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.

Green Tea Strawberry Cake: National Dry Cake Day

I was reading an article the other day via my twitter feed about the fact that we have a "Food/Animal/Normal Thing Everyone Does Day" for essentially every day of the year now and how it's particularly driven by social media. Oh! It was in the NYT I think, because the very first 2 sentences were about some 13 year old from like Palo Alto looking forward to National Watermelon Day so she could post a picture that she took weeks ago of herself eating watermelon. This is what triggered my memory of the NYT because 1) Lol California is so far away from NY and 2) Lol this article is about a 13 year old from a fairly affluent part of the US.

Anyways, the article just spends a very long time talking about how people feel that its weird to just post a "random picture" of themselves unless they can caption it to tie-in with a a national event/day. My second favorite part of that article was when they described this 13 year old's watermelon picture, particularly emphasizing just how boring and uninspiring the picture was. As a quote below (clearly I've become so invested into this article that I of course looked it up and will now link it here):

Ms. Khan does not “have a special thing about watermelons,” and the picture of her eating one was not a momentous event. It was a hot day in June. She and a friend bought a watermelon. Someone took a picture.

Isn't that just magical? To be fair, you probably could go off the deep end here and make a reasonable point about how these random national holidays are favored because they make your watermelon day part of a greater community of watermelon days and obviously at our core, we're social creatures that like to feel that we belong.

I bring up this entirely forgettable article about how social media works because I'm a bit culpable to it myself. When I have no idea what to talk about for a post (ie here), my train of thought usually goes along the lines of "what season is it, how can green tea and or strawberries be relevant to the fact I'm horribly sunburnt and musing about the fact I just bought a sun cookie cutter because I could make it into an astrocyte cookie too." And darn, green tea and strawberries have nothing to do with any of those things! Arg! If only there was a national green tea strawberry cake that looks great but is actually too dry day.

Unfortunately there is not a day (yet) for such a holiday, so you'll have to just savor these relatively pretty pictures without a "btw it's green tea and strawberry cake day!" caption. As I alluded to earlier, this cake didn't actually turn out as great as I wanted it to due to the fact I continue to suck at baking cakes. I probably could have soaked the cake in a bit more simple syrup to counter the dry factor, and there was likely some fishiness going on with my egg whites folding and integrity. But the color contrasts between the red, white, and green are appealing regardless. So you know, if you suck at baking cakes like I do, just put this out as decoration, but bring out like ice cream when you need to actually serve people dessert.
Recipe from La Fuji Mama, with an added 1 tbsp of matcha/green tea powder to the dry ingredients.

Roasted Strawberry Buttermilk Sherbet: Sweet and Sour Beginnings

I think there's an inverse relationship between me stating on my blog "I promise to blog more consistently!" and me actually blogging consistently. I got into a major baking kick right in early June. And then I went on vacation and hiked some rocks. And then I realized how awful taking pictures of real food is. And then I moved to San Diego. And now we are here.

I probably have been putting off writing a new post because I don't know what to write. Maybe I was hoping that after a few weeks in San Diego doing things I would have things to write about? But unfortunately, my less than chipper attitude seems to be able to render even the biggest, most exciting of life changing moves into something that is just meh. Like yay! I moved! My new lab is cool! I wish I was less shy and awkward! I hate driving for 10-15 minutes stretches in traffic! I miss New Haven pizza! I miss walking to the grocery store even though I can now actually buy things like watermelon with my car! I feel awkward getting a car for essentially free because it was from high school and being so not an adult because I didn't buy my own car here! I watch way too much Scrubs! I need to run more since bad weather is no longer an excuse! What if I'm so unsociable that new lab won't even take me if I do want to do my PhD there! Being quiet sucks when I want to learn to do things and take initiative! My priority plot thing 100% did not work because I didn't fold my laundry until like today even though I said I was supposed to do it like 3 days ago! Clearly I have a lot of repressed slash fake stress given that its summer and school and real responsibilities haven't even like started and I keep using the word like!

So maybe its a good thing I'm forcing myself tonight to post a blog post since every habit starts with a first step. And what better place to sandwich rambling sentences about my life that no one cares about than between really really crafted shots of roasted strawberry buttermilk ice cream (roll credits)? If I were actually a food writer, this would probably be the place where I would start romanticizing youthful summers, and farms, and cows, where kids frolicked and strawberries were so fresh they were a perfume and buttermilk so rich it was heaven or something. But no, we live in a modern world with billions of people on the earth that need to be fed, and the very lucky couple of them doing highly productive things in the labor force to advance society so 'aint nobody got time for romanticizing a pastoral life that is very much not the way we would actually want to live today.

But hey, if you were hoping for your own farm one day- a dream I just crushed because you also now  realized why the midwest is so cheap- let it be known that delicious strawberry buttermilk ice cream can be made with you local grocery store's offerings of such products from commercial big agro farms (this is not to say that there are not issues like antibiotic overuse or labor/wages/lobbying or sustainability issues in agriculture).

