A move, and a Hawaiian cheesecake

I haven't mentioned it until now, but I'll be moving tomorrow to a new place about 15 minutes' drive outside of Hilo to the town of Pepeʻekeo. It's been a more drawn-out process than moving usually is for me, which is partly why I hadn't mentioned it; it involves moving to a house my parents bought in advance of retirement and, for once, I've been able to set my own time-table. I've been shuttling small loads of stuff to the new place the past few weeks, but tomorrow marks the big move of furniture and changing where I sleep. I'll never enjoy moving, but at least I get to pick when I need to be out by, and can do the moving and then come back and clean (and perhaps finish moving non-essential stuff) after a week settling in rather than needing to get it all done at once.

That's mostly just to say that it might be a bit quiet around here as I get moved in and go through the excruciating process of readjusting all my routines that moving always entails. I don't want to end this post without pointing out something I baked last month, though!

This is an ʻōhelo berry cheesecake I made for a social gathering. The ʻōhelo are present in the form of a compôte on top of a basic cheesecake, and it came out quite well. Even after making this and the pie from before I still have a few cups of ʻōhelo berries in the freezer, so I'm still thinking about what to make with them. There are lots of recipes involving blueberries out there (muffins, perhaps?), so we'll see what I come up with! A hui hou!

A Hawaiian pie

It has been a very busy month here for me, which is why it's been so long since my last post. Some of the busyness has been pleasant (birthday parties!), some…more neutral (being in a hotel while my apartment building was tented this week), but all of it left me with little downtime or drive to write.

One exciting development is that last week I finally managed to make the pie I've been meaning to since about May! The idea was sparked by a comment from a coworker about how one could theoretically bake a pie using ʻākala (native Hawaiian raspberries) and ʻōhelo (native Hawaiian blueberries). The ʻākala ripen earlier (around May/June), so while I had some in the freezer ready to use for a few months it wasn't until late August/early September than the ʻōhelo really started ripening in significant amounts. Once they did, though, I was able to pick a lot – easily a few cups of berries in a quarter-hour's work. I ended up with so many that I didn't even use them all up making the pie, and will have to find some other use for them…

Thankfully, the pie came out well! I used the recipe I mentioned in my previous post (where I made it with raspberries and blueberries), and only added about a fourth of a cup of additional sugar. It wasn't an especially sweet pie, but it wasn't tart as I had feared the ʻākala would make it. (It's interesting to me how red the filling is – while related to blueberries, ʻōhelo are generally more red or reddish-purple in color.) I ended up making it after a particularly draining day at work (an arduous protocol that involved much tromping through the forest, under a sky that rained off-and-mostly-on all day) so I didn't get too fancy with the crust, but I did scratch the unofficial D20 logo into it. (It was also our last day doing that protocol this year, so it served as a nice celebration for finishing it.)

Anyway, just a quick post today as I'm technically still lodging at the hotel even though my place was cleared for re-entry this morning – the gas company won't come out to turn on the gas until Monday so I don't have any hot water or stove. I've got some interesting photos from visiting the annual Hakalau Natural Area Reserve open day last week, so look forward to those when I finally get a chance to catch my breath (hopefully this week!). A hui hou!

Happy Two Pi(e) Day 2025!

It's that time of year again folks! By which I mean Tau Day, 6/28, and Michael Hartl's annual State of the Tau update. Looking back over my blog, I realize this marks ten years since I made my first post on Tau Day back in 2015 (with one every year since except for 2017, where I seem to have simply forgot).

Since you're probably tired of me explaining over and over again why \(\tau=2\pi\) is a more natural circle constant than \(\pi\), let me instead share some (photos of) actual pies. You see, up in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve where I work a lot of plants are busy producing various fruits over the summer. Two of those happen to be the native Hawaiian raspberries (Rubus hawaiensis), known as ʻākala, and the native Hawaiian blueberries (Vaccinium reticulatum & V. calicynum), known as ʻōhelo (though they're actually red in color).

ʻŌhelo and ʻākala are both edible, though neither are particularly sweet (and ʻākala in particular can be very tart). Last month someone at work suggested the idea of baking them into a pie (where some added sugar could combat the tartness), and this inspired me enough to go out, buy a pie pan, and make some practice pies. I used a recipe for blueberry & raspberry pie (which I'm pretty sure I made while I was in Australia), using store-bought berries to stand in for the Hawaiian versions.

Before baking…

…and after!

And I think it came it pretty well! This is the second of two practice pies I made, since the berries I bought turned out to be just enough for two. The top cover design is meant to be a stylized view of a D20 die (or icosahedron), since we're the 20th domain in NEON and often abbreviated D20 (and have shirts with such a design on them). This was my first time making my own dough (I just used pre-made pie crusts in Australia), and while I think it could be slightly tweaked and improved I'm pretty happy with how it came out (both visually and taste-wise!).

I haven't had much time to collect berries from the field the past two weeks, but this week should provide me opportunity. Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a picture of an ʻākala pie from another conservation team on the island, so I'm clearly not the only person experimenting with it. A hui hou!

Miscellaneous family visit photos (part 1)

While my family was visiting in November we checked out a number of places on the island, from which I have a bunch of photos. I'd just gotten a new phone (the Pixel 7 Pro, for the curious) and was learning the camera, and partly because of that I often only ended up with one or two good shots from a location. Instead of writing a lot of little posts about each individual spot, I thought I'd bundle up photos from multiple places into a few larger posts. (They also won't necessarily be in chronological order.)

For this post, I think I'll focus more on the biological splendors (or things of interest) that we saw. Two interesting places we toured were a coffee farm on the Kona sida and a chocolate farm just north of Hilo (just a few miles from my house). I'd never seen either fruit on the tree before, so it was interesting to see how they grow and hear about the process by which they become the end products we're familiar with.

