For Science!

So my convoluted vegan experiment is over today! In the end, the whole thing lasted 40 days: 31 as a vegan and 9 days where I fell off the wagon because I was visiting family or friends were visiting me. Not too shabby.

In the end, I don’t think I will become a full-time vegan, though I have nothing but respect for those who can stick to it! Eating this way has definitely been good for me, though. I ate a lot more vegetables and legumes than normal and a lot less dessert. I didn’t miss the extra sprinkle of cheese here and there, but there were a few things that I craved. Mostly dessert (of course) and, weirdly, seven-layer taco dip. I really want some taco dip for some reason!

I’ll probably indulge in the taco dip, but I can definitely see myself doing a similar challenge (with the same wishy-washy rules) again in the future.

You can probably tell from this post and the previous one that Rae and I are trying to get out every weekend while the weather is still nice! This weekend we saw a bit of Jamaica Plain, which is a neighborhood south of the downtown area. We took the orange line all the way out of Forest Hills and walked north along South St. and Centre St. Besides having a pleasant walk, the main goal for the afternoon was to find something cute and fall-appropriate at one of the thrift stores along the route. We had some luck at Boomerangs where we each bought a wool skirt that needs hemming and I bought a cute sweater dress for cheap.

We had some lunch at The Real Deal, which I like even though I find their menu board really hard to read. It’s a combination of the small writing and the fact that every sandwich is named after a person. I’m never quite sure what I’m ordering, but luckily I received the hummus wrap I wanted and not a meatball sub or something. Later we drank a double espresso at City Feed and Supply and watched people out the window (and then looked away and tried to pretend we hadn’t been looking at them when they caught us).

When we got home, Rae got to work on the skirt that she bought. I wish I had taken a “before” photo of what it used to look like, because she managed to change it from ridiculous 80s disaster into something extremely cute and wearable. First she hemmed it from calf-length to knee-length, which already made a huge difference. Then she decided to change the ugly-ish yellow color by dying it in a bucket in the bath tub. She kind of winged it with the dye, but it ended up an awesome dark purple. Now she has a fancy wool skirt for $5 and the cost of a box of dye. I’m very impressed!

If you’re wondering what I’ve done to my skirt, I haven’t even gotten started. To be honest, I don’t even know how to do a proper hem, but at least the skirt is grey, so no dying will be necessary. Whew!

Today, Rae and I went to Manchester, NH on a whim. We had seen some of the brick factory-like buildings from the highway while driving by that way. I actually expected it to be more of a touristy town with little shoppes — which must be pronounced “shop-ees” in order to be suitably quaint. It wasn’t overly quaint, but it was still nice to walk around on a beautiful day. Next time I probably wouldn’t go on a Sunday, though, because what shoppes there were were mostly closed!

Town hall was quite pretty. From a distance, we thought it was a church.

This fellow is apparently named John Stark. The whole street was named Stark Street, in fact. Rae and I have been reading too much A Song of Ice and Fire.

I told Rae to go in that phone booth so I could take her photo.

And this was the unhappy face she gave me after she realized it smelled strongly of urine in there.

This weekend my friend Martha visited me for the first time since I moved. We did a lot of fun touristy things like the Freedom Trail and the aquarium, but we also spent a fair amount of time baking because that’s just how we roll. Martha brought a book of macaron recipes for us to try out. She, Rae and I tasted French macarons for the first time this past spring when we were in Paris, and they were amazing (they were from Ladurée, so we went straight to the source!). I’ve been borderline obsessed with them for a long time and since we’re both experienced bakers, we thought we would try our hand at making our own. You can probably tell by the post title that it didn’t go exactly as expected.

You can find plenty of macaron recipes on the internet, but the one we used called for some pretty complicated ingredients that were unlike anything else I’d baked before. Stuff like ground almonds and caster sugar, which I had to google before we went to the grocery store. We managed to find a box of caster sugar and ground up our own almonds in the food processor. We decided to go with a chocolate cookie in order with a chocolate ganache filling to keep things simple, but the dark chocolate cocoa powder in the cookie seemed to suck all the moisture out of the batter. Our batter ended up so thick it could barely be piped!

Martha says the piping bag looks like the lung in a smoking PSA.

The end result. Not quite like the photos on the cover.

So instead of lovely, delicate pastries we ended up with ugly chocolate lumps. All was not lost, though, because they actually tasted quite good. They didn’t really taste like the macarons, but sort of like a chewy brownie. In fact, we took to calling them maca-brownies to make ourselves feel better. On the plus side, the ganache came out perfectly, so our baking egos aren’t bruised too badly.

Now I’ve got macarons on the brain, so I’ll have to check out some of the macaron purveyors of Boston!

I’m not going to give a whole PSA in favor of blood donation (which is not to say that I won’t be writing one in the future). Suffice it to say that I am in favor of it! When I lived in Binghamton, I was in the donation office so often that I  knew all of the technicians by name. Unfortunately, the reason I was in there so much was because I almost always failed my test for iron levels. But, undaunted, I would come back week after week for as long as it took before I was able to donate. To give you an idea of how much it was: I was only about to donate about three times in a year!

