying colors. They are hands down the most comfortable shoes I own.

2) The Belgian rapper (?) electronic artist (?) Stromae. I mean, look at those cheekbones! That raised eyebrow! Don't you just want to sit and listen to everything he's ever created? While American rappers are rapping about money, drugs, and treating women deplorably, Stromae's over in classy Europe rapping about absent fathers, cancer, and the dangers of social media. He is AWESOME. If you don't believe me, you should believe Madonna and Kayne West, both of whom fully endorse Stromae. I recommend: Papaoutai, Ta Fête, and Alors On Danse. 

3) MUSE. Randomly, Aaron and I rediscovered them a couple months ago and we. are. obsessed. Besides Stromae, they are all I want to listen to. My poor lab mates have borne the brunt of this with me playing mostly just Muse in lab all day, every day. #sorrynotsorry is really a perfect descriptor here. We are so sad that this obsession couldn't have come up 7 months ago so we could've gone to their Philly concert in January. Unfortunately, we'll just have to wait until the next time they go on tour. wahhhhh. I recommend:

everything.

I LOVE IT ALL. Especially Plug in Baby, Knights of Cydonia, Undisclosed Desires, Handler, Butterflies and Hurricanes, Sing for Absolution, Madness...I'll stop now. Wait, one more: Hysteria.

If you have anything else I should be listening to, lemme know. My lab mates will appreciate it. 

[fairly empty] thoughts about dessert

I've been accidentally collecting unfrosted cake recipes lately, like this double vanilla butter cake, ooey gooey double baked chocolate cake ("ooey gooey"? ugh, come on, Food52), and this grapefruit curd in grapefruit cake.

I actually made the double vanilla butter cake tonight and in case you were wondering, can I forget to mix the sugar with the eggs at the beginning and not realize it until I've already added all of the other ingredients and still get a decent cake? Yes, you can! I tested out that scenario just for you! Your cake will be about half the height of the cake in the picture and therefore twice as dense, but it will still taste okay!

This will sound like a stupid idea coming off of that failure, but I also decided I want to tackle a Milk Bar cake sometime soon. Probably the birthday cake. I'm debating whether it's worth forking over a bunch of money on Amazon for 1) glucose 2) acetate strips 3) quarter sheet pan 4) 6" cake rings 5) more sprinkles. I was already going to buy myself sprinkles for my birthday, but glucose? When am I ever going to use glucose again unless I bake more Milk Bar cakes?

Not cake, but these salted peanut butter cookies look amazing. However, any recipe with significant amounts of peanut butter, maple syrup, honey, or Nutella makes me hesitate because that stuff is not cheap. And if we're buying peanut butter it's because Aaron eats a peanut butter sandwich almost every day for lunch (he's a champion of food monotony), not for a batch of cookies we'll devour in a couple days. This is when I'll know we've made it: when I can nonchalantly pick up an extra thing of peanut butter at the grocery store for cookies I'm making on a whim with no purpose or event in mind.

Speaking of cookies, I got a cookie scoop for Christmas, and it is a life changer. I want to make drop cookies all the time now because cookies obviously, but also because using that scoop is so fun. It magically makes my cookies turn out much better to boot. I've been biased against cookie scoops in the past because I've always thought of them as ice cream scoops, and they suck at scooping ice cream. But, it turns out when you use them for their actual purpose, they work great! Who would've thought?

You'd think that after such a long gap between posts I'd return with something meaningful or interesting to say buuuuut nope! CAKES AND COOKIES. The important things in life.

checking in

A few random thoughts...

1) Up until last week, I thought the lyrics to The Killers song "Human" were:

Are we human? Or are we dancer?

Like I thought it was this great ode to dancing. Yeah, I'm not human, I'm dancer! Yay dance! Turns out the actual words are:

Are we human? Or are we denser? 

Which does make a little more sense, I suppose.

NEVER MIND. It IS dancer, and I clearly am unable to find reputable lyric websites.

2) The other day I read this review article about chemical gardens, which are these alien plant-looking mineral formations. It turned out my lab had everything needed to make some. So I did, and I posted about it on Twitter, and a million (okay like 40) people retweeted it, and I felt so cool.