If you've never roasted strawberries before, I 100% recommend that you do. Even if you don't eat them. Just soak in the amazing scent that will be coming from your oven, and definitely stick your nose a little too close to the pan when they come out. The buttermilk adds a sour tang to the ice cream that while interesting, felt a little too strong for me relative to the strawberries. I'd probably either add more strawberries or more sugar next time I make this. Because there will definitely be more stress induced posts in the future where ice cream will very very very much so be needed.

Recipe from Bon Appetit.

Mini Rose Apple Pies: Pi is Romantic!

First, happy belated pi day of the century!
Second, I usually find that corny math/physics pick-up lines are a little gross. Like they were written by nerdy teens who, like all teens, giggle at any and all references to sex. Like the classic "I wish I was your derivative so I could lie tangent to your curves." Though to be fair, those probably were written by nerdy teens who were like, woohoo calculus and boobs! 

But not all math and physics romance lines are bad! It's really actually sad that when people think about math, physics, or science really, that they think of this cold, analytical subject devoid of passion, creativity, or beauty when its really quite the opposite. There's a certain learning curve when it comes to math and sciences maybe, but those "rules" that make things like creationism false and evolution real make the world more amazing and awe inspiring-- not the reverse. Like take this physics romance courtesy of the always favorite xkcd: 

Like such an action is absolutely futile compared to the gross mass of the earth and the even grosser mass of the sun, but in terms of romance, that's a lot more effort than building the perfect dream house for the woman of your dreams whose already married to another guy (Ok I'm not sure if that's what happens in The Notebook, but its been like at least 5 years since I last watched that movie).

 

But, of course, given this is a pi day post, and one about romance, because roses, I can't get away without pointing out the most relevant math pick up line- "My love for you is like pi- never ending." Which I'm honestly 100% ok with. As long as there is also a good supply of never ending pie, mainly pumpkin and apple if possible.

These little mini pies would be extra cute for Valentine's Day, not just Pi Day, though Pi Day is obviously the better holiday. The roses were made by rolling together half moon shaped apple slices together. This works a lot better with larger slices, so I would advise picking larger apples should you choose to make these. And possibly a mandolin to make slicing thin sections an actual possibility. With those tools, I think that making the actual roses shouldn't take that long. The apples are softened by a quick zap of the magical microwave. These obviously can be clustered onto a larger, real sized pie, but I read through a reddit post that suggests full size rose apple pies are actually quite annoying to eat. This is probably the first piece of cooking advice I've gotten from reddit, but it's also endorsed by Cook's Illustrated, if you're into the more traditional avenues of food authority.



Now, I must sadly confess that these are not actual homemade pie crusts, or even actual pie crusts, but rather puff pastry. My two or three tries at pie dough have all resulted in really pathetic failures, and I just couldn't risk the effort in making roses being ruined by shoddy pie crusts. Not to worry pie purists though, I will one day learn to make the perfect pie crust, just not today.

Recipe from FMITK: From My Impossibly Tiny Kitchen.

Orange Creamscicle Frozen Yogurt

When it comes to having bad weeks or being sad, I think its always useful to have some ice cream around. Not like an entire freezer full of emergency Ben and Jerry flavors (though you're certainly welcome to that lifestyle if you would like), but like one or two solid ice creams you can grab a scoop or two as you mope through it all.


Of course, I might only be saying this because it gives me an excuse/reason to justify my continuous ice cream making. Not that you need an excuse to make ice cream, please. Though, orange creamsicle isn't exactly the type of ice cream or frozen yogurt one usually draws to for moping. And if you're going to froyo as your moping food, you're probably doing something wrong.



Orange creamsicle needs to have a renaissance. As a kid, we'd literally buy these huge bulk sized bags of creamsicle popsicles. They were the best. Icy, sweet orange juice on the outside. Soft creamy vanilla on the inside. And when it all starts slowly melting and mixing in that way only popsicles determined to drip all over the driveway do? Perfection.

My recent foray into the world of frozen yogurt may be related to my growing laziness at the worst possible time in terms of things I need to focus on in my life and work. That aside, frozen yogurt is literally the easiest thing ever. Just some sugar, yogurt, juice, whisk it all together. Add a dash of lemon and salt for tartness. Chill for like 10 minutes. Then churn churn churn. It definitely suits my minimal work style at the moment.
My frozen yogurt ended up with semi-large chunks of grated orange peel. Mainly because I don't actually have a grater or microzester but rather just a vegetable peeler and a knife. But I kinda like the bitterness you get from a small chunk of orange zest in this ice cream.

Bonus notinthekitchenoronatable photo because #naturallight is a thing people are into. I might have to stop making fun of people to set up absurd food photo shots on old crates because you know, I'm becoming one of them.

Recipe via the one and only Serious Eats.