NIH and PD (the kind that comes with pie, not akinesia)

(who says you can’t dramatically light a pie?)

I’ve already experienced a brief hiatus from keeping this relatively current, I’ll blame that on my job.  I now feel completely integrated into the lab.  I’m working fairly independently and my results and productivity are completely of my own doing.  Granted, accountability only means so much in an internship position as compared to a real, proving yourself, type of job.  But nonetheless, I’m calling the shots now.

 

This is very much a double edge sword.  One on hand, I feel integrated, not only into my lab, but also into society as a contributing member of the big whatever that everyone contributes to.  My specific project is looking to characterize healthy and compromised mitochondrial autophagy in neurons, specifically relating to vesicle and organelle trafficking and behavior within the axon.  Autophagy is kinda like one mechanism of trash disposal in a cell.  Garbage is sequestered, taken out back and then destroyed.  Mitophagy is the specific subsection of this pathway that involves mitochondrial degradation and turnover.  Anyway, I won’t go into anymore detail, the point is, autophagy is a fairly new topic of research, looking at it in neurons is even less understood or pursued, and looking at mitophagy specifically in relation to neurodegenerative diseases is even more of a blank canvas.  So even though I’m contributing to science in a very small way, it is within a topic that is barely understood.  This makes it a little more interesting.  I’m trying to identify characteristic cellular functions.  Woah, think about that for a second.  Now, the other edge is that now I’m planning everything for myself and I often get carried away and try to fit too many things in together, leading to long days of experiments, lots of weekend work, and generally getting burnt out and not having time to do other things.  However, this weekend, I made time to make a delicious pie (even if I did have to shirk some of my responsibilities…).

 

Pushing Daisies is my favorite new TV show (Season 2 begins October 1, btw).  I started rewatching season 1 with my friend, Liz, who hasn’t seen them before.  My newly inspired culinary experimentation was once again piqued by the delicious pies that cameo in every episode of Pushing Daisies.  Ever since I saw the episode (don’t worry NO SPOILER TIPS, I don’t do spoiler tips) with the Apple Gruyere Pie (it may have actually been done with pear in the show, but I’m using a degree of creative license), I’ve been dying to try to make it.  I’ve never made a pie before, and despite my motivation, trying to create this from scratch, by myself, would have been disastrous.  So one day at work, probably while I was waiting for a blot to blot or mice to birth or bacteria to grow, I scoured the depths of the interwebs and BEHOLD: Apple Gruyere Pie.  I found a food blog with a similarly keen interest in fantastic realism and pies.  However, the idea lay dormant in my brain until one day, wandering through the aisles at Whole Foods, I see “SALE: Gruyere Reserve”.  Done and done.  Here are the results:

 

Firstly, I give all credit for the deliciousness of this recipe to Tisha, the creator of The Rice and Spice Cupboard.  Most of this recipe is directly from her.  Her version of the recipe is linked above.

 

Ingredients:

 

Crust

2 ½ cups all purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

20 tbsp unsalted butter (yes, that’s 20 tablespoons, 2 ½ sticks, this one goes on the menu of our restaurant, Jessica)

~2 ounces of Gruyere, freshly grated with a fine cheese grater

6-7 tbsp icewater

(note on piecrust: if you’re interested in extremely delicious crust, check out the original post linked above for the recipe using lard.  yummmmm.  I’m not opposed to lard, I just didn’t have access to it…)

 

The Rest of the Pie

4 lbs apples, cored, peeled, quartered

½ cup sugar

1 tbsp lemon juice

¼ tsp cinnamon

5 tsp cornstarch or all-purpose flour

1 egg, lightly beaten

 

Day 1:  The Crust

So I’ve never made a pie before.  However, I’ve watched my friend Jessica, a pie fiend, make pies and crusts of all kinds: cream, fruit, cup sized, regular sized, tartlettes etc…  So naturally, I count all of that as personal experience and go to begin my pie-making quest.  I’ve read and heard about all these high tech ways of making piecrusts using cuisinarts or automatic chopping devices, but I decided to follow the steps of my pie maker mentor and use a fork and knife (or a spoon and knife in this case, as all 3 of my forks were being used).

