Flan Flan Flan!

So much has happened in the past couple days, my head is still spinning from everything. To add to my numerous less than 24 hour stints in Chicago, I went home on Thursday evening so I could see my sister off on Friday as she heads out into the great wilderness of New Zealand. It was so bittersweet to see her packing, to see a years worth of her future life being packed into a single suitcase. I've been walking a thin line of emotional breakdown since I closing, and seeing my sister go was incredibly sad. Even more stressful was the missing of the flight, the hours on standby, and the hours driving back to school randomly bursting into tears... i don't know when i became such a baby, but i'll miss my sister a lot. She's grown a lot and i think this year abroad will be an amazing time for her. I know a year flies by quickly, but still-- she's somewhere out there, several hours in the future, and i can't bother her when i'm bored in lab. it's strange to see her go... my baby sister all alone half a world away!!! I'm also exhausted from travel and working on the house and working towards this soulcrushing degree. my heart aches for a weekend to rest. but that's besides the point. i should stop whining and think and talk about food as i sit here in a restless state of insomnia.

Flan is something that i have been dying to make for years... but for some reason never made it. something about flan and it's delicious caramely sugary goodness dripping over the custardy creamy goodness that i so love.... i was afraid that if i made it, i would ruin it and that once i ruined it, my desire to make it will die forever... which is mildly dramatic... but in my head, it was all true. Something in me finally decided that i needed to venture into flan making. Forced to push the fear of failure aside, my case of less than a dozen eggs came out of the fridge and sacrificed themselves for the greater good of my tastebuds.

Flan

8 egg yolks
2 eggs
2/3 can sweetened condensed milk
1 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

Caramel topping

1/2 c sugar
1/8 c water

• Preheat oven to 350 F
  
• In a small saucepan, heat the sugar and water until the sugar becomes a nice golden brown color.
• Divide carmelized sugar into 6 or so ramekins and set aside to cool
• While sugar is cooling, set a pot of water to boil
  
• In a mixing bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, 2 eggs and the liquids (this is too amazingly simple i almost didn't believe it) mix everything together until creamy and smooth
• Pour egg mixture into ramekins and cover tightly with foil
• Place ramekins in a baking pan. When the water starts to boil, pour into the baking pan until the water level comes halfway up the ramekin
• Bake in oven for 30-40 min until the custard is set
• Cool completely and store in the fridge

My Handy Assistant

Yum... Burnt Sugar

Out of the Oven!

OMG Flan!

But in the meantime, what else has happened-- random bouts of activity have ensued, with long bike rides in the hot hot heat, swimming laps before storms roll in, and playing hours of tennis before being eaten alive by bugs....

My labmate defended her thesis today (well, i guess really it was yesterday) and it's always encouraging to see someone finish. it's also heartbreaking to see all the work a thesis defense leaves out. It seems as though a thesis defense is merely a project defense, where years of work and hours of agony are condensed into a single graph, a single blot, a single gel.... A PhD is a difficult road, and having the tenacity and patience to walk that road takes a special kind of person. Maybe I can learn a few things from her if I can look past other things that have kept me blind. Maybe one day, my jaded grad student self will finally find peace within failure and maybe one day, I too will graduate and sign a champagne bottle that my advisor will keep on her shelf. Maybe one day i'll finally grow up and have something that resembles a normal life, one where you don't wake up planning and anticipating your day where you don't spend your lunch hour troubleshooting experiments that have been failing for months, where going home at 9 is no longer considered kind of early, but rather late, where you can go to bed without having anxiety about the next day's experiments, where you can spend a weekend not working and not feel guilt about it, where you can take a vacation and not spend weeks trying to salvage what you left behind...

or maybe one day, it'll be my profession, and i'll love it as much as i did two years ago.

it has been a difficult year, but i can feel it in my bones, deep within-- 2010 will be a good one. a big one and a good one. and by 2010, i mean 2010 extending into most of 2011.

til next time.