Juhhhst Peachy!

The Clark Park Farmer's Market has been selling peaches for $1.75/lb. I bought some peaches, including yellow peaches, a white nectarine, and a yellow nectarine. According to Wikipedia, nectarines are the same species as peaches... it's just that they have a recessive allele for a gene that gives peaches fuzz. I love both peaches and nectarines equally, because peaches remind me of China, and nectarines remind me of Australia (we used to have a nectarine tree).

Look at that beautiful skin! I love peach skin...I love peaches.

However, like the guy who was selling me the nectarines, I prefer white nectarines over yellow ones. The white ones are sweeter. The yellow ones are more sour and tangy. I also prefer nectarines slightly unripe (crunchier rather than soggy). The guy (sorry I can't be more descriptive... I wish I knew who I was buying these from; after all, that's the point of the Farmer's Market) actually let me try a piece of white nectarine because I couldn't decide which to get. I ended up getting one of each. He told me to come back next week and tell him which one I preferred. I don't know whether I'd go this weekend, since I want to try get on the 11:30 bus rather than the 12:30 bus.

The left nectarine is the yellow; the right is the white.

White nectarine. Delicious! Fresh!

Yellow nectarine! Delicious! Definitely more sour.

On a side note, I wrote a Python script that will convert my images from the Blogger size of 400px x 300px to my preferred size of 700px x 525px. It's weird; despite taking CIS110, it never occurred to me that I shouldn't have to do it manually every time I want to poof up pictures. So, for the past 8 months, I've been manually backspacing the "4" and adding a "7" and backspacing the "300" and adding a "525".

The good thing about my script is that it also accounts for when Blogger makes images 399px x 302px due to rounding errors.

I also realised that there are definitely programs out there that do conversions (e.g. Microsoft Word's Find and Replace), but it feels pretty good being able to write my own program.

Miracle Berry!

The Biological Basis of Behavior [BBB] Society is a club at Penn. During New Student Orientation, I signed up for literally over 20 clubs, and I've been ignoring most of the club emails, since I actually only go to 3-4 on a regular basis. I recently got an email about a miracle berry tasting event with lecture from the BBB Society, and now that I've gone, I've realised that I really DO want to do taste research in the future (taste research or thyroid research?! I like both...). It was actually really helpful, too, because now I feel more obligated to learn about G-protein coupled receptors, which will be on my exam on Thursday (and... I should be studying for that).

Dr. Kaplan gave us the lecture on the miracle berry (Synsepalum dulcificum), and he teaches BBB 109 here. I'm actually considering taking the course, since it seems very interesting and he appears to remember all his students. So, miracle berry is a fruit from a tropical area, and contains a protein called miraculin (what a coincidence!). Miraculin is a protein that can bind to the taste receptor for sweetness on our tongue, but it doesn't actually bind to the "receptor" part of the receptor when you eat the berry. Only when there is an intake of acidic foods does the protein change its conformation and bind to the taste receptor. So, when you eat miracle berries, all you're doing is sticking miraculin onto your taste receptors for sweetness. Then, with the introduction of acid (protons!!!), the miraculin changes conformation and you get the sensation of sweetness without actually eating anything sweet.

This is a recurring theme, because last night I watched The Matrix for the first time in my life, and this morning I was reading about the "brain in a vat" idea, and now...I get the perception of sweetness but I'm actually just ingesting lemon juice. What is real, then? Everything is just a electric/chemical/mechanic reaction, right?

So, I know I was supposed to eat half of the food on the plate right before eating the miracle berry, but I decided to just eat the berry, since I knew "what all that stuff tastes like already" (but I was wrong. I think I was confused in some instances).

I will now go through a list of the foods I ate, and my perception of them.

1. Miracle berry: This small berry smelled like an olive. I think this may be because there were 2 olives sitting on the plate in front of me, but that was my first impression. The skin was thick and the pulp was scant and stuck readily to the pip. Texture-wise, it was like eating a cherry that didn't have much pulp, and it wasn't as juicy. The skin had the texture of grape skin or tomato skin, and the flesh was sticky, and not juicy like grape flesh. The flesh itself was tasteless, although I think it was a bit sweet due to the placebo effect. We were instructed to keep the berry in our mouth for about a minute. I kept the seed and I hope that I can maybe grow my own miracle berry tree, although I don't have any soil.