Coffee berries at Greenwell Farms.

Chocolate pods at the Lavaloha chocolate farm.

The chocolate pods in particular were rather interesting with the way they just grew seemingly at random upon the tree, including up and down the trunk. I'm holding a mature one in that photo, to give you a sense of scale (the coffee berries were more like olive-size). Within the pods are a bunch of seeds surrounded by a fleshy layer, which has an odd but not unpleasant taste. (We got to eat some straight from the tree on the guided tour!)

We also visited Richardson beach and walked along the coast to Leleiwi beach were we came across a pair of sea turtles sunning themselves on the rocks. I think that's only like the third time I've seen turtles in my time here (not spending a great deal of my time at the beach), so it was pretty neat. Especially since the zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro is a lot better than on my old phone, allowing me to get shots like these while staying safely distant from the nonchalant chelonians:

Two tired turtles at Leleiwi beach.

Close-up of one of them checking us out. (We we safely beyond the legal distance, don't worry.)

Anyway, that's all for this (fairly short) post. I'll try to get another up fairly soon summarizing some of the cool geological sights at the places we visited. A hui hou!

Bread-baking bowls

So I'm about a year and a half late to the homemade bread-making party, but better late than never, right? For whatever reason I just wasn't really interested at the beginning of the pandemic while the rest of the world was discovering it and tweeting about it. I don't know why; it's not like it's a foreign concept to me – my parents had and used a bread-making machine while I was growing up – but I think the only bread I've baked myself was the time I made the Berke family pretzel recipe.  

Up until this past week, that is! I recently discovered a nifty device for helping with bread-making, and it's such a simple idea it's a surprise I hadn't heard of it before. It's essentially a silicone bowl by a company called Lékué, which allows you to do all the steps within it: mixing, kneading, rising, and baking. Yep, just pop it in the oven to bake at the end (no need to transfer to another container), or in my case I just use my combination microwave/convection oven/air fryer. I made some bread using one of the recipes that came with the bowl this week, and for not having done it before it came out splendidly.

That's the bowl on the left.

I've now baked a second loaf, and can hardly wait to try out more recipes. The ones that come with the bowl are pretty small, but it could easily hold a more “normal” sized loaf, so that's something to experiment with in the future. It's great to have the smell of fresh bread wafting through the house, and I'm looking forward to baking a lot bread in years to come. A hui hou!

Experiments in AI-assisted art: DALL•E

You might have heard about DALL•E (a combination of Dali and WALL•E) sometime in the past year or so, a machine-learning AI system by a research team called OpenAI which can take a natural language prompt like “A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball” and produce an image based on it. It can mimic a huge range of styles from realistic photographs, to digital art, to hand-drawn sketches or paintings, and has produced some remarkable output. It got some coverage back around June when the team behind it started opening up access to a few people, who started sharing the images they were using it to create. I happened across the form to request access, and, intrigued, signed up, not expecting for a moment that I'd get it without entering a Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn profile. Near the end of July I saw an article that OpenAI had opened DALL•E up to a million people, and imagine my surprise when I got an email notifying me I'd been selected.

“A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball, realistic photo”, by DALL•E.

Above you can see one of the images I created with DALL•E. I was trying to explain it to someone as, “That new AI system where you put in a crazy phrase [at which point I tried to come with the craziest phrase I could think of] like, ‘A corgi made of jello dancing on top of a ball,’ and it spits out an image of it.” And then, well, I had to actually try it and see what I got. (DALL•E actually produces four variations every time you give it a prompt, which will look generally similar but have some differences in style, allowing you to choose the one you like best.)

“An Impressionistic painting of the Gemini Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea in the style of Vincent Van Gogh”, by DALL•E.

It certainly has some quirks. While the site encourages you to be descriptive and specific in the prompt you give, it's hardly perfect at interpreting what you mean. In the image above I asked for two very specific things (the Gemini Observatory and Maunakea), and while it's done a decent job of an image (I rather like the composition of this one) it's inexplicably given the observatory two domes instead of the single one it has in reality. (DALL•E was weirdly fixated on the notion that Gemini = two domes, as I tried several variations on this prompt and pretty much all of them had that feature.)

“A delicious-looking hamburger in the shape of a Rubik's cube, professional food photography”, by DALL•E.

One funny article I read recently had the author playing with phrases like “X in the shape of Y” in regards to food, which led me to try the prompt above. (Which, side note, looks scruptious and I would totally eat.) I find, in general, that DALL•E works best if you give it a fairly specific prompt about generic objects, though you can certainly include phrases like “in the style of X artist.”

There's been some hand-wringing online about whether DALL•E might lead to the death of various creative professions in the visual arts, like concept artists. Having played with it, I'm not too worried. Oh, sure, as it rolls out to wider use there'll probably be some changes, in the same way powerful new tools have always produced changes. There will probably be a lot of small jobs that might've been done by hand before that DALL•E will replace (stock photography, in particular, is something that DALL•E could fill in for quite well I think). But as my experiments with it showed, there are things I can see in my mind's eye which I can't figure out a prompt to produce with DALL•E, and if I want to show them to the world I still need to pick up a paintbrush or break out Blender or something to that effect. Sometimes something DALL•E puts out sparks something in my imagination, which is neat; I'm actually half-tempted to take my paints to the summit of Maunakea and attempt an Impressionist painting of the Gemini Observatory myself now. Ultimately we're just on the cusp of AI-generated images from natural language prompts (there are several other models around pursuing similar things), and we'll just have to wait and see where it takes us. I read about someone using DALL•E to produce a logo for a program they wrote, which I thought was a neat use of it.

