NPR show on Mortgage crisis
May 10th, 2008This morning on NPR I heard a fantastic show discussing how the Mortgage crisis all got started, as told by the investment bankers who started it. Very interesting and very well done! The link to the program is here, though currently the free full download is not available, it should be tomorrow ish.
I’m working on a take home midterm for now so I’m gonna disappear again, unless of course I need a distraction!
Tomatoes in my bananas?
May 8th, 2008So we have a little banana plan in the office and I tend to throw out the washed out remains of my lunch bowl on to the plant. It’s either the remains of some tea, or water with a bit of potato starch etc all vegetable stuff nothing crazy, I noticed this week that we have 4 mysterious sprouts coming up in the banana plant pot! I think they are tomatoes?? It’s the only thing I could think would be in the wash water of my lunch to create a sprout! I’m pretty excited to see them grow! I’ve also read that it’s best to water tomato seeds with warm water, which I’ve in inadvertently been doing because I boil water and pour it into the lunch bowl to help get the sticky bits off! Anyway, I’m hoping the seeds survive and we have some tomato plants in the office 
Also, listening to NPR I came across this very interesting blog. It’s written by a woman in Cuba, about life in Cuba. Here is an article discussing what her blog is about, and about a recent journalism award she won. It sounds very insightful and I’m interested to read her posts.
I’m also excited about the upcoming Folk Festival here in Seattle! I’ve been pretty busy with work the last few weeks and hoping things will be a little more calm by then and I can go enjoy a fun weekend! Anyway, that work-crazyness isn’t over yet! Later!
Boat Un-Progress
April 8th, 2008So my boat is far from complete, but still have hopes of getting more done, especially now the weather is starting to get better! Shivering in the cold to work on the boat was not so great! I’ll post more pictures as progress comes, but this was an interesting link passed to me….
Super Fast Forward
April 7th, 2008Christmas - Went to Maine, Cape Cod, Visited Lots of friends and family!
Winter Quarter - Took one class, did research work, did a lot of cooking, snowshoeing etc For example discovered these amazing purple potatoes! They’re both beautiful and tasty
Spring Break - Drove to San Francisco! Stopped at Avenue of the Giants, Patricks Point State Park, wandered around Golden Gate Park, Cruised around on the 6 person surry. (Totally want to customize one for my own cruising purposes!!!) Went to the sea shore, etc!!
NOW- Spring quarter! Taking two classes, and will surly get up to more adventures! House is adopting a cat as of tomorrow! Pictures sure to follow!
Snow Xmas and all that Jazz.
December 11th, 2007Well we finally had a bit of snow here!!! I was pretty excited, took a few pictures. It all melted pretty quick though as we had some pretty incredible rain the next day!!! I don’t know what the numbers were but I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a foot of rain instead of a foot of snow!!!
Other excitement was making gingerbread “houses”. I use the term loosely as I ended up making a diarama of Bree, the town of the Inn of the prancing pony. You know the scene,Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry go to the inn, Frodo gets tipsy, puts on the ring accidently and all of a sudden, doom (ringwraiths) sweep down upon them, knock down door to the city wall and stab the empty beds. Well this is my candy tribute. I am particularly proud of my frosting on chocolate waffer, prancing pony placard!
That mint thing… yeah gandalf gone minty, The black blob is a fire chard snowman peep masquerading as a ringwraith!
Ok, geek moment over, I had lots of fun!
Not quite December
November 30th, 2007Things have been quite busy as of late, hence the lack of blogging. I was tagged by Maricello for to write about seven interesting things. I decided to post my 7 favorite foods for thanksgiving. I wasn’t able to go home for thanksgiving so I had several of the other far-from-home graduate students over for dinner. I had sooo much fun cooking!!! I made a few other side things but these are the top 7.
Roasted Turkey - Rosemary (4T), sage(4T), dijon mustard (1/2c), oil (1/2-3/4C), onions (one small onion finely chopped). Turkeys are big birds so they need a lot of dressing! Mix everyting together and rub that into and under the skin of the turkey before roasting. I reserve some to the side to use as a complimenting flavor with rice, etc. Recipe was originally for chicken.
