Adventures in Cooking, Part Ratatouille (without the rat)

Yes, I did have to check the spelling of “Ratatouille”. Last night, I spent two-three hours doing this:
Because I was tired of paying $5 for salads and other foods that were healthier than Papa John’s like I did last year at the campus restaurants, for the past two months I have been making semi-weekly trips to the Safeway, rushing to the shuttle with my re-usable bag, then lugging back all the food I bought. I haven’t had much time to actually “cook” per say, beyond throwing awkward handfuls of baby carrots at my rice cooker when the rice is half done, but now I’m forcing myself to. Why? Because. I have a feeling a post about how half the words on my Arabic vocabulary list are Turkish cognates would be really boring, as would a post on shelving cart after cart of books, so here I go. I’m becoming my own little cheesy cooking show tonight.

First, I would like to direct your attention to the vast quantity of vegetables required. Look! I did it all fancy in separate bowls too, all cut up ahead of time; except I didn’t give myself a commercial break to make my staff cut them up. Evidently, this is called something in French.

Chopping up and separating le vegetables, the French way

The first disaster strikes. I have no salt, and neither do any people in my wing, it seems. I rush to the student union and grab a handful of packets, naturally stopping at Papa John’s to get parmesan cheese (I’m going to make pasta one of these days…) Day seized.

I'm pretty sure having this much salt would make me either royalty or a thief in the Dark Ages

And now to wait for an hour as the eggplant soaks. As we wait, I will tell you a few weird facts that I either know or have guessed about eggplants.
*cheesy music*
Did you know… the eggplant is part of the nightshade family of plants. That’s the same family as tomatoes, and a bunch of poisonous plants. Monkshood, I want to say.
Did you know… if you don’t let the eggplant release juices with the salt it will soak up oil like an SUV when it’s cooking, and will also become nasty and slimy.
Did you know… eggplants are great roasted and mashed up as babaganoush? They are. You should try it.
Next step is to roast the eggplant in the oven. For this purpose I have checked out two baking sheets (along with the colander the eggplant drained in, and the pot I will cook the onions in) This is going to be a late, late dinner.
(After several long commercial breaks) Well, the eggplant and the zucchini are just about done roasting. I’m golden-ing the onions and some garlic, and will then add in the tomatoes.
Cooking in a dorm is a pain in the butt. Especially if you live on the third floor with a basement kitchen and then forget something.
Adding the tomatoes into the onion-garlic thing, and getting them (somehow) to look appetizing.
And finally… I stir in the eggplant and zucchini.

IT’S DONE.

It makes Pixar villains' hearts melt.

Om nom nom nom nom nom nom…

Skinny Jeans As a Concept

I would like to proudly announce that I have written the longest Turkish paper I’ve written since 11th grade. Hoping for more like this; I actually feel competent at the end of them. Anyway. It’s three pages long, and if you were dying for a look at the front page in mirror view, you are just really lucky today.

I went on a very brave journey to the Tucson Mall last week; it is not a journey that should be travelled on public transport, nor is it a journey that should be travelled often, but I did. I’m thinking of saying it will be an annual pilgrimage that started last year and ends this year. You may say “But… that’s a two year tradition”. Well, if I may answer your statement with a statement that also happens to be a question: How many pilgrimages have YOU been on?
The reason of my pilgrimage I will not mention here, but alongside the necessary requirements of the journey, I was able to look at a lot of puppies in plexiglass cages, and a Jack Russell Terrier that was stupidly put in an x-pen that was *much* too short for it. On this pilgrimage I was also able to try on a pair of skinny jeans. They were interesting, and are better left as a concept*.

*No! Don’t envision it! You can’t. It’s a concept. Like string theory; you can’t picture it.

Most Exciting Thing Today?

I got a 100 pack of tea bags.

I’m drinking one right now, and it doesn’t have a single drop of milk in it.

Captionary 2.0

This is the official resurrection of Captionary, spawning the 2.0. It is risen!

It is risen indeed.

Now quick! From where we left off in incomplete sentences!

Finals Yay GPA Home Unemployment Boredom Sad Goodbye Seattle Proposal Engagement Bermuda Dolphins Sunburn Wedding Dress Seattle (again) Boat Toy Story 3 Orange County <Arrested Development reference here> Disney Land Child-like Wonder Packing Moving Here

It is now the 2nd week of school, and sophomore year feels exactly like a continuation of freshman year. Same food, same homework, same guy on the corner handing out bar fliers with the stripper on them and same evangelist yelling about homosexuality/creationism/pot.

