Goodbye Mom
Friday, October 9, 2009
My mother passed away at 8:44pm on Saturday, September 12, 2009.
She had gone into the hospital almonst three weeks earlier for severe abdominal pain. It was centered around her liver, and we believed it was residual pain from the cyberknife (targetted radiation) treatment she had just finished. The doctors agreed that it could take a week or two for the full pain of the treatment to manifest itself, and that supported our belief. They put her on strong painkillers so she could pass through the worst of it sleeping or out of it.
Everything seemed like it was going to be OK, or at least as OK as could be given the situation. When they took her off the painkillers, she was still groggy, out of it, not there, whatever euphemism you like. That's when we knew something was wrong. The sonogram of her liver revealed 5 tumors, and the doctors confirmed that she was in liver failure. By the time they found those, she was already in a coma from toxic levels of ammonia in her blood. The doctors said she had between two days and two weeks left. In a way I'm glad she never had to hear them say "there's nothing more we can do for you."
I go the phone call on Friday afternoon, and flew home Saturday morning. She couldn't respond, but I lke to think she could "hear" me at some level. I sat on the edge of her bed and held her hand as her breathing became more labored, more swallow, more infrequent. She took a final gasping breath at 8:44, and she was gone.
As per her wishes, she was cremated without a service. Mom never believed in or liked funerals, and she didn't understand why people would get dressed up to cry. She was nothing if not fervent in her beliefs.
I loved her more than I can express in words, and I miss her every day.
Goodbye, mom.
Grad Gourmet
Monday, August 10, 2009
"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."
If, without the aid of Google, you know who said this (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin), chances are you won't find anything new in this post. If, without the aid of Wikipedia, you know who Brillat-Savarin was (an 18th century French lawyer and food author), chances are you could do a better job than I will. However, if you're like many of my fellow grad students, then this maxim probably has you pegged as consisting mainly of Cup Noodles and free pizza. Sad, but too often true.
But it doesn't have to be that way! Cooking doesn't have to be a dreaded task or a mystery wrapped in an enigma that only your parents and friends with spouses and children understand. Cooking is part science, part art, all fun. Cooking is about exploring, experimenting, failing, failing again, succeeding! It's just like doing research. Believe me, if you're reading this, then you have all the personality traits necessary to enjoy and rock at cooking. To get you started, here are ten tips that I've picked up since my grandma first started teaching me when I was a child.
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A good knife
One of the misconceptions propagated by late-night infomercials is that it takes a box full of gadgets, doo-dads, and items with the suffix "O-Matic" to make a good meal. Truth is, you need very few tools to make the vast majority of dishes. Most important of these is a good chef's knife. The brand doesn't matter, but the features do. The blade should be about 8" long, a good length for accomplishing most tasks. Shorter blades will be hard to use with large cuts of meat or thick vegetables, and longer blades will be unwieldy. If 8" seems too long, remember that you don't have to use the full length. Precision work can be accomplished by pinching the spine of the blade just behind the tip. It should not be serrated, as serrated blades are more specialized and harder to sharpen. A good knife of this size should cost between $30 and $50; you can find ones for much more, but there's really no need to go that top-of-the-line. Treated properly (don't put it in the dishwasher!) and sharpened regularly (Kitchen Arts on Newbury St. will do this for $4!), a good knife can easily last more than a decade.
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A cast iron skillet
The only other piece of hardware I'm going to recommend, the cast iron skillet is an American classic that no longer gets the publicity it deserves. The best ones are made by Lodge, a family-owned manufacturer based in Tennessee. Dirt-cheap raw materials (they literally smelt scrap iron) keep prices around $20 for a 10.25" model, which strikes the right balance between size (the 9" can't hold 2 decent sized steaks at once, for example) and weight (the 12" has a couple of weeks in the gym as a prereq). Speaking of weight, shipping will kill you if you order online (you can literally pay more for shipping than for the skillet), so head over to Target for this purchase. Cast iron is the original nonstick surface, and if you follow the instructions for curing and caring for the skillet, you'll be amazed. Cast iron is perfect for pancakes, eggs, steaks (any cut of meat really), fried chicken, cornbread, "hash"-style meals, fajitas, and just about anything else.
