Prelim Madness

A PhD is a long road. how do you describe it to someone who's not pursuing the same degree in a similar field?

My friend has a great analogy for what med school is like: imagine you are a sponge. you are an eager and dry sponge waiting to learn and absorb everything that is taught to you. but you're standing in front of a fire hose and when classes start, that fire hose is turned on to full blast and there you are, a helpless sponge trying to absorb all you can... and when the spray is finished, you're clinging on to every drop you can.... so you can pass (pass mind you.... not pass with flying colors....) your exams, wring yourself out and stand in front of that fire hose again.

postgraduate education is a test of endurance, you're thrown into a pool and told to swim a million laps and when you're done, you exit the pool with an md, a jd, an mba... whatever. as an academic research graduate student, you're thrown into an ocean with maybe a small small flotation device that can barely keep you above water and you are told by whoever dropped you off in the middle of the ocean, "find your way to land" and they leave you. floundering, cold, alone, and very very hungry and sad...

yet we still... keep going... and we hit our milestones. and every milestone you hit is inspiration for everyone around you... except yourself... because you just spent the past month preparing and are too tired to really appreciate the joys of taking that next step.

(thank you PhD comics for figures!)

figure 1. styleized timeline of graduate progress

Figure 2. salaries :-(

in our department, the preliminary exam is where you present your proposed thesis work... for me, it was right around "friend from undergrad who didn't go to grad school shows of his/her new BMW" (fig 1). that's already happened to me but insert prelim exam there. we write and propose the work that we will be doing for our thesis research and present it to a committee of faculty who are there to judge you and your advisor and the project you are saying that you will do. mindyou, it's already been three years and you wonder... what the hell have i been doing this whole time... if i'm JUST getting around to putting my thesis project together.....???? and then you realize... it just took THAT long to even assemble a project that was worth pursuing. the previous years were spent adjusting to the lab, figuring out how to do things, figuring out what you're doing with yourself, doubting the fact that you belong in academia, questioning your career path, and being lost in the endless dark tunnel called "grad school."

it is a truly lonely and solitary endeavor... it's hard to tear people away from their research.. your future colleagues and friends... it's hard to network when people are ball and chained to their bench. but you find ways to meet fellow embittered grad students and you cope together in your jaded haze.... and you manage with your tiny salary (Fig 2). it's far from glamorous but it's worth knowing that you have flexibility to pursue your interests (as long as they're in line with your advisor's interests). remember... we're here to be life long learners and to know how to ask the right questions when given an impossible problem.

the impossible problem presented to me on Thursday: how can i get my thesis committee to pass me on my prelim?

i asked the right questions: what kinds of people are they? what time is the prelim scheduled? what are their interests? have i done my lit review? is my paper spell checked?

and i checked my materials, wrote up a protocol and began my experiment. which yielded amazing and delicious data points that were figure worthy (see below).

Peach Apple Walnut cake

1 cup diced gala apples
1 cup peaches (i had some fuzzy white ones)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted, cooled
1 large egg
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

• Preheat oven to 375°F.
  
• Butter and flour 8x8x2-inch baking pan.
  
• Throw together cut fruit, sugar, butter and egg in large bowl.
  
• Add flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt.
  
• Add chopped walnuts, mix thoroughly. Transfer mixture to prepared pan.
  
• Bake for 35 min until tester toothpick comes out clean

so, the cake... smelled amazing. but i was a little saddened to see that it was a little too moist when we dug into it. sad. but tasty. (pictures to come soon)

i also made the salted caramel thumbprints and cut up some fruit.

results: pass.

the anxiety of presenting in front of four incredibly smart and competent individuals on a topic that they are relatively unfamiliar with, and convincing them that it's an interesting project... is almost unbearable.

however, when else would you get four faculty who are experts in their field, providing input and devoting all their attention on a student and their project all at once? it was almost magical... to be given their blessing, the encouraging words, and their smiles, to see their support and their suggestions...

so i guess it's time to START my research.... the past three years were only warmup.

