Blogs / Cosmic Variance

So for the first time ever, I stepped into our fancy new Molecular Biology building (it’s been finished for a year or so now….). I was expecting to be accosted by security the moment I walked in, because, I don’t really expect that they’d let us poor theoretical physicists walk around in such splendid surroundings! Luckily, the first person I saw as I walked in was Mike Waterman (he who helped host the reading of our play last month), whose Computational Biology group is now also in this building. So all was ok.

Why was I there? Well, it’s been an incredibly long day (all day committee meeting retreat in a hotel boardroom in downtown LA) and now it’s Friday night…. and so that means fun, of course! Seriously, I went back to campus for a short while and ran into my colleagues Gene Bickers (condensed matter physics) and Leonard Adleman (biology, see below), carrying a blue cask. They turned out to be on their way back to Leonard’s lab (he’s both a Computational Biologist and a Molecular Biologist) to make ice-cream using liquid nitrogen! Better yet, they invited me along to have a look and try some! (Above is Leonard and his daughter Stephanie.)

So, remember our last cooking time together when I made beef lo mien? Well, it’s time for desert…. So, pour in the ice-cream mix, which one of the experimenters (Pablo) had prepared earlier (his secret recipe, perhaps):

Pour out some liquid nitrogen (boiling point is 77 K = -196 °C = -321 °F) into a handy container for accurate pouring….

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Two things.

(1) So on my wanderings through the Hollywood Farmer’s market yesterday (see right an earlier picture of the sort of loot you can get there), I decided to stop at my favourite tamale stand for lunch. While eating the tamale sitting on the curb, I met a very interesting person, Ysanne Spevack, (who was also sitting on the curb, chowing down on some excellent jerk chicken and fried plantains from the stand opposite) who’s an expert on the organic food industry, a mine of information about it and generally fun to talk to. See the amazing website that she edits and helps write, or her eight books, for more information about organic food. Excellent!

(2) Well, curbside eating turned into tea in a nearby cafe to talk further (it’s not often someone actually wants to [join me in] listen to me droning on and on and on about public transport and bikes, gardening and drought-tolerant plant varieties, etc) and then we were joined by a friend of hers. Turns out she’s a model. The reason that is interesting is because (more…)

Oh. So you thought I’d stopped thinking and talking about Taiwan, right? Sorry… no! (See the archives, say under “food and drink“, if you don’t know to what I’m referring.)

Another great thing I enjoyed while there is the fruit. There’s great fruit everywhere. Reminds me a lot of part of my childhood for lots of reasons.

Here’s an arrangement of some type of very fragrant citrus fruit that was in a reastuarant in Hsinchu. They had several of these arrangements around the place, and it smelled divine!

(I went there with my dear friends and colleagues Chong-Sun Chu (Durham), Keh-Fei Liu (Kentucky) and Tu-Nan Chang (USC), who are all based in non-Taiwan institutions (although Tu-Nan is directing the National Center for Theoretical Sciences I told you about earlier.)

Here’s an arrangement of fire-dragon fruit brought to the table at the end of a banquet-style meal at an excellent tradiational-style restaurant (see below) in Hsinchu. Just a wonderful fruit, with gorgeous patterning and colouring, don’t you think? And delicious!

(It was quite a splendid restaurant (as was the other one). It is particularly famous for its traditional layout as well as the food. The layout (shot of entrance below right) includes full-blown streams of water running through the restaurant, with (more…)

Having spent a long day thinking about Physics, fourteen of the weary panel members went for dinner at the fine restaurant “Fire” in downtown Dublin. After a lovely dinner, with excellent conversation, we trekked back through the cold and rain (quite lovely
actually) to our hotel, to find that the lobby was alive with activity! A fellow wearing whites and a chef’s hat came up to us and offered us hot chocolate -with whipped cream and sprinkles! How could we say no? We sat for a while in the fun atmosphere of the lobby (I think maybe two or three conferences had collided nicely to chill out in the lobby, spilling out of the bar, etc)

I took a few snaps. [Sorry they're a bit dark.... wanted them spontaneous and hate to use flash.... did not have time to re-expose as well as I wanted to avoid being fooled by extraneous lighting]. Here’s Astrophysicist Luca Amendola (Roma), and Mathematical Physicist Anne Taormina (Durham):

… and Christina Lacey (USC – the other one…University of South Carolina).