2. Lemon: HUGE confusion in my brain. The first drops of lemon juice in my mouth were typical; they were sour. SUDDENLY, they started to taste sweet. I'm not kidding. There was this prickling feeling, followed by sweetness and I gasped in surprise!! (I started blabbing to the 3 other people at my table, who are strangers with whom I made some small-talk before the lecture, about how the lemon tasted sweet and they thought I was kidding.) What I was consuming tasted exactly like Lemonheads candy. EXACTLY like Lemonheads candy = an initial sour note, followed by sweetness, then sour and sweet mingled in lemon-y harmony. This was the most efficacious food from the plate that was transformed by miraculin. I finished one lemon segment, and it tasted purely like Lemonheads candy. The sourness was present, but so was the sweetness. After I tried all the other foods, I tried the second segment of lemon just to see how much of the miraculin I had swallowed down already (because, for some reason, miraculin has a higher affinity for taste buds than do other taste proteins. I mean, after we swallow some candy, after a short while, the sweet taste in our mouth disappears. This differs from bitter foods, like coffee, where after swallowing coffee, one can taste bitterness for at least another minute). This time, it took longer for the sweetness to kick in, and the sweetness wasn't as pronounced as it had been earlier.

3. Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips: This tasted like a salt and vinegar potato chip. It's funny what packaging does to people; the person next to me commented that she had no idea what the flavour was. I wonder: if we switched the packaging for different flavours of potato chips, would people be able to tell? Do we base flavours of things on the taste, or on what the package CLAIMS the flavour is? Anyway, I do not think that the vinegar (acid) tasted any sweeter, and if it did, it may be just my amylase breaking down the starch in the potato. In other words, miraculin doesn't seem to work well for chips.

4. Pickle: The pickle tasted like a pickle. It did not taste sweet. It did not taste that sour. It tasted like a pickle. Perhaps (for me?), miraculin only works for plainly-super-sour food items. Pickles are sour, but their sourness is weak. Diluted with water.

5. Chocolate chips and grapefruit: Miraculin doesn't actually enhance the sweetness of foods that are already sweet. I suppose the point of having sweet foods was to demonstrate this to us. Actually, I think that the grapefruit was there as a "sour" product (like the lemon), but, like most commercially-produced grapefruits, this one was sweet to begin with. So, it and the chocolate chips tasted rather normal to me, and they were the source of Calories to keep me energised before my Bio review session and frisbee later on in my day.

6. Olives: I don't like olives so I didn't eat these. Olives aren't sour though. They're just saturated with salt and have that olive flavour that I dislike.

7. V8 (the red liquid): Now, the last time I had tried V8 was 4 years ago, when my parents thought that buying a bulk pack from Costco was a good idea. Actually, my dad likes to drink V8 in the summer, so we keep buying it every year. I personally am indifferent to it; it's a bit too sour for my liking and I would much rather eat the actual vegetables (more time spent chewing and tasting food = happier me!). With miraculin, I really couldn't taste anything sour about the juice. It just tasted like...sweet tomato juice. I don't think that I like this sweetened version of V8 though, because I'm not really used to eating sweet tomatoes (I've tried sliced tomatoes sprinkled with sugar, before, as a salad-ish platter, and it was an interesting experience but I didn't fall in love with it).

8. Not-Super-Strong Coffee: No difference in taste was detected, although a person next to me claimed that the coffee tasted creamier. I did drink all the coffee though, because it's kept me awake for the past 7 hours. Remember; miraculin is supposed to work in the presence of protons. Technically, then, it should have made the coffee taste a bit sweet because coffee is acidic.

So there we are: instead of going to Monell's tasting event for the Philly Science Fair (I had a chem exam today that coincided with it, unfortunately), I got to taste a miracle berry and consume a bunch of pseudo-Lemonheads for about 0 Calories, and eat other foods with my tongue saturated with miraculin.

Graham Cracker Houses Studded with Sugar

Is it bird or a plane?! It's... both. It's in the bird's eye [or plane] point of view! So, the question is, is it a tree or a house? It looks like a Christmas tree, sure, but it's actually...

GRAHAM CRACKER HOUSE! Whoot! I don't really eat graham crackers [ever since I found out there's PHO in them... I don't like trans fat], and I don't eat premade icing either [PHO], but it was sure fun creating houses! I decided to make a triangular one because... well, everyone elses' houses' angles added up to 360 degrees. Or two pi [aw, I can't make a pie joke here!], so I decided I just wanted one pi.