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Herbs and spices
I hate to be stereotypical, but in general as one travels from South to North in the USA, the prevalence of herbs and spices in food diminishes rapidly. Note that I'm not just talking about "spiciness" in the sense of food tasting hot. I'm talking about herbs/spices in general, whose flavors run the gamut from floral and fruity to earthy and grassy to pungent and fiery. Whenever someone talks about a dish having "depth" or a "complex flavor", you can bet that herbs and spices were there in force. For people whose parents didn't cook with spices, learning to use them can be truly daunting; just look at the "spice wall" at Shaws to get an idea of the number of options. The trick is to not let yourself get overwhelmed, and slowly build up a knowledge. One great way to do this is to find a premade spice blend that you enjoy, then read the ingredients and try them individually. In addition, here's a quick primer on the most common spices you'll encounter:
- Paprika: made from a crushed red (not hot) pepper, brick red in color, the base spice for the majority of blends, often used for its color
- Cumin: dull brown in color, very common in Mexican/Tex-Mex food (the smell when you walk into a fajita place is usually cumin)
- Tumeric: organgey-yellow in color, very common in Mexican/Tex-Mex food, often used for its color (a little can turn things bright yellow)
- Cayenne: made from a crushed red (hot) pepper, lighter in color than paprika, hot, very common in cajun/creole food, a little goes a long way
- Rosemary: resembles small needles, complex aroma, woodsy and floral flavor, goes great with red meat and chicken
- Thyme: small leaves, similar in some ways to rosemary but more woodsy, especially good with mushrooms
- Oregano: usually found powdered, light green in color, common in Italian food, especially good with pasta
Obviously this list is nowhere near comprehensive, but it should at least be a start. Seriously, the only way to learn to use herbs/spices is to be willing to try and fail. It's worth it!
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Garlic
This is closely related to 3, but deserves its own point. If you don't learn anything else from this post, learn about garlic. No other ingredient can do so much single-handedly. Garlic is bright, complex, deep, earthy, pungent. It wakes up the taste buds, it opens up the nasal passages. It's eminently controllable. Left in big chunks, it adds a hint of flavor. Chopped fine or crushed into a paste, it adds a clear flavor in the front. Added early in a recipe and allowed to cook thoroughly, it becomes sweet with hints of caramel. Added late and kept mostly raw, it's pungent and spicy, with a sharp burn like fresh black pepper. Please, use more garlic. Don't have time to skin and chop it? Prechopped garlic is a fantastic time saver. The flavor won't be quite as good as fresh, but it will still be better than not having garlic. As for what to use it with, anything but dessert is a good place to start.
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Pasta
One of the most daunting parts of cooking is coming up with recipes, and there are a few kitchen staples that can make that process easier. Dried pasta is dirt cheap, quick to cook (10 minutes in boiling water), nutritious if you buy the 100% whole wheat variety, and easy to work with. To steal a phrase from Food Network star Alton Brown, pasta is "kitchen velcro". In a hurry and feeling like something light? Spaghetti noodles, lemon juice, olive oil, and a little salt and pepper. Done. Want to make it more substantial? Add artichoke hearts, olives, a can of crushed tomatoes, and maybe a package of frozen, pre-cooked shrimp. Done and delicious!
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Good bread
This one gets overlooked a lot, but great bread can turn an ordinary meal into something special, can make a 5 minute sandwich a delicacy, and can be used as part of a snack/appetizer tray if you're cooking for more than one. Bread on the side is especially important with pasta dishes or anything that comes with a sauce. Flavored breads are especially great for taking simple dishes up a notch. Use a sweet bread like cinnamon raisin to make killer French toast, or a tangy garlic bread for the best grilled cheese. Here's today's shameless plug: When Pigs Fly Bakery in Somerville, just down Highland from the Davis T station, sells the best bread I've ever had in my life. Do yourself a favor and go one day. There's unlimited free tasting; need I say more?
