I'm sitting at Applesauce Tea House drinking some turkish coffee with extra cardomom (EXTRA CARDOMOM!). The owner of this place is a great guy. Cassandra and I talked a bunch with him one day and he gave us all the Flagstaff gossip. We asked him why he named the place Applesauce, and he said it was because he's originally from New York City (the big apple) so everyone just started calling him "Applesauce." He serves waffles and waffle sandwiches--that's right, you can get ham and cheese on waffle here. I have yet to try any waffle dishes, but I'm especially intrigued by the vegetarian waffle with onion sauce.
So the last week and a half have been probably the hardest I've ever worked, and I'm not getting paid for it. I work in an amazingly beautiful place, and even out in the middle of Hart Prairie with the horny toads and prairie smoke and the view of the San Francisco peaks, I just couldn't help but thinking "What the hell am I doing pushing this cart full of plants over rocks and bunch grasses. Why am I here, I'm not getting ANY MONEY for this."
Ehh, I feel a little better now, although the work has not ended. So I transplanted around 600 plants last week while my adviser and his wife were around, and Cassandra and I dug up 120 more just yesterday. Tomorrow I will plant them all by myself (Cassandra is camping this weekend--a well deserved break for her.)
I seriously cannot wait to stop digging holes and start measuring some shit.
Here are some pretty things I've seen.
Earthstars!
Jelly fungus!
Primrose ready to bloom. Pretty foliage, eh?
Good lichen and a potentilla(?)
Ok, that's it for now. Expect the entries to come a little more often now that I have a new camera.
My camera has stopped working today. I can turn it on, and view pictures and even take pictures. The only problem is all the pictures turn out solid black. The lens is no longer seeing anything. The good news is that in the process of fiddling with it, I found a couple of lost pictures that were on the internal memory that I didn't know my camera had. One of them is a good one of Lyndsay from newyears. So, I haven't decided yet if I'm going to spend money on a new camera quite yet, so I'm not sure if you will get to see any more pictures any time soon.
I'm in Flagstaff, AZ for the summer doing research. I'm staying at this research station with my labmate Cassandra. We drove down together in my car and arrived on Saturday night. Cassandra's dad, Karlton met us here and is staying with us for a week. He came to help out with getting our projects started, but as you'll soon see, we haven't been able to put him to work too much.
So on Sunday we just drove around to look at my sites. It sure is beautiful around here and the trees smell like butterscotch!
The first thing I saw when we drove into the parking lot was the goofiest looking squirrel I've ever seen.
They're called Abert squirrels and they eat the tips of the lower ponderosa pine branches, which makes them look more like lollipops than xmas trees.
Research has been very slow. We're here very early aparently. It snowed like 6 inches on Tuesday night. The gilia plants are just barely starting to bolt, and they haven't really been browsed yet, so there isn't a whole lot I can do yet.
I purchased my soymilk maker from BigCrazyStore via their ebay store for a total of $39.94 with shipping included. The reason I got such a good deal (most soymilk makers are around $100) was because this one was used. It's in great condition though.
The box included an instruction manual, a recipe book, a measure cup, a tooth-brush thingie for cleaning the filter, a soft scrubby pad for cleaning, a tub for soaking the dirty parts in, a power cord, and of course the soymilk maker. The soymilk maker is basically three parts, its got the pitcher part, which is just a metal pitcher. The top lifts off and has the computer and the motor in it as well as the heating element and a couple of sensors. The filter basket on the bottom can be removed to reveal the blades.
How it works: Soak one scoop of dry soybeans in water for 8-12 hrs. Then with the filter basket screwed on, pour the soybeans though the chute in the top. The reason you can't just put them in the basket and screw them on is because they basically fill the basket and you won't be able to work the blade down in there (trust me, I tried it). Sometimes the soybeans get backed up in this little chute and you have to shake them down, which would be my main criticism of this device.
After adding the soybeans, just fill the pitcher part with water up to the line (1.8L) and lower the top onto it. You plug it in, press a button, and in about 20 min you have fresh, hot soymilk! It even plays some sort of Chinese song when its done!
To clean up, you place the whole top part into the tub that is provided and fill it with water to soak it. Then you gotta remove the filter basket and toss out the soybean sludge (which is a great texture, by the way) and scrub out the tiny holes in the filter with the toothbrush thing. You can't submerge the whole top since it has electrical parts, but you can run them under water and wipe it off with the scrubby pad provided.