For now, I'll keep throwing in the occasional crazy prompt I think of. While writing this post I had the thought that perhaps it would be useful for generating images for text-heavy posts where I don't have a photo or something else to break it up. I often find it surprising how well DALL•E can handle fairly abstract or abstruse concepts. We'll see how it goes, but you might start seeing more DALL•E images around here in the future. A hui hou!

Air fryers and pressure cookers: adventures in new kitchen gadgets.

Welcome to 2022, everyone, and a post about food.

Well, a post about kitchen gadgets that facilitate the preparation of food, anyway. Moving into my new place back in November I found myself in the novel situation of having almost a blank slate when it came to kitchen tools, and kitchen equipment, and kitchen...just about anything, really. I did ship some things from Australia—measuring spoons, the electric kettle I was gifted, some serving spoons and the like—but those still haven't arrived yet (though I've heard the boat is slated to arrive in Hilo on Monday!). I thus found myself in a unique position to start almost from scratch and tailor my kitchen to how I wanted it with the latest advances in cooking technology. While in Australia I held off any any purchases of new gadgets beyond the bare essentials for several reasons (difficulty in moving back before I expected to have moving expenses paid, electric plug differences, ect.), but I'd picked up a few ideas from the internet over the years that I wanted to try out.

Perhaps most pressingly, I didn't have a microwave, and while I was down in Walmart browsing the selection an intriguing combination microwave + toaster oven + air fryer caught my eye. I'd heard about air fryers and wanted to give one a try, and multi-use gadgets have always appealed to me (and made a lot of sense in my kitchen, which is not huge), so I picked it up.

So far, it's been quite handy and I'm really happy with it. Much like how I mentioned in the post about my new car, I have the feeling of technology having taken a leap forward without my noticing it. (Also like my car, I'm sure some of the innovations have been around a few years, but they're still new to me.) In the past, microwave ovens have been things you put food inside of, guess at how much time it'll take to heat it up satisfactorily, input that time, and stood back while it cooked. Now, I can cook with either microwaves or convection in the same appliance (both at once, even!), and it's got humidity sensors that let you automatically heat or reheat food to the right temperature. In fact, I've only turned on my oven once since moving in (to make lasagne with the new pan my aunt gave me for Christmas) because anything that would otherwise need the oven which can fit in the microwave is easier done in there. If I want to make cookies I can just stick them in the microwave and set it to the preset "Bake cookies" option. If I need to cook a frozen fish filet, it knows how long to do it based on the weight. Mozzarella sticks or French fries? The air fryer functionality stands ready to cook them conveniently and quickly. It's quite a useful device, and I'm happy I got it (it's this model by Galanz if anyone's interested).

Another gadget I haven't had before, and have been low-key interested in for a while, is a pressure cooker, so when I moved it I bought an Instant Pot Duo. It wouldn't be hyperbole to say that it's revolutionized my cooking even more than the microwave air fryer. It does such an incredible job of simplifying the cooking process that I can't get over it. If I wanted to make pasta before, I'd have to put a pot of water on the stove, wait for it to boil, put in the pasta, stir it for 10 minutes or so making sure it doesn't boil over, and finally have it ready. During that time I couldn't stray too far from the stove for too long, which made preparing other food at the same time tricky. With the pressure cooker, I just dump the noodles and some water in the inner pot, set it to pressure cook for a few minutes after building up pressure, and come back in 10 minutes or so to ready-to-use noodles. Similarly, I like rice, but making it manually is a dull and time-consuming affair. Now, I just rinse it, put it in, and hit the Rice button to come back to beautifully cooked rice. I've also been experimenting with steaming a variety of vegetables, and I'm finding steaming retains the flavor better than other cooking methods I've tried in the past (in addition to being easier).

And it's not just pressure cooking, either! The Instant Pot Duo can also function as a slow-cooker (another multi-use gadget!), so I've used it to make my particular slow-cook chilli a few times already. It can also be used to sauté, so just today I used it to sauté some frozen burger patties (which came out incredibly delicious, garnished with some greens from my hydroponic garden). Unlike doing it in a frying pan, the spattered grease was easier to contain (with the help of a lid), making it a lot cleaner than doing it on the stove. There's other features I've yet to try (like "yoghurt making," and cooking soups or roasts), but I feel I've already gotten my money's worth on this gadget and then some. It's just so nice and efficient to be able to put food in to cook and then having that time to work on other things rather than needing to stir a pot or whatever.

Anyway, that's not the end of my experimentation with new kitchen gadgets and tools, but I'll save that for another post. I just wanted to my voice to the chorus of people on the Internet who've discovered these things and had them change their cooking experience. In my case, while I've been cooking for myself for over a decade now, it's not usually something I initiate because I want to, but rather because I, well, need food. Between the pressure cooker and microwave air fryer and a few other new gadgets, I'm finding myself actually excited to cook, and after several years of grad school and lockdowns I'm actually finding myself increasingly eager to try cooking new things. It's a good feeling! A hui hou!

...Farmer!

Yesterday I discussed passing my thesis defense, and becoming in some sense a “real” (astro)physicist, thus fulfilling the first part of this blog's domain name. Today, let's talk about that “farmer” part.

For those who might not know me as well, the Berkes have been farmers in Nebraska for multiple generations, stretching back over 150 years to the mid-1850s. My dad got a PhD in crop breeding rather than more traditional farming, but was always growing things as I was growing up (especially after we moved to five acres in California when I was eleven, where we had several vegetable gardens and orchards of as many types of fruit trees as he could get to grow in the climate). I, on the other hand, have never had a green thumb (I once managed to kill a resurrection plant), and found myself drawn rather to the starry heavens than the organic. I picked up a lot of knowledge related to growing plants a long the way, but other than a few abortive attempts over the span of my life was never really interested in doing so.