Christina, planning to go exploring the area in and around Dublin after her panel work, put her head together with area Astrophysicist (always wanted to say that), Anthony Murphy (N.U.I., Maynooth) to consult over detailed maps on the local geography.

Then off to my room to blog and then to bed …. Yay!

-cvj

So on Friday afternoon during the rain, and after dashing home from work to do a hurried packing of a bag, I made a dash for the airport. It was quite a nerve-wracking trip because the rain meant that two of the three freeways I needed to use were not moving very well (in fact, the middle one was almost stationary for a while), and after losing a lot of time there, calling my airline and finding out that the flight was of course going to leave bang on time, I got to the check-in desk (after sitting on a frustratingly slow bus from the parking lot that dutifully stopped at six other terminals before mine) with -1 minutes to go before the flight was officially closed. There were no other flights out that day, and so it would have been a disaster to miss the flight. As it was, some combination of (1) my asking on the phone that a note be put in the record of my flight that I was on my way, and (2) the presence of two other (unapologetically late) annoying Europeans besides me holding up the line, I got onto the ten hour flight to London.

So after a quick stop in London to say hello to my sister, have a look at Bromptons, Routemaster buses, etc…..here I am in Dublin, Ireland….one of the main places where you can get the best pints of Guinness on the planet. I’m using the wireless access provided by the head offices of one of Ireland’s main funding agencies, which gives you a clue as to the cover reason for my being here….. I’m part of a panel reviewing the grants for funding. We sit in a room with a long table over two days and deliberate solemnly over proposals from a huge range of physics areas. We all wrote reviews of selected proposals earlier in the year, and now we get to read each other’s reviews, argue a bit over the physics and other relevant details, and come up with our recommendations. It’s actually a lot of fun, since I just love reading about physics from all sorts of areas, whether related to my own area, or not. Both experts in the particular fields and non-experts get to make intelligent comments (there’s lots of give and take) on all proposals, and so one gets to learn a lot about what’s going on in the big wide world of physics, while making a valuable contribution to the scientific community as a whole.

It’s just another of those things that we do as part of our job as academics plugged into an international community (and on which we report to you from time to time).

The other perks? Well……. later tonight, I’m going to sit down with a pint of Guinness, properly poured (i.e., slowly), for a change, with a perfect creamy head and full body. Oh yes….. It makes the jet-lag I’ll have at both ends of the trip (I have to jump back on a plane pretty soon for a ten hour trip back in order to get back to my classes, etc), the missing of the Oscars, all worth it.

-cvj

Serious blogs are apparently not supposed to be of the “what I had for dinner last night” variety. Do I care what people think a serious blog is supposed to be about? No! I can think of few things I care less about, in fact.

So here is the ultimate “what I had for dinner last night” post. (Except it was not last night, but some nights ago.) (Oh, sorry, co-bloggers!) People asked for this, and so here it is….. It is the promised report on my noodle dish experiments, inspired by my wonderful Walkabout culinary experiences in Taiwan, described in several posts earlier (see e.g. here, here, here……)

A disclaimer: This is not really a recipe for beef noodles (beef “lo mien”), as I am not giving you measurements and the like. I am giving instead suggestions about things: ingredients and procedures….. I’m telling aspects of what worked best for me after a few attempts, a least so far. I’m also celebrating the “jazz” aspect I’ve noticed in Chinese cooking, which is the wonderful serendipitous aspect: I never use exactly the same things every time….. There are some broad themes for the framework, but some of the details can be swapped for others…. For example, I just like throwing in the butternut squash later on….. some nights I don’t…I use something else. And my green leafy vegetable can vary a lot too…..I just get a variety of things on the market on the weekend, and open the fridge and see what I feel like on the night.

A further disclaimer: I’m not a chef or a cook, and nor am I trying to be one! Any real chefs who know me, I apologize for this encroachment on your turf! (e.g. Mark B, if you’re reading, sorry!) However, I have cooked a lot, since I was young, and I’m going to assume that you can cook just as well (or whatever) as I can. So think of this not as a cooking lesson, but as though I’m telling you about a new song or melody I learned. Not teaching you to sing. (If you don’t cook…this might not be the place to learn.)

