So The Shadow Rising is the fourth book in the “Wheel of Time” series. I’m starting to slow down in my pace with these books, but the story is picking up again. Book three felt a bit fluffy as far as the plot went, but this book follows Rand more closely.

I really appreciate the way Robert Jordan entices you to want to know more. In book three, I was particularly tied up in Perrin. This book I was more interested in Egwene and the girls, but by the end I was back on track following Rand.

A lot is revealed in this book. An explanation for why the Tinkers and the Aiel avoid each other, more detail about dreamers and their talents. And Moraine says explicitly what she only hinted at in book three. Hm, also I keep wondering when (if?) Moraine will die because I feel like it’s been set up so that she must.

Oh, and King Arthur references! The “Sword in the Stone” bit tickled my fancy. =P

So when I went to meet my newest baby cousin, my sister told me I should bring an Angel’s Food Cake. I never particularly liked Angel’s Food Cake. My family normally eats it plain, but on TV you usually see it eaten with something. I wasn’t really up for making the cake myself, and I thought just showing up with a store-bought Angel’s Food Cake in a plastic container wasn’t particularly classy. So I decided to make a compote.

- 2 pkg (12 oz) raspberries
- 1 pkg (6 oz) blueberries
- 1 pkg (6 oz) blackberries
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- sugar to taste (~ 1/2 c)

(This amount of berries makes over 3 cups of compote. We found that you only need ~1 cup of compote to satisfy most people eating a medium sized Angel’s Food Cake.)

Rinse the berries and mix them together. Put about 2/3 of your berries into a medium saucepan. Turn the heat on low to medium. Add lemon juice and ~1/4 c sugar. (The berries will release liquid, so you don’t need to add water.) Mix occasionally until berries soften (2-5 minutes). Taste to test sweetness level, add more sugar if needed.

When I did this, the raspberries basically melted while the blueberries were still firm. I actually literally crushed most of the blueberries with a wooden spoon against the side of the pan because I wanted it more sauce-y.

Add the rest of your berries and mix 1-2 minutes (just to slightly warm/soften). Remove from heat and spoon/pour into glass jar/container. Serve warm or chilled.

Apparently you can keep this in your fridge for up to 2 weeks, but it is NOT like jam/jelly (ie. you cannot keep it for very long). You can also freeze it, but with this amount of berries I pretty much finished it in a few days. Try white bread + compote. Yum. =9

My compote turned out pretty liquid. I read that you can add a cornstarch+water slurry to thicken it? But I didn’t really think it was worth the effort. The liquid part is a similar consistency to like, raspberry sauce that restaurants use decoratively in desserts? In fact, I kept craving chocolate cake whenever I was eating my bread+compote…

I’m going to have to get that flourless chocolate cake recipe from May…

K: i was actually thinking the other day about chicken eggs and
what is that thing called where ppl believe a fertilized egg is life
M: pro-life?
K: anyway
it’s kind of interesting to think about it
once a chicken egg is fertilized
it pretty much is self sustaining
it is “alive” sort of
it’s outside of the mother’s body and it doesn’t receive any more nutrients or energy
i mean it has to be warm to stay alive but pretty much everything it needs to become a chick is itself
so conceptually it’s like it’s already a chick, it just needs time
but a human embryo, if you take it out of the mom
even if you keep it warm
it’s going to die
wait does it?
the sac or wtv has nutrients but i don’t think enough to keep the embryo growing
the mom has to continually input nutrients and energy into it to keep it growing until it’s a baby
so it’s not really self sustaining
does that mean it’s not alive in and of itself
it is only alive in the sense that it’s part of the mom and the mom is alive
M: yeah, it needs the mom’s nutrients
through her blood
K: anyway that’s something i had never thought about before
M: me neither
K: a baby is like, an extra organ the mom has
M: yeah
K: but a fertilized chicken egg is like
a chick waiting to hatch
M: an extra organ that kicks her other organs
K: lol
like a cancer
a baby is like a cancer
it occasionally can kill the mom too
M: it does keep growing uncontrollably
K: it’s cells dividing out of control
yup
crazy
anyway
that’s a day in the life of my brain

A poem I enjoyed from L. S. Klatt’s poetry collection, Cloud of Ink.

May Day

I am adrift in a burned-out canoe
without a helmsman. It was once a birch
straight & narrow made swift. The planets
revolve behind the blue sky, but I don’t
witness. The news is good. The willow
has waded into the pond, & the purpose
of the pond is outside of me. The bow
of the boat follows the breezes. Light-
years from Zero.

So I buy Ghiradelli semi-sweet chocolate chips. I think they taste better than the Nestle Toll House ones which seem more popular (maybe they’re just more popular because they’re cheaper?).

On the back of the Ghiradelli bag there is a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. We used to have a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that we made all the time. But we stopped making them because the recipe called for shortening and the general populace went through a phase where shortening was just one step away from death or something. (I’ve since heard that the new formula for shortening isn’t worse for you than any other sort of baking fat. So I’ll probably try to dig up the old recipe at some point.)

Anyway! I made the Ghiradelli recipe before, when I was at Tech. I did it in a single bowl out of laziness, and it just didn’t taste that good. I mean it didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t everything I dreamed it would be.