At least, not until fairly recently. I'm not sure when it started happening, nor can I point to a specific day, but over the course of the past two years (and centuries months of lockdown) I found myself wanting to grow my own food. Maybe it was always latent, maybe it was triggered by a desire to see things green and growing again after so long cooped up inside (especially through two Australian winters), maybe it was playing Stardew Valley starting in 2018 with its idyllic view of farming and sharing your bounty with others, but whatever it was, by the time I moved back to Hawaii I found myself with a burning desire to see what food I could grow for myself.

Then, a bit of a reality check: for one thing, I'm in an apartment with no area to grow a garden outside, and for another, Hawaii has endemic parasites that cause angiostrongyliasis, commonly known as rat lung-worm disease. Put simply, parasitic worms founds in land mollusks like slugs and snails in the islands can cause some serious damage to the human central nervous system, so if you're ever eating fresh produce in Hawaii make sure you wash it really well. Unable (and somewhat unwilling) to start an outdoors garden, I had to think outside the box, or rather, inside the house; and that's how I became a hydroponic gardener.

Hydroponics is the art/science of growing plants without soil, with nutrients delivered to the roots by dissolving them in water. Some years ago (before I started my PhD) we took a family trip to DisneyWorld in Florida, where we went on a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the gardens that grew the food served at the park, including a large hydroponics section. That's the first large-scale exposure to the concept I can remember, and it obviously stuck with me for me to remember it now. Anyway, as soon as I knew I'd be moving into my current place I started doing some research and soon after moving in I put in an order for a Farmstand from Lettuce Grow, one of several companies making consumer-ready hydroponics systems.

Just under three weeks ago, on December 2nd, the seedlings I'd ordered arrived (the parts to assemble the stand having arrived a few days earlier), and with expectant anticipation I arrayed them in the little recesses provided for them and set up the water pump and LED grow lights (which work on a schedule). Here's a photo I took of the first seedlings all ensconced in their places (with labels so I could remember what was what):

Farmstand, assembled!

For this first trial I picked a selection of different types of lettuce, some herbs, celery, and a cherry tomato plant. My motivation was that I'd like to be able to grow my own salads and avoid having to buy them as often. Once cool part about the Farmstand is that it's expandable; I've got the minimum of two layers, but it can go up to six, and I can already see myself growing a larger selection of vegetables in the future.

Anyway, I was a bit worried for the tender seedlings the first few days as they all looked a bit under the weather from their short trip here by FedEx, but they all not only survived, but thrived. Within a few days I could tell that the fastest-growing among them were visibly bigger, and by the end of the week even the slowest were showing growth. At the two-week mark I was able to pick my first few leaves of lettuce to put in my sandwiches for lunch or add to the store-bought salad I was having. Over the weekend I had my first salad entirely from my own lettuce mixture. And today, one day short of three weeks...well, see for yourself:

The grow lights make it hard to get natural-looking photos after dark.

Every morning now I come down from my bedroom upstairs eager to see how my plants are doing and have been growing over night. The lettuces are prolific, and are starting to look like leafy explosions in slow motion. The herbs are a bit slower, but still busy putting out leaves. Just this past week I discovered that the crafty tomato plant (on the far side in these photos), though not showing much too much outward growth, had sent one long thin root all the way down into the central reservoir, so hopefully it'll start picking up the pace. It's an amazing feeling to be able to just walk over and pick a few leaves from various plants for salads or sandwiches, and I think it's safe to say that I've found a new long-term hobby.

And that's the “farmer” part fulfilled now that I've eaten my own produce, at least on a small scale. (Though I have...plans. Indeed I do.) It's amusing to me that it ended up happening so close to the “physicist” part, but this blog's domain name is now finally topical! And it only took almost a dozen years! I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the topic of indoor gardening in the future, but this post is probably long enough for now. There'll be plenty of time to talk more about my new hobby. A hui hou!

Edit (12/29/21): One thing I forgot to mention, for anyone who might be tempted to get their own Farmstand, is that you can use my personal referral code FRIEND-YKPW to get $50 off the price of a Farmstand. (It also gives me $50 in credit.) That said, Lettuce Grow is hardly the only company making consumer-ready hydroponic growing systems, so look around to see what's available if you're thinking of making the leap to indoor gardening.

Supertasters

I recently came across the page on supertasters on Wikipedia while browsing…and I think I might be one.

A supertaster, per the article, is “a person who experiences the sense of taste with far greater intensity than average.” This refers to both pleasant and unpleasant tastes, and it was while reading the list of foods that supertasters generally dislike that I went from reading with mild interest to sitting up and taking notice. The evidence is, admittedly, circumstantial, but let's go down the list:

