now picnic

Some of the beautiful bounty from the garden -- look how big those pink brandywines are! And here's a lovely yellow tomato ...



In case you are looking for something to read, read this. It's about cheeky ATMs. And it is funny.

We have a LOT of tomatoes. We have so many tomatoes, that we have vowed, solemnly, to plant (at most!) half as many next year. We know now: we got a little carried away. While we are raking in the tomato bounty, though, we're looking for interesting ways to cook them. I ran across this recipe for red and green tomato stir fry in the excellent book "Hot Sour Salty Sweet." It's a beautiful book, worth buying for sure. The authors have a new one, too, about Indian cooking called "Mangoes and Curry Leaves" which I'm sure is just as delicious, but this amazon reviewer has got it all wrong: "The book's value as a cookbook is largely lost due to it's unwieldy size and the fear of getting spots of curry paste or yogurt on these expensively glossy pages." You can check out my scan below to see that the value is certainly not lost for me! The spots mark the good recipes, obviously.

I scanned in a few recipes from the book for a stir fry that uses sweet, red tomatos and tart, unripe green ones. It originally had pork in it, but we made a veggie version for tom7 and cortney that came out beautifully. This pdf contains all the recipes you need, and more!

Tips!

• If you don't have green tomatoes, ask us for some. :) Or use tomatillos, or leave them out.


• If you are leaving out the pork, you want something oily to replace the pork fat, so add a bit of extra peanut oil, and a bit more sesame oil at the end. (I already adjusted the recipe for you.)


• The other thing you need to replace the pork is something crispy and brown. For this, we recommend making one recipe of the veggie dipping sauce (below) and marinating some tofu in it for 30 min or an hour or whatever. Then, fry up the tofu with some oil in a non-stick pan or wok until it is crispy and brown in places. This takes a little while, so make spoons do it.


• Then, add the tofu into the tomato stir fry where it's indicated on the recipe, and add all the leftover marinade for extra tastiness.


• We served the tomato stir fry, yunnan greens, rice, and a bit of the carrot/radish slaw together. The bean sprout/scallion slaw is great, too. You don't have to be such an overachiever, though. You can just make the stir fry and rice. :)


• The marked up version makes dinner for four, with rice and a side dish veggie.

All these recipes.

A few weekends ago, spoons, rose, HPhil and I took a drive to Millvale, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh which seems slightly lost in time. You can check out my photos on flickr.

I just read a nice article by Case Western physicist Lawrence Krauss about why the basic science that we do in particle physics is worth doing: Discovery for the Sake of Discovery.

Here's the beginning:

"On a summer day, you can ride your bicycle through the narrow lanes that bisect fields of grass on the outskirts of Geneva with no thought that, dozens of meters below, one of the most complex construction projects in human history is underway. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), just one year from completion at CERN, will be the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, the largest and most technologically sophisticated machine ever built, and one of the greatest scientific endeavors humanity has yet undertaken.

The late Austrian-American physicist Victor Weisskopf described the grand particle accelerators that began to take shape around the world in the 1950's and 60's as the "Gothic cathedrals of the 20th century." The comparison was, and is, apt. The medieval cathedrals pushed the limits of available technology, involved the craftsmanship of literally thousands of skilled workers, and took generations (and sometimes centuries) to complete. Modern particle accelerators require decades from conception to completion and involve scientists from about 80 countries, speaking dozens of languages, whose separate handiwork must mesh together perfectly on the scale of thousandths of millimeters. The physical magnitude of these distinct public works projects is similarly comparable—just one of the LHC's four detectors is large enough to house the Notre Dame Cathedral."

... read more.

The photo below is the experiment I've been working on, but this time with a person for scale -- in the lower right-hand corner you can see a guy in a blue jumpsuit and white hard hat. The detectors at the LHC are even bigger. I wasn't around the lab when the detector was being rolled into the collision hall (the photo is a stock Fermilab one) but I hope to be at CERN when things start up there!

* Note! This entry was hacked sometime today. Weird. That stuff about "Megaupload! Send your nasty Screencaps to me" was not me. I swear.

There's a pretty picture of my experiment, taken by someone at the lab years ago, before it was moved into the 'detector hall' where the proton and anti-proton beams are. I've been working on a work webpage that explains what I do. Check it out and let me know if you have suggestions. I spent a fair almount of time picking out the links on the page, so definitely click around.

mmm. pesto.

also. snakes! on a plane! tonight!

also. spoons is awesome. and peppery!