 

Begin by adding all the dry ingredients to a large mixing bowl and give it a once over.  Chop all 20 ounces of the butter into chunks about an inch large or so.  This part is supposedly the key to a delicious piecrust:  cut in the butter until you have approximately pea-sized chunks of butter left.  Mine were personally larger than a pea, they were actually approximately the size of Po mouse pups, I attribute this to the spoon I was using to cut,  unsurprisingly, not very helpful.  So go at it with the chopping and cutting until you run out of patience or it looks about done.  Keep in mind, you don’t want the butter to melt here, so minimal finger mushing should be used.  The chunks of butter will be flattened out when you roll the dough and then when baked will create a deliciously tender and flakey crust (hopefully).  You can also put the butter in the freezer for about 15 minutes or so before you use it just to chill it a bit more.  Next, add ice water to the mixture 1 tablespoon at a time.  There will be a point at which cutting is no longer effective and you will need to switch to using your hands.  The recipe called for 6-7 tablespoons but I probably ended up using 8-9.  Just make sure you add cautiously, as just like making pasta dough, it will come together nicely exactly when the right amount of water is added, and you don’t want extra.  Boo mushy piecrust.  Once it’s all done, divide it into two chunks or disks, one a bit larger than the other (approximately 3/7 and 4/7), cover inn saran wrap and put in the fridge overnight.

 

Day 2:  OMG Pie!

Preheat oven to 400°F.

The day has finally arrived: Pie Day!  First, make sure you actually have a pie tin.  Apparently, I do not own one.  Luckily, my better-equipped roommate, Whitney, has a baking stone that would suffice.  It was a little bigger than a normal pie tin would have been, but it worked just fine.  Quarter, core and peel your apples.  Slice them into medium to thing slices and throw into a large bowl.  At this point you add the rest of the ingredients (not the egg).  You might want to actually measure them.  I was getting a little overanxious and just started throwing them in by eye and my pie ended up a bit runny, not enough cornstarch.  Toss the apple mixture until all the ingredients appear to be evenly spread.

 

Place the apples aside for a few moments; it’s time to prep the dough.  Work on a well-floured surface and be sure to add flour as you roll out the dough, flipping it over a few times helps, too.  If you’re not careful, the dough will totally stick to the surface and you’ll be totally frustrated.  Roll, roll, roll, then place the dough circle from the larger piece into your floured pie tin.  Toss in the apple mixture on top.  For the truly decadent, you can add a few thin slices of butter on top before you put the top crust on.  Say your goodbyes to the apples and place the top crust on its home.  Crimp the crusts together any way you wish.  I made a peace sign with my left hand, placed it on the edge of the tin with both layers of dough underneath, then took my index finger from my other hand and push up between my peace signed fingers and squished it all together.  Take your egg, lightly beat it, and brush it on to the top of the pie.  If you don’t have a brush (like me) you can just use your fingers and rub it around, just don’t tell people.  You might not use the whole egg, don’t worry about it.  Cut 3 parallel slits in the top of the pie and then throw it in the oven and reduce the heat to 375.  Bake approximately 50 minutes.  Also, if you want to make sure your crust doesn’t get super crispy, you can make a ring of tin foil and place it on the crust then remove it about halfway through the baking, although, I found with the egg wash on top, even the edges of the crust didn’t burn, they just got a little bit more crispy than the rest, so the foil probably isn’t really necessary.

 

Take out the pie; let it cool for at least 20 minutes.  Prep your favorite episodes of Pushing Daisies, cut yourself a LARGE piece of pie and enjoy.

 

(another picture for the road, and to motivate you to make it, …delicious…)

Media Center!

