Vietnamese Spring Rolls: trying to just roll with it.

The pictures I took of this spring roll making attempt are relatively gross. Kinda as bad as Martha Stewart's food pics back in the day (if that is still a relevant reference). They remind me of food wrapped in some sort of plastic....rather than rice paper, but in an effort to hold myself more accountable for posting and reflecting on fun things I do, here we go. I'm just gonna ~roll~ with it. I know that was terrible but I've had a week riddled with minor things going wrong and this is the best I can do.

Since moving in with my SO, we've been slowly trying to get rid of the doubles of cooking items we have-cinnamon, oil, salt, sugar, and a giant drawer of cooking utensils I'm terrified of dumping out and sorting through. Prior to moving in with another human, I never would have had rice wrappers on hand. Too 1-time use only. But lucky for me, he likes to buy 1-time use things, so now I get to to mess around with recipes I would have never bothered with for the lack of time.

Spring rolls themselves don't have too much in them- its the rolling that requires the most skill in my opinion. While its fairly easy to get a loose roll (see above), I wasn't quite able to get as tight of a roll as I would have liked- making picking these up to be a bit dangerous. But despite their lack of structural integrity the balance of herbs and peanut/hoisin dipping sauce was a success! And given the >3/4 full stack of rice wrapper we STILL have left, I'm sure there will be an update to this post with more aesthetically pleasing photos.

Recipe via a combination of AllRecipes (mainly rolls themselves) and HungryHuy (mainly pictures and dipping sauce) with adaptations.
Filling:
-3 cooked shrimp
-2-3 Basil + Mint Leaves
-salad lettuce + coleslaw salad (for crunchy texture)
-vermicelli rice noodles

Strawberries and Cream Scones: Day Light Savings Treats

Today I slept in to the gloriously late 8 AM thanks to day light savings. And today I decided to spend that extra hour baking Strawberry and Cream Scones, because strawberries from a Halloween sangria were starting to look a little sad. An extra hour gained doesn't feel like it should feel meaningful to me. After all, I waste many hours doing things as mindless as watching tv I don't even like (looking at you Grey's Anatomy), learning more about memes on reddit, or just hitting cmd+T and typing in "facebook.com" or "buzzfeed.com" or "twitter.com" or "nytimes.com." The usual eclectic mix of online fake news.

The "busy-ness" I experienced during medical school last year *should* have given me a new sense of appreciation with my time. After all, back then I would savor at just the rare treat of helping cook dinner, or just taking a walk. But I guess similar in the way thinking in graduate school is not quite the same as thinking in medical school, so too is my free time. All of which to say graduate school is not some leisurely afternoon tea. More like a tea for the queen that you have to put on entirely on your own and she wants some bake and tea that no one else has ever created and you as a completely inexperienced baker and pure coffee drinker don't even know where to begin.

But thanks to my extra hour, I can at least have some of these scones with which to eat while crying over why I don't understand visual cortex or why I have no interesting ideas or whatever thing decides to make my grad school day blue. I've already tested them on Ikea furniture building tears today and they held up well, so lets hope grad school tears are about the same as Ikea tears. 

Recipe from King Arthur Flour, with 1/2 flour substituted with whole wheat flour. 

Peach Tau Peach Tart: Double Pi

I wrote a lot of word vomit in like June trying to get this post out. But it sounded all wrong. And then I remembered that I have literally not written anything of considerable length in almost 2 years. Aside from maybe editing bits and pieces of a paper. Of course, I've written SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, and plan) notes, H and Ps (history and physicals), and the letters OLDCARTS (onset, location, duration, characteristics, aggravating, relieving, treatments, significance) over and over again on crinkled pages in my pocket.

But, desserts and foods are not humans suffering in a million different ways, through which careful questioning and trust may only answer about 1/10th of those ways. So how do I talk about my own life and food again? I've never *really* written about food on here. The idea of using an never ending list of adjectives to describe juicy, flakey, melt in your mouth sensations has always sort of creeped me out. I clearly find (like most people), talking about myself significantly more interesting.

The best way (I think) to learn how to write and think outside of a medical note is probably just practice. After all practice, on standardized patients, on classmates, on unwilling pets, and semi-willing SOs is how I got to kinda figuring out how to ask people nosy questions about their lives. (I didn't ask my dog questions about her life, I just listened to her heart murmur lol).



