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 stay out catching office hours
Some nights, I call up my mom
Some nights, I wish that I was on a meal plan
Some nights, I want to eat a ton
But when I come home, and I'm so hungry
Oh, Lord, I'm still not sure what to eat tonight
What is for dinner?
What is for dinner?
Most nights, I don't know anymore

These nights, it's incredibly convenient to have meals on hand that are ready to eat after just a minute or two in the microwave. Take your pick from the wide variety of microwave meal options including Lean Cuisine, Amy's, or even Hot Pocket, but one that provides a real bang for your buck is - you guessed it - Kirkland Signature. In a style reminiscent of the Asian mother, Costco sells soup stored in yogurt-style containers that can be frozen indefinitely before being thawed and consumed. The tortilla soup is my favorite; it's delicious and provides two things often absent in my diet: meat and a variety of vegetables. In addition to tomatoes, it's made with celery, carrots, and corn.

Kirkland Signature soups come in packs of two 32-ounce containers, which make about six meals total. Eat this soup with toast, or better yet, tortillas, and your meal count will of course increase. The simplicity of this meal lifts the weight of the dinner problem, leaving me with the freedom to make some quesadillas on the side.

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 Curry for another day), and requires only eight ingredients, two of which are oil and salt. It took me thirty-five minutes from ingredients-on-the-counter to fragrant-curry-steaming-on-the-stove. While this is a significant chunk of time, for seven servings, it divides into only five minutes per meal, which is pretty good. If you like to think in terms of money, seven meals at your friendly neighborhood Chipotle would cost about 7 x $8 = $56, whereas the ingredients for this curry cost no more than $10. That's $46 saved in one week!

Coconutty* Chicken Curry

*Yes, coconutty. More so than just coconut chicken curry, this curry boasts an intense offering of delicate coconut flavor.

Makes 7 cups of curry.

Ingredients
olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 an onion
3 chicken thighs
salt
1 Tbsp. curry powder
3 cups frozen vegetable mix (carrots, corn, peas, green beans)
can of coconut cream (can substitute coconut milk)

Optional Ingredients
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. minced ginger
1 Tbsp. turmeric
1 tsp. cayenne pepper

Equipment
cutting board (preferably large)
chef's knife
large nonstick saucepan or wok
can opener
wooden turner/spoon for stirring
ladle for serving

Method
Mince the garlic and start to sautee it in some oil in the pan on medium-high. While this is heating up, dice (half of) the onion and add to the pan. Cook until the onion begins to turn translucent, stirring occasionally. While the onions and garlic are cooking, slice the chicken against the grain. Add the chicken and salt liberally.

Cooking the chicken dry - before adding the coconut cream and vegetables - allows it to brown via the Malliard reaction, developing a caramelized crust. To amplify the Malliard reaction, you can add in the sugar here. Once the chicken has browned, add the coconut cream and curry powder, and if desired, ginger, turmeric, and cayenne for an extra kick. Mix thoroughly and bring to a boil. Add the veggies and return to a boil, then simmer until they've cooked. Add salt to taste.

Serve with rice. I packed half of mine up with rice in individual containers to take to campus for lunch and stored the rest in one large container to eat for dinner.

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 Law School, topped with graduating tied for first in her class at Columbia Law School. At Harvard back in the fifties, she was among just nine women in a class with around five hundred men. She had fallen in love at Cornell and married right after, so she was working through law school and raising a family simultaneously. Her husband, Marty, she says, was the "first man I met who cared that I had a brain." He developed cancer during her time at Harvard and overcame it, but between taking care of him and their young daughter as well as doing her own coursework, two hours of sleep was all she got from night to night. Nevertheless, she says that "meeting Marty was the best thing that happened to me."

Ruth and Marty had quite different personalities. While Marty was extroverted, described by friends as the life of the party, Ruth characterizes her younger self as "sober" and even "recessive." Both friends and coworkers point out her lack of participation in small talk. While she didn't put herself out there much, she definitely poured herself into her work. One of her law partners gushed over the reports she wrote, in awe of how she thought through every word - every single word.

When sixty years ago, not one law firm in all of New York City would hire this woman, it makes me happy that she sits on the highest court in the nation today.