Imam ibayaldi - This is one of my FAVORITE dishes. It’s roasted stuffed eggplants kind of turkish/greek style? 2 eggplants, cut lengthwise. score the inside, and reserve some of the fleshy bits for the stuffing. Put the eggplants into a baking dish, and drizzle the insides with oil, then add some lemon juice. just a dash. For the stuffing, dice one large onion, 8 roma tomatoes, some garlic, the eggplant middles, season to taste. sometimes I add tomato paste if it needs more thickness. sometimes a dash of vinegar, sometimes a LOT of parsley, somtimes oregano. Once this is soft, scoop into the eggplants and roast. While they are roasting prepare a bechemel sauce. Ratios are about 2T butter, 2 T flour, 1ish cup milk, 1/4-1/2C parmesean, nutmeg. Melt the butter and flour, add milk slowly and stirring a lot, as it thickens add parmesean and nutmeg then pull of the heat. Once the eggplants are nearly done, pour this over the top and cook untill browned. MMMMM soo good!
rissotto - Short grain rice or abboriroroooo rice, about 1C, add onions, leeks, add wine, chicken/veg broth, keep adding liquid as it boils off, rice will become creamy. add parmesean and LOTS of parsley. oh so good could also add other veg or herbs as desired.
Guinness cake - This was my new recipe for thanksgiving. I got it from a chocolate cook book given to me by nem while i was in England. it’s a fantastic recipe! it was the first thing to disappear from the thanksgiving table. The cake goes like this:
50g cocoa powder
200ml guinness or other creamy stout
110 g very soft butter
275g dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
175 g plain flour
1/4tsp baking powder
1tsp baking soda
cream butter and sugar together thoroughly. gradually beat in eggs a little at a time. sift flour, b powder and soda together and reserve. measure cocoa into a bowl and gradually add stout. Next, add flour and cocoa stout into the egg mixture alternately a little at a time. Divide batter between two cake tins. (they said 8″ i used 9 and it was fine) Bake cakes 30-35 min till done (springy to touch and just pulling away from sides of the tin) they also recommended putting a circle of baking paper in the bottom of each tin, if you don’t have non stick, it might be recommended, i just put a light coat of butter on a non stick pan and it worked ok.
Guinness chocolate icing
110g icing sugar,
50g soft butter
2T stout
110 g dark chocolate (gently melted)
25g walnuts fine chopped and reserved
Combine sugar and butter, gradually adding stout, then melted chocolate. add nuts to HALF the mixture (the half that goes between layers) use the smoother un nutted frosting to frost the top! I liberally altered this recipe with more butter, and sugar and guinness. Dust 6-8 whole walnuts with coco then place on top of the cake for the final touch. ALSO I cheated and used coco and a bit of oil in place of the dark chocolate, since I didn’t have any
cranberry pie - Tried and true amazingness. 2C chopped cranberries, 1/2c chopped walnuts, 1/2c sugar. mix this together and put in to a pie tin. next make the top, with 2 eggs, 3/4C butter, 1 C sugar, 1 C flour 1T each almond and vanilla extract. mix butter and sugar first, then eggs, flour etc. Pour this on top of the cranberry mix and bake at 350 for about 40 min. it’s ooh so good!
Sweet chilli dip - sweet chilli sauce, and cream cheese, mix em together and serve with tortilla chips sooo easy!!
So there are my seven things! and Hanneke, I guess you’re now tagged since I don’t know any other bloggers! Can’t wait till finals are done, happy holidays!
Einsteineum
October 27th, 2007So my extra project for the week has been the EE halloween contest. My team put together an Einstein doll that had a head attached to a servo motor, and a web cam linked to a computer so the head could track objects it saw in the camera. We also recorded a lot of different messages for it to say to the audience, related to the object it saw. It turned out beautiful and we were all really pleased it it!!! however in transport from lab to the contest area, something happened to the router and our network went down!!! It was just a doll for a while, but then we got the image recognition software going so it would speak based on the object it saw, but the head wouldn’t turn. 
We had loads of fun, didn’t win anything but eh you can’t win them all!!!