So, unfortunately, my current extra-vocational ambitions are the type which require a moderate financial backing.  That also means that I get to research all sorts of cool bits and piece and get to min/max price and performance, which, fortunately for me, is something that I thrive upon.  I have high ambitions for this new project.  Essentially, I’m going to create a Digital Audio Workstation of sorts.  I’m going to call it my Media Center!  It will consist of a new computer, which I’ll be building myself (no, I don’t really know how to do that) specifically for digital audio creation, mixing, sampling and editing.  Additionally, I’ll also be acquiring a keyboard of sorts, an essential tool for a DAW.  Incidentally, I’m also interested in other forms of digital media, namely photography and digital image editing and design.  Of course, any games I fancy can also be brought aboard this beast.

 

This all started from my slightly impulsive decision to buy a DSLR camera.  After weeks of arduous research, moral dilemmas and dragon vanquishing, I finally acquired a Canon Digital Rebel XSi.  The goal of the extensive research and analysis of significant purchases is obviously to continue to be satisfied with your purchase after you’ve acquired the item.  Complete success with this camera!  The price was affordable, all of the features that I would use, being a person just getting into serious digital photography, and very simple to use.  I’m totally pumped to start exploring more with it.

 

This brought out the artist in me, which has been buried for quite some time.  Music used to be the main focus of my life until I got whisked away to Chicago, lured by the promise of knowledge and delectable academia.  That is very much what I got, almost exclusively however, and thus, my music dwindled over the first two years and essentially lay dormant for the last two, although, it didn’t go down without a fight.  I took a whole year of theory for music majors and then a second year of ear training and keyboarding (one of my more interesting academic choices).  I also managed to remain in the Wind Ensemble for five quarters before I was driven away by a (much) less than spectacular director.  All of the fun (and coincidentally, good) trumpets left at the same time.  I’m not quite sure what they did after that…  And during my second year I arranged and composed some music for a stellar playwright’s brainchild.  “Sweettime” was amazingly fun for me to work on.  It was very interesting, because I’ve never composed for song, per se.  I had dabbled in composition before, but never songwriting.  My interest was piqued, to say the least.  However, I didn’t have enough ambition or free time to continue with it at that time.  However, now for the first time in many years in my life, I’m not on a schedule or a tract for something.  No deadlines, no applications, no restrictions (well, a full time job, but aside from that).  This means free time abounds and ambition and motivation, although not quite plentiful, can be sought out.

 

And that brings me back to Media Center.  Despite costing a pretty penny, with current music production software, it’s really actually fairly amazing what one can create on a budget.  With a rig of about $1000 and keyboard of about the same or less plus a little software, you can make professional sounding recordings/mixes/samples (or what have you) that compete with those made from multi thousand dollar recording studio setups.  It’s pretty impressive and very accessible to the every day musician.

 

From my few weeks of intensive research (that’s not meant to be read with sarcasm) this is the potential system I’ve set up.  Granted I don’t know that much about all of these components and building computers, but I’ve learned a large amount in the past few weeks.  Topics like computers and photography have LOTS of internet resources available for you.  Other topics like music production, details about midi and keyboards have very little information and require a lot of piecemeal work to gain any ground.  Anyway, here beith Media Center (beta):

 

Intel e8500 Core 2 Duo (3.13GHz)

4GB DDR2 1066 RAM

MSI P45 Platinum Motherboard

VisionTech ATI HD 4870 GPU

Corsair 520W PSU

NZXT Tempest Case

Pioneer DVR optical drive

Western Digital 640GB

Zalman cpns9700 cpu cooler

Windows Vista Home Premium Edition…

Plus Periferals and softwares, which will be decided at a time in the future and may include an entirely too large monitor…

 