But Ghiradelli chocolate chips were on sale in December, and I bought a couple bags, and I thought I would try out the recipe again with a few alterations. So here’s what I did…

Ingredients:
1.25 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup bread flour [original recipe called for 2.25 cups flour total]
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon [I added this]
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
3/4 cup white sugar
2/3 cup brown sugar (packed)
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 cups (1 bag) chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375F.

In a medium bowl, stir flours, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.
In a slightly larger bowl, beat butter and sugars until creamy (or almost creamy). Add vanilla and eggs, mix until creamy.
Add dry mixture into creamed mixture. Stir in chocolate chips.

Drop dough in roughly round blobs onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake until golden brown.

A few notes:

- I really only used bread flour because we’re almost out and I want to use up our bag. And Mike’s other chocolate chip cookie recipe uses the same 1.25:1 ratio.

- Recipe says it makes 4 dozen cookies if you had tablespoon-sized blobs. I ended up having 26 cookies. So…apparently my cookies were twice the size that they intended? But mine came out about the size of my palm, which is the size I like.

- Recipe says bake for 9-11 minutes. My giant cookies needed around 20 minutes (I guess that makes sense).

- Mike thought my cookies were too cinnamon-y to be truly great. I thought they were maybe just a touch over-spiced if at all. So I’d suggest just 1/2 tsp of cinnamon if you like that sort of warmth. If not, just cut it since the original recipe doesn’t have any anyway.

- Original recipe also has an option 1 cup of chopped walnuts or pecans which I skipped because I don’t like nuts in my chocolate chip cookies. But to each their own.

I thought I had a post last year about the books I read in 2011 that I liked, but I can’t find it. So now I’m thinking maybe it was on Nematode and I deleted it or something. [edit: Nevermind, I found it at the bottom of this entry.]

So here are the books I recommend from the ones I read this year. They’re in order of when I read them, not how much I recommend them. *shrug*

A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (Week 9)
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet – Jamie Ford (Week 11)
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Sister – Rosamund Lupton
The Best American Short Stories of 2010 – Richard Russo (editor) (Week 32)
Nutmeg – Kristin Valla
Middlemarch – George Eliot (Week 43)

– a summary of the year taken from journals 48, 49, and 50

19 Jan :: She said the survival rate for that situation would be in the single digits because he [Monty] has a pre-existing valve condition, etc.

11 Feb :: I still remember May and I would do “concerts” to the songs on that [Whitney Houston] CD Daddy had.

29 Mar :: From the first class I also learned that a marriage between a Catholic and an unbaptized person isn’t recognized by the Catholic Church.

11 Apr :: Amara “learned” waving (hello and goodbye).

28 May :: I thought I should write something about the wedding but I was too busy this weekend and honestly even now that I have a spare moment I’m not quite sure what to say about it.

05 Jun :: We have barely any furniture.

19 Jul :: Ten years later I’m still trying to change lanes into other cars.

01 Aug :: Edmond Yuan born at 9:30a

17 Sep :: And DinTaiFung three times.

31 Oct :: Sally Nguyen born 3:31a: 5 lbs, 19.5″

22 Nov :: Monday I started thawing the 9.2 lb. turkey.

25 Dec :: Christmas with the Whites.

Wow, it’s been a crazy year. Way more exciting than 2011…

I had this idea that I wanted to write some advice for future Caltech students, things that I learned the “hard way” so to speak. But I looked around on the internet and there doesn’t really seem to be a demand for such things. I guess most people who went to Tech were prepared, unlike me. And there are some forum topics on CollegeConfidential for current students who have specific questions on classes and majors and such.

So I guess I just didn’t do my homework properly, or at all really. Seems like the story of my life. I never seem to be prepared for the things I attempt to do. *facepalm*

I’m reading a book titled Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century… which sounds really boring, but has actually been surprisingly enlightening. For someone who doesn’t know (or rather, retain) much regarding history, it’s been pretty educational.

Every time I look at the cover of this book and recall the title, my brain tries to run away. But when I force myself to sit down and open the page to my bookmark, I always enjoy it, to my surprise.

I admit, like most of the “educational” non-fiction books I read, it is extremely repetitive. Bugs the heck out of me. But I’m taking this book in such small doses because of the revulsion the title gives me that it actually hasn’t bothered me that much, even though I can recognize practically whole paragraphs that are pretty much just repeated. -.-;;

It’s taking me a long long time to get through this, given the way I’m hacking away at it. But I’m hopeful that it’ll move past WWII soon and touch on other topics.

I like to have one book of poetry on my “currently reading” list at any given time. Mostly because it’s a change of pace, but also because poetry can usually be a one or two page thing that you can read quickly and then fall asleep thinking about. I’ve never stayed up until 2a because I really needed to finish that book of poetry.

Usually I like the images and word play in poetry. However, the poems in “Cloud of Ink” are maybe a little too abstract for me? The poet uses a lot of scientific and mathematical words, which usually tickles my fancy, but in this case has almost always fallen flat. I don’t know if it’s something in me that’s changed or something about this collection. *shrug*

I’m not quite finished with the whole book yet though, so maybe there can still be a pleasant surprise for me.