Goat Curry

My roommate and I share a passion for grocery stores. That's a normal interest, right? I kind of want to add "Grocery store enthusiast" to my "about me" section.

So, on our way back from work one evening, we couldn't resist exploring the grocery store that we had passed by a couple times. It seemed pretty standard, but with some slightly exotic produce such as taro and chayote. It also stocked goat meat. In a stroke of "great minds think alike", we both immediately concluded that goat curry was going to happen.

After some research to find a recipe using few different spices, we found this recipe on indiansimmer.com, which asked for cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon, and bay leaves. We got these spices in ridiculously large portions for ridiculously cheap from the local international market.

The curry is pretty simple: sautée the spices in oil, add the onion garlic and ginger, add the goat meat, add the tomatoes and salt, simmer for 25 minutes.

The resulting dish was good, but not perfect. The goat meat was rather tough. We each attempted to eat with our respective favorite utensils (fork and knife for me, chopsticks for my roommate) but these quickly proved to be useless. After agreeing on a no-judgement policy, we ended up ripping meat from the bones with our hands and teeth. 

Also, the meat was not at all seared and the dish was too greasy. The recipe says to sear the meat after adding the onions, but (at least in our pan) there simply isn't space to do so. So, my roommate and I thought that a way to fix both problems could be first searing the meat without oil and rendering some of its fat, and using that fat (rather than extra oil) to sautée the spices and onions.

New York

Duuude it's been forever. I'm in New York now. Like, New York, New York. Manhattan. In the middle. For three months. This is pretty exciting.

Living in New York City is very different from the California suburbs I'm always lived in. Cars are honking all over the place. There are regular wafts of rotting food and sewers. It rains in summer. It's hot even if the sun is gone.

What surprised me the most was the cost of food. The cheap restaurants have $7 sandwiches and $12 entrées. Most restaurants have entrées at $15-20. The food in grocery stores is also more expensive, especially the produce, all of which is imported from California.

However, I am not doomed! By the wonders of Yelp, I found a very cheap produce market: http://www.yelp.com/biz/stiles-farmers-market-new-york. Three dollars for four tomatoes and 2 bell peppers? Sounds good to me!

I was curious as to what I would end up cooking when I need to cook for myself regularly. As the kitchen obviously did not come stocked with spices, it is difficult to make anything fancy because I only have the basics in my pantry: The flavorings I have so far are salt, pepper, cinnamon, and hot sauce.

When I first got here, I made a lot of eggs. Specifically, fried eggs on toast with goat cheese and marinara sauce. Then I switched to cabbage and leek pancakes (like this, but I've actually figured a much better way of doing it). I've also made pasta with tomato/bell pepper sauce, and well as tomato/bell pepper salad.

What about New York? Well, I took some pictures!

Fountain Pens!

A couple weeks ago in chem lab, I noticed that my lab partner was writing in her lab notebook with a fountain pen. A fountain pen?? I thought those had died out decades ago! But no, she was writing with a bona fide fountain pen. It was beautiful.

For a week starting that afternoon, I spent all my free time researching fountain pens on the internet. My lab partner had recommended gouletpens.com as a good source of pens, ink samples, and information. From there I found a whole fountain pen community on the internet. There are forums, blogs, stores... All the things I had come to expect from the internet foodie community, I found for fountain pens. I learned about proprietary cartridges, cartridge converters, and converting cartridge pens to eyedropper pens. I saw a range of 3 dollar disposable fountain pens to pens worth hundreds of dollars and inlaid with Japanese lacquer. 
From pens I went to paper, and I read about super smooth French Clairefontaine paper that weighs 90g per square meter. I read at least 30 various notebook reviews. I found writing samples of different pens and inks on different papers. It was an obsession.

Finally, I deposited my paychecks and bought everything I needed to start my fountain pen experience: a $4 Fine Platinum Preppy, three ink samples (Noodler's Blue-Black, Private Reserve Purple Ebony, and Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrun) and a Clairefontaine notebook. 

The Platinum Preppy

The Preppy's nib

The Preppy came with a cartridge of purple ink.

After reading about the ink that comes with the Preppy and being disappointed by its quality, I decided to not use the cartridge right away.  Instead, I did an "eyedropper conversion" so that I could use better inks. I got some silica grease from my lab partner and now I use the barrel of the pen to store ink! I used a syring to fill the pen with Noodler's blue-black ink.

2mL ink samples from Goulet Pens

10mL blunt tipped syring for dispensing ink

Now I had a working pen! Writing with a fountain pen is cool because I barely need to put any pressure on the paper to write. The ink just flows. Naturally, I then needed to test this pen everywhere. I first tried out the fancy French paper.

Clairefontaine's A5 "Basic Life. Unplugged" Notebook

It is clothbound!

Clairefontaine paper is well known in fountain pen circles for its smooth surface and absorbance. It is supposed to have minimized feathering (little spikes around lines) and minimized bleed through. I was not disappointed. I tested the paper with all the pens I could find in my room:

Various pens

No see-through!

A cool part of using fountain pens is shading. Shading is the effect of having different parts of letters have different amounts of ink. On the picture below, some strokes are lighter and more blue/green, and others are closer to black.

Close ups of the various pens are here. 

I also used my fountain pen on more standard papers. My "Evidence Ampad" recycled paper notebook actually fared very well. It had little bleed through although it did have some feathering.

Thin printer paper did not have as smooth strokes. Notice the feathering on the f. 

In conclusion, the platinum preppy is a fun pen to use, the ink I got has pretty shading, and fancy paper is nice but not necessary. However, I do find the lines a bit thick. After a bit of research, the most thin but reasonably priced fountain pen I could find is the Pilot Penmanship with an Extra-Fine nib, it is the next pen I will get. It has a nice looking clear barrel that could be converted to an eye-dropper pen, although I might get a cartridge converter to keep it cleaner. Cartridge converters are basically refillable cartridges that can be used with any ink.  

Now I want to go back to writing on random different types of papers with my Preppy pen :)

(Actually, I'm going to work on chem homework...)

Grapefruit

Sometimes you just need a bowl of sweet, pink, grapefruit to get you through Ecology homework.