I still have a few decisions to make.  Mainly, e8500 processor or q6600 (core 2 quad 2.4GHz).  There’s so many discussion on this topic specifically riddled throughout the internet that it’s too difficult for a silly computer neophyte like me to make a reasonable educated decision.  When push comes to shove, it’s likely I wouldn’t even notice a difference between the two, however, making a concession like that isn’t in the spirit of aggressive min/maxing, now is it?  The motherboard is also an issue.  That’s been the hardest component to get a good grip on.  I’ve found about 4 different types that are all fairly similar and I can’t differentiate between, so I’ve been trying to rely on new egg reviews, which are actually a very good source of information.  Right now I’ve settled on the one that has the coolest looking heatsink (by the time I’ve posted this, I’m sure I decided on a different one already).  Also, I’m trying to decide between power supplies: 520W modular and 650W non modular are very similarly priced on newegg.com right now.  I don’t have the best handle on wattage consumption, but I don’t ever imagine using two GPU’s and I don’t think I’d exceed 520W with anything I’d do.  I’m also terrible at making decisions, so it makes this whole process that much harder.  But all-in-all, I think I’ve made a fairly muscular, reasonably economical beast (which will also apparently glow blue, as the case and cpu heatsink/fan are riddled with blue LEDs…)

 

I haven’t yet purchased anything, but I think I will soon.  However, as with any electronics, never purchase until right when you want to use it, otherwise the price will inevitably drop two days after you order your stuff.

 

I’ll photodocument the rest of this endeavor, hopefully for both of our amusement (and not to my potential extreme frustration).

Sage Rosemary Roasted Chicken and Mashed Potatoes

My day in, day out life at the lab can get a bit tiresome and monotonous from time to time, occasionally interacting with my furry murine friends more than my less furry coworkers.  I think (hope) that giving them motivational talks sometimes helps their baby making process.  So far I haven’t really noticed any significant difference, but I haven’t been keeping track of the effects (or lack thereof) and I have performed no t-test, so really, the effect on the mice is still inconclusive and I will continue to do so.

 

My lab manager, Claudia, is really into gardening and her and her husband have a pretty big garden at home with apparently an endless supply of herbs.  So sometimes she brings in delicious fresh herbs for me and I make delicious fresh foods from them.  This past week she brought me some fresh rosemary and sage.  I had some ambitious ideas of roasting a leg of lamb, inspired by my favorite foodblog (linked to the right) and a trip to Eastern Market last weekend with Jessica.  I soon adjusted my goal to something more reasonable: a chicken.

 

I don’t really have much experience with cooking large roasts or birds, so this was a bit of a gamble, but I made some strong decisions and carried on with my plans.  I don’t yet own a nice roasting pan or stone, it’s high on my list of needed cooking accessories, so on the way home from the airport I got one of those tin foil type throw away pans and a nice looking 8 pound chicken from Giant.

 

First things first: exploring the chicken.  So there should be a bag of giblets, I think usually stuck in butt end of the body cavity.  Now, if I remember correctly from my Thanksgiving Turkey experience from back in college, there was a neck stuck in the other hole in the turkey.  With minimal investigation, I couldn’t find anything that would be easily removed from the other end of the chicken, so I left everything in place over there.  Just make sure everything in a paper/plastic bag is out of the bird before you begin.

 

Sage Rosemary Roasted Chicken and Mashed Potatoes

1 chicken (approx 8 lbs)

4 branches rosemary

3-4 bunches sage

pepper to taste

salt to tasete

8-10 cloves of garlic

1 lemon

1 small yellow onion

6 tablespoons butter (unsalted)

8 oz sour cream

½ cup heavy whipping cream

5 large Idaho potatoes

Preheat over:  450°F

 

Rinse the chicken off a bit, then pat it dry with paper towels, making sure to dump out any water or chicken liquid that may have accumulated in the bird holes.  Making sure it’s fairly dry helps when you rub butter all over it.  Since it would be a pity if the chicken weren’t covered in butter, double check the roaster pan for excess chicken liquid.  Put the chicken in the roaster, breast side up, and rub it with butter.  About 1 to 1-1/2 T depending on the size of the chicken.  You can skimp if you don’t want to use as much butter, but I don’t recommend it.  Butter makes food good.  Rub the butter all over the chicken, throw some inside the chicken holes and under any loose skin.  Butter everywhere will help keep it from drying out.