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Boneless skinless chicken breasts
The last ingredient on this list, and one you should always have on hand. Chicken breasts are like a Swiss Army knife for the kitchen. Quick and easy to prepare, high in protein and low in fat, and cheap to boot. Chicken breast is like a blank canvas. Feeling like Mexican? Slice it thin and throw some peppers and onions into the skillet (see #2) and you've got fajitas. Italian? Cook it with a jar of prepared sauce and mix it with the recipe from #5.The possibilities are endless!
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Breakfast for dinner
This is another answer to the "what do I cook?" question. Traditional breakfast foods -- eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns, pancakes, etc. -- are quick and nutritious, and can make a great option for dinner.
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Ask your mom/grandma
One complaint I hear fairly often is that most recipes you can find online or in magazines are too long, too complicated, too involved, etc. The best solution I've found for this is to ask your family. It's different for every family, but I guarantee you can find someone in your family that had to cook full meals for a large group of people with limited time and funds. In my family, it was my grandmother that raised 4 girls and made dinner every night. People like this won't give you 3-page recipes to make food artwork, but they will give you recipes that work in the real world.
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Experiment!
In the end, that's all cooking is about. Don't be afraid to screw up! The worst that can happen is you fill up your trash can and order pizza that night. Go, cook, eat!
Three Updates and More to Come!
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
As you'll probably notice, there are three new posts below this one, all with the same date and time stamp. I've decided to start mirroring some of my posts from the MIT Graduate Student Council blog here, since the audiences for the two websites aren't all the same. Posts that are really specific to the GSC or the Boston area won't go here, but more general ones (like movie reviews or stories of me doing dumb stuff in lab) will. I'll also continue to post unique updates here, so this should be the beginning of more regular content. I know I've said those words before and not meant them, but hopefully this time I will!
I'm (NOT) a Research Genius
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Determine the actual concentration of hydrogen peroxide by diluting 1:1000 and measuring the optical density at 240nm
That's a piece of cake, I thought to myself. I'm an organic chemist; I've used a UV-vis spectrophotometer more times than I can counts! And the step makes perfect sense. Peroxides are unstable, and even under the best conditions they degrade over time to water and oxygen. The bottle I was working with was nearly a year old, so this step was essential to get accurate data about the antibacterial properties of the hydrogen peroxide.
I collected my reagents and equipment, did some quick math in my head. 1:1000 dilution, so that's 1000 uL for every 1 uL, so that's 1 mL for every 1 uL, so that's 10 uL H2O2 diluted up to 10 mL total volume. Simple!
Pipetman in hand, I transfered 10 uL of H2O2 to a conical tube, then added 9,990 uL of distilled water. Just like I was taught in undergrad, make mixtures starting with the smallest volume so that you get more thorough mixing. No shortcuts here, no adding 10 mL and saying the final volume was close enough. I wanted this data to be good.
I turned on the spec, programmed 240nm, and threw in a cuvette with distilled water for my blank reading. Swapped it out and replace it with my sample, hit the read button. The machine paused, made the high-pitched whine that signaled it was analyzing, and popped the result on the LCD dispaly.
- 0.053
What?!? Absorbance values can't be negative!
Alright, fine, no big deal. Something must've gone wrong. I know! Maybe the distilled water from the tap was relatively impure, and that threw off my reading. I'll just try it again using distilled, deionized water for the dilution and the blank reading.
- 0.048
Damn! Ok, ok... maybe this H2O2 is old and a 1:1000 dilution is too much, so I'm out of the linear range. I'll try using a 1:100 dilution, still using the distilled deonized water.
- 0.051
Huh.... ok... maybe this H2O2 is really old, so I'll try a 1:10 dilution.
- 0.042
...what the hell, I'll try it undiluted.
- 0.055
What the hell!?! I was at my wit's end. I was ready to sue Fisher Scientific for selling me negative molarity H2O2. Why didn't this work?!?