BEHOLD THE MAJESTY:

What you do is make a sodium silicate solution (which you can do at home by crushing up some silica beads like you find in the do-not-eat packets in shoes or electronics and mixing it with lye) and then drop in some metal salts (which you can buy on Amazon, like everything else in existence). Pictured above left to right the metal salts used are: copper(II) chloride, cobalt(II) chloride, zinc chloride, and iron(II) chloride. Different metals lead to different colors and different growth patterns. Chemistry is so great. 

3) Speaking of how great chemistry is, here's a piece by Oliver Sacks that spells it out a lot more beautifully than I can. As he is dying of metastatic cancer, he finds comfort in the physical sciences:

"Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.

 And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence — an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence — I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy, with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity."

Little emblems of eternity. I love that.

4) I started listening to podcasts on my walk to/from lab. #muchculture. I am loving Invisibilia and Radiolab, especially this episode. Parents of a baby who died a few days after being born donated his body to medical research, and a little while later, his mom tried to find out exactly where his organs went and what they were used for. It made me cry and feel proud to be a scientist.

5) Aaron and I were recently debating over buying an ice cream machine because it seemed like a fun new cooking adventure we should try out. And then out of the blue, Wendy sent us one because she is the best! It turns out making ice cream is super easy and delicious. We've tried salted caramel and mint chip, and basically if you come to our house for a party or dinner in the future I'M MAKING YOU ICE CREAM!

So...that's how things are going around here lately. What are you loving these days? What else should I be reading/listening to/eating? I mean besides ice cream, obviously.

sharing time

Three more thoughts for today:

1. I really loved this series of essays by C. Jane about her past relationships. You ought to read them.

2. Cooking mishap: Tortillas will stick to tin foil, and you will get really frustrated with your tin foil-studded enchiladas.

2. Cooking win: Yesterday we had a successful salmon and cheesecake experience (though not at the same time). Two birds with one holiday, guys! Salmon recipe here, chocolate cheesecake found here.

You got any links you want to share?

favorites

I have two people to introduce to you:

1. Aaron and his med school journey of hope and wonder!

2. Becky and her ponytail!

My husband and sister both recently joined the blogging community, and they are both really entertaining. And they are two of my most favorite people in the world. So why don't you give them a read? :)

the world is a mess, and i just need to rule it.

Today I made a life goal to get together a group of people and dress up like the Evil League of Evil for Halloween. If that never pans out, well, I'll just be Dr. Horrible by myself.

Here are your costume choices!

Fake Thomas Jefferson, Professor Normal, Fury Leika, Snakebite, Dead Bowie, Tie-Die, and Bad Horse (who is not pictured, but is an actual dark brown horse).

What am I even talking about? Watch the videos.
(bad quality, if you have Hulu Plus, you can watch them all there high quality.)

far far

We survived Irene, and our power never even went out. This experience taught me how difficult it is to purchase matches and flashlights, and also how scary the dollar store is near ShopRite (never again, never again).

Orientation started today for us incoming grad students. It made me want to just jump right in already. Enough talking about, wondering about, waiting about becoming a grad student. Let's just do this thing! All of the current students we talked to this afternoon told us that the first year is the hardest, because you're taking difficult classes, you're TAing classes, and you're trying to figure out which research group to join. Personally, I am tired of spending all my time baking and pinterest-ing. I could use a little organometallics to kick my butt (which it will).

Also, I got nominated for a blog award by the lovely Jackie from Sweet and Wild! She has a beautiful blog, and she even spent her summer in France (!!!!! so I am epically jealous, of course. check out her blog and show her some love, mmk?). The award is the Liebster Award, and it's meant to highlight blogs with up to 200 followers.

The rules:
Link back to the blogger who gave you the award to keep the chain going
Choose your top five and leave them a comment to let them know

Without further ado, here are five blogs that I think you all ought to check out because they are awesome:

start something new...
[a liberation broadcast]
welcome to my blog.
Crumbs From My Table
Redhead Cuisine

Happy reading!

i miss back to school shopping

Lately I've discovered some great style blogs, and I wanted to share my discoveries with all of you! I love these blogs because most of the outfits they feature feel like something I could actually wear, instead of being so high fashion that I would feel completely ridiculous wearing it. And, all of them are quite well-written, which makes reading even more fun.