It looks like a monster... note the eyes, the wrapper nose, and the tongue/path thingy. "Why the long face?" Haha...

AK had a graham cracker house party, so that's why there are all these houses [and one igloo!]. AK's house looks like a summer outhouse! :D

The ingredients included: graham crackers, brown or white icing, M&Ms, York peppermint pieces, gummy worms [well. Those got eaten...], gummy bears, marshmallows, yucky gumdrops, dots, fat jelly beans, Skittles and Rolos.

I need to make some gingerbread... Well, that'll be something I'll do on the 26th.

None of this food is healthy. Maybe there are vegetable/fruit/whole grain houses, out there, for Christmas, but the kids would overwhelmingly prefer sugar-sprinkled houses, right? It's the activity to do, even for people who don't actually believe in Christmas. It's become a holiday that's commercialized, and I'm not sure why I'm partaking in this commercialism. And this weight gain...

Amy Gutmann's Halloween Party!

Excess...

It's funny seeing 17-24+ year-old students swarming around taking candies. It's really funny. It's funnier because Amy Gutmann, the president of UPenn, was hosting this event [I guess this is where part of our tuition ends up] and giving out Penn-style silly bands from a plastic pumpkin bucket. "It was as if Snape had started handing out sweets", except that Amy Gutmann isn't like Snape.

There was so much food it was ridiculous.

There are way too many pictures to upload so here are a few good ones.

Easy observations, though are:

1. No one likes the Dubble Bubble Gum. NO ONE LIKES IT. It's just what people buy because it's cheaper than the other candy. It lay on the tables, untouched.

2. Few people like plain ol' tootsie rolls. I was COMPLETELY OBSESSED with them two years ago; I literally ate 10 pieces at LEAST, in one sitting. It was something to keep my brain occupied. However, that fad [like my nutella fad] died out really quickly, and now I don't really enjoy the taste of tootsie rolls anymore, especially as there are PHOs in them [so many for using the "original" recipe from the 20s]. These were also left over, but I did see people taking them because there was no more other candy.

3. Twix is very very much liked.

4. The "chocolate"-esque candies were the most popular, in all honesty.

5. Hard candy received mixed reviews; no one seemed to want mints, but there much more mint candies than chocolatesque candies so it was difficult to tell.

6. Marshmallows, fruit, pretzels and chips with chocolate dip was widely enjoyed.

Yeah, bread bag because I didn't think to bring an actual drawstring bag. Heh.

Tomato Biscuits!

On Friday, TJ, MA, JC and I went to the Penn Taiwanese Society Bubble tea Social. Unfortunately, since we went at 2:30pm [Oh, we got let out of class really early because we were all going to go see Noam Chomsky, but it turned out that we were supposed to preregister], there was NO MORE BUBBLE TEA. I didn't really mind because I was going for coffee with my HSOC peers and professor. Anyway.

Since we [well, TJ, mostly] looked extremely upset, they just gave us some food. Yay! I got some nori which was amazing since I LOVE dried, crunchy seaweed. I also got this:

Notice that there are holes in the back of each piece. I guess it's on purpose... because all of them had holes on the back. They were really pretty, in my opinion, for crackers/biscuits.

Now, they were crunchy and a tad tomatoey and oily.

Get this, though: they were SWEET. As in, there were sugar granules on them. I'm telling, you this was bizarre. Imagine drenching a slice of pizza or lasagne with a packet of sugar, and you'll get the picture. Get the taste, rather :P [<- tongue is out, to lick the food]. Unfortunately, it wasn't even a good pairing. Peanut butter and tortilla chips are a good pairing, yes, but this... wasn't.

Definitely a "Newtaste".

Melon Tapioca!

My mum has wanted to try this ever since we made tapioca that first time. She read that blending tapioca with melon makes a delicious drink.

She is correct.

It's like bubble tea; however, not only is there a lack of "tea" in the bubble tea, but there are also TWO TAPIOCAS!

Yes - mini tapioca beads PLUS big tapioca balls. YAY!

Plus, there is no added sugar, and the melon adds even more texture to it. Unfortunately, it's not very photogenic.

Quinoa Porridge [Sort Of]!