Anyway, the point is that I’m dedicated to blood donation! Since I donated right before I left Binghamton, today was my first donation since coming to Boston. I went to the center at 276 Tremont (soon to be relocating) and everyone was very nice. After how much I loved the Johnson City staff, I was nervous that their shoes would be too big to fill, but apparently the Red Cross only employs extremely nice people. I can tell that this staff and I will be BFFs soon.

The woman taking my vitals let me know that the area has a critical need for platelets and asked if I would consider platelet donation. Your typical blood donation (what they call “whole blood”) only takes 15 minutes or so, but platelet donation is quite different and takes several hours. The needle that they put in your arm looks the same, but it’s actually connected to two tubes that are connected to an apheresis machine. The blood gets taken out of your arm and goes into the machine where a centrifuge spins it around really fast. The components of the blood are separated by density and the desired part (in my case, platelets) is filtered out The rest of your blood is pumped back into your vein through the same needle. Pretty cool!

I had never donated platelets before, but since I passed the iron test, and I didn’t have any pressing appointments, I decided to give it a try. My honest assessment: I will do it again, but it’s not my favorite feeling in the world. Because they’re taking your blood out, running it through a machine and then putting it back into your vein, they add an anticoagulant to prevent clotting. The side effect is that it makes you feel really cold. Naturally, they warned me about this ahead of time, but I guess the unseasonably warm weather made me forget how much I hate being cold! Blech! The feeling was really pervasive and made me groggy, whereas I normally feel fine after a whole blood donation.

On the plus side, they gave me several blankets to snuggle in, hot from the dryer, and all the snacks I could eat. The staff kept checking on me to make sure I didn’t need anything. They set up a TV for me to watch a movie (I chose Blazing Saddles). The entire appointment from the time I walked in to the time I walked out was about three hours, but the time passed pretty quickly. The needle they used seemed normal: a sharp pinch at first, but then you hardly feel it (though you can’t move your arm for a long time). I also has a little bit of cramping in my legs, but they fixed me right up by giving me some Tums to chew on. Next time they’ll give it to me beforehand to ward off cramps before they start.

Your blood regenerates much faster after platelet donation than whole blood, so I’ll be able to donate again in two weeks. I have a feeling it will go much better this time, since I’ll know what to expect.

I’m experimenting with veganism lately. I have a 30 before 30 list (inspired by this project) and going vegan for a month is on it. Unfortunately, as much as I think veganism is a healthy and sustainable diet, the challenge has been tough for me (though maybe not for the reason you’d think).

For a long time (as in over 15 years), I was a vegetarian who also ate fish. Last year I mostly cut the fish out, only indulging once in a while when going out for sushi or when someone cooked fish especially for me and I didn’t want to be rude. So far eating as a vegan at home has been really easy — it’s barely any different from what I would normally be eating. The problem is when I try to eat outside the house. I guess I’m not 100% committed, because I can’t bring myself to inconvenience anyone for the sake of my vegan challenge. I go with my friends to regular restaurants (not vegan ones, since I’m not sure they would like it) and I try my best to order something vegan. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s out of my control — like when the plain pasta I ordered the other day came out with a ton of cheese already on it. I’m not about to make the waiter throw out a perfectly good plate of food because of an experiment. Also, when people cook for me, like my parents did on a recent trip to my hometown, I want to insist on a separate meal. Though I was at least partial motivated by not wanting to miss out on the goat cheese and roasted tomato penne with nutella smores for dessert!

I might sound hopefully un-assertive, but I promise that if I was going to be vegan full-time then I would warn all my friends and family. I managed it just fine when I became a vegetarian at the tender age of 11. If the pasta in the restaurant scenario above had be slathered in meat sauce, I wouldn’t hesitate to ask for another one. But for a 30-day challenge, it seems like overkill.

So the verdict is that I can definitely complete 30 days of veganism… I’m just not sure if they will be 30 days in a row. That’s probably cheating, but it’s my 30 before 30 list so I’ll cheat if I want! So far I’m at 10 days vegan, 5 days not, and I’ve only ever caved because of friends/family (not because I felt like eating an ice cream cone that day). In the meantime, here is my vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe that I adapted. I had a lot of fun reading about the chemistry of vegan baking. The butter is pretty easy to replace with oil, but since eggs are leavening agents, you need something to make the cookies puff up. In the vegan recipes, they often use baking powder and a little vinegar for leavening. The apple sauce is to replace the egg’s wetness. Interesting!

Megan’s Vegan Cookies
A combination of my normal (and amazing) non-vegan recipe and this vegan recipe I found on YouTube. These taste just like those Freihofer’s chocolate chip cookies but bigger and fluffier and, thus, better.

1 cup brown sugar
½ cup white sugar
½ tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
2 cup all purpose flour
2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
½ cup applesauce
1 tbsp vinegar
1-2 cup vegan chocolate chips (some normal brands are accidentally vegan, google and check the labels)

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Mix the dry ingredients together in a big bowl. Mix the wet ingredients together in the measuring cup that you used to measure the oil. Add the wet to the dry and stir with a wooden spoon until combined (don’t use a mixer). Add as many chocolate chips as you like. Line the baking sheets with parchment paper and portion out the cookies (makes 20-30). Bake for 15-20 minutes until they’re just barely turning brown. Scarf them down (well, let them cool off first).

