Lovely...

Every once in a while, you find some poetry which speaks to the very depths of your being...



What precisely it says to my being isn't quite clear, but I have always kind of wanted a pith helmet.

The Saga of the Saag Paneer

Yesterday, we had adventures in Indian food! We made saag paneer. It was fun - here's how we did it.

Start with 1 quart of milk and a lemon. Boil the milk, and then stir in 3 Tbsp of lemon juice.
It congeals into a horrible mess.

Pour through cheesecloth (used for cheese for the first time ever!) and collect the curds.

Let it cool, then squeeze out the whey.

After you've got as much liquid squeezed out as you can, squish it for 20 minutes.

Chop up your cheese.

Holy crap! We made cheese!

The next thing to do is to fry up the cheese with a teaspoon of cumin seeds. Yummy.

Fry up an onion, 4 cloves of garlic, and 2 little red dried chili peppers.

Then, add a truly ridiculous amount of chopped spinach. (20 oz. - about enough to choke the average moose.)

Finally, sprinkle half a teaspoon of salt on, add back the cheese, and cook it down. Drain off the liquid. It says to cook it until all the water evaporates, but I'm too impatient and wanted to save some of the vitamins. Anita scoffs, but it worked out just fine.

Serve with tasty home-made naan!

A triumph! It's fun to make squeezy cheese. That's what we've learned this weekend. How about you?

Spring!

Most of the aches and pains have subsided, allergy medication has been obtained, and life has returned to normal. I got my bike fixed, so now I also have no excuse for being out of shape.

It looks like Jorge's going to let me spend $1000 on getting a gene synthesized from scratch. I've been trying to overexpress and purify this Geobacillus enzyme in E. coli, and the codon usage is so different from what coli uses that I'm barely getting any product. So, rather than struggle with it any more, we send money to this company, they figure out what codons would work best in coli, whip it up in their DNA synthesizer, and voila: gene. If it works, it'll be great! (Another exciting adventure in science!)

SSMF Syndrome

Sudden Spontaneous Mike Failure, that is...

Oof. Knees hurt, neck out of joint, tendonitis in the left elbow (hey, that's a new one!), and the onset of allergy season - just having a lovely time this week.

On the plus side, I won a fellowship worth about $21K! I don't get any of the cash, but Jorge is happy, since it pays my salary for the year and frees up that money to buy sciencey stuff with.

Time For A Party

Well, here I am at home, in lovely upstate New york, celebrating my Baskin Robbins birthday. The dog is ready to party...

I guess I have to officially admit to being a grown-up now. Sigh. Someday I might even have to get a real job. (Don't hold your breath, though... :-)

So far, we've celebrated by having lunch at China Road, and there's the promise of Lieh's and Steigerwald bratwurst for lunch today. When I visit my parents, we celebrate in a fundamentally lunch-based format. It works out.

The Upchuck Roundup

Back at the old bunkhouse, pardners, and I'm afraid the livestock have been a mite off their feed lately.

Today, after 3 days of Tobu barfing, Kaiyo decided to get into the action with a little puke of his own. Dagnabbit. I think hairballs are the problem, but it may just be recreational vomit. You can't tell with cats.

I told her ranching these little varmints was more trouble than it was worth.