• “Certain alcoholic beverages (gins, tequilas, and hoppy beers)”
• Well, I've never actually had one to confirm, because I dislike the smell of most alcoholic beverages—especially beer.
• “Brassica oleracea cultivars (become very sulfurous, especially if overcooked): Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale”
• I'm definitely not fond of either Brussels sprouts or kale. Cabbage I like raw, in a salad, but reading this reminded me that I don't like sauerkraut despite generally loving sour tastes. So, kind of?
• “Coffee”
• Can't stand it. When I first started my PhD, back when we had a coffee machine in the lunch room, I decided to finally give it a go and see if I could figure out what people saw in it. I stuck it out for a few months, before finally giving up because I just could not enjoy the vile taste (and that's despite dousing it with sugar).
• “Grapefruit juice”
• This one I can't really remember trying, but going off my memory of the scent of grapefruit I don't think I'd like it.
• “Cilantro or Coriander”
• No. I have the gene OR6A2 which makes cilantro taste incredibly repulsive. Like, if you don't have the gene, I'm not sure it's possible for me to convey just how awful it tastes. To me it tastes like the smell stinkbugs make. Take a bite out of a cake of soap if you want an inkling of what it's like.
• “Green tea”
• I don't really drink green tea, I realized. I drink black tea sometimes, but even then I don't really drink it for the taste, as I only have it with enough sugar to make it sweet. I guess I dislike unsweetened tea in general.
• “Watercress, mustard greens, horseradish, dandelion greens, rutabaga and turnip”
• I…am trying to think of the last time I had any of these, if ever. None of them are things I'm particularly motivated to seek out, at least, so it's possible I tried them once and didn't like them.
• “Soy products”
• Not entirely sure what this one means. I do like soy sauce, and I'll eat soybeans…though they can definitely be a bit bitter sometimes, now that I think about it.
• “Carbonated water”
• Never could stand the stuff. I like it if it's sweetened as soda pop, but not by itself—it just burns my tongue.
• “Mushrooms”
• I definitely dislike mushrooms, though part of that is their texture. Not sure how much of it is their taste—I haven't had one in long enough to have forgotten what they taste like.
• “Anise and licorice”
• Don't like either.
• “Lower-sodium foods”
• Not really sure what this is referring to. The article does say “Supertasters consume more salt in comparison to those with average taste.” It's true I do love my salt-and-vinegar potato chips (that perfect combination of salty and sour, perhaps why I love dill pickles as well), but I don't think I particularly dislike lower-sodium foods.
• “Hot-spicy foods”
• Yup, definitely do not like spicy foods. I can stand the occasional “mild” salsa or taco mix, but that's about it.
• “Other foods may also show altered patterns of preference and consumption, but only indirect evidence exists:
• Tonic water – quinine is more bitter to supertasters”
• No idea, don't think I've ever had tasted quinine (though if it's bitter, I probably wouldn't like it).
• “Olives – for a given concentration, salt is more intense in supertasters”
• For whatever reason, I've always been ashamed of my dislike of olives (unlike any of my other dislikes). I'll order them on pizza, or Subway sandwiches from time to time, and over the past year I've actually been buying them from the grocery store to try to build up a tolerance of them, but no. They remain disagreeable.

So that's at least eight things on that list I definitively dislike, and several more that I'm pretty sure I'd dislike based on my nose (which by the way, Mom and Dad, was basically 100% accurate when, as a kid, I told you I wasn't going to like something before actually tasting it)¹. Keeping in mind that is only general trends and not a strict diagnosis (which requires exposure to very specific compounds to see what they taste like, apparently), it's still pretty striking just how well this lines up with my overall taste preferences.

I suppose the flip side to all this is that if I am a supertaster, at least I'm experiencing the good tastes more intensely too? I don't have any way of telling that, of course, though I have learned to tone down my natural reactions to biting into a perfect hamburger or other culinary masterpiece to stop people teasing me about it. Not that it really matters either way, I just thought this was an interesting phenomenon to learn about. A hui hou!

¹I can think of a few foods (sauerkraut, coffee) where I like the smell but dislike the taste, but no foods where I dislike the smell and like the taste.

Drinking through Grass: Plant-Based Disposable Straws

Plastic is an incredible material which the vast majority of our ancestors would've gone to great lengths to obtain; imagine being able to store your grain for the winter in water, air, and vermin-proof containers which neither rust nor rot! Unfortunately, that extreme durability becomes a liability when used for products which are intended to be disposable, specifically drinking straws (as the increasing amounts of them ending up in the ocean show). Multiple different types of reusable straws are coming out on the market (and that's an admirable initiative), but they often have issues of their own, such as straws being difficult to wash out and possibly prone to mold.

Looking for another solution, a new company called Equo has created a range of disposable, plant-based straws which biodegrade over a few months or so. They had a Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, I backed it, and yesterday I finally got a chance to try some of their straw out!

The packaging got a little dented in transport, but the straws were all fine.

They offer four different kinds of straws, but I only got two, as I don't really use straws at home much. Or at all, really, I just thought they'd be fun to try out. They offer straws made from rice, coconut, sugarcane, and grass, as seen here. They're each made in slightly different ways, but it basically involves soaking or steaming the plant material into an elastic mush, then forming into straws as it dries. Except for the grass straws, which are simply stems from the grass Lepironia articulata, or grey sedge. They naturally form these hollow tubes, so they just need to be cut to size, sterilized, and packaged! Because they're natural grass stems, they don't go soggy in liquid—I used one yesterday, left it to dry overnight, and used it again today. They're all even edible (with maybe the exception of the grass ones), with Equo noting that you can cook the rice straws down into porridge after use, if you want, and simply eat the others.

I'm a huge sucker for more innovative use of our God-given natural resources, and from personal use I can give these the seal of approval, so I really hope these catch on. They're not yet available for sale generally, but now that they've started production hopefully we'll be seeing them ‘in the wild’ soon. A hui hou!

There's no way to look dignified while sipping through a straw, so I offer this photo of me trying out a sugarcane straw purely from a sense of scientific integrity.

Baking Cinnamon Rolls

This weekend I made some cinnamon rolls using a recipe from a friend, and they turned out pretty good. I think this is the first time I've done some proper baking with proper dough and yeast for…three years, perhaps? I took some pictures during the process and thought I'd show 'em off.

Here's the dough after letting it rise for an hour.

It's been so long since I last mixed up a proper dough. It's funny how the smells come back to you, like the way the yeast smells. I also have a ton of yeast left over now since the smallest package of it I could find was a half-kilogram, so I guess I need to do some more baking soon. I had a hankering for runzas just the other day…

Cutting up the rolled-up log of dough with the cinnamon mix inside.

