I sing the body electric.

Giorgio de Chirico, Mystery and Melancholy of the Street, 1914.

(via soverypretty)

Chinese New Year’s Food.

Some more homemade Chinese New Year’s goodies:

New Year’s sticky cake (nian goa):

Ingredients: Glutinous rice flour, Chinese brown sugar (or just regular brown sugar), and water; dates and sesame seeds for topping.

Fortune/Prosperity Cake (Fatt Gao)

Ingredients: Rice flour, water, brown sugar, and baking powder.

Texture! Texture!

Both cakes were steamed so no oil was necessary. I will never buy nian gao or fatt gao again. They’re so easy (and economical) to make. And just like any cake, they taste better when homemade.

Spring semester’s beginning.

I’m finally here. The last of my hard science nursing pre-reqs— microbiology and physiology— began last week. There’s a lot of memorization and a lot of application of concepts. Looking ahead, micro seems more interesting than physio. I’m especially looking forward to learning about prions, viruses, and all the pathology sections of microbiology.

In addition to volunteering, both classes will keep me busy for the next few months. Good bye, social life. See you in June.

Cozy.

(Source : appleday)

London, England.

Happy Chinese New Year’s!

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year’s. Keeping with tradition, we had a big family dinner tonight. We even set a spot on the table for my brother who’s currently in San Diego.

Last night, I made tong yuen with black sesame paste filling (peanut butter and red bean are also common fillings but black sesame is my favorite).

The ingredients are very simple…

Tong yuen: glutinous rice flour, water.

Filling: black sesame (ground), sugar, vegetable oil

Soup: water, ginger, piloncillo brown sugar

You can also use regular brown sugar or white sugar for the soup but I prefer the piloncilo, which is a Mexican brown sugar that I use in my hong sui or red bean soup (another popular Cantonese dessert).

A warm delicious dessert on a cold winter’s night.

PS - I visited the Chinatown in Oakland yesterday. Very festive and insanely crowded. I can only wonder what it’s like right now in China or Hong Kong.

Teff, Brown Rice, and Chickpeas.

On Saturday, we made peanut butter cookies with teff flour. Teff is the world’s smallest grain and is commonly used to make injera (a flat bread staple in Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine). Anyways, our teff peanut butter cookies has got to be some of the healthiest peanut butter cookies on earth. We used maple syrup and agave nectar for sweeteners and we substituted the vegetable oil with apple sauce. Apple sauce is one of my favorite tools of trade because it instantly makes your dessert a lot healthier without— depending on the other ingredients involved— compromising the taste. Apple sauce typically works well in recipes that contain chocolate and peanut butter.

The cookies look messy because the dough was extremely gooey (but eatable!) so, instead of rolling 1-inch balls and flattening them, we essentially spooned the dough on the cookie sheet and hoped for the best. But the cookies came out very soft and very, very tasty. I declare that all my peanut butter cookies shall now be made with teff flour!* (*When possible because teff is more expensive than wheat :|.)

Today, we also made my favorite cookies: blueberry tea-biscuits with brown rice flour and garbanzo bean (chickpea) flour.

The first batch: bleedin’ berries.

The second batch: burstin’ berries.

Since these biscuits are made from beans (chickpea flour) and rice (brown rice flour), they constitute a source of complete protein. I’ll bring some to class tomorrow morning. Yes, it’s starting again. Physiology lecture/lab at 7:30am. I’m going to need the energy.

The Doctor Meets Van Gogh.

Last Christmas, I was talking to my friend about Doctor Who. (She first introduced me to Doctor Who a year earlier— hooked me with “Blink”.) She was watching all of series 5 in one go. I remember her saying that “Vincent and the Doctor” was one of her favorite episodes. So that gave me an idea for a drawing— which eventually became a Christmas present. Knowing how I tend to take extended breaks between projects, I started this in early August.

Materials: large manilla drawing paper, blue ball point pens.

Months, weeks, days, hours and countless lines and swirls later…

As for my reference, I initially used my ENORMOUS Van Gogh book (published by Taschen). It’s a 700+ page complete collection of all of Van Gogh’s paintings plus an account of his life (pictured below, under my preliminary sketch).

It proved too big and too heavy for my modest desk… so, I ended up using a small pocket book on Van Gogh that I picked up at my local library’s book sale for— get this— 25 cents! (I was very excited over the find. It’s a pretty old book too so it may be worth something someday. Plus, I sort of have a thing for old books; let alone old books about art!)

(The reproduction quality isn’t as nice as what you get in Taschen’s book but it worked all the same since I only needed a rudimentary framework.)

The TARDIS under a starry night. Woot.