Category Archives: food and drink

The Beet Goes On…

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Tomorrow I’ll be doing something a bit unusual, I’ve heard. I’ll be writing lots of equations (so far so normal), but I’ll be doing it on a stage and will be filmed doing it. Should be fun. It’s for an educational TV show that’ll be out some time soon. Will tell you more when I know more. My task later on is to figure out which equations they’d like on camera. It’s been a long day, so I thought I’d sit here with some camomile tea and blog a bit first.

It’s been a while since we’ve been to the kitchen together, hasn’t it? Let me tell you about Monday’s special dish. I was invited by a friend to go to their house and join some others for a Rosh Hashanah gathering. The instruction was to “bring a side dish of your choosing”. Excellent. Well, I’m out of figs now (the main tree has run out of them after a remarkable season), and so could not rely on that. The big problem was really that on Monday I teach until 7:00pm (ugh), and I’d have to go home first to get the food. I certainly could not rely on being able to cook a meal and take it immediately since I’d have about 15 minutes to make everything and get it to my friend’s place. So I needed something good, but something simple and fast.

For some reason I decided on oranges. I don’t really know why. I thought I might do something with oranges, sliced, and then maybe some fresh mint from my garden […] Click to continue reading this post →

Fest

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fig bread.... going fast Well, since it was the last weekend of the slow Summertime (semester begins – see next post), it seemed a good idea to go out with a party. Silver Lake supplied the party (the Sunset Junction street festival, which, despite my strongly supportive words of the previous post, turned out to be not as good as it used to be [update: The Militant says it well]), and I (well, my garden) supplied the figs. I had some friends come around to raid the fig tree, help me consume some bottles of Hoegaarden and Leffe (along with some wine and a little gin later). Seems I threw together a couple of loaves of fig bread as well, while my guests were chatting and drinking.

My guests were nice, in that they said it was delicious (between enthusiastic mouthfuls of it, still […] Click to continue reading this post →

First Fig Fun

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figs and cheeseWell, for some of this time I’ve been away I’ve been a bit worried about the fig tree. Why? Well, as I was leaving town, it was hugely laden with fruit that looked rather like they were going to peak while I was away. I certainly did not want that to happen since the squirrels and other critters would have a field day (or several!), and get used to the idea that they had full access to the tree with no dissent from me.

Well, it turns out that the tree held out longer than it seemed that it would, so while the peak came while I was away, it was only for a week or so.

So I lost several figs, and had to deal with the sticky, frenzied-ant-infused mess left […] Click to continue reading this post →

Some Saturday Shopping

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Well, of course I made it to the Aspen farmer’s market. Why would I pass up the opportunity to pay $3.50 a pound for assorted squashes? (And that was some of the more reasonably priced stuff…) I like to support these things, and mingle with the people, so I go anyway. Also some of it is very good, even though there are very few actual fresh produce vendors compared to the farmer’s markets I’m used to in Los Angeles. (This latter fact is not entirely traceable, I think, to having a smaller target population, or being at high elevation.) (Of course there’s a lot of selling of knick-knacks of various sorts of the tourists…. you know: hand carved dual dog bowls with Western outdoor themes and so forth…)

Here’s the (half-folded) bike with some of my findings:

saturday pickings from the market in Aspen

You can get a closeup on the basket by clicking the image on the right. Some apricots, […] Click to continue reading this post →

Going Bananas…

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…in the kitchen. A friend of mine has a number of banana trees that are producing fruit right now, and to help her get rid of her surplus I accepted a generous gift of bananas last week. (Thanks M!) It turns out that they have a remarkably strong flavour, concentrated a lot by the fact that they were already quite ripe when I got them. That strong flavour meant that I only managed to eat one of them in a given day, even though they are quite tiny.

Well, after some days I still had many of them, and now they were rather far gone down the road of ripeness. Too far, for my tastes, but I did not like the idea of throwing them away. It did not seem in the spirit of the gift at all. Then I hit upon the solution. This means, of course, a long overdue episode of: Asymptotia goes to the kitchen…!

My mum’s recipe could not be used at this point since she was travelling, and there’s an eight hour time difference, so I could not call her to ask for her method. Instead I consulted a replacement that’s sometimes acceptable in times like this: Jim Fobel’s Old Fashioned Baking Book. What was I looking for? Banana Bread.