Ok, ok, calm down... maybe... hm, maybe my math is messed up in my dilutions? Maybe I've forgotten how to use a spectrophotometer? Maybe this isn't actually H2O2? I ordered a fresh bottle of ACS certified, Baker analyzed, reagent grade H2O2. I asked one of the postdocs in my lab to sit and let me talk through the math with her, to make sure I was doing it right.
Me: An X% weight/weight solution means X grams of solute in 100 mL of total solution, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And I can convert from grams of solution to volume of solution with the density, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And the density of a 30% H2O2 solution is 1.2, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And I can convert from grams of H2O2 to moles using the molar mass, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And the molar mass of H2O2 is around 34, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: So a 30% solution of H2O2 should be around 9M, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And a 1:1000 dilution means 1 uL for every 1 mL, right?
Her: Yep
Me: And...
Her: Brandon, why are you asking me questions I know you learned in high school?
Me: Because this damn step won't work! It should've taken 5 minutes, and I've been trying for a week now!
She smiled a little, then looked curious. Then she stood up.
Her: Come on, let's go do it right now and see if we can figure this out.
I happily followed her, confident that the problem had nothing to do with my technique.
Her: What wavelength are you doing your readings at?
Me: 240 nanometers.
Her: Hm, and which cuvettes are you using?
Me: Oh just the disposable plastic ones.
She raised an eyebrow at me, and I stared at her like she had a second head.
Her: Plastic?
Me: Yeah, I don't...
And then it hit me.
Our disposable cuvettes are made of polystyrene. Polystyrene is a highly conjugated organic compound. Highly conjugated organic compounds absorb light in the 200-300 nanometer range. I knew that. I'd used UV-vis to identify conjugated compounds in my undergrad organic chem lab. So why had I been trying to take readings using cuvettes that absorbed at the wavelength I was analyzing?!?
I popped in a quartz cuvette and tried everything again. The result? 9M, right on the nose.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go lock my door before some thugs from my alma mater show up to take my degree away.
Harry Potter and the Halfhearted Production
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
In case you've been living under a rock encased in lead inside the Fortress of Solitude on the far side of Borneo, the sixth film in J.K. Rowling's inconceivably lucrative series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, came out this week. I saw it at a midnight premier on Tuesday, and as a person who did not read the books but is following the movies, I was unimpressed.
The movie suffered from what one friend called Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-2-Syndrome, a condition in which a movie lacks sufficient self-contained action and functions chiefly as a bridge between two other movies. Put simply, not very much happened in the movie.
"But Brandon!" you exclaim, "this is the movie where [spoiler] Snape kills Dumbledore! How could you say not much happened?!?"
Easy there fanboy. Yes, something major happens late in the movie, but it's like getting one notecard on your third try at passing quals; it's too little too late.
The same is true of the time spent on Voldemort's back story, showing glimpses of his childhood when he was probably called Tommy and enjoyed wholesome activities like quidditch and pulling the limbs off of small animals. As played out as the whole "he-had-a-rough-childhood-and-was-an-orphan-and-nobody-hugged-him-so-now-he-kills-people" shtick is, it can still work if it's done right. At its best, it adds nuance and depth to the villain and encourages asking tough questions about the nature of mankind and morality and other topics that seem oddly pertinent at 1am in The Thirsty Ear (the campus pub) while playing Connect Four (or maybe that's just me). At its worst, which it pretty much is in HP6, this sort of thing is just annoying. You've spent 5 movies and >3000 pages convincing everyone that Voldemort is more evil than Hitler mind-melded with Cthulu and drinking a smoothie of newborn tears, and now you'd like me to understand him? No thanks, I'd rather just see him impaled on a quidditch broom.
IKEAgenuity
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
I recently moved into a snazzy new corner room in a graduate residence called Edgerton, which is one of the unfurnished options on campus. So like many budget-conscious grad students before me, I made the trek to IKEA in the nearby town of Stoughton to pickup the necessities (bed, dresser, desk, bookcase, etc.). So far so good.