Kendi Everyday

Married Kendi decided to have a blog instead of a baby. Ha. She always has great outfits and incredible photography.

Sidewalk Ready

Hairstylist, photographer, and fashion maven Kayley blogs about her life with husband while wearing great clothes. She also has a ton of great hair tutorials (hello, she's a cosmetologist).

The Other Emily

Recently graduated from grad school in architecture, Emily is currently traveling the world with her boyfriend for nine months on a design fellowship and manages to look fabulous while living out of a suitcase.  

What Would a Nerd Wear

Tania is a British literature grad student (so all of her posts are exceptionally well-written). I particularly love her blog because she features a lot of outfits that are dressy enough for teaching/TAing a class, but casual enough to be comfortable. 

Have you found any fashion blogs that you enjoy perusing? Do tell!

(This post is slightly inspired by the fact that my sister is coming to visit this Saturday, and I will finally have a shopping partner!!! I've gotten a lot of inspiration from these sites.)

to and fro

My lovely friend Sara emailed me this great talk by Sister Patricia Holland. This paragraph was particularly striking to me:


"We must have the courage to be imperfect while striving for perfection. We must not allow our own guilt, the feminist books, the talk-show hosts, or the whole media culture to sell us a bill of goods—or rather a bill of no goods. We can become so sidetracked in our compulsive search for identity and self-esteem that we really believe it can be found in having perfect figures or academic degrees or professional status or even absolute motherly success. Yet, in so searching externally, we can be torn from our true internal, eternal selves. We often worry so much about pleasing and performing for others that we lose our uniqueness—that full and relaxed acceptance of one’s self as a person of worth and individuality. We become so frightened and insecure that we cannot be generous toward the diversity and individuality, and yes, problems, of our neighbors. Too many women with these anxieties watch helplessly as their lives unravel from the very core that centers and sustains them. Too many are like a ship at sea without sail or rudder, 'tossed to and fro,' as the Apostle Paul said (see Eph. 4:14), until more and more of us are genuinely, rail-grabbingly seasick."


Full talk here.


Oh and chemistry GRE? So done with that. Scores to come in 6 weeks. I'm just glad it's OVER!!!!

little rockstar andrus

I just have to brag about my brother again. 

He and his band recorded a single called "Spirals". It's awesome. And you should definitely have a listen (see music player on the left side of the page under the people who like this). 

"We dialed the sun, but where on earth have you been all this time?

Over and done, the squares and circles turning rhythms into rhymes

Sunlight's all over the breeze, whispers fly

The answers are all in the seas, only the moon will cry."

like

So I discovered this company {a} vintage poster (via the rockstar diaries blog) that sells these adorable vintage-inspired prints for $15.00

And I love them!

Aren't they adorable? Seriously tempted right now...

if only my debit card hadn't been expired since August.

Maybe this will finally motivate me to take care of that (also so I can register for GRE tests...ugh).

forget about deal breakers?

I found this article via the incredible blog The Apron Stage:

"My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)"

Very interesting read...what do you guys think? Can you be happy with settling? Or is there something to be said for holding out for exactly what you want?

I have a suggestion

Watch "The Last Airbender" trailer.

I promise, you'll get at least half-excited as I am.
(but not more than I am, because I don't think it's physically possible. This is the girl who searched etsy yesterday for a Katara water tribe necklace for 2010's Halloween costume. To quote my sister, "People don't realize how big of a nerd you are.")

Just click here. It's only 32 seconds long, and oh so very worth it.

white

It is the first day of December, and it has yet to snow and stick.

Perhaps I will convert to global warming after all.*

Happy Tuesday (oops, it's now past midnight, make that Wednesday) everyone!

*I still think Al Gore is ridiculous, and so is all of the political hype surrounding global warming.

Oh, and with that footnote, I just reminded myself of a thought.

Anyone else share my disbelief and anger that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize?

Ridiculous.

Especially when people like Greg Mortenson were nominated.

Grrrr.

Have a "Horrible" Halloween!

I know I've posted this once before on this blog, but I think it's fan-freaking-tastic and Halloween-y enough to repost:

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

You must invest approximately 42 minutes of your time to fully enjoy this. It is all worth it.


Happy Halloween!