This part reminded me of watching videos during tours of the Jelly Belly factory about how they make those little taffies with the pictures inside, by rolling up logs of ingredients and cutting across them.

Putting the rolls in the pan…

…and a half-hour later, when they'd risen some more and filled up the space.

Finally, baked, frosted, and sampled!

The frosting didn't work out quite so well unfortunately, as the butter wasn't softened all the way through. Which left little lumps of butter which later melted once spread over the piping hot rolls, visible here as the yellowish regions. Thankfully it doesn't seem to have affected the taste, these do indeed taste delectable. I left them in the oven a few minutes too long so they came out a bit more “done” than they should be, but I'd say they're still a solid 6 or 7 out of 10. Not too bad for a first try! I'll have to do these again sometime. A hui hou!

Changing Food Preferences: Celery

I've been home sick the past few days (with what I thought was a bad cold, and in retrospect may have been a comparatively mild flu; I'm almost over it now, however), and, among the other illness-addled thoughts in my brain over that span, I got to thinking about how my views on celery have changed over time.

Well, somewhat: I never liked raw celery as a kid, and I still don't. It has never seemed at all appealing to me, even with something on it. What I've discovered in the past few months, however, is that I really like celery stewed, or fried, or cooked in any way—in fact, I absolutely love it, to the point where I've been buying more and more celery lately and using it in more and more dishes. It's hard to say if I've always felt like this and just didn't know it (it's possible I just didn't recognize cooked celery in dishes as a kid), or if it's an actual change from growing up.

Whatever the case, I've started making more meals at home and bringing lunch in over the past two months, as I think I've finally gotten a bit sick of eating out so often during the week. This, of course, has led to lots of opportunities to experiment with celery, so I'm pretty happy with it. Who knows what other foods remain out there that I might like now? Exciting possibilities! A hui hou!

Paintings and Pie

Friday was Tau Day (where \(\tau=2\pi\)), so for Journal Club that morning I and another guy at Swinburne brought in two (homemade) pies. I can't, to my knowledge, remember baking a pie before, but it turned out to be really easy: I settled on a blueberry pie (which I haven't had in ages), and with a pre-made frozen pie crust the rest of the pie-making was surprisingly simple. It came out tasting amazing, so I'll probably experiment with more pie-making in the future. I've noticed that fruit pies seem to be somewhat rare in Australia compared to the U.S.; they're not unknown, as I came across pre-made frozen apple pie while looking for pie crusts, but they're definitely not a common thing.

Delicious blueberry pie.

On the topic of painting, I recently finished a small landscape painting I started back in February and didn't get back around to working on for a few months. It's going to be…either a highly belated or an extremely early (depending on how you look at it) Christmas gift for my housemate's parents who had me over for Christmas last year.

“Dandenong Nighttime Vista,” canvas, 10”×8”.

I had some silver paint leftover from another project, and as I'd been planning to do a sort of moonlight-on-the-forest-leaves effect I tried using silver for it. (I also used it for the stars, where I think it works quite well.) I'm not 100% convinced it works—I probably shouldn't have spread it horizontally so much in the background as that makes it look more like moonlight on water—but it does make for an interesting and perhaps unconventional approach. I am pretty happy about the trees in the foreground, as I spent quite a while painting all the vertical lines making them up.

Finally, you may remember my Easter painting from back in April. Although my original intent was to try a looser, more impressionistic style for it—as seen in the sky, the first part I did—it morphed into my more usual meticulous, detailed style along the way. I was never quite happy about the sky, therefore, so although I had intended it to be finished by Easter, I ended up going back and reworking it. It fact, I reworked the sky twice before being satisfied with it, and ended up detailing some of the mid- and foreground more as well. It's still recognizably the same painting, but I'm a lot happier with it in its current state now:

“Easter Morning,” 40×30 cm.

I've also been working on some space-related paintings for an exhibit I'll be participating in in honor of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 next month, but things are all in the final stages of coming together for that, so I'll get some pictures of the works I and others have contributed for that soon. I'm looking forward to seeing it all hung and ready for exhibition! A hui hou!

Lamb, Chopped (Minced, Really)

Last week I went to an interesting fund raiser at church: a company called “Tastepoint” runs taste-testing sessions where they'll pay the organizer for getting enough people to participate. During the sessions everyone gets a number (seven in this case) of different cuts of meat of differing qualities and prepared differently as well. You rate them based on several factors such as flavor, juiciness, and tenderness. I have no idea whom this research (into…consumer preferences, I guess?) benefits, or how, but it's apparently a pretty established thing.

Anyway, for that session they were serving lamb (they also do beef), something I didn't grow up eating much—or at all, really—as an American. Pretty much my only exposure to it comes from eating shwarma in Israel (or kebabs, as they're known elsewhere). I've actually had goat meat more often—it makes pretty good sloppy joes. I rather liked some of the cuts of lamb that I had, so while I was grocery shopping yesterday I decided to try cooking with it for the first time. I did some quick searching for recipes and decided on making some shepherd's pie with lamb mince.

After assembling the ingredients, I started making it for lunch after church this morning, but failed to realize just how much work was involved, so I ended up having it for supper instead. (It basically requires making lamb stew and mashed potatoes separately, then combining them and cooking them further on top of that.) It came out pretty well, though I think I didn't boil enough liquid off while making the lamb-and-vegetables mix, so I had to leave it in the oven a bit longer. I also added some shredded cheese on top which went very, very, brown and crispy from the extra cooking, but all in all I think it came out all right. The sort of “lamb stew” intermediate product was interesting (and smelled delicious) on its own, so I've got some ideas for using lamb in the future. We'll see where it goes, I suppose. A hui hou!