 

After you’ve grown tired of rubbing the chicken, pat on the herbs.  Use about 3 branches of rosemary and a similar amount of sage (about ¾ of the total herbage gathered) and chop up the herbs.  About a medium size should be fine, just so they don’t get stuck in your teeth and require excessive effort to chew them when you eat the chicken later.  Pat the herbs onto the chicken making sure to throw some inside the body cavity.  Sprinkle on pepper (freshly ground if available) and a little bit of salt.  Sliver 2 cloves of garlic thinly and arrange on the chicken. 

 

Now here’s the fun part: throw some things inside the chicken.  Yes, you can stuff it with, like, stuffing.  But that slipped my mind when I was at the grocery store, so I improvised.  Crush about 4 peeled cloves of garlic with the flat side of a knife and throw them in the body cavity of the chicken.  Cut the small yellow onion into quarters and throw them in.  Cut the lemon in quarters, squeeze the juice from one of the quarters onto the top of the chicken and throw the rest inside.  You can put anything else inside that you want, but there really isn’t too much room.  The butter, onion, garlic and lemon seem to do pretty well.

 

Make a tin foil lid for the roasting pan.  Put in the over for 10-15 minutes, then lower the heat to 350°F and continue cooking.  Remove the tin foil after about an extra 30 minutes, depending on the crispiness desired in the chicken skin: less foil time, more crispy.  Cook until the popper pops, if there is a popper in your chicken.  An 8 pound chicken took about  2-1/2 hours total to cook.  The legs should be loose at the joint and when you cut into the joint, the liquid that comes out should not have any red or pink color.  The chicken should also be golden brown and have nice crispy skin.

 

While your chicken is roasting, get the stuff together for the mashed potatoes.  Peel and cut 5 large Idaho potatoes.  Boil approximately 20 minutes, or until tender.  Finely chop the remaining rosemary, sage and garlic.  Combine the heavy whipping cream (yes, skim milk can be used instead if necessary…although heavy whipping cream is my favorite ingredient to cook with) and butter and heat in the microwave until warm.  This way the potatoes will stay hot when you add the extra ingredients.  Strain potatoes and beat in the cream, butter, sour cream, herbs and garlic.  Add extra pepper and salt to taste.  Put lid back on potatoes and wait for the chicken to finish.

 

Gravy!  By the time the chicken is finished, there should be a bunch of chicken juice in the bottom of the pan.  It might go a while before this chicken juice appears in the pan, but don’t worry, it’ll come.  It is delicious.  Pour the juice out of the pan and separate the fat.  Fancy fat separators work fine, but I just used a tall thin glass (University of Chicago super tall senior night at the pub highball glass finally had a use) and spoon out the fat at the top.  Place on high heat to reduce.  Chicken stock or wine can be added to the gravy to give it more body and flavor.  Usually I’d guess a white wine would be best to use…but I only had red.  So I used the red wine anyway, just not so much that the wine takes over the flavor.  Add maybe ¼-1/2 cup wine, depending on the amount of chicken drippings you got from the pan.  Continue to reduce over high heat.  Add about ½ cup of chicken stock (or water and 1 chicken bouillon cube) and reduce again until it reaches the desired concentration of flavor.  I’ve stopped trying to thicken my gravy because it always turns out disastrous, gross or chunky or something.  I kinda like thin consistency gravy better for bird meat anyway, but if you prefer thicker gravy, by all means thicken, and let me know how to do it right.

Voila, yummy roasted chicken, very simple.  Eight pound chicken and 5 large potatoes can feed 6 hungry, large appetited people, or feeds me for a whole week.