However, my favorite part of the year, without a doubt, is the part where I get my own room. My mother would like to point out that the last time I had my own room was NOT when I was 4 (when my brother was born) but when I was 12 (when we spent a sumer at my grandma’s house) None the less – I’m thrilled.

It’s the room originally designated as a “study room”, where two desks were put so one person could study while the other slept. That just seemed kind of pointless though, so I got my own room!

It has four windows.

Not a Time Machine.

Dendrograms are not time machines.

Nor are they Tardisi*

*this is the pluralization. I promise.

Life By Flashlight

For about 4 hours tonight we had a full out shut down of electricity and interblag. Thank goodness for generators, the hallways were still lit. The majority of the hall is science and engineering majors, who all have the same chemistry test tomorrow morning. Poor people. People sat in the halls with their computers until their power was drained, and then rushed over to the student union and library to plug back in again. I sat tight reading “One Day in the Life of  Ivan Denisovich” by mini flashlight. Though tempted to light my technically prohibited candle, I have never gotten around to buying any definitely prohibited matches to light it with. Do not fear, the entire adventure was chronicled.

Tweets by TalkinTurkey

Meanwhile, here are the humorous happenings (things I’ve found time to mock)

I love polls.

I realize it is blurry so, here we go:

Who would you rather meet?

a) Sarah Silverman (10 votes)
b) Martin Scorsese (15 votes)
c) Leonardo DiCaprio (22 votes)
d) None of the above (24 votes)

New question:
Do you think the Pac-1o should expand?

If any of you guys want to take a swing at either of these questions, go ahead and leave it in the comments. I’m terribly curious. I just hope Ms. Silverman, Mr. Scorsese and Mr. DiCaprio aren’t offended by the original results.  I also think that to follow the “new question” we should ponder is, if we *do* expand, should we actually change the number at the end of the Pac, or is it just too much money to re-brand?

Also,

No.

No amount of “FREE” food will lure me.
Your background pic selection? Also NO.

My Tattoo

I am a huge fan of Fresh and Easy. So much so that, on my way out of there last week, I picked up a tattoo of their logo. Yeah, I’m pretty bad-a… *cough* I’m pretty cool.
Unfortunately, I had to preform self-tatoo-removery before I went to see my grandma the next day. My coolness was diminished.

A bad quality photo of how briefly cool I was. Note the tattoo-appropriate attitude face.

Also, while we’re on the coolness subject, or, the diminishing coolness subject, however you see it:

Croquet.

Mostly Pictures, Cake and International Organizations

Having taken a few days to recover from spring break, I return to you now from the dorms to comment again on my own life.

I am currently watching a cocktail of The Andy Griffith Show, Hogan’s Heroes and Leave It to Beaver, available on tvland.com for those of you with a case of the nostalgics.
Update on the academic front, we have finished “The Romanian Letters” segment we were reading in Ottoman, a rambling travel diary, and are now moving on to a knock-off of Sherlock Holmes. This should be fun. Updates to follow. And now for this week’s Book of the Week! Just so you know, this book beat out a civil engineering/environmentalist book titled “The Toilet Papers”. I’m maturing. Now, here’s to all of those who enjoy this lazy version of baseball:

As glad as I was to take a break from school, spring break was cut short due to the long anticipated Model United Nations High School Conference that us in the MUN club/class here put on. It was extremely exciting, busy and tiring, and I tip my hat to all the people in the Executive Committee who really did all the work behind setting it up. I was honored to act as the Resolution Processing Coordinator, though, I was the only one who wanted the job. High schoolers debate and caucus in meeting halls and ballrooms, and then runners type and send drafts of the resolutions they write to me, which I check, assign to a resolution processor, check again, and print. Easy as it  sounds, it gets really busy. We had, I believe, 7 or 8 committees sending in resolutions. Some of them relevant, some of them obvious (yes, we WOULD like to reaffirm that factories should treat women fairly.) and some of them offensive: “Stating that curling is not a real sport”… Are you kidding me. We had them strike that one.

For two days we all enjoyed getting up at 6, rushing resolutions through the process, urging our PMS-ing printer/copier to NOT eat our paper, and eating a LOT of leftover cake.

The Resolution Log.

Resolution Processors, processing. Also, a member of the "press"

CAKE.

We all enjoyed the perks of eating leftover cake from the delegate dance with leftover plastic utensils (mostly knives) from leftover plastic party cups (mostly neon green).