About halfway through assembling the dresser, my roommate and I discovered that I was missing 3 plastic "nails" (essentially plastic dowels with ridges) to hold the final drawer together. For those of you keeping score at home, yes the instructions told me to go through all the parts beforehand and no I didn't do that. Ahem.
Now, anyone who's purchased something from IKEA before knows that missing parts are an understood hazard of DIY furniture. So understood, in fact, that the instruction manual tells you precisely what to do, in the form of an adorable graphic featuring an androgynous stickperson looking forlorn because he/she can't find his/her nuts. Said tragedy is swiftly rectified in the following panel by a simple phone call to the nearest IKEA showroom. So that's what I did. Here's a rough transcript of the ensuing conversation:
Menu: "For assistance assembling your purchase or to request replacement parts, press 5."
Me: 5
Operator: "Thank you for calling IKEA, how may I help you today?"
Me: "Hi, I need to order a replacement part."
Operator: "You'll need to come into our store because we do not currently have a system for ordering replacement parts over the phone."
Everybody out there catch that? Just in case, let me replay the pertinent part: we do not currently have a system for ordering replacement parts over the phone. What an amazing business model. I think I'm going to open a bar with the same theme: our special will be Jagerbombs, but you have to walk to the 7-11 to get the Red Bull. Seriously IKEA? That's like Billy Mays not having a system to double your order if you call now (too soon?).
Perturbed but determined to have a place to put my socks that night, I took a trip to Economy Hardware in Central Square, partially assembled drawer in hand. Ten minutes later, the gentleman from the key grinding booth emerged from the stock room and dumped a pound of nuts, screws, anchors, nails, dowels, and doo-dads into my hands. "Something there should do the trick." Total charge? $0.
One inch plastic nails are for pansies anyway. My socks are safe and sound, supported by 3" masonry screws. Booyah.
Continuing the Trend
Friday, July 3, 2009
Posting an update in the middle of the day on a weekday?!? It's a holiday here in Massachusetts (a consolation for July 4th falling during the weekend), and my lab is pretty empty. On top of that, I don't have terribly much to do (I counted bacteria on a plate and played on Facebook for a while), so I decided to grind out an update before I head home. A bunch of buddies and I are going to a BBQ place for dinner, then I'm going to have a wild and crazy night building Ikea furniture for the new apartment that I move into on Sunday. Initially I was a little bummed about having to move (my first choice for housing was to remain in the graduate dorm that I currently occupy), but the closer the move gets the more excited I am. The building's closer to campus, I'll be living with a good friend of mine from my department, and our room is a huge 3rd floor corner room with 6 windows and a great view. We now have the option to keep the room until we graduate, so I imagine in 4 years we could turn it into something quite respectable. Small steps, though; first I need to build my bed!
I added two new pieces to the portfolio. The first is a link to a YouTube video of me giving a microteaching presentation on organic stereochemistry. It's basically an 8 minute lecture on a small topic within organic chemistry that I prepared and delivered as part of the Graduate Student Teaching Certificate Program that I'm participating in to hone my teaching skills. The second is a research proposal on DNA repair that I wrote as the final project for my Perspectives in Biological Engineering class from spring semester. I'm pretty sure it's the best paper I've written to date, so I'm happy to finally have it online.
Mom's surgery to implant markers was outpatient and only took about an hour. She's sore on her side and has to take it easy for a week to guard against bleeding, but otherwise there were no ill effects. She's been taking Tarceva for about a week now and no rash has cropped up yet. She goes next Tuesday for a CT scan to map out the CyberKnife treatment, and then it should be a couple of weeks before she actually starts treatment (which should be once a day for about an hour).
Finally, I've started blogging for the MIT Graduate Student Council, where I currently serve as Co-Chair of the Activities Committee. The posts there should be short and fairly MIT specific (it's designed to generate interest and excitement among current and potential graduate students), but I thought I'd throw in a link anyway.