Panna Cotta with Lemon Blueberry topping

I have never eaten panna cotta. Why I have never eaten or tired to eat panna cotta was always a mystery to me. Was it a texture thing? Was I afraid of what the consistency would be? Maybe it was because I never had cute glassware to put them in. People would post pictures of their panna cotta masterpieces in adorable glassware, the perfect snooth white gel overlayed with the perfect colorful fruit accompaniment, all set up with tiny matching spoon and cute napkins on a perfect platter, ready to be eaten. After browsing for years and seeing these pictures I decided 1. I NEED cute glassware! and 2. at this rate, a panna cotta would never emerge from my kitchen and I would be doomed to wonder for the rest of my life.

But I was invited to a dinner party. I had two hours. And I needed to whip up something quick and delicious. And what I had wanted to make would have taken a substantially longer time. So enter: Panna cotta! with a blueberry and lemon topping!

Blueberry Lime Panna Cotta

Panna Cotta
2 cups heavy cream (or half-and-half if you want to cut calories)
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1 packets powdered gelatin
3 tablespoons cold water

Lightly grease 8 ramekins or cups with oil.

In a large saucepan, heat cream and sugar until sugar fully dissolves. Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla extract.

In a small bowl, combine powdered gelatin and cold water. Let sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Then, after the gelatin has set, stir into the cream and sugar mixture. Stir until the gelatin completely dissolves into the cream.

Blueberry Lime Sauce
2 cups (1 pint) blueberries
2 limes
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cornstarch

To begin, zest each lime. Make sure the zest is a fine zest. You may the slice the zest into smaller pieces with a knife if this is not the case. Take one of the zested limes and juice it. Set aside.


In a large saucepan, combine the blueberries, lime zest, the juice of one lime, and the sugar. Simmer over medium heat for 10 minutes to allow the blueberries to soften and release their juices. Stir occasionally. When cooked, add the cornstarch to the sauce to thicken.

Cheaters

Cheating is not good. The only way cheating can be good is if it is the form of an amazingly edible, delicious desert. Enter: Berry Trifle.

my go-to quick fix cheater dessert. it's light, fluffy, delicious, and fruity... a perfect summer dessert.

BERRY TRIFLE

8 in angel food cake
1 pack instant vanilla pudding mix
1 tub cool whip
1/2 pint blueberries
1/2 pint black berries
1 pint strawberries
sugar

Save some blueberries and strawberries for garnishing :-)

• Let the cool whip thaw in the fridge for a couple hours
  
• Wash and cut strawberries and blackberries into small pieces (usually halves for the blackberries and eighths for strawberries), wash blueberries and toss in a large bowl.
  
• sprinkle the fruit with two tablespoons sugar and two tablespoons of water and mix
• Let the berries sit at room temperature for an hour or two until delicious juices start to come out
• prepare the instant pudding (directions were two cups of cold milk with a packet of instant pudding mix, let sit 5 min)
• while the pudding is setting, tear of large hunks of angel food cake and line a 8x12 pan
• scoop generous heaping spoonfuls of fruit over the angel food cake, letting the juices soak into the cake
• scoop the pudding over the fruit and cake in equally generous, if not more generous, heaps and smooth out to cover the entire cake

Hellooooo Pudding!

• over the pudding, scoop and smooth out the cool whip until the layer of pudding is no longer visible

There it goesssssss

Sea of Coolwhip

• wash the strawberries that were set aside for garnishing and slice thinly. decorate the cool whip, toss some blueberries on top, and refrigerate for hours.

Berry Topping... mmmm

• eattttttt
  

and because i am a glutton for fresh looking foods, here are more pictures :-)

Onions and cherry tomatoes for my stew

til next time, eat. a lot

exhausted

i am so exhausted from life. i need a break from everything...

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.