Today I took a day trip to New York City to meet my Parisian friend, A. who was in town for vacation. Online dating notwithstanding, A. is the only person I have gotten to know online before meeting IRL. We first bonded on LiveJournal because we were both studying chemistry (she is a chemical engineer), because I was studying French and she <i>is</i> French, and because we shared a love of the same TV shows.

We decided to check out the American Museum of Natural History. I used to go there fairly often when I was a kid, but a lot of things are different than I remember. The dinosaurs and prehistoric animals area is much improved, based on my vague memories. But on the other hand, is it just me or is the blue whale hanging from the ceiling in the Oceans exhibit not the same one that was there twenty years ago? I kind of miss the old one — it never gave me the impression that it was diving toward the floor in order to suck me into its baleen.

One thing that hasn’t changed in the Ocean exhibit is “the squid and the whale” as referenced in that movie with Jeff Daniels. That exhibit looks exactly the same as it did when I was a little kid, and it still freaks me out just as much! Something about how dark it is in there makes me feel like the diorama goes on forever. Looking at it gives me the same sense of vertigo that I felt when I was snorkeling in the real ocean in the deep water where I couldn’t see the bottom. I get creepy chills just thinking about it! (The real ocean, not the exhibit. It is only a diorama after all!).

Another section that hasn’t changed is my favorite exhibit: the minerals and gems. In fact, from the looks of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t changed since the seventies! I have always loved rocks better than animals. In the third grade I did a science project where I took photos of all the minerals in the exhibit that struck my fancy and my parents had them developed into slides. Does anyone even remember slides? This was in the days before PowerPoint! For my project I presented the slides with blurb that I had researched and written about each mineral. At the time I thought I wanted to be a geologist, but I think I compromised pretty well by studying materials science and crystal structure. I get to learn about rocks and chemicals at the same time!

I did my graduate work in Binghamton, NY so I lived in the area for six years. In the summer of 2006 we had a really bad flood, though it hardly affected me personally. We didn’t get any flooding in the apartment where I lived and none of my friends had anything worse than a slightly soggy basement. The university campus was also fine, but because there was a state of emergency in the area, I had to take two days off from work (something about not wanting us to work in chemistry labs when all the emergency personnel are off campus). While there was certainly a lot of damage, I mostly remember it as “those couple of days when I couldn’t do any experiments”.

Now the record flooding from 2006 is being beaten by even worse flooding going on now. Due to a bad combination of the saturated ground from Irene and days of heavy storms, Binghamton and the surrounding area is under feet of water. I don’t live there anymore, yet I feel like it’s affecting me much more this time. A lot of my friends in the area are teachers who had barely gotten the first week started before all the schools closed down. One friend was evacuated from her neighborhood, and another had her house fill with over a foot of water. The photo above (credit to Bill Walsh and http://www.wbng.com) shows the downtown area. You can barely distinguish the rivers from the streets!

I’m wishing everyone in the area a speedy recovery! Stay dry!

If you’re on the East coast (or probably anywhere else that has 24-hour news channels) then you know that we’re expecting hurricane Irene this weekend. It’s big news mostly because it’s coming farther north than typical hurricanes and it’s passing directly over New York City, which could cause a lot of damage. In the Boston area, it’s not supposed to be all that bad, but we were encouraged to prepare for up to three days without power. We don’t have a TV in our apartment, so I’ve been spared the 24-hour news cycle of panic, but that hasn’t quite stopped me from taking my storm-tracking to an extreme level of craziness!

As I write this, it’s about 9:30 on the day of the storm. From what I can gather online, they’re not faring too badly in NYC and here in Boston, it’s hardly more than a little wind and rain. In order to curb my hurricane-induced insanity, I’ve forbidden myself from checking any more weather news until at least 11:00, when the worst of the storm is supposed to start in my area. I’ve been driving Rae nuts all morning with my constant descriptions of what the radar looks like now and reporting every eye-witness account that I read on reddit. She has started giving me a you-should-seriously-stop-now look, so I’m going to give it a rest for a while.

I couldn’t sleep last night because I had the same nervous feeling that I get the night before a really busy day when I have lots of things to remember. It’s nuts of course, because I don’t have anything to do today except stay indoors! I eventually got up at 7:00 and called my parents in upstate New York, who were experiencing “severe sprinkles” and thus breaking into their “emergency non-perishable crumb cake”. Despite the fact that the wind was barely blowing, I was paranoid about losing power, so I made coffee hours before Rae woke up. Whoops!

Despite all my storm obsessing, I’m not particularly worried about there being any hurricane damage around here. Mostly I just want to know the most up-to-date info on the storm for the sake of my own curiosity. I hate waiting around not knowing if the power is going to go off and not knowing how bad things are in other parts of the east coast. So far, my best source for news is the subreddit /r/irene. I thought Twitter would have good information, but the hashtags #HurricaneIrene and #Irene are mostly made up of lame jokes without any real information