I think I'm going crazy. I am obsessed with grainy porridges. E.g. rice pudding, oat bran porridge, oatmeal, etc. The list goes on. Anything with carbs, really.

Today I decided to make quinoa porridge, which is quite a deviation from the norm since quinoa isn't really used in making sweet dishes [I think?]; it's usually used for salads or stir fries or soups or something savoury. Now I know why quinoa isn't used for porridge. It doesn't soften or get mushy or gluey, so it doesn't make a very gooey porridge.

I also added way too much honey [two teaspoons for about 3 cups of quinoa seemed pretty reasonable, but I guess I was wrong]. Actually, I think that the extra raisins also made the porridge super sweet. I doubt there will be a "next time", but if there were, I would definitely just cut out adding honey, since the raisins suffice in rendering the porridge to taste like some sort of textured candy.

Coffee Ice [or...Granita?]

I'm technically not supposed to have much caffeinated stuff anymore due to the fact that it apparently interferes with methimazole efficacy, but this was made with decaf coffee [so, it has 2% of the caffeine it otherwise would have] which means that it probably has the same caffeine power [if not less] as some chocolate. I started off with coffee, fat free milk, some honey, and some saccharin. I froze it for an hour, and it looked like the image above.

An hour later, a layer of ice had formed on the inside sides of the plastic container, but the centre was still liquidy [or, slushy, after I mixed it]. The whole point of making this is to chop up the ice crystals every hour or so. I actually should've used a shallow container, since it was more difficult to reach the bottom parts which were frozen.

In total, six hours later, this is what I ended up with. Granules of frozen coffee and milk! The volume had [evidently, due to not only the lattice structure of ice, but also to the air between each crystal] increased to... about 157% its original liquidy volume.

I'm not sure whether this is "Italian Ice", "ice" or "granita". When I was younger, my brother and I used to make watermelon granita, which I recall included 150g of caster sugar dissolved in water, a lot of watermelon juice, and lemon juice. It was made in the same way as this, and did NOT taste like artificial watermelon flavour. It used to be such a big deal! Today, I felt like making this since it's too humid to drink hot coffee [even though it was pouring with rain all afternoon] and I felt like this would be yummy. Before freezing, the slurry tasted like normal sweet coffee with way too much milk [I tend to like coffee without milk]. After freezing, I feel as though it tastes even more watery than originally... which means that next time, I have to brew super-strong coffee. This is saying something, since I generally make really strong coffee. However, it isn't super sweet, which is great. I'm just worried that it's going to freeze into one huge mass by tomorrow morning, since I probably didn't add enough sweeteners to keep the ice not-that-frozen, since adding sweeteners means that the freezing point of the solution increases, which means that, in theory, the granita would freeze at a higher temperature [because the sweetener molecules prevent the water molecules from bonding to each other as efficiently].

MP's Chocolate!

So, during dessert [after which we ate pizza. Don't ask.] at MP's grad party, I tried three chocolates, from this rather dandy tin box of chocolates. It was a Polish brand. There were five flavours in total, but I tried the chili, coconut, and brandy flavoured ones since they seemed to be the most "exotic".
The chili one was a huge disappointment. Actually, the label just says "HOT CHOCOLATE", which implies that it is either a high-temperature-chocolate-drink flavoured, or a spicy flavoured chocolate [with the chili pepper, right there!]. It was neither, unless you count the fact that it was probably 35 degrees C. In this case [or should I say, in this tin], the whole box of chocolates were hot chocolate. Meaning that the brandy was hot brandy, and the coconut was steamin'.
In short, the "Hot Chocolate" flavour tasted like a dark chocolate truffle and did not taste even a bit peppery or chili-ful or spicy or zingy. Rather huge disappointment, as I wanted to measure my home-made chili chocolate cake [from a few years ago] with something that's actually in industry.
The "White Chocolate and Coconut" flavoured chocolate was really textured, though. No, really, I honestly. Fell. In love. With. It. The taste of coconut was very prevalent, which made up for the failure of the "Hot Chocolate" flavour earlier. There are some brands of chocolate in which the coconut is basically jam-packed in sugar, like the interior of an Almond Joy. This one, however, was literally "jam"-packed, in the sense that it was NOT a saturated dessicated coconut mass. Instead, there was some sort of coconut "jam" or goo, which worked well with the harder outer shell. The white chocolate was extremely smoooooth, not sickeningly sweet, and paved the way for this gelatinous center.