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 of single-serving sweets for the many aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mom's side of the family. Every Christmas, we spend hours in the kitchen, buried in butter and sugar.

This year, for my dad's side of the family, we made two desserts: a gingerbread layer cake and classic pecan pie with a twist - a layer of chocolate.

And for my mom's side of the family, we prepared baklava, blueberry cream cheese pie (a softer, no-bake take on cheesecake), and more gingerbread cake.

It's fun to pick out new recipes and decorate them every year, but without fail, by the time all the dessert is packed up in containers in the car, I feel like I never want to touch a sugary treat again.

It's a good thing that that feeling goes away by dinnertime.

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 the button by your front door is wired to a little box somewhere inside your house - mine was on the wall in the hallway. The sound is played from that box. The "ding" is a higher note produced by striking the smaller key, and the "dong" is a lower note produced by striking the wider key. The mechanical act of striking the keys is presumably done by electromagnets (if you're familiar with electronic components, think relay). The two white plungers (the official name, although I think they'd be better off being called hammers or mallets, like the implements used to strike actual xylophones) move up/down to hit the keys and make the ringing sound.

The reason I had to take the doorbell down was to paint our hallway; once the paint had dried, back up it went.

Still functional, hooray!

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. At Caltech, about 90% of our exams are take-home, which is wonderful and horrible at the same time: it means that we can take them whenever and wherever we want, but also that professors can make them however long they want. Some finals are upwards of six hours long. I am fortunate not to have experienced this atrocity.

I thought my finals week was looking pretty chill until I forced myself to sit down and make a list of everything I need to do:

• Math final: 2 hr final + review 9 lectures * 40 min/lecture = 8 hrs
• History paper: 12 hrs (I'm a slow writer)
• PCB (printed circuit board) class project: 4 hrs
• Signals and Systems assignment: 5 hrs
• Biodevices project and writeup: 4 hrs
• Research PCB: 1 hr schematic + 3 hrs PCB = 4 hrs

My time estimates are conservative, but yikes, this comes out to a total of 46 hours. I'd planned to spend Thursday at an amusement park and Friday packing, which leaves me four days: Sunday - Wednesday. Guess I won't be as bored next week as I expected...

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 time. Photograph an event for Caltech Associates? Of course. Go play pick-up soccer? Can I even say no? It all stacks up, with homework now just the cherry on top, and soon life becomes a nine-to-midnight job and I'm in desperate need of a fifteen-minute break for dumplings bobbing in a bowl of steamy ginger broth.

Especially if it can be made in another fifteen low-maintenance minutes.

Comfort Dumpling Soup

Makes one comfort-sized serving.

Ingredients
2 c. water
1 tsp. chicken Better than Boullion
1 tsp. minced ginger
1 head baby bok choy
15-20 rice noodles
1 egg
5-10 frozen dumplings (I like Costco's chicken cilantro mini wonton)

Method
Put the water in a small pot to boil, and stir in the chicken boullion and minced ginger. Chop the baby bok choy, first cutting off the part nearest the root, then slicing it in about 0.5" pieces all the way to the tip of the leaves. Separate the stalk pieces from the leaf pieces, and add them to the pot since they'll take longer to cook. Cover and heat on high. Come back in five or ten minutes once the water has reached a rolling boil and add the noodles. Stir. Leave the lid off and lower the heat to medium. When the noodles have about two minutes left to cook, crack in the egg and give the broth a swirl. Finally, add the frozen wonton and bok choy leaves. Cook for the last few minutes and then pour into a bowl. Enjoy as soon as it's cool enough to eat!

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 Los Poblanos serves one dish - carne asada with guacamole, cilantro, onions, and salsa - in four different ways, Melissa explains. First, of course, are tacos, the chopped steak piled high on homemade donut-sized corn tortillas and topped with a splash of guacamole. Quesadillas and mulitas both have larger tortillas and are filled also with melted cheese, but the former are folded and the latter are stacked and smaller. Finally, vampiros are made with a crispy tortilla shell. Standing in line, we watch the tortillas being made. First, one woman takes a big chunk of masa from one of several huge cloth-covered bowls, kneads it, and breaks it into even pieces. These are stamped into flat disks and tossed onto a hot griddle to be peeled up and flipped over by calloused fingertips, after which they puff up like little whoopee cushions. Finally, the chewy, flavorful tortillas are filled with meat and toppings for the next hungry customer.