The soymilk is great! A little bit of grit on the bottom, but so much better than store bought soymilk in my opinion. It's good hot with sugar, or cold in cereal. I don't add sugar to the whole batch, since its good plain in sweet cereal.
I got my soymilk maker that I bought on ebay in the mail today! What a great earth day present to myself! I promise I will post a more detailed entry once I've made my first batch (beans are soaking as I type this).
I first had these at Far Leaves in Berkeley and thought, "Hey, I could probably make this." So I did, and I love them! They're good served with any green tea, or black for that matter. The only problem is every time I've made them, I've forgotten to write down the recipe--specifically I always forget how much tea to put in! So this time I took notes and took pictures. I basically just modified a spiced biscotti recipe but instead of cinnamon and cloves and all that, I add ground up jasmine tea leaves. I've also reduced the vanilla a teensy bit.
Ingredients:
2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour 1tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 1/4 tsp salt 1 1/2 Tbsp ground jasmine tea or the contents of about 6 tea bags*. 2/3 c sugar 2 large eggs 2 large egg yolks 1/4-1/2 tsp vanilla*
*Note: So I actually failed this time around and with only 1 Tbsp of jasmine tea (about 4 tea bags) the biscotti were not jasminey enough. It might be because I usually use looseleaf tea that has been ground up in a mortar and pestle (or you could use a spice grinder). I'd guess that 1 1/2 Tbsp might be enough, although you might want to try 2 Tbsp. Also, the original recipe I modified this from calls for 1/2 tsp vanilla. I reduced it so I could taste the jasmine more. It's up to you.
First, mix all the dry ingredients besides the sugar and including the tea. Then, whisk the eggs and sugar together and add the vanilla.
Fold the dry ingredients into the wet. This will make a dry, crumbly dough (which makes sense because the only liquid is egg!).
Form the dough into two flat loaves on a greased cookie sheet. Those green specks are the tea leaves. There should be more of them.
Bake at 350 for 25 min or until the edges begin to brown. Let cool for 10 min. Meanwhile, reduce the oven temp to 325. Once the loaves are cooled, slice them on the diagonal and place the slices on their sides back on the cookie sheet. Pop them back in the oven for around 15 min, flipping them halfway through.
So this weekend turned out to be pretty nice despite the craziness of unnoficial St. Patrick's day and all the work I have to do for next week.
Friday was unofficial. For those of you who are not from around here, this is a holiday that was invented by local bar owners to compensate for the fact that St. Patrick's day always falls on spring break, when many students are away from campus. To celebrate unofficial, students drink all day and disrupt classes. The lecture I TA for had 4 or 5 police officers and 3 security guards outside checking people's bags. On unofficial, no one is allowed to have any beverages of any kind in classrooms. Last year, around 90 people went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning I've been told. I already knew I would hate this holiday, but several unexpected things made it worse.
First, a student in lecture had a shirt on that was so terrible that it totally ruined my day. I wanted to punch him in the face. I won't go into details, but let's just say he succeded at offending Irish people, Native Americans, and women. Good job, asshole.
After that I taught and had a student get all up in my face about a lousy 2 points on a test question. Then at noon, walking back to my office, I saw a guy stumbling along, drunk, holding a Jones Soda bottle and mumbling "fuck" over and over to himself.
This was too much. I had to go home for the rest of the day.
Saturday was better. Got some grading done and then went over to Katherine's house for a game night. She has some crazy cats. One of them likes to chew on fingers A LOT. Check it out:
The other one just likes to lay on shoes and jackets. Not that weird I guess.
We played a bunch of different games including one that's kindof like balderdashand trivial pursuit combined but with personal questions instead of definitions, if that makes any sense. They guessed it was me whose last words would be "bring my body to the top of Mt. Diablo so I can be eaten by turkey vultures."
We also played Clue: Museum Caper. Here's a thief-eye-view of Lisa.
Today (Sunday) I went back to El Charro for lunch before doing FOUR HOURS of statistics homework. I had two al pastor tacos and one lengua taco. The al pastor is just so so, bu the lengua was very good.
I'm a California native in love with food in all its diverse forms. I'm currently a masters student at UIUC and although I was pessimistic at first, I've found that there is some pretty great food here in CU. My current blog is a mish-mash of personal stuff, recipes, CU restaurant reviews, and chronicles of my travels.
