Caltech

Dourmet Dishes: Easiest Tortilla Soup (aka Microwave Meals)

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in an apartment kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech. Living off-campus, I'm all too familiar with the stupid feeling of staring into an open fridge, having just rummaged through the shelves, trying to decide what to eat for dinner. I just want to find something that takes minimal effort to get on the table. It's late, and I'm tired, because Some nights, I... Read more →

Dourmet Dishes: Coconutty Chicken Curry

I'm trying to get consistent with meal prep this term. Busy weeknights usually find me floundering at the thought of *actually* cooking and resorting to the straightforward but actually somewhat time-consuming fried-egg-and-rice. Instead, I want to avoid the dilemma altogether and cook a large quantity of real food once a week. Today, the first day of winter term, I kicked off this resolution today by making seven servings of chicken curry. This curry is made from scratch (save the Golden... Read more →

RBG: One Really Badass Grandma

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, affectionately known as the Notorious RBG, is a soft-spoken, eighty-five year old woman who stands just an inch over five feet tall. She's a widow, grandmother, and also a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Plane rides are where I catch up on the latest movies, and on my way back to campus from winter break, I started watching a documentary on this extraordinary woman. She has quite the resume: attending Cornell and Harvard... Read more →

Merry Bake-mas!

In my family, Christmas is all about baking. And then baking mas. They might quibble with the idea of the holiday being reduced to a celebration of the stomach, but in reality, that's how it goes. Both sides of the family always put us on dessert duty, which means that my mom, sister, and I spend one day preparing a couple posh centerpieces for the Christmas festivities on my dad's side of the family, and another making dozens upon dozens... Read more →

Disassembling a Doorbell

Ever wondered what's inside a doorbell, what black magic produces those hauntingly cheery chimes in house to house across America? And how did the onomatopoeia become "ding-dong," anyway? Before disassembling the one at my house, I thought the tune was just played by a speaker, but turns out it's fancier than that: the doorbell is actually live music. Turns out a doorbell is more like a door-xylophone - it has two keys and hammers to strike them. A signal from... Read more →

Finals Week Work

Tomorrow is the last day of class in fall term!!!!!!!! But next week I have forty-six hours of work!!!!!! Finals week can go either way. I've had some that were the most relaxed seven days of of the term, with free time to hang out with friends and go do fun things in Pasadena. Other times, it's made me the most sleep-deprived I've been all term, struggling to balance time spent debugging final projects, studying, and slogging through four-hour exams.... Read more →

Dourmet Dishes: Comfort Dumpling Soup

This is the part of a series of posts on food that can be prepared in an apartment kitchen amidst the craziness of life at Caltech. The typical Caltech evening is (a) cold, (b) cortisol-inducing, and (c) chaotic. It's cold because California's just weird like that. It raises my cortisol levels because Caltech's just weird like that, and it's chaotic because there are far too many fun things to do. Call my parents? It's been too long since the last... Read more →

Comfort Tacos

My friend Melissa knows what she likes. Window shopping at Prada and Gucci in Beverly Hills? No thank you, she says, but she'll take us to a "really good taco place" instead. "It's authentic. Most authentic." After a half hour's hazy highway drive, we park on the street and walk a block to the auto shop parking lot hosting our dinner spot, Tacos Los Poblanos #1 Estilo Tijuana. The line snakes almost all the way across the parking lot. Tacos... Read more →

Day in the Life as a Tech Company Intern

It's a Wednesday at work, and while I wait for some measurements to run, let me tell you about a day on the job at my internship at a sensor company. 8:50 a.m. I roll up to the bayside office complex on my bike, winded. I just can't keep pace with those speedy little automobiles. I climb up to the fourth floor and head straight to the lab to check on the measurements I started last evening. 9:00 a.m. Crap.... Read more →

Three-Ingredient Peanut-Butter Cookies

I'm usually suspicious of recipes with click-bait titles like this one. "Simple" and "easy" and "N-ingredient" baked goods have been around longer than click-bait itself, masquerading as genuine homemade desserts in my grandmother's cookbooks and on Betty Crocker's website today. Consisting of ingredients as authentically American as cake mix + pudding + oreos + jello + whipped cream, these recipes seem like they'd be as shockingly sweet as they are simple. The ingredients for these cookies, on the other hand,... Read more →