Vegemite

As the saying goes, “when in Oz, do as the Aussies do,” (or was that Rome? No matter) and as a result I've taken to eating Vegemite. I was actually given some to try my fourth day here, and it's really not half bad, certainly not as bad as I'd been led to believe…if taken in moderation.

For the sake of any of my fellow Americans who decide to try it, I've attached the following picture to show you how to apply it:

1. The slice of bread on the right has butter. This is what you want for your base.
2. The slice on the left has butter, and less than the size of a pea's worth of Vegemite. This is the correct amount to apply. Actually, even that may be a bit thick. A little goes a very long way.
3. The slice in the back has Nutella. Do not apply Vegemite that thickly. It will not end well for you.

The best description I've heard is that Vegemite is basically like spreadable soy sauce, and it's an apt comparison: both are extremely salty foods that can spice up otherwise-boring foodstuffs if applied in moderation. It'll probably take me about forty-seven years to get through that jar at the rate I eat it, so I should be set for life. Let me know in the comments if any of you have any personal experience with Vegemite! A hui hou!

Bouncy Burgers

While food-shopping on my way home from church this afternoon, I found this in the meat section:

The picture speaks for itself.

Naturally, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to sample an indigenous species. I picked them up and fried up two for lunch. Despite a tragic lack of dill pickle hamburger chips in this country and the necessity of slicing my own (it's the little things that make you homesick), I thought the resulting burgers came out pretty nicely:

I like how you pretty much can't see the burger patties in this shot. Great framing, me!

The verdict: …hmmm. I don't mind the flavor—in fact, thinking back I can barely remember a distinct flavor from the burgers. I was less thrilled with the texture. I'm not sure if it's a result of how I cooked them or what, but they seemed sort of…I guess “mushy” is the best word I can think of to describe it. Perhaps it's just that I was subconsciously expecting beef and that wasn't what I got that made it seem less than satisfactory; I'm still not sure. It was a rather confusing culinary experience. Luckily it was a four-pack of patties though so I've got four more to try to make up my mind. Maybe they just need cooking differently, or maybe I won't mind it as much if I'm expecting it. We'll just have to see! A hui hou!

Edit (3/16/18): I had the rest of the burgers a few days later, and definitely noticed the taste this time. I wouldn't say I really liked it, but it wasn't objectionable either. I've had some people tell me that burgers really isn't the best way to have kangaroo, so perhaps I'll have to try some other form of it.

Berke Family Pretzel Making!

Last December after I was unexpectedly able to be home for Christmas my mother sent me back to Hawaii with the Berke family recipe for German pretzels, passed down through generations of adventurous Berkes over the course of two centuries and two continents, all the way back across the sea to the Berke family bakery in Germany (which is still there today), to before an enterprising scion of the family decided to try his luck in the New World (though it should be noted that Berke is not a German name and we don't know where our intrepid forebears migrated from, though I have my theories…).

With that melodramatic opener out of the way, it's not like it's a secret recipe or anything. This weekend I upgraded my computer from Debian 8 to Debian 9, and while it was busy upgrading and I was twiddling my thumbs I decided to try making the Berke pretzels for the first time on my own (I've helped my mom make them in the past), and since I took some pictures along the way I'm going to share the recipe and process here in case anyone else wants to try (or I ever lose the hard copy!). You're going to need a few things to start with…

You can also see the chili I was cooking simultaneously in the crockpot in the background.

First, microwave ½ cup of lard with 2 cups of water for a minute or so until the lard melts. While that's heating up, sift together 3 cups of flour (preferably bread flour), ⅔ cup of powdered milk, ⅓ cup sugar, ½ teaspoon salt, and 1 tablespoon of yeast (as seen above).

Add the water/lard mixture to it and mix. This is best done by hand, as the mixture is incredibly sticky at this point. Add ⅓ cup more water and continue mixing, adding up to 4 cups of flour 1 cup at a time. Keep mixing and kneading with your hands until the dough is just not sticky (this may require a little more flour; it did when I made them).

The right hand knows what the left is doing, and is very grateful it's too busy taking photos to be involved.

This dough is so sticky I can only hope my fingers are still attached; I haven't seen them in about 5 minutes.

At this point, pour a little oil in the bowl and slosh the dough around in it so the top is oiled, then set to rise for about an hour (cover the bowl while the dough is rising).

I ended up letting this dough rise about 2½ hours by accident.

Now, give that dough a good punch.

Punch!

Next, start some lye water. Mix 2 tablespoons of (food-grade) lye (sodium hydroxide, NaOH) in ~2 quarts of water over very low heat in a glass or enamel pot ONLY. Don't let it boil, and use plastic utensils! (The lye water will react with metal such as aluminum to create hydrogen, so don't let it spill and keep away from sources of open flame. You can flush it down the drain when done, though.)

To prevent boiling of the lye water you can use an improvised bain-marie like this one

 Next, roll out the pretzels. An easy way to get a good size is to divide the dough into 36 pieces.

Yes, I know. My pretzel-shaping skills are abysmal.

 (You can let them rise a little after this.) Next, prepare some pans by covering them in heavy-duty aluminum foil and spraying liberally with Pam. Then start dropping pretzels in the warm lye water one by one for ~15 seconds before placing them on the prepared pans.

I'm being very careful here not to let the metal handle touch the water, while taking a photo with the other hand.

That foil is quite necessary if you don't want the lye water messing up your pans.

Sprinkle with kosher sea salt to taste, then bake for 10 minutes at 400 °F. (In my experience, what seems like a lot of salt when you're shaking can be hardly noticeable after baking. See the salt in the pictures below? I could barely taste it, so don't be afraid to be liberal with it.) If they come out looking like the ones below, congratulations, and enjoy!

