Apple π

In honor of π month, I baked apple π.

Note that next year is going to be particularly exciting since it will be the year when on March 14, the date gives the first five digits of π!  Imagine the excitement at 9:26, when three more digits are added!!

Day 2 in Chicago

I did not fulfill my promise yesterday, and no results, groundbreaking or not, were attained. At some point, I decided to stop working all the same, and made my way back downtown.

I had a wonderful dinner at Fox and Obel. The waiter convinced me that it was a good idea to buy a huge bottle of beer, since "they are sold at retail price, so buying more is saving more"! The result of course was that I got so drunk that all the money I "saved" had to be spent on dessert. It was worth every penny though!

Same recipe for 25 years

...except perhaps for the added mace and cardamom, and the missing egg. Twenty-five years of practice do pay off!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Anke made her famous appeltaart:



(Don't ask; I don't know what these numbers on the cake mean either.)

UPDATE: Ellen and Christiaan thought this was the most appropriate way of celebrating my birthday.

Giving thanks

To be honest, it was not so bad. A Mexican guy brought some tortilla (= Beijing duck pancakes) with I-forgot-what-it-is-called meat and salsa, which was great. A fellow postdoc brought some food made by the Chinese grandma (his own) that he is keeping locked up in his apartment (just kidding about the locked up part-- I think). And then there was the obligatory turkey, sweet potato roast etc, which I guess you have to have more emotional ties with than we do, to fully appreciate them...

I know I should not be saying this, but I will do so anyway, because many of our readers are American(ish) and I recently learned that tooting your own horn is encouraged/expected in the U.S. of A.*: my favorite dish of the evening BY FAR was the apple pie with cardamom scented cream.



* Apparently, on page 86 of this book they recommend that Chinese people dealing with Americans develop an "Understanding that modesty is equated with low self-confidence and that enhancing and crediting oneself is expected."

"Thanksgiving" - epic fail

Here is what we will be bringing to the "Thanksgiving" party in a few moments.

As you can see, we failed miserably.



The sweet potatoes are about as watery as they were yesterday (apparently, storing overnight in the refrigerator does not remedy this).



The mashed potatoes lack any chicken-y flavor, and where are the onion-y bits?



The apple pie smells funny, of some weird foreign spices. Even worse, the whipped cream that goes with it does not come from a hygienic spray can, and -- oh horror! -- it seems like someone accidently spilled some cardamom in it!

We can only hope that our fellow postdocs won't notice.

Happy Birthday To Anke

Anke made her own cake, and ate it too! Everybody seemed to really like Anke's apple pie (or did a good job pretending to).

Dutch Apple Pie

Next week is Anke's birthday (hint hint) and one of the secretaries asked yesterday what kind of cake she would like her to order. Very nice that the secretary remembered, but we know from previous birthdays that birthday cakes are not one of the many accomplishments of Chinese cuisine.

So Anke decided to try whether she still has it in her to make Dutch Apple Pie according to the "Recipes for Six-th Graders". Here is the result:



We had a piece for breakfast this morning, and although it is a far cry from the pie that won a prize at an ORIE picnic, it was still much better than the cream pies made by the stores here. So next week, Anke will be baking her own birthday cakes...