Windows, check

We installed the windows in the garage this weekend. I have since primed the trim, but you'll get the idea:

Ken cutting the siding to get the windows to fit:


Installed looking out:


Installed looking in:



They open and everything. I am so excited

Homemade Tuaca

Oh sweet heaven. I was flipping through a local magazine and found Gilt Club's recipe for homemade tuaca. I figured a few of you would also want the recipe. Ken and I started a bottle of it tonight:

Homemade Tuaca

1 750 ml bottle brandy
2 vanilla beans, split lengthwise
Zest of 2 tangerines
Zest of 1 grapefruit
1 3 inch cinnamon stick
1/2 cup simple syrup

Pour the brandy into a clean container and add vanilla beans and zests. Let sit 1 week, then add cinnamon stick and simple syrup. After 1 more week of infusing, strain out all ingredients, reserving the vanilla beans. Drop the beans into a clean bottle, then fill with the brandy. (Note: to make simple syrup, bring equal amounts sugar and water to a boil until sugar dissolves.)



Tuaca Sidecar

2 ounces homemade Tuaca
1 ounce orange liqueur (such as cointreau or grand marnier)
Juice from 1/2 orange
Juice from 1/2 lemon

Pour Tuaca, orange liqueur and juices into a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a martini glass rimmed with Orange Sugar (recipe below). Makes 1 cocktail.

Orange Sugar

Grated zest of 1 small orange
2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 cup sugar

Toss the orange zest with the salt. Spread out in a thin layer on a sheet pan and allow to sit overnight or until dry. Run salt through a food processor or use a wooden spoon to crush and grind salt back to original consistency. Add the orange salt to the sugar and mix well.

Pumpkin Bars

I've made three batches of these in the past week and have taken them all over town. Super easy and really good. Not heavy, really flavorful - from Penzey's Spices

Pumpkin Bars with Cream Cheese Icing
1/2 cup butter, soft (1 stick)
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2/3 cup canned pumpkin
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon powdered ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350. Cream the butter. Add the brown sugar, eggs, pumpkin and vanilla and mix well. In a separate bowl, sift all of the dry ingredients together. Gradually add to the wet mixture and mix well. Pour into a greased 9x13 inch pan and bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes (mine took about 25, toothpick will come out clean). Let cool and top with brown butter icing.

(The recipe ices the bars with a brown butter icing, but I was sick of cooking and had cream cheese in the fridge so I went with a cream cheese icing instead. Awesome):

1/2 block of cream cheese (4 oz?, can use more)
2 cups powdered sugar

Mix well and spread over cooled bars. Cut into squares.

Bulbs in the Front Garden

I planted 333 bulbs in the front yard on Friday. It should look amazing for spring. I hope so. My hands were freezing and my back was killing by the time I finished. Here are a few of the pictures of the varieties I found on the internet(s).

Early spring:
130 Crocuses (Mixed and Jeanne d'Arc)


Mid-spring
16 Hyacinths (10 Delft blue; 6 pink pear, 6 yellow City of Harlem)
30 Daffodils (20 Thalia and 10 Cheerfulness)
30 Chionodoxa (mixed)

80 Tulips (20 Fringed Mixed, 40 Bastogne, 12 Oxford, 8 pink diamond)


Late Spring
40 Anenome (Royale)
7 Alliums (nigrum)

Brave New World

I gave my notice today.

2 more weeks of benchwork and then, poof, like Kaiser Soze, I am gone.

I can't wait. I'm going to take a week off to relax before starting my new job. Yes, I have a new job. It makes me salivate with enthusiasm. I am Pavlov's dog. I'm staying at the same institution but working in a new department doing science education. It is awesome. For my job, I get to translate research to the general public. To teachers. To K-12. I'll be working with the local science museum on events and exhibits. Some work with the zoo. Long story short: explaining science and research in a creative way is my new job. It's like brain awareness week year-round. Making models. Explaining DNA. Talking about how things work. What do 8 year olds need to know about stem cells? And how can I convey that using glue sticks and paper mache? I can't wait.

Timing is a crazy thing. I didn't even know this kind job existed a few weeks ago. I stumbled on it by volunteering at a friend's community center. Now I start doing this, the kind of work I love, full-time beginning December 10th.

Meat Porn

I was going through some pictures of the smoked andouille sausage I made a few weeks ago. Then I smoked some of the spanish chorizo and pepperoni tonight. Put it all together and you have some gorgeous pictures of smoked meats:

The andouille sausage before it was smoked:


And after:


Kinley thinks it looks good, too. In fact, he wouldn't leave the room:


And the spanish chorizo and pepperoni from tonight. All are hanging in the basement as I write this. From left to right: unsmoked spanish chorizo, smoked spanish chorizo, smoked pepperoni, unsmoked pepperoni:

Sausage Bomb

Jason and Natascha came over yesterday to do the next batch of meat curing. Our pancetta is just about ready to be unwrapped, but it was still a bit soft so we're giving it a few more days to hang. Natascha brought over an aged gouda and a lemon stilton; Jason brought some spicy coppa and breasola; and I made some marionberry caramel sauce, an angel food cake and poured the apricot mimosas. It was time to begin.

We decided earlier this week what we were making and split up the ingredients. Here's the meat menu:

Fresh ginger and sage breakfast sausage (some in links, rest in bulk -- note: sheep casings are a pain and it's doubtful that I'll be making breakfast links again anytime soon. That said, the bulk sausage was great and would be perfect in any sort of sausage application. It just wasn't worth the time to stuff the small links)

Spanish Chorizo -- this was the dry-cured sausage we were most excited about. It's a pork sausage seasoned with lots of paprika that is currently hanging in my basement. It can be smoked, so I'll probably smoke half of it for comparison. Mmmmm chorizo taste test.

