This evening marked my first celebration of Chinese New Year. Since a large number of the students that live in my house are chinese, they decided that we should celebrate as a house with a dinner this evening. I baked an apple pie, but the real treat was the Chinese food that tasted like nothing you'd get at Dong Fong or any other Chinese restaurant in the US. I made the mistake of coming down to the kitchen before all the food was prepared, so I was pressed into service helping to stuff and fold the Chinese dumpling. Well, it wasn't really a mistake, it was actually a lot of fun to learn how to make them, and I now know that a good dumpling has at least 12 feet (the little pleats), and I even managed to impress them by being able to wield chopsticks semi-skillfully. The food though, was incredible, I have not eaten so much in a long time, and part of the reason I'm awake writing this is because my stomach is still too full to sleep, guess its bread and water tomorrow to recover. There were fresh spring rolls, some sort of double cooked hard boiled egg, a delightful soup with meat dumplings, a dish with four or five different types of mushrooms, fried rice, gelatinous rice balls (much nicer tasting than it sounds), the dumplings I helped to prepare, and I can't even remember what else, but wow, it was great. Although I suppose it had better be good since they spent almost 5 hours in the kitchen preparing everything, I felt guilty that I spent about forty minutes prepping an apple pie, and that only took time because I had to slice the apples and chop the nuts for the topping.
Sitting around the table, with six chinese students, myself, two Australians, and two British students, really reminded me that the incredibly diverse student body is one of the most amazing things about Cambridge. We had a lesson from one of the Chinese students on the four different ways of pronouncing sounds, debated the merits of international travel, compared stories of sleepless undergrad days, and discussed the continuing war in Iraq. It was probably almost more educational than some of the lectures I've attended while here, and one of the things that really makes me glad I'm here for the year. I mean, how many Americans get the opportunity to celebrate Chinese New Year the way I did, and the chance to realize how much I really do have in common with these people. It's moments like these where I find myself shaking my head, staring out my window, and going, "my goodness, I really am in Cambridge" and reaffirming just how lucky I have been.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Monday, February 07, 2005
One Culinary Disaster, Coming Right Up!
Disclaimer - The food disaster about to be described was not mine, I am not that inept in the kitchen.
Almost half the students that live in my house are Chinese, so we're going to have a potluck on Saturday to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The couple that lives on the ground floor asked if I would cook an apple pie, since that seemed to them something traditionally American that I could contribute. Personally, I think it's quite simply that they want to see if I can actually cook something that doesn't involve directions saying "Remove from package, pierce film, microwave for 5 minutes." So a brief gander through the Betty Crocker website, and I found myself armed with an "Impossibly Easy French Apple Pie" (french I know, kind of defeats the American idea, but c'est la vie).
After an ordeal of trying to find a pie plate anywhere, I finally had all the necessary ingredients minus the apples. So when I found myself with all my reading done by 7.30 this evening, with nothing else to do, at my mother's suggestion I decided that I would attempt a test case to ensure that I couldn't manage to destroy a Bisquick recipe labeled impossibly easy. After a brief trip to Sainsbury's, and several minutes debating the merits of Granny Smith, Braeburn, Bramley, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious, and Cox apples (I decided on Granny Smith), I found myself actually *gasp* following a recipe and doing something that could be reasonably described as cooking. As I sat in the kitchen slicing three apples and preparing to assemble my pie, one of my housemates, Kate, was having dinner with two girls from her crew team, and everything seemed cozily domestic, or at least compared to my gourmet Jello efforts from my West Point cooking days.
As I put the finishing touches on the crust, one of our other housemates, Steve, came in, and put a saucepan with some minced beef (aka ground beef, but doesn't minced sound nicer?), on the stove on HI, and then left to return to his room for something. I popped my pie in the oven (on a cookie sheet in case it leaked since my pie plate seemed a bit shallow to me), and took all my dirtied items upstairs to wash up and put away. As I'm in the kitchenette on the first floor about 10 minutes later putting away the last of my washing, the fire alarm went off!!! I ran down the two flights to the basement, convinced that somehow, something labeled impossibly easy had quite possibly gone wrong.
However, the clouds of gray smoke that bellowed forth from the open kitchen door were heavy with the unmistakable odor of burnt meat rather than burnt apple pie. As I heaved a sigh of relief - and promptly began choking on the fumes - I saw Steve returning from outside having dumped a flaming mass of charcoaled meat into the back alley. To my utter shock, he then began to blame Kate and myself for having left the kitchen when he thought we'd be in there!!!! I was completely dumbfounded, apparently the guy hadn't returned to his cooking, and so it had caught fire or something, and he had the audacity to blame us. Now maybe if he had asked either of us if we were staying in the kitchen and would we mind his cooking, and we had left after saying we would, then maybe he could blame us. But no! the idiot had merely left and apparently forgotten he was cooking something.
So now everything in the entire house smells like burned meat, even though for an hour we had all the windows and doors open to create as much ventilation as possible. And the guy never even apologized to us for having to wait outside til the porters came to turn off the fire alarm, for ruining Kate's saucepan, for stinking up the whole house, or for anything.