Food and it’s mysterious contents
October 21st, 2007SO, my revelations of the day. This morning I was feeding my fish their fish food flakes and I thought to myself, my this food smells very fishy, how horrible would it be if I was really feeding them fish! that’s cannibalism! So I looked at the list of ingredients and to my surprise the first ingredient was “Whole Salmon”!!!! Followed by “halibut, cod, whole herring, krill, rockfish, shrimp, squid, clams and octopus. WOW!!! How did I not notice this before… I guess I don’t have vegetarian fish…
The next food revelation was regarding stew. I got a huge craving for this Norwegian stew called “Lapskaus” which apparently translates as “meat stew”. When Dan and I were in Norway last year, one of our more infamous moments was biking up the highest pass in Norway, to camp at the base of Norway’s tallest mountain and hike to the top the next afternoon! This event coincided with Dan’s metabolism kicking in and him deciding he needed to eat everything in sight! We hiked in what was supposed to be two days rations, but it turned out to be just an afternoon’s worth of rations given the new consumption ratios. We planned to make some pasta for dinner so we boiled at WHOLE box of spaghetti and devoured it. We were still hungry! Fortunately for us the hut was a staffed catered hut and their menu for the evening was Lapskaus. The most amazing stick to your insides hearty simple amazing stew! It was our savior.
Tonight I looked into my freezer and saw a small package of stew beef and thought fondly of that event and searched for a true Norwegian recipe. After reading several, my recipe is:
1lb cubed stew beef
5ish medium potatoes (large diced)
1/3 lb baby carrots halved
1/2-1ish C sliced cabbage
8-10 mushrooms quartered
1/2C bulgar (would have used barley but was out!)
1 large onion (don’t skimp)
5 cloves garlic
1.2 L water
salt, pepper, bullion cube to taste.
To make the stew, brown the beef on all sides, add the onion and garlic and a dash of olive oil and cook till they are golden. Add everything else. Bring to a boil turn ing the heat to med low letting it cook down for about 1.5-2 hrs. It is extremely close to what we had in Norway. and despite missing the ingredient of starved and exhausted it tastes fantastic!
So later in the evening my housemate turns to me and says he hasn’t eaten anything but a bagel since 10am, I offer him some stew, and I say I left the mushrooms in quarters so he could pick them out. While picking out the mushrooms he extracted a teabag from my soup!!!! We both DIE laughing for at least 10 min. I totally deny that I was so absent minded that I could have put that in the soup!!! I’m really dumbfounded as to how it got in. After several more laughs, and my housemate pointing out that there had formerly been at teabag in the spoon rest, it clicked. Somewhere in the repressed corner of my mind I remembered I had purposely been resting the spoon at the corner of the spoon rest (absentmindedly so as not to disturb the used tea bag with any mucky soup. Trust me it made sense when I wasn’t thinking about it!!!) As the soup thickened and continued resting the spoon on the clean corner of the spoon rest, at one point the tea bag must have stuck and went in as my “extra secret” ingredient! Wow.
That’s my story and I and my tea bag are sticking to it.
Wasting the weekend
October 15th, 2007So Grad school is apparently alot of work. Who would have thunk it! I’ve been living in lab a lot trying to finish problem sets. Fortunately freedom came with friday Friday night I went out with friends. Saturday slept a LOT, ran some errands, then listened to the red sox game for most of the afternoon, eventually doing a tiny bit of work. This morning, I looked at my boat a bit, though I can’t really make any progress until I get some help. Then went out again to run a few more errands. Opened one of the very sealed windows of the house to fit a large desk through a large window. Finally I settled down and read about *WhAlEs* <---annunciate as if speaking whale. I did some genuine work but after a few hours got distracted and found this fantastic video. and then realized I had drifted off topic, just a tiny bit…
Boat Update
October 7th, 2007Well unfortunately the boat building is becoming severely interrupted by school! Horrible! 
I actually have been enjoying school so far too. I think I’ve juggled around my classes now so it’s manageable. I will be taking probability and signal processing. It felt really weird the first day to be sitting in classrooms again, but that feeling quickly disappeared as I was scribbling down notes trying to pay attention to the lecture. I’m also enjoying the research aspect of it all too. I tentatively will be working on whale acoustics. It’s still all pretty preliminary, I’m mostly doing a literature review right now, and investigating several possible directions to take the project.
Today I finally got a little bit of time to work on the boat again. I was working to stitch together the hull. It was a bit complicated maneuvering the long planks of wood to align the holes for the copper wires which tack it into place. I took a few documenting photos, more in the gallery, but this is the workshop setup.
This was my most recent bit of progress today, stitching together the hull. Basic procedure is to use copper wires to tack the hull in place, then use epoxy in the seams to glue it more permanently and remove the wires. After that it’s going to be lots of epoxy, fiberglass and sanding, then some more wood working to put the deck on. It’s starting to look like a boat!!!!