I order two tacos, one mulita, and an agua de jamaica, one of their aguas frescas (literally: fresh waters). It's a vivid purple, fruity, floral drink with just the right amount of sweetness. Everything is so good that we rave and sigh about it all the way back to the car, and then some on the drive home. The evening has been all sunshine and rainbows–except for the realization that I've been calling mulitas quesadillas my entire life.

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. The measurement log on my command prompt has frozen, a mysterious error message its last words before breaking off in the middle of the night. I start it up again, but there's no way it'll be finished by the time I promised my coworker, who needs the temperature chamber I'm using. I think the error might be caused by our server momentarily losing connection, so I add a workaround in the code.

9:20 a.m. Next stop: The breakroom! I get my daily kombucha and an apricot and head to my desk. I open my computer and scan my to-do list for something to keep me occupied while the measurements run... To be honest, this week, it's pretty sparse. I remote into the lab computer to monitor the measurements and start this post.

10:00 a.m. My deskmate, the project manager, arrives, and I relay the gory story of my indoor soccer team's 12-2 defeat this week. He's a sharp-eyed soccer analyst and always wants to hear how we're doing.

10:45 a.m. I spot the coworker with whom I'm sharing lab equipment and gather up the guts to tell her about having to delay her measurements for the third time. She takes it graciously, bless her.

11:00 a.m. I get some surprising news about the activity I was coordinating for this fall's Frosh Camp from the deans. In particular, it's been replaced. Now, I'm trying to figure out if we want to hold it back on campus after Frosh Camp instead.

12:30 p.m. Lunchtime! I heat up my chickpea dumplings and sit with my coworker and another friend. We talk about Mexican food, siblings, and Texas, and suddenly I miss home.

1:00 p.m. Back to work. With warm food in my stomach, I'm starting to feel sleepy. Thank goodness for standing desks and caffeine.

2:00 p.m. Only half an hour until the measurements are done, but I go listen to another intern's final presentation - he's returning to school next week. This summer, he developed a module for dealing with data from a specific part of the sensor: reading it from the sensor, storing it in a database, and viewing it.

3:00 p.m. The automated tests are done, and I spend the rest of the afternoon post-processing and plotting the data and also running manual measurements. I should be (finally) done with the temperature chamber by morning.

5:30 p.m. I update my to-do list with completed and newly-opened tasks, pack up my things, and head out. Most of my coworkers resort to more of an eleven-to-seven schedule to mitigate long commutes, but living so close, I like to go in and get out early so that I can enjoy my evenings.

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, are as basic as the list itself: peanut butter, brown sugar, and eggs. And boy, are they good. They make peanut butter seem light and airy, with a texture like meringues. They're perfect for spontaneous dorm cooking, which hardly ever has a full pantry of baking supplies to work with.

Three-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen
Makes about 30 cookies

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups light brown sugar
2 eggs
1 3/4 cups creamy peanut butter (equivalent to one 15-16 oz jar)

And if you're feeling fancy-schmancy, you can take these cookies from dourmet to gourmet with:
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
coarse-grained sea salt, to finish

Method

Beat the light brown sugar and eggs together with a fork in a medium bowl. Whip it until you get some serious bubbles, because since these cookies don't have baking soda or powder, this is where they get their rise. Mix in the peanut butter (and if desired, vanilla) until completely smooth. Freeze the dough for 10 minutes or so - this makes the cookies easier to shape. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350 F. Once the dough is firm enough, use a spoon and your hands to form cherry-sized balls and set them on a greased pan. For the best cookie height, freeze the pan for another 10 minutes before baking. Sprinkle with salt, if desired, and then bake for 14-15 minutes, until you can see some browning on the tops. They will be soft right out of the oven, so let rest for a few minutes before transferring to a plate. As Deb notes, these are best when cool, so "the different textures (crisp outside, soft inside) can set up."