Pictures of sexy cupcake pies and dogs and crêpes

We made these cupcakes except we adapted them to fit the ingredients at hand -- Kahlua and coffee liquor instead of bourbon, and hazelnuts instead of walnuts.  The pie crust Leah made from scratch!  We ended up with a spare cake.  How awesome is that?! 

Here is what goes in the cupcake pies.  Those are chopped hazelnuts with mini semi-sweet chocolate chips.

The cake batter was a vanilla cake mix, but we added coffee liquor (we only had enough Kahlua for the ganache) instead of the Kentucky bourbon the recipe called for.  What's better than hazelnuts and coffee flavor??

We used a bag with the corner cut off to pipe the ganache onto the cupcake-pies.

There wasn't enough room in the cupcakes for all of the cake batter, so we used the extra to make a small cake:

We also made crêpes with salami, provolone, tomatoes, onions, and a little bit of oregano and basil.  This was Leah's first time making crêpes and only the first one fell apart!

 We didn't eat the dogs. 

And yes, Leah does in fact own a pet gargoyle.

Macaroni, and the best roast beef I've ever tasted

Come back with me to 4 Jan 2010 for a moment.  What were you doing that day?  I remember exactly what I was doing: eating some fan-freaking-tastic macaroni:

Now jump forward to 15 Jan 2010 (yesterday).  What were you doing then?  I was gorging myself on the most mind-bendingly delicious roast beef I've ever eaten, courtesy of your friend and mine, Leah Morabito:

We made Outback Steakhouse-esque green beans again, and this time with half the brown sugar.  Delicious!  Still not quite OS caliber, but pretty darned close.

A new direction!

Since I don't have anything terribly interesting to contribute in terms of witty and original social commentary anymore, I decided to take this incredibly popular blog in a new direction: food!  Pretty much all I do anymore is make food (with Leah) and study physics (also with Leah).  And sleep occasionally.  So here are some interesting things we've made recently.  Yesterday was a lamb flank from Central Market, which Leah marinated with olive oil, minced garlic, coarse ground pepper and I think an Italian seasoning.  We also had orzo with lemon juice and some lemon zest (too much, perhaps), and also my feeble attempt at Outback Steakhouse-style green beans.  (Next time I will use probably half the amount of brown sugar that recipe calls for.)

And since I don't have a vegetable steamer, we built one that sort of looks like a spaceship:

First semester of graduate school is done!

Tons of work, but definitely worth it! I'm taking the electromagnetism and astronomy qualifying exams in January. If I pass them both then there are only two left, and then I can focus on research for the next 5 years! Huzzah!

A message from Lewis Black

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy67kwA6Xm4

First graduate exam

Friday was my first exam in graduate school. As Dr. Kantowski handed out the exams he said, "I hope you'll agree that this exam is fairly easy, but just long." Everybody groaned, because that same statement has prefaced all too many physics exams in our respective pasts which promptly proceeded to eat our respective lunches. But this time he was actually right: it was not hard, but much too long for the amount of time we had. I'm feeling pretty good about it right now. There are only 11 of us in this class so hopefully he'll have them graded by Tuesday.

I'm definitely in the physics department

As I've started studying more complicated physics, I've met along the way so many physicists who understood more than I ever thought possible. So much, in fact, that they had forgotten just how dumb the rest of us still are. I vowed I would never, ever become that way. No matter how much I studied physics I would always remember what it was like not to know anything about the subject, so I would never respond to a future student's question with my advisor's favorite phrase, "Oh, that's trivial." (And of course his explanation following that ominous response is ever-faithfully NON-trivial.)

Today in my office, as the five graduate students in there were studying for our qualifying exams next week, I suddenly realized that I was already a good way up that ivory tower I so dreaded ascending. Two specific examples jump out at me. First, we have started using LOTS of slang for things that at one time seemed far too nuanced to merit such language. Second, I noticed that we complete one another's sentences in ways that must seem completely nonsensical to the non-physics student. A conversation this afternoon perfectly embodied both of those:

Tom: "Hey, when you do the potential of the grounded cube thing, do you end up with an infinite series?"
Me: "No, because they give you V on that last side so you can do the integral. So you can do the orthogonal thing and get a real number... Oh wait, no, sorry, you still get the series but if you know V you still get all the coefficients. Otherwise you're stuck with the integral."
Tom: "Yeah, ok."

We had this exchange sitting about ten feet apart, without writing anything down or pointing at anything on a chalkboard. The contexts of these problems have become so familiar that our brains automatically set the stage, complete with props, so it's perfectly acceptable to resort to using words like "thing" repeatedly and with regard to different abstractions --- Thing #1 was the conducting cube, but #2 was the orthogonality property --- with no loss of clarity.