Luckily however, 20 minutes after this incident, I pulled a lovely french apple pie from the oven, and proved my mastery of the culinary art to three of my housemates after coercing them into playing guinea pig for my cooking atempt. Since one of them ate almost half the pie, and used his fingers to mop up every last crumb from the pie plate, and requested that maybe I try to cook two for Saturday, I considered my foray into the realm of Betty Crocker a success. Too bad the same thing can't be said for Steve's meat, and I'm sure I'll have strange dreams tonight as I drift off to sleep in this stench.
Almost half the students that live in my house are Chinese, so we're going to have a potluck on Saturday to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The couple that lives on the ground floor asked if I would cook an apple pie, since that seemed to them something traditionally American that I could contribute. Personally, I think it's quite simply that they want to see if I can actually cook something that doesn't involve directions saying "Remove from package, pierce film, microwave for 5 minutes." So a brief gander through the Betty Crocker website, and I found myself armed with an "Impossibly Easy French Apple Pie" (french I know, kind of defeats the American idea, but c'est la vie).
After an ordeal of trying to find a pie plate anywhere, I finally had all the necessary ingredients minus the apples. So when I found myself with all my reading done by 7.30 this evening, with nothing else to do, at my mother's suggestion I decided that I would attempt a test case to ensure that I couldn't manage to destroy a Bisquick recipe labeled impossibly easy. After a brief trip to Sainsbury's, and several minutes debating the merits of Granny Smith, Braeburn, Bramley, Pink Lady, Golden Delicious, and Cox apples (I decided on Granny Smith), I found myself actually *gasp* following a recipe and doing something that could be reasonably described as cooking. As I sat in the kitchen slicing three apples and preparing to assemble my pie, one of my housemates, Kate, was having dinner with two girls from her crew team, and everything seemed cozily domestic, or at least compared to my gourmet Jello efforts from my West Point cooking days.
As I put the finishing touches on the crust, one of our other housemates, Steve, came in, and put a saucepan with some minced beef (aka ground beef, but doesn't minced sound nicer?), on the stove on HI, and then left to return to his room for something. I popped my pie in the oven (on a cookie sheet in case it leaked since my pie plate seemed a bit shallow to me), and took all my dirtied items upstairs to wash up and put away. As I'm in the kitchenette on the first floor about 10 minutes later putting away the last of my washing, the fire alarm went off!!! I ran down the two flights to the basement, convinced that somehow, something labeled impossibly easy had quite possibly gone wrong.
However, the clouds of gray smoke that bellowed forth from the open kitchen door were heavy with the unmistakable odor of burnt meat rather than burnt apple pie. As I heaved a sigh of relief - and promptly began choking on the fumes - I saw Steve returning from outside having dumped a flaming mass of charcoaled meat into the back alley. To my utter shock, he then began to blame Kate and myself for having left the kitchen when he thought we'd be in there!!!! I was completely dumbfounded, apparently the guy hadn't returned to his cooking, and so it had caught fire or something, and he had the audacity to blame us. Now maybe if he had asked either of us if we were staying in the kitchen and would we mind his cooking, and we had left after saying we would, then maybe he could blame us. But no! the idiot had merely left and apparently forgotten he was cooking something.
So now everything in the entire house smells like burned meat, even though for an hour we had all the windows and doors open to create as much ventilation as possible. And the guy never even apologized to us for having to wait outside til the porters came to turn off the fire alarm, for ruining Kate's saucepan, for stinking up the whole house, or for anything.
Luckily however, 20 minutes after this incident, I pulled a lovely french apple pie from the oven, and proved my mastery of the culinary art to three of my housemates after coercing them into playing guinea pig for my cooking atempt. Since one of them ate almost half the pie, and used his fingers to mop up every last crumb from the pie plate, and requested that maybe I try to cook two for Saturday, I considered my foray into the realm of Betty Crocker a success. Too bad the same thing can't be said for Steve's meat, and I'm sure I'll have strange dreams tonight as I drift off to sleep in this stench.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
So Much Work
Life here may seem like all play and no work, but its definitely not. And cadet style procrastination is definitely not a smart way to play the game over here. With an engineering undergrad background, I would have thought that building and analyzing a model would be easy, but like the majority of people in my course, I spent this past weekend stressing out over what factors contribute to pricing in a PDA... sounds riveting doesn't it. Now that that is finally out of the way, we're all left with the stark reality that in a short four months time, we're expected to be handing in dissertations that contribute to our chosen area... Yikes! It's definitely a stressful thing to be worrying about, and I've woken myself up with nightmares about being laughed out of Cambridge without a degree and finding myself in hot water with the Army... needless to say, it's not the most stress free time in my life right now.
So apologies to any and all who check up on my blog here, but the truth is that writing about hours spent in a library or in front of a computer terminal hardly seem newsworthy, although I will try and keep updating with stories that may or may not be exciting :-)
So apologies to any and all who check up on my blog here, but the truth is that writing about hours spent in a library or in front of a computer terminal hardly seem newsworthy, although I will try and keep updating with stories that may or may not be exciting :-)
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