So in honor of "practicing," here is post with 2 pies/tarts, both an iteration of peach and homemade crusts, and a testament to the ideas that 1) improvement can happen, and 2) you can always have more improvement. Pie crust has been something I've dreaded tackling for a while now. Food bloggers and state fairs love to romanticize pie crusts that must use ice cold butter cut in x dimensions, or vodka, or that t-shirt that wins all the football games and makes all the pie crusts perfect.

But just like expert pie contest judges can't always tell what is a homemade vs. real crust, I guess my family at least cannot tell what is good/bad homemade pie crust. The pie crust was actually not as scary to work with as I thought (see Tau Peach Pie), and the challenge was rather dealing with the excessive ripeness of my peaches (thanks over fertile peach tree). However, not having a real pie tin really put a damper on have a nice pie edge. I think the peach tart (red white and blue for 4th of July), ended up having a more uniform crust, though the crust style was a bit more cake rather than flake. Still delicious though.

Alas, peaches that are fun to eat as a snack do not like being put in hot ovens where they will proceed to create a peach juice pool. But, given the depth of human existence, I think I can live with a little bit of peach juice for now.

Peach Pie recipe via I honestly do not remember anymore because I forgot to save my sources, so I will forever be shamed. I swear I am not trying to avoid citing my sources!

Peach Tart recipe via Food and Wine.

Peach Ice Cream: Summer Beginnings

My least favorite thing about blogging is having to do the "well, long time no see" intro necessitated after every long lull in blogging. But since I hate it, I won't do it this time!
Its finally summer, and being forever in school, I have lot of things I've accomplished this year--

• Done with 2.1 years of medical school
• Maybe know a few things about pregnant women and non-pregnant women
• Finally got those 3 little numbers that more or less say what I can or cannot go into as a specialty in the future (so romantic right?)
• Found a lab to call my home for the next 4 years and ready to nerd out about some neurons

Things I have yet to accomplish--

• Dreadfully behind on my run 201.7 miles New Years resolution.
• What is baking? What is ice cream? 
• Soaking up enough sun to prove to people I actually live in California.

Fortunately I have 2 weeks of pure freedom during which I can start making progress on a few of the things on my "to-do list." Starting obviously with the most important- ice cream. My parent's peach trees have been reproducing like mad, and peaches dropped rotten on the earth just are a waste of life.
This ice cream is stupid easy to make- if I could make it after not touching an ice cream maker for over a year, then anyone can. If you're so lucky to live in a beautiful town where you can wander to your front yard and have your pick of fresh peaches, all the better. :)
Now time for some non-medical reading and living luxuriously out in the sun. But don't worry, there will be more peaches and creations to come!

Recipe from David Leibovitz's The Perfect Scoop. 
Also found here.

Panforte Ice Cream: California Seasonal Seasonings

I left Thanksgiving under the impression that the complete work-free break would be re-energizing for med school. And it was. For like, 4 hours on day 1. And then.....it was like, wow. I have a lot of things to memorize and I just don't care anymore. So I curled up in a fetal position and learned about the gastrointestinal system while drinking diet dr. pepper and eating twizzlers and jelly belly beans to survive to a much more real 2 weeks of winter break. So here I am, writing about ice cream I made over the teaser Thanksgiving break because real winter break has been filled with skiing and snow rather than lazy house baking.

Despite the abundance of fruit in California, I don't think fruit cake is a particularly common California holiday treat, or like anytime treat. Probably because we actually have fresh fruit to eat and thus do not need to suffer through dried fruit laden desserts to survive winter and plagues and wars. That being said, I'm not actually California born and raised, and California is large enough where fruit cake traditions may vary by regions. Looking at you in a super judgemental way Nor-Cal. Like seriously, if there were to be a part of California that enjoyed fruit cake, it would totally be Nor-Cal.

Fruit cake hating aside, Panforte (aka italian fruitcake) Ice Cream? Totally something I can get behind. This was a surprise find in my favorite David Lebovitz ice cream book. The first time I made this back in June, my brother finished off the entire batch within the span of two days before I could take proper pictures. Panforte ice cream doesn't actually involve dried fruit, but rather deliciously soft candied fresh citrus peels and lots of your favorite holiday spices and California almonds. While you could be lame or efficient and just buy candied citrus peels, they are fun to make in that vaguely mindless way of peeling citrus' and slicing them into the size of toothpicks. If you're into that. But so delicious!!

Given that this will be my last post of 2015, its only reasonable to do some reflecting, even though I think forced gratitude/reflection/affection due to holidays is silly. Well, for one thing, I never reflected last year so I can't go back and go hmm, did I fulfill what I reflected on last year? (You can thank interview season for that).