Other highlights from the conference included frustration, confusion, exhaustion, and enjoying absolutely every minute of assigning, rushing, printing, typing, correcting and occasionally yelling.

Our researcher, watching C-SPAN. On his computer.

*whispers* nerd… 🙂

WANT.

All in all, it was a great start to the other half of the semester, and has convinced me that, I UN (?) UN.

The Post In Which I Talk Like FutileOhm

2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor;
SD card slot;
2GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM;
Pre-installed;
Zoppity.

These are all words that could be used by FutileOhm to describe what I recently received absolutely free of charge from the UA:

Yes, yes it is.

I’d just say: Freaking. Awesome.

It all started with a call from my dad.
“Would you be ok with giving your sister your computer? Hers is absolutely falling apart.”
“Well, yeah, half the computer is held together with duct tape. But… then I would not have a computer.”
“Not necessarily. See, we got this letter…”

Evidently, the UA started an alternative scholarship program where they give a few hundred freshmen a free Macbook Pro for “academic achievement” and because they got their name pulled out of a hat. As long as they stay enrolled as a full-time student until the end of their first year, it’s theirs. Pretty sweet. I *never* win things like this. The last thing I won without writing an essay or something was when I was 6. I won a community center raffle and got a free backpack. It was black.

This, however, is silver. Shiny, gorgeous silver.

FutileOhm, being the helpful guy he is, single keyboardedly set it all up via iChat screensharing, and dubbed the new member of my techno-family “Charles”. If I get to know him any better, I think he’ll let me call him Chuck.

The two things you probably notice about the picture (look above to see the awesomeness) are that the Apple logo is red, and that there is a faint etching of the UA logo in the corner (kind of tasteful, eh?). Those are there to remind me how much UA wants me to pay them lots of money to become educated here, but they enjoy being really nice to people every once in a while. I almost took the red apple off (it’s a red film sticker on top of the legit one), but as I started to, I felt oddly ungrateful. So the sticker is staying there, as a sign of my inkling of school spirit  to this overall pretty cool university; at least until it has a run in with FutileOhm, who expresses his interest in restoring the Apple logo to it’s full glory.

Needless to say, I feel blessed beyond all reason. I keep on waiting to get killed by a falling icicle or something… It seems so off-balance, this good luck. It’s mind blowing how much God has blessed me these past few years. I am extremely thankful.

Hoping you all get your own Macbook Pros, or equivalent blessings.

P.S. Though the thought was resisted at first, it has been confirmed that this computer marginally surpasses the superiority of the FutileOhm Macbook. I win!

Science.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Or Happy Anna Howard Shaw Day, depending on if you watch 30 Rock or not.

The previous post was actually written about a week ago, but I was too lazy to edit it until now. Posting it got me in a writing mood, and now I give you this monster…

I just got back from a shift at the library, and am currently listening to NPR and eating my dinner of cereal and orange juice. My shift was surprisingly interesting today, because shelving is hardly ever interesting. I was sent over to the science library to shelve. I have never shelved at the science library before, and now I know why.

Shelving at the science library is a change in my schedule, so of course I was not happy at first. I like knowing which carts I’m going to enjoy shelving (NOT 4A), where the bathrooms are, where the punch machine is, what I’m going to be facing when I exit the freight elevators and most importantly, the door code to the room I placed my purse in. Also, certain areas of the science library all of the sudden switch to Dewey Decimal. Don’t get me wrong, I know how the system works, I guess I just like putting letters in front of numbers.

Geez NPR, why don’t you play a *longer* version of that song?

On the more neutral to positive spectrum, the science library reminds me of my dad and things I associate with him teaching. Tile floors, lots and lots of white boards (there were whiteboard tables), vague collection displays of inanimate objects like seashells… and books, if you call the library a “collection” (I wonder if they also have a empty soda bottle collection?). Also, a certain scattered-a-bout look that I appreciate in my dad, but not so much in a public institution. Also, the place smelled very science-y. There were several large books that I had no interest in reading, such as a monstrosity titled “Geology and Exploration of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, 1974-1982” (“Bears” seemed more enlightening, on a practical level). However, several books were very rewarding to shelve because they were so big and emptied the cart very quickly, unlike certain call numbers’ books (I’m talking to you, LB-PQ!). More on my annoyance with education, art and film (etc.) majors with their large quantities of books in a later post. Anyway. I think I will try to shelve at science again, although preferably not too soon…