Eat it

Busy day, so here is something fluffy to distract me (and you, potentially). I came across this food meme earlier. Are you an experienced eater? The foods I've eaten are below, bolded.


1. Venison
2. Nettle tea - No, but I've seen Survivorman make it.
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile - Alligator, once
6. Black pudding - Somehow I missed this one in London.
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich - My lunch today
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle - But never enough to really appreciate, that stuff is expensive!
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes - I think I've had some terrible rasberry wine.
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese - This isn't actually the brain, I think people think it's the brain.
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - Cognac, no cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O - unfortunately
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat - Many other curries, but no goat.
42. Whole insects - Ants, as a kid.
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu - No, but I dare my brother to try it when he moves to Japan.
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal - Again, unfortunately.
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads - Mmm, thymus glands.
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini - I think I had really bad caviar once, so maybe
73. Louche absinthe - Recently, actually. Totally overrated
74. Gjetost, or brunost - Tried to find it once, but failed.
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake
101. Elk
102. Ostrich
103. Moose
104. whole hog BBQ
105. wine that costs more than $400.00 a bottle
106. Home made bacon and sausage
107. chocolate and chiles
108. chittlins
109. moonshine - No, surprisingly
110. quail eggs

That's 66/110, 60%. Not bad, I've had variations on some of the non-bolded items (such as steamed lobster, sans thermidor treatment), and some are prohibitively expensive for a poor twenty-something student.
Continue reading "Eat it"!

Tuesday morning links - 8/19/08

For your perusal.

Inside brain surgery

Wild dolphins tail walk

Face your Manga

The neuroscience behind magic tricks (may post more about this later)

NSFW chimpanzee video of, erm, tool use

Finding NYC bagels in Beijing

Free 3D modeling program Google Sketchup (may also post on this more later)

Brief discussion of free will vs. determinism (again, more later)

Russian Proton rocket launches big satellite

Continue reading "Tuesday morning links - 8/19/08"!

New Gadgets

Last Friday I turned 24 years old (nearly a quarter century!), and I ventured away from Ann Arbor for some fun with family and friends. I was given several nice gifts, but I want to highlight two that satisfy some of my greatest interests: technology and coffee.

First, the Flip Mino, a miniature camcorder.

It's about the size of a pack of cigarettes and holds up to an hour of video. The best part is the flip-out USB adapter; all I have to do is plug it into my MacBook and upload, or connect the TV Out cable and display images on a bigger screen. I've recorded a couple short ones, but nothing yet worth posting. There may be an opportunity to record and post video of some of the more visually interesting things I do in lab. YouTube, here I come!

Second, a Bialetti mukka, a stovetop device that allows you to make cappuccinos and lattes without an expensive milk steamer and espresso machine. It works great, like magic actually, as you can see in the demonstration video at that Williams Sonoma link.



This mukka is going to save me so much money. Every morning I get coffee at the Espresso Royale outside my building. Every morning. And not just coffee, sometimes I get fancy drinks, like a soy chai latte. This amounts to $2-4 a day. Just this summer, I've spent over $200 on coffee. Continue reading "New Gadgets"!

Something to watch/TiVo/download from the internet

Airing on public television his fall.



Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow travel and cook Spanish food. They are friends? It appears so, because, at one point, she calls him "Batals." They are totally BFFs. Willie Nelson music and Michael Stipe from R.E.M makes an appearance. Bizarre, sure, but this looks sort of interesting. It also features Mark Bittman, a food guy for the New York Times. Coincidentally, Bittman has a NYT blog called Bitten. Continue reading "Something to watch/TiVo/download from the internet"!

Cheese news. Good news?

My group has whittled down a list of cheeses for use in our MDS project. (Our group name? Culture Club. Another of my suggestions.)



We picked the above based on three dimensions - milk source, region, and texture. These won't be made explicit when the tasting occurs, but we're hoping they are pulled out in the analysis. So theoretically, parmigiano and pecorino will cluster based on texture and region, which are the same, but perhaps not by milk sources, which are different. I'm skeptical that people can be that discerning, but it would be cool. I had a few more cheeses on the list, but we cut them out to keep the number of pairings down to a reasonable number. One of them, oaxaca, is a mexican cheese used in quesadillas and nachos. It's made by a stretching process similar to mozzarella, but melts much better, so it makes excellent queso dip. I hope to find some at Whole Foods or one of the markets in town. Another one that did made the list, brunost, accounts for 25% of all cheese eaten in Norway. I've never had it, but it's supposed to have a very strong flavor that some people love, some people hate.

One of my group members, Eila, let me borrow her copy of Steve Jenkins' Cheese Primer, an impressive 576 page tome.



I am fast becoming a cheese nerd (if such a thing exists). Like beer, wine, olive oil, and few other foods, cheese is made from surprisingly simple ingredients and yet thousands of varieties exist. How can you not appreciate a food that relies on bacterial cultures for flavor? Continue reading "Cheese news. Good news?"!

Drainage issues, E-pubs, and Cheese

Walking through campus the other day I came across something unexpected. The path ahead was awash in six inches of water. Ann Arbor has a problem with residual snowmelt. Anytime a foot of the stuff falls, the city is all over it with plows, salt trucks, and snowblowers. Once that snow melts, however, the infrastructure falls apart. Puddles, muddy puddles, are everywhere. This makes my journey from home to lab treacherous. An example of one of my obstacles:



When I lived in Morgantown this never happened because of the mountainous topography; everything drained into the river. Ann Arbor is unnervingly flat. Yet another graduate school adjustment to make.

Speaking of academics, my paper from undergrad is finally available as an electronic publication online. I am now searchable on PubMed, the principle database for biomedical scientific papers. This is cool but, sadly, a little anticlimactic.

An upcoming assignment in my statistics class involves multi dimensional scaling. Don't ask me to describe what that means in depth, but it is an analysis technique for visually examining similarities and dissimilarities among data. MDS might be used by a marketing department to determine how consumers categorize their products into perceptual groups. Sprite and 7Up, for example, would cluster closer than Sprite and some variety of root beer. It's also used for more serious ecology or computer science research.

This is a group project, so I'll be working with the other first-year students from my area. Our subject will be cheese, as per my suggestion. Today I compiled a tentative list of the cultured curds for analysis. Once we finalize this and do our similarity tests, I will post the results, along with some cool graphs. Cheese! Continue reading "Drainage issues, E-pubs, and Cheese"!