But anyways, my approach to New Year's (Day) is usually to think about what was old and what was new in the past year. So, new things- starting medical school, wonderful new friends/classmates for life, and taking the next steps to being the bitter uber science doctor nerd that was always within me (or will be forced into me). And old things- returning to california dreamin' and saying goodbyes to the labs that defined and shaped where I am today. But also, good riddance to east coast humidity.

I don't do New Year's Resolutions, but I guess I have 2 for 2016. 1) Run 201.6 miles because Michelle is making me do it. 2) Keep remembering to find small things to be happy about even on the roughest days of med school.




Recipe via David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop, also found on the internet here.

Thanksgiving 2015: Hello

Hello. It's me.
I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet.
To go over, everythinggg
-proceed to hum/belt out the remainder of the song to your desired length-

I was going to just keep posting lyrics, but my end point of Adele "Hello" humming tends to go on for a very very long time. But pop culture references have aligned with my blog coming semi-back to life, so hello hello hello again! I can't really say that this will be as grand of a return as hers, but there are more upcoming holidays with much baking and cooking to be done.



This sounds a bit masochistic, but there are few feelings of happiness that are greater than getting to return home and go on vacation with literally NO school to think about after getting your soul semi-crushed by school. Don't worry, I'm kinda joking on the soul crushing thing. I mean, its not like med school is supposed to be easy, but the problem (or good thing?) about med school is that no matter how much you might hate the 8 AM lectures, the hours of being in anatomy lab, the excessive amounts of time you spend on a powerpoint presentation that is essentially "google x disease and tell us what you found," or the ridiculous ways you remember words like "torus tubarius" by making up a story about a Taurus whose name is kinda like Tiberius, who plays the Tuba and is an asshole, you can never fully hate it. Because ultimately all of this knowledge and nonsense is stuff meant to help us do our best to help keep people healthy enough so that they can go to their thanksgivings, live their dreams, etc. Which is both energizing and just a downer when you're trying to just be grumpy about your life.



So while I'm being forced to not think about the body or the next thing I need to be studying, here's my list of things I'm happy for in my life. Thanksgiving, like a lot of holidays, isn't really super genuine at its origins (like thnx now lemme give you small pox anyone?), but I'll just on the bandwagon for blog purposes:
1) California dreaming
2) Friends, old and new, who teach me about new emojis, snapchat, feed me spaghetti squash, make sure I'm fully caffeinated, and just make sure I don't go too crazy.
3) Slowly turning into adult siblings
4) The ultimately intense privilege that has been my education and will be my education (and hopefully future job?) going forward.
5) Adele
6) Radio stations that have now started to play straight up holiday music 24/7
7) Fuzzy study blankets
8) And of course, premade pie crusts, because we all know how much of a struggle pie crusts are for me. But my first ever Pecan Pie was a raging success! Well, as raging as a Thanksgiving 70% sponsored by Costco could be.

Pecan Pie Recipe via Allrecipes.
Pumpkin Pie Recipe via Libby's (Allrecipes).

Not Food #1: A Good Day

I don't know what this post will be about food wise, but I just wanted a space to write down some wise words I got yesterday at my white coat ceremony before I forget them. Orientation and these things tend to be filled with cheese and iterations of the same theme, but I think underneath all of that, certain phrases can stick.

So to have a good day, here are the three parts you need:
1) Learn Something
2) Have Fun
3) Do Some Kindness

I'm not super sentimental (if you couldn't tell by the intense bitterness that plagues my stream of consciousness), but I feel like having chosen to do an MD/PhD program, I get to do ALL of that. And its pretty amazing to think of how lucky it is that I am basically doing exactly what I want to do in life right now. Sure, its going to be really really hard down the line (aka in three days), and I have serious fears and dread about studying, doing well on standardized tests, asking the right research questions, publishing, getting grants. I've been so privileged to have the opportunities and access to probably something akin to the 1% of academia. There are so many things just not even within my control- being born in the US, living in great neighborhoods, parents with stable jobs and financial means, that a lot of people way way smarter and more deserving than me just don't have. Hard work is certainly one aspect, but also just being at the right place at the right time.

I'm not going to dwell too much on the sense of "do I deserve to be here" (I'll do that later), but I'm here, and ready, and its good to just move forward. Because the second piece of advice I've gotten this past year that has stuck is the idea that "no decision you make is ever a mistake." It's the decision you make, it's not good or bad, and its the one you've chosen to make the most out of. All in all, I think the choices I have made up to now allow me to fairly easily do all three things needed for a good day most of the time. Which is frankly, pretty awesome.

-end cheese-