PennApps Hackathon Spring 2012

Stuff I ate at PennApps (more than this but I didn't take pictures of everything) -- free:

Curry, paneer, rice, vegetables

Fruit

Chocolate Insomnia cookie

2 slices of vegetable pizza

Falafel, hummus, pita bread

1.5 bagels. Full boxes of bagels. 2X as many bagels remained after the event was over.

3 bubble teas

3 Jimmy John's sandwiches

2 goat cheese/spinach/tomato sandwiches, with tomato/tofu salad.

Sitar Indian Restaurant

It's so hot today.

My room's AC is also pretty terrible.

Anyway, TJ, CL and BN and I met up at The Greek Lady for dinner, but after looking through the vegetarian options, we decided to go elsewhere. It's not that their selection was scanty; it was just that everything vegetarian was basically the animal version, sans animal. For example, the vegetarian gyro was lettuce, tomato, feta cheese, sauce and pita. Uh, where is the protein part? Where is the falafel?

After much wandering around in 96F weather (yes, I was watching the really vapid "news" - how the heck is "Oh. Today is 96F." allotted to 15 minutes worth of news?), BN decided to take us to Sitar, an Indian restaurant/buffet place. Apparently, lunch is around $8 and dinner is $11.75+tax, and there is a student discount of 10% [allegedly]. We each ended up paying $13.

I'm not really sure whether or not the mango juice was free, because the menu claims that it's $2.50, but either way, we all ate a lot of food and laughed at many jokes. The juice was unusually sweet, pulp-free (sigh.), and chilled. TJ put pepper in BN's water, but he didn't notice. Chances are, the pepper, being an insignificant amount and also insoluble, sank to the bottom of the glass.

I don't know the names of many Indian dishes, unfortunately, but the naan bread was amazing. Actually, it tasted kind of like the flour tortillas that my mum used to make, which means that either my mum unknowingly made naan, or the naan just tastes really similarly to flour tortillas (well, not Qdoba/Chipotle flour tortillas. Those are more gluteny). The spinach and paneer cheese was really delicious paired with the naan. On its own, the cheese was great, but the spinach was too spicy for my liking. Actually, a lot of the food was too spicy for me (I guess I'm just not that tolerant). The yellow lentil thing that is covering the naan in the picture was really great, too.

Plate 2. Unlike at Penn Dining, it is kind of hard to consume more than 1.5 plates of food. Also, the rice had animal pieces in it even though it was labelled vegetarian and BN mistook the animal pieces for nuts, which I then mistook as cashews. It turns out it was something chewy and meaty. :( The potato in the potato and green beans was really great, but the green beans were really salty and wilted (due to the salt, of course). I loved the potato samosas and the chickpeas! At that point, however, I really felt like not eating anymore Indian food for at least a few months. Seriously, I was that full and I honestly do not crave Indian food anymore. Although the food was pretty good, I think that if I were to buy food from here again, it'd be the potato samosas!

Fruit watery custard-y thingy. The fruit? canned apples. Actually, they're canned pears, but they look like apples (the red parts), so I'm not really sure what they REALLY are, but they're definitely canned. The custard part was pretty good, though, although it was less viscous than yoghurt. I guess it's a bit confusing for me because I prefer custards to be super thick.

Vanilla ice cream (50% of it melted, because the bowl was warm) with some carrot+nut+syrup, which tasted kind of like rice pudding. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't something I'd crave.

Unlike peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate, and avocado sushi, which I can never get tired of, Indian food is something to be enjoyed only occasionally, although I do love it.

Sitar Indian Restaurant, 60th S 38th St (around 38th and Chestnut St.), Philadelphia

Psychology Dinner Weeks Ago...

There was a psychology dinner a few weeks ago and I completely forgot to blog about it. The dinner was supposed to inspire us and make us want to major in psychology. The speaker, however, was extremely biased. She advocated against double majoring, stating that psychology is the most important subject in the world since it infiltrated every subject. Well, I would say that Biology is more important, because it studies LIVING THINGS whereas psychology only studies animal behavior [arguably, only human behavior, because psychologists always try to extrapolate animal data so that it can explain HUMAN behavior. However, then people may say that chemistry is what makes the world run since it explains THINGS, and the physicists will then claim that physics actually explains both THINGS AND NON-THINGS [a.k.a. tangible and untangible, including all those theoretical quantum stuffs] instead of just THINGS or merely LIVING THINGS. However, the mathematicians claim that maths runs everything, because physics relies on mathematics. This is an idea from XKCD.

Anyway. I got kind of irked because she had no right to tell me to singly major, so I think I lost some respect for her. She's a psychologist so she should have an inkling on how to manipulate us so that we'd leave falling in love with psychology.

Anyway, I'm here to talk about Indian food, not psychology, so I'm just gonna say that I couldn't eat half the stuff due to the chicken chunk infestations. I actually thought the spinach was with paneer cheese but it turns out it was chicken chunks...

However, the chickpeas were quite nice, as were the vegetables with paneer cheese. I don't really know why I'm so fond of curry yet not so inclined to eat spicy Chinese food. Perhaps the curry, due to the addition of tons of fat, is mellowed out, whereas Chinese spicy food is a full-out firecracker.

This is some doughnutty cake thing that was saturated in sugar syrup. It was extremely soggy and quite uniform in taste, so I'm not sure why I liked it. I believe it was deep fried before being drenched in sugar syrup, because it had that oily taste to it. Perhaps that's why I liked it.

The naan was extremely oily so I didn't really enjoy that part; generally I prefer savoury floury carbs to remain low in fat [breads, my mum's tortillas etc.]

3 Dinners!

Somehow, my normal dinner at Commons ended up, in three hours, being a triple dinner. I went to a career info session, where there was food from Greek Lady. I then went to French House and my professor, who hadn't had dinner yet, decided to take us all to Tandoor India Restaurant for dinner. Whoot...

The Greek Lady sandwiches made me realise that I indeed haven't been eating many sandwiches lately, and that I indeed LOVE and miss sandwiches. So, for the past week [This was the 4th], I've been eating at least one sandwich per day. Sometimes, one sandwich per meal. It is delicious.

So, I was full by the time we went to Tandoor, so I just tried some stuff...dude, this was at least $10 and I felt bad for not eating a lot... but I was actually full. The naan bread was AMAZING though, as was the potato and vegetable samosa. The spinach with cheese was also great, but the cube of dessert [I'm not really sure what it is, and it's kinda hard to see due to the flash of the camera] was really gross. I think it's just that my taste buds don't like it...

We all then had some mango lassis, which I initially disliked because I could taste the grains of sugar. After a while, though, it got more tolerable, although I didn't feel hungry, which is perhaps why this review is quite negative. I just think that fresh mangoes, mango ice cream, or even mango pudding tastes better. I don't like having grainy pieces of sugar in my drinks... and this drink was supersaturated with sugar. For those who like sugary foods, this is for you :D!