Your results may vary.

The day after I returned from Taiwan, I went to Chinatown. I wanted to find a good Chinese grocery store when I could get excellent ingredients and try to reproduce the flavours I’d been tasting on the walkabout. I found one after asking some people on the street. It’s fantastic (although I get funny looks whenever I walk in – I’m the only non-Asian I’ve ever seen in there so far – people are fine with me once they see I’m just shopping like everyone else) and full of excellent things…. at great prices….. including a wonderful butcher, and stacks of fresh noodles. After a bit of reading around for what the key themes and flavours are, I then went to the store and created a new supply of important sauces and other ingredients for my cupboard and fridge, and I’ve been experimenting with cooking in this style for a while now….

So take a nice bit of high quality flank steak and cut it into strips, against the grain. Pop the strips into a bowl, sprinkle a bit of cornstarch in, coat the pieces with it and then put in some dark soy sauce. It’ll sit there for a while and the sauce will penetrate into the meat, during the preparation of the other things. Start a nice big pan of water on the stove….. you’re going to cook some noodles in a few minutes….

A sauce for later: Some blobs of thick oyster sauce…amazing stuff…..never ever thought of using it before. Put also in some light soy sauce…. a spoonful or two. Mix that with a cup and a half of beef stock. You’ve either made the beef stock yourself from tasty beef bits in an earlier session and saved it in the freezer/fridge, or you’ve gone and bought some off the shelf. Good to have a supply ready at all times. This time, I did not have any stored, and so I used some good off-the-shelf stuff….Trader Joe’s does an excellent one, for example….it is not a specialist item.

Now, another fun part. Chopping stuff up with a big knife. First, garlic. Aside: People often get troubled by garlic….getting the skin off. No problem: Just take the cloves of garlic and crush them under the knife…… then they come right off. Ta-da!

Chop ‘em up nice and fine in a few seconds.

That water should be boiling by now. Take your desired quantity of fresh noodles (of a type that you like….I’m using some thin, white, flour noodles…lovely and soft and floury….) and drop them gently in, perhaps adding a pinch of salt… stir and agitate them a touch with something pointy (chopsticks, spoon, whatever) to separate them… and in a very short time they’ll be ready.

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Saturday night, and I’m doing a bit of blogging after clearing weeds in the garden. Shouldn’t I be getting ready to go out on the town and live it up a bit? Perhaps. I’ll see how I feel in an hour or so. Let me tell you a bit more about my Taiwan wanderings. I’m cheating a bit by borrowing (heavily edited and abridged!) extracts from one of the other blogs I keep…this one being a real diary that lives on my laptop, which I started while on Walkabout as a means of clearing my head (the point of the trip): essentially talking to myself (I recommend it).

At some point in my stay in Hsinchu on my Walkabout, I began to look for places that served good coffee, where I could sit and do a bit of thinking and some work, (sometimes both!). Both coffee and atmosphere are two important fuels for this type of work, at least for me. (This was before moving to Taipei and finding the various excellent tea and coffee places near National Taiwan University that I began to haunt regularly. I think I mentioned those in earlier posts about the trip. See e.g. here and several others.) Apparently coffee bars took hold rather recently in Taiwan and have become quite popular (often in combination with tea bars, but even as a thing unto themselves), although this was not so evident in the part of Hsinchu I was in.

It turned out that I spied this potentially nice coffee place right next (a few doors down from) to my hotel in Hsinchu, and one lunchtime I thought it would be nice to go and sit there and have some coffee. It was not clear whether the place really did sit-down coffee though, maybe only serving over the counter bulk coffee (no tables really set up… possible counter seat or two, but not really sure), and so I thought I would go in and do a bit of a mime to get across my question (as I’d grown accustomed to doing). So in I went, and the proprietor was chatting with someone over the counter. I thought I’d wait, but they broke off and I started to try to say something when the customer (a knock-you-over-the-head-with-a-bat-pretty young woman) spoke to me in English and so I asked her the question. So she asked the proprietor (a charming older lady with no English) and it was established that I could have a cup of coffee there for $100 NT and could sit. I tried to talk to the customer a bit more by asking her if she had a recommended coffee she liked, etc, but then we ran out of things to say before she had to run off, and that was it. She left. (I kicked myself for the rest of the day for not asking her if she wanted to join me for coffee, and wondered at the fact that I’d missed an opportunity to reach out and make a new friend. Getting slow in my old age, I guess.)