So, I've never had brandy before. I don't drink. This flavour tasted like a normal truffle, except that there was this hint of something weird. I suppose the weird thing was the brandy. Because I couldn't detect brandy [as I don't know what it tastes/smells like], everyone decided to sniff it. It was actually quite amusing [Okay, not just amusing. I was literally choking with laughter] watching people sniff the brandy truffle.
The bright side is that none of the chocolates that I ate had dimples due to the plastic or metal moulds at the factory. Thus, I can conclude that they are better than the Lindor Truffles, with respect to their appearances. Actually, the Lindor truffles were definitely inferior to these, tastewise, too. Plus, no condensation, even though this is July, whereas Lindor's sweaty exterior was prevalent in January.
Looks like ganache. Smooth move, Choco Amore doods. [MP gave me some Polish chocolate for my birthday last year. It was really smooth too, which was a pretty huge feat considering it was a fruit and nut bar.]

Ferrero Rondnoir

Erm. Pop art. Pops in your mouth, not in your hands.

I was skimming through my Food folder because today, I did not eat anything remotely interesting. Okay okay, I lied. I had a burrito, with mango salsa. Oh, and green bean soup. And purple cabbage. However, I hadn't taken any pictures of that stuff today, and I KNEW that I had stuff in my Food folder about which I hadn't blogged.

And here is one, from January. The dark chocolate Ferrero. The Rondnoir. As a digression... it's rather funny how the first search result for "Ferrero Rocher" ends up with the USA company title of this, er, Italian brand. I suppose it's now more American than Italian. Sigh.

So, this was six months ago, before I knew how to take food pictures. Actually, to be fair, I'm still not great at taking pictures. But, at least I now take pictures of the interior of the food...
So, now, I shall explain the interior of the Rondnoir, since I did not take any pictures of it. Imagine... a cookie-like crunchy exterior, which confuses you, as the exterior looked like hard sprinkles rather than airy cookie crumbs. Imagine the gentle shell of wafer... and in your head, you're musing about how cookie crumbs can stick to a wafer. It doesn't seem possible. Perhaps it is due to the thin veil of hard, shiny, chocolate coating that binds all the crumbs together? Maybe it is the sheer magic of chocolate, the glue that binds the world together? KABLAM! You're suddenly thrown into oblivion, as you taste a sweet, soft, gooey, chocolatey spread... it's like chocolate jam, sans texture. No, no, it's texture is so utterly completely smooth, it feels as though you are skydiving. Or lounging in melted fudge. Or chilled ganache. Yes, ganache is the perfect descript- wait! What is this hard sphere doing in your mouth?! You bite it... and realise that it is a centre of bittersweet chocolate, the perfect accompaniment -or, rather, all the others [the cookie crumbs, wafer, ganache] were the perfect accompaniment to this frivolous finale. It's gone. You have devoured a copy of what everyone else, including you, has deemed as beauty. You hold the wrapper to your tongue, just to check that every atom has been exterminated. Your breaths inhale every modicum of life from the remnants. Your ears contain the final crinkles, never to be heard again.
Okay, you get the picture. Or, the taste. I'm sure a zillion other blogs have blogged about this... but you know that mine has, by far, the most sensual experience.

Hunan Manor

Hello Doctor State, a.k.a MD, Maryland!
After being in the car from 3:45pm to 8:15pm, we finally arrived at my parents' friends' house. They then drove us to dinner at Hunan Manor, which - surprise surprise - is a Chinese restaurant. I personally didn't have a great impression of it when I went in, because of this:
Dude, it's nearly mid 2010. And, "dungenese" isn't that great to advertise to people who speak English.
They actually, though, had a ton of vegetarian stuff that was, well, DELICIOUS.
The weird fried flour thing:
Napkin roses; the one on the right is mine, the one on the left is my brother's:
Fried tofu with mushrooms:
Sweet and Sour "Pig" [a.k.a gluten]. Actually, I was gonna get Sweet and Sour "Chicken" [a.k.a gluten], but the waitress literally said, "That one doesn't taste good." Then again, the "pig" dish cost more, so I guess that was their marketing ploy. Either way, it looks like the real thing, and the sauce was really good! The "pig/gluten" part itself though was really dense so I suppose it depends on people's preferences. I don't think I really like dense stuff, except fudge and brownies and toffee [you get the picture].