As you may be able to tell, my ability to make a pretzel shape is pretty much nil, and this pretzel expresses my feelings on the subject pretty accurately:

First Grumpy Cat, now Grumpy Pretzel.

Anyway, that's all there is to it! Well, “all.” It's a significant amount of work and will take at least a few hours, so you may want to make a double batch to get more pretzels out of it (three dozen will go surprisingly quickly!) A hui hou, and happy baking!

Thanksgiving Breadfruit

This week I peeled a ripe breadfruit for the first time. It was quite an interesting experience!

I've cooked breadfruit before—I've even written about it on this blog—but looking back on it I realize now those breadfruit were unripe. Peeling a ripe breadfruit is a very unique experience. The closest I can liken it to is to trying to peel a lump of soft, sweet, bread dough encased in a skin something like a pear's, or perhaps a potato's—and I can definitely see where the name breadfruit comes from now! The taste is also difficult to describe. The closest thing it reminds me of is bananas, but it's very definitely its own unique, mildly sweet taste.

I've been having a rain of fruit going on in my backyard this past week, which prompted the breadfruit peeling. The avocado tree lost a small branch loaded with fruit a week ago (in addition to other ripe fruit falling), and there's been a steady stream of small earth-shaking thumps from the intermittent rain of breadfruit.

I peeled the breadfruit in order to cut it up and make a sort of hash out of it, with sautéed onions and diced Spam, but I suspect a less-ripe fruit would have been better (unripe breadfruit is kind of like a potato in texture, although it also bleeds an extremely sticky latex-like sap, so there's a lot of washing involved). I'm still trying to figure out how to prepare one best; I cooked an unripe one in the oven, but it came out looking extremely unappealing. I cooked a ripe one on the advice of a coworker, but forgot to peel it first leaving it somewhat difficult to separate from the (sap-covered) skin (it's still in my fridge while I think how best to eat it). I'm thinking of just peeling a ripe one and eating it raw at this point, but if I can find a good recipe for it I may put it up here in the future.

And finally, on a different note, happy belated Thanksgiving everyone! I spent a very relaxing Thursday topped by dinner with friends remembering all the things I'm thankful for, such as trees dropping seemingly-endless amounts of fruit in my backyard. Hau‘oli Lā Ho‘omaika‘i!

Guacamole-making...thing.

I've mentioned before on this blog that I discovered a love of guacamole while living here in Hawai‘i. At least, my idiosyncratic version of guacamole. I've had some commercial stuff that I didn't particularly care for...

Anyway, for Christmas my family got me a guacamole-making...thing. I have no idea what to call it. If anyone knows the name for the thing below, please let me know.

Guacamole-making thing-a-ma-jobber.

I'll admit – I was slightly skeptical of its efficacy, but thought I'd give it a try, so the first trip to the store after getting back I picked up some avocados. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is actually perfectly designed and engineered to make guacamole – the sea-shell shaped end works amazingly for scooping the flesh out the avocado, and the spiky flower-y end does a smashing job of mushing the scooped-out avocado flesh up. I can see how it wouldn't work in the scenario I was imagining, as an unripe and hard avocado would be difficult to scoop out and mash (amazing tool or no). But for a ripe, soft avocado it works wonders. So thanks guys! I'll probably try to make guacamole a bit more often after this.

Since I put up my chili recipe a few weeks ago, I might as well close by putting up my guacamole recipe if anyone is feeling adventurous. It's pretty simple: take two ripe avocados and clean out the flesh. Add “a heaping spoonful” of mayonnaise – I'm not sure how much, about half a cup I'd say. Mix it well. Finally, mix in a can of tuna (drained). Add other seasonings or flavors as desired. (I usually see what I have lying about and toss small quantities in...minced garlic, onion flakes, various herbs, etc.) Consume on its own or with chips (my preferred method, sea salt and vinegar chips work quite well). Enjoy!

New Food for the New Year

As the title says, what better way to ring in the new year than with a new recipe? Last year, rather by accident, I came up with a new recipe for chili. I made it off-handedly for some friends while I was back in California, and ended being told by two people who self-identified as “not liking chili” than it was “actually pretty good.” I considered that to be approbation enough for me to present it in case anyone else wants to try it.

The recipe is pretty simple. Simply mix the following ingredients in the proportions listed in a large pot or skillet and heat:

1 can chile con carne with cheese
1 can corned beef hash
2 cans diced tomatoes of whatever kind you like

Let it simmer on medium heat for about 10–15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until it reaches a consistency you like. Let it sit longer if you want it less watery (you could also try draining one of the cans of diced tomatoes before adding them to cut the amount of liquid). Feel free to add anything else you like, such as minced garlic or spices. Serve with sour cream or cheese. The basic recipe should provide about 4 to 6 servings.

I came upon this recipe through a process of trial and error. It came about (as most of my impromptu culinary experiments do) with me standing in the grocery store aisle and wondering how corned beef hash and chile con carne with cheese would taste mixed together (shouldn't it really be “chile con carne con queso” for consistency?).

The first test was alright (good enough for me to continue iterating on it, at any rate). I really like corned beef hash but it's very dry, so I thought mixing it with the chile would add some moisture. Not quite enough for my taste, though, so I added a can of diced tomatoes the second time around. This was better, but still not quite enough. Adding a second can of tomatoes (I do love tomatoes) brought the ratio to an acceptable place in my mind, and I've made it several times in the past few months. At this point I consider it a stable base recipe and after successfully testing it upon family and friends I figured I'd put it up here. Just today I had an idea to make the next batch with some peas, chopped carrots, and minced garlic added, so we'll see how that turns out.

If you do try this recipe and enjoy it, let me know in the comments! It's always nice to know you've shared something nice with someone. A hui hou!