The proprietor took an awfully long time to make the cup of coffee, and I stood there on my own in the store, thinking that it would be really ironic if all of this resulted in a really lousy cup of coffee….

Eventually she brought it. It was excellent. It was in a rather special cup which she seemed rather proud of, and we had to fiddle a bit to set me up a table properly. (taking a large bag of beans off the only one that was close to flat on the floor and so usable). For the rest of the time I was there it was clearly a big deal that I was sitting and drinking coffee, for every time one of her regulars came in to get some beans, there was a long conversation, and then they would both turn and look at me for a moment, and then carry on talking. (Also, she came over and glanced over my shoulder at what I was writing, not knowing that I could see her doing this -I’ve eyes in back of my head, in case you are wondering-…..I was playing with a conjecture at the time and drawing lots of pictures and scribbling equations…wonder what she thought that all was?).

As you can see from the pictures, the place was very charming, as coffee places go. It turned out that this was typical of the dedicated coffee places (I went to others later, and in other cities). They’re just chock-a-block full of bags and bins of coffee, coffee paraphernalia, bizarre-looking coffee-extracting equipment (including lots of fancy round glass flasks straight from a science lab in a 1950s SF movie). It is an aspect of the atmosphere that I had not anticipated, and was rather welcome, since I’m quite a fan of ….paraphernalia.

Well here’s the more unexpected part of the story. (more…)

Well, all you other single types out there on Valentine’s Day night, why not dream with me a bit about food? It’s rather pleasant to share my memories of more excellent food from the south of Taiwan, the city of Tainan. I’ve already told you a bit about it in previous posts, (see here, here and here) so this continues the story. Recall that – after dashing off after my seminar in Tapei, a four and a half hour bus journey – I’d just arrived in the city late at night, and was promptly taken off to an excellent restaurant, where we spent some considerable time eating into the wee hours (and a rather drunk restaurant hostess was trying to seduce me with the aid of Taiwan beer)….

That first meal was the first of several where I could really dig deep into the considerable and wonderful culinary depths of the culture. For the next 48 hours I’d not be just sampling things I could figure out how to order on my own…I’d have help (such as with that last meal) from a fellow food lover, my dear friend Huei-Shih Liao, who lives in the city. So I could discover the really advanced stuff, get things that aren’t even on the menu, and learn a lot about the food and history too. It was actually Huei-Shih I came to see in Tainan (having met her in Taipei back in 1997), and to meet her husband and young daughter. The fact that Tainan also happens to be a fantastic historic city with arguably the best food in Taiwan was just a lucky bonus. It was enough for me to see my old friend in her home country again. That was the highlight of the whole Walkabout actually.

Well, anyway, the next excellent meal was in the morning. In a specialist breakfast place somewhere in the city (there are several by the side of the road), and I got to try several of those tasty eggy-things I recall from my first random samplings in Taipei eight years ago (see here). Basically, delicious variations on spring onion omelettes and savoury pancakes of some sort.

A major component of the meal that I would never have been able to appreciate without Huei-Shih’s patient guidance through the menu: Soy milk drinks of various sorts. Perfect accompaniment, along with hot milky tea (which I knew about from the last visit and am addicted to)!

After that, visits to temples and old forts…. excellent, but more later… let’s stay with the food here. I’m a big fan of buns of various sorts (steady now…), and dumplings….. basically the whole range of soft, warm, yielding things you bite into to reveal some delicious filling or other. There is an infinite variety there that you can pick up for lunch or just a quick restorative snack between temples. Actually, it is quite common to find really excellent food places near temples. This is not an accident, I’m told. The visit to the temple would be followed by a stop for a good meal, going back numerous generations, so why not have them conveniently adjacent to each other, to this day?