Italian Sausage -- It was lunch time, so we made a half batch of italian sausages (sweet and just a bit spicy). I made the carmelized onions, Natascha brought the buns. We sat around and ate our freshly made sausages while drinking apricot mimosas -- we even toasted the fennel seeds ourselves. That was fun.

Breasola -- Breasola is an eye of round beef roast that is cured in salts and seasonings for 2 weeks and then hung to dry for another 3 weeks. Jason brought some from the store for us to try. My goodness, here's hoping ours turns out half as good. I am excited about this one. Especially since it's $30/lb at the store yet only cost us $5.10/lb to make, not including labor. Jason's tending it for the next two weeks before hanging it in his basement. Did I mention this stuff was good?

Pepperoni -- We were a bit overwhelmed and running behind by this time. Jason and Natascha were playing in a bowling league at 6. I (and my kitchen) were covered in meat. But we hunkered down and ground the last 5 lbs of beef round for the pepperoni, added the seasonings and I stuffed the mixture into 10-12 inch links after people left. I poured myself the last mimosa for motivation.

At final tally, I calculate that we cured 14 pounds of pork and eight pounds of beef in a variety of ways. I have the spanish chorizo and pepperoni hanging from hooks, dry-curing in my basement. I have 7-8 twelve inch links of each. I'll probably smoke half of each next weekend, or tonight, which ever comes first. It will then continue to cure, and in 12-18 days, I'll have either awesome, home-cured sausages or a giant moldy stinky mess of rotting meat*. I can't wait.


* Note: I'm saying rotting meat for dramatic effect. Both dry-cured sausages and the breasola have appropriate levels of sodium nitrate, a long-lasting preservative used in making dry-cured sausages to prevent botulinum toxin from being formed in the low oxygen environment (read: inside the sausage). It sounds sketchy but I take solace in the idea that it's been done for hundreds if not thousands of years by people who didn't understand the science, may not have had the cleanest of equipment or access to consistent levels of salt and/or preservative. Still, fingers crossed.

Toxic People

We had our draft league dodgeball tournament today. We played a person down but still came in 3rd place, taking out three great teams along the way. It felt good. Really good. What felt better was that, even though we lost, our team came out with great morale and a lot of respect for each other. We had a great, fun team and we enjoyed ourselves all season. Better still, we all felt the same way.

After the tournament, we went to a nearby bar to congratulate the winners and chat with the other teams over a beer. There are always going to be the whiners and poor sports, but I hate the people who need to insult and drag you down because of X,Y,Z reason in their own lives. Even worse, I hate that I am sad right now about a bitchy remark thrown my way from someone I don't even care about. She hated her team, has other things going wrong right now and can't let anyone finish a sentence.... but at least she feels better insulting me over happy beers with my teammates.

I have no patience for that. I have been pretty good of cutting out the toxic people from my life. -- even if they were just acquaintances. This is no different. Good riddance*.

* Note: as much as I'd like to hold a grudge (and have been able to in the past), that phase of my life is over and all terms are still negotiable... I am just not going out of my way to speak to her.

SfN 2007

It is good to be home. I was in San Diego for the past week for a work meeting. I had a great time seeing everyone again, but it is really, really nice to be home. I love Portland and the life we've built here. Most of my friends are looking for jobs now, which will require them to move yet again. It's a frustrating but inevitable part of science if you want to stay competitive.

That said, I got to see a whole bunch of old friends from undergrad and grad schools who are now scattered around the country. The meeting is really great for that. Dave and Kristen have a great new place and a kegerator that became a close personal friend throughout the meeting. Caroline flew in from Hawaii (I love the geological layer cake shirt that Kyle got her). Julie is as crazy as ever. Taryn loves Oregon like me. Sara and Drew are still hard at work in the lab where Sara is trying to finish up. And Chuck is the closest of all of us to getting a faculty position. I've always enjoyed his take on things and his sense of humor so it was great rooming with him again. After a full day of science presentations and insanity, Chuck is one of the few people with whom I enjoy talking about science at the end of the day.

So I'm home now and happy to be back. Ken installed one of the garage windows which looks fantastic. I am confused as to what day it is. I'm shifing gears so I can get things going again but it's like driving a stickshift after being in an automatic for a while. And the leaves have changed.

Yesterday was my first day back. I needed to regroup, so I cleaned out the freezers, did the laundry, made a pot of gumbo for dinner and canned 14 pints of tomato sauce for winter. I also went to the store for some milk and bought a duck. I am going to make duck proscuitto this weekend.

VIP, by association

I leave for the neuroscience conference today. I'll be there until Tuesday and get to see a lot of good friends I made while in Arizona. Chuck, Taryn, Julie, Dave, Kristen, Caroline, Sara and Drew, among others. I also get to see my old labmates from when I was an undergraduate. And so does everyone else. This meeting is a lot like homecoming weekend for scientists. A nerdy homecoming, but homecoming nonetheless.

When we were getting ready for dodgeball last night, I heard Ken on the phone but didn't know with whom he was speaking or the nature of the conversation. When he came in the living room, he informed me that he bumped me up to first class for my trip down to San Diego today. At no cost or miles. He just flies a lot and had a guest upgrade for yours truly. I was so excited -- I jumped up and down. Literally.

I always wondered how fancy/important/wealthy a scientist needed to be to fly first class to this meeting. Now I know... none of those things, just well connected.

I can't wait. This will be the best 2h 45 min of my day.