Salted Caramel Thumbprints

life is somehow still in disarray. one would think that as soon as everything has been moved, settling in would be easy... but it's not as easy as i thought it would be. I'm still unpacking things and while it seems as though bits and pieces of my life are back in order, a huge majority of things are still sitting in the garage, waiting to be taken care of. The realtor stopped by the other day and marveled at how different the house looks now compared to what it looked like and the condition it was in when i bought it.

in between house stuff (taking a short break from remodeling and fix 'er upping) i've ventured back into the land of exercise and activities. biking everywhere has been an amazing step up from driving everywhere, and i can't wait to start the long trips out on the country roads. but, for now... the kitchen is still being warmed with delicious cookies. I found this recipe here and i thought they were worth trying out. and um, they totally were.


Salted Caramel Thumbprint Cookies

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter
¼ white sugar
¼ light brown sugar
1 egg separated
1 teaspoon of vanilla

12 unwrapped nibs
1/8 + splash cup heavy cream

1/2 cup almonds – chopped, lightly toasted

Toasted Chopped Almonds

• Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
• Add light brown sugar, egg yolk and vanilla extract. Beat until just combined. Set batter aside.
• In a separate bowl whisk flour and salt.
• Slowly add flour mixture to batter while beating on low until just incorporated. Do not over beat or the dough will become sticky.
• Form into one inch balls and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
• While the dough balls are cooling, beat egg white until frothy.
• Removed chilled dough and dip into egg whites first then roll into nuts.

Rounded Dough Rolled in Almonds

• Using either your thumb or a round ended tool, press the rounded dough to create an indentation.
• Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove from baking sheet and cool on rack.

Caramel Sauce:

20 Kraft caramel squares
¼ cup heavy whipping cream

Nips preMelting

- Place caramel squares and cream in a sauce pan and melt over low heat for approximately 7-8 minutes.
- Caramel sauce is ready when it is free of any solids.

Assembly
- Fill indentation of thumbprint cookies.
- Sprinkle with sea salt.

Filled with Caramel

Sprinkled with Salt

These cookies were delicious. They were a wonderful balance of flavors and textures, with the hint of salt, the sweet from the caramel and the toasted nutty almond flavor mixed with the soft cookie, the crunchy almonds, and gooey caramel. great with coffee, better with friends. I'll be making a second batch of these... you know... just to make sure the first wasn't some abnormal fluke in the kitchen :-)

Moving Woes and Trashy Hoes

Sunday was a big moving day. After living at one place for two years, you really accumulate a lot of crap... esp if the place came completely empty with only a fridge and a stove and a hall light. My kitchen cabinets threw up their contents onto the countertop and then my countertop contents threw themselves up into boxes... and then my boxes threw their contents up in my new place.... and now my life is in major disarray.

Moving has been a huge stress. remodeling has also been a huge stress.... and not having D around to help has made the stress even more stressful... but I survived! and i'm almost done moving! and the house is almost ready to be lived in! it's been an incredible stressful couple weeks... but now i think i can say that most of the move is done and i the best friends in the world. once i organize my furniture and finish cleaning the bathroom and floors... maybe it will be liveable. my life is still packed in boxes... i've lost my charger, and spare key, i lost so many papers and important documents... life is a little bit in disarray.

fiona's been pretty good about the move. she's still a little nervous around the house, but she likes to hide and sit on the bed and eat her food... at least she's not pooping everywhere out of anger.

one thing i noticed last night before i went to bed, was the silence. at my old place, you could hear the train every hour (i lived not far from the tracks), you could hear frogs and crickets all night, and around 4 in the morning, sometimes sooner, the birds would start chirping. the new place has nothing. the occasional helicopter flies overhead to go to the hospital, sometimes i hear cars drive by with deep pounding bass, sometimes i hear birds... but mostly... i hear the house. it's a little bit sad that i'll be away from all those familiar sounds, but i guess it'll be nice to be a 10 minute bike ride away from lab... instead of a 30 min bike ride.... and miles of high speed and no shoulder.

here, meet my lawn mower:



the thing is huge.