I love the containment paraphenalia associated to the food as well. The kit. The equipment. Case in point, those woven containers that the various dumpling sorts come in….. Have a look. Lovely. I just love those. I think I’ll get some for my own dumpling experiments later. (Which reminds me… my noodle experiments have been going very well. I should report on them some time.)

That night (after wandering around Tainan’s original street, packed with edible goodies (more…)

Just so you don’t get into too much of a comfort zone with the wonderful tasty food I’ve been describing to you recently (see here and here and more to come) from my Walkabout, here’s a scene perhaps a bit less familiar (at least to the Western eye) from a street market in Tainan:

You can walk along with them on a stick and eat them like a lollipop. Squidelicious! (or is it Octopussilicious!? Although the top bits look squiddy to me, I can only see eight legs/arms/tentacles/whatever, not ten, unless two are hidden in each case?)

I should apologize to PZ Myers right now, since he’s a fan of these critters, I recall…. and ask him “what type are they exactly, PZ?!”

-cvj

So you’ve got the idea by now (if you’ve been reading about my Walkabout) that Taiwan is wonderful for food. Taipei is said to be the most important city on the world map of Chinese cuisine for the sheer quality, quantity and variety. That may well be true enough…..

But the real Source is Tainan, in the South of the island. Getting -at the last minute- the opportunity to go there, I gave a seminar on the 23rd December to the String Theory group (essentially all of the Taiwan string community came…this was part three of a series of talks), shut down my computer, excused myself as best and genuinely apologetically as I could, and grabbed my bags and headed for the door. A while later, after fortifying myself with a bowl of beef noodles (what else?) at Taipei Main Station, I headed for the bus, and the four and a half hour journey from Taipei to Tainan. There’s a bewildering variety of bus stops, and several bus companies to figure out, and getting on little shuttle buses to go to the other place to get the main bus….. and lots of yelling of destinations which I could not understand….I will not claim that I figured this all out myself……the brother of the friend I was going to stay with was also travelling this way, and so he offered to accompany me. I was dreading the bus journey, to be honest. It is not that I can’t do long bus journeys – as a student, to save money on home visits, I regularly took the marathon nine hour one leaving from from London Victoria at midnight, headed to every busstop between London and Preston – but that it was a bit cold, I only had my jacket, and I was not as well prepared in my mind for it either… I was not really in the mood for it, but it was the only way to get there and I was certainly going to go and was prepared to put up with whatever hardship it entailed.

When the bus actually showed up, and I boarded it, I felt a bit silly about being apprehensive. It was not so much a bus as actually twelve fat -FAT- soft beds on wheels! With large (ish) TVs with lots of movies. And massagers built into the chairs. And curtains. And blankets. Yes…..there’s so much room to recline these guys all the way back and put out the leg rests because there are only. twelve. seats. Fantastic. Did I mention how much I love Taiwan?

Four and a half pleasant hours later, having gorged on incomprehensible kung-fu movies (helpfully dubbed and subtitled from Cantonese to Mandarin), and got about half an hour’s shut-eye, the bus pulled up at a street corner in the middle of somewhere or other, and we were in Tainan.

Not much later – about 1:00am – it was time to begin the real business of why I was there…. to spend time with my friend and eat my way around Tainan. My food guide (this was going to be way deeper culinary exploration than I could do on my own) for the two days I’d be there, the dear friend I came to visit, was reassured a day earlier when I told her that I was not looking for Western food of any sort. I wanted to try what was considered good to eat by the locals, and she should not assume that my palate was unable or unwilling to try things. This cleared the air, and I heard her (over the phone when we had the conversation) breathe a sigh of relief, as this meant that she could really have some fun exploring some of her favourite places and sharing some of the tastes of Tainan with me. (I don’t think she was fully convinced until later though…. she seemed to be often surprised when I asked for certain foods, or enjoyed certain flavours that were considered to be only to local tastes.)

So stopping only to pick up my friend’s husband from home, we went to the restaurant of a friend of theirs to start with. While spending my time untangling myself from the establishment’s (shall we say, to avoid blushes) extraordinarily friendly hostess (who was also trying to drink me under the table… goodness knows what lay in wait for me there…), I worked my way through just the first of many excellent meals in Tainan:

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