Accelerated Adolescence

Bao

Kristen made homemade cherry pie tonight. I made bao. We invited a friend of ours over for dinner. Rachel is a very cool grad student who works in Dr. Messman-Moore's lab (which is where I know her from). Between the pie and the bao, Rachel was given the impression that all we do is be amazing. When she discovered that we had picked the cherries ourselves (either this year or last:), she likened us to figures of movie status (hopefully Breakfast At Tiffany's and not The Secret Lives of Dentists). The evening was awesome and I think that Kristen and I have made a mutual friend. I think that the graduate students are beginning to feel that we stand apart from other undergraduates, a feeling we've had for a long time.

The cherry pie was fabulous and runny:) I loved it. The bao, in its first incarnation, stuck relentlessly to our bamboo (= cheap but cool looking) steamer. After that, I lightly oiled the bottom of the bao. I anticipated Andrea, Rachel's girlfriend, joining us but she had to work late and was unable (though we met her later in the evening). I made two sauces for the bao, one used a little olive oil, light soy sauce, lots of garlic, much ginger, and enough red pepper to make it a friendly spicy. This is the same concoction (minus the red pepper) that I used to sautee the chicken, mushrooms and onions that I used to fill the bao. Unfortunately, I made one and a half recipes, remembering that I always felt that we were short when we visited Mara and Mark. Becuase Andrea couldn't make it, we had eight pieces of bao left over. I'm not sure that bao does left over very well (it certainly doesn't do 20 minutes very well:). The other one was watered down "Iron Chef" sesame garlic sauce (let me put it this way, it has corn syrup in it). The former sauce was definitely the more popular of the two. The bao was yummy. Mara, thanks for the recipe, it turned out really well.

Overall, tonight was a cullinary learning experience that turned out very well. Rachel was enthusiastic about the bao and we really enjoyed having her as our guest. We've tentatively arranged to have a night of sushi adventures and gaming with them. Along with the few really cool undergrads that we know, we're really developing a social circle of friends that we connect with. Miami has been isolating, at the least, but is getting better. I look forward to graduate school.

On another note, I have to go now and try and clean our steamer, cool as it is, it isn't incredibly practical.