Most, if not all, of what you need for a quick banana bread is probably in your cupboards already, if you’ve much of a cooking bent, so no special shopping […] Click to continue reading this post →

Wild Irony

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The universe likes laughing at me. In so many creative ways. (See earlier.) Here’s another. Of all the tomato plants I’ve ever grown, the ones that have done best -spectacularly well, in fact- have not been the ones I intentionally planted and red cherry tomatoes that came from a wild plant in the gardennurtured but the ones that have grown up in random places. I then take care of them and they end up bursting with fruit. Meanwhile the others produce some fruit, but nothing to write home about, after a great amount of care and worry about how suited the ground is to their needs. You will recall another example: the cherry tomato plant that appeared in a crack in the steps that I was sure could not make it (but lasted for two years, almost constantly producing fruit) – see posts here and here about it.

Well, at some point during the Winter (yeah, yeah, I know) I noticed a new tomato plant […] Click to continue reading this post →

So Have You Been There Yet?

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I’ve mentioned it twice (here and here) in other posts, but I think it is worth a post of its own.

Have you been yet? I’m looking at you, USC-area person. There’s a fantastic new wine-bar in the neighbourhood, a relatively short walk north of campus at Union and Hoover. I’m so pleased to see it, and it is extremely welcome as far as I’m concerned. It is called Bacaro, and I’ve been there a lot already with several different groups of friends and colleagues.

   bacaro interior   bacaro interior

Why? Well, the wine is just great (various Italian wines) and the menu is fantastic too […] Click to continue reading this post →

Up for Air

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early spring fig tree growthMorning cup of tea, and short reflection – coming up for air before diving back in…

It’s a bit of a mess here, time-wise. Just not enough hours in the day. Everything totally fragmented. Yesterday was grueling… here’s some of it:

Up at 5:30am, finding that I’m immediately thinking about a physics project for a bit (I fell asleep doing so, having been the whole evening in the Casbah drinking coffee and doing the same) before having to break off to get ready, get to office early to start an insanely busy day. Answer a ton of email, and deal with other online stuff, planning to ignore it for the whole rest of morning. Note that flimmaker/journalist friend B has sent me an email with a list of comments and suggested changes to my script for the Video. Got to discuss it with A, my collaborator in Chemistry on this. Whenever are we going to meet in the next few days? Sigh. (Must remember to do blog post about this new project, and how I ended up involved with the Chemistry department!)

After some dithering, decided to drive in, since the plan was to stay super-late and probably involve driving someone home.

Cold as I walk to the office from where I parked on the street. Mostly in my mind, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Potato, Moon

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roast potato

There’s really nothing like a sweet potato roasted in the heart of a wood fire. A wood fire lit out under a clear big sky with a full moon. After a long day of hiking. A day of hiking in the desert on a super hot day of vivid blue, brown, and gold. Delicious flavours, textures and colours.

I spent most of last week on retreat in Death Valley. It was Spring break, and I was […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Farmer’s Market at USC

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(hollywood farmer's) market day basket of cvjFantastic news! There’s going to be a farmer’s market on campus at USC. The first one is on Thursday this week, and rumour has it that it is expected to be monthly! If anyone has more information about this, please let me know in the comments or by email. (Right, enlargeable image of one of the results of my weekly visits to the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. More here.)

Here’s the announcement for Thursday: […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Delicious Fractal

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romanesque cauliflower

A small Romanesque Cauliflower. (Click for larger view.)

Imagine my delight when I spotted this lovely piece of edible mathematics in the Hollywood Farmer’s Market this morning. The stall has several of them of many sizes (this was a very little one) and of several colours. Wonderful. If you don’t know what I mean when I talk about the mathematics, or use the term fractal, look it up. There are several things of note, among which are the wonderful spiral structures that you can […] Click to continue reading this post →

Physics and Whiskey

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jameson irish whiskeyBeing a loyal fan of Scottish single malt whisky, I never thought I’d be blogging about Irish whiskey, but this is why we get out of bed in the morning – we seek the stuff we can’t guess*.

So I was going to point out to you an amusing distraction. The series of radio ads for Jameson Irish Whiskey that you can listen to here. There’s one featuring a physicist, you see, and a friend of mine sent me the link for that reason**. There’s the idea of attraction, and so gravity is brought in by the ad man trying to use the concept to sell the product, and the physicist is obviously not having it… a short bit of fun play between segments of some program on some station somewhere or another. I can see that they’d work rather well. Have a listen.

That was going to be it, until I found another – real – physics connection. Turns out that Guglielmo Marconi – he of the use of electromagnetic waves for telegraph communication, Nobel prize, and so forth – is the the key to the connection. Do you know what it is?
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Anticipation

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mum's coconut bread

Well, for some of you, the title of the post should be “Frustration”, since I’ll get to try these (click for larger view) later when they cool down, and (sadly) I can’t share them with you in that way. But I thought I’d share the common and special memory of the warmth of baking smells… good thing to start the year off with. Especially if you’re somewhere a bit cold.

There’s been a lot of cooking and eating here over the last week and a half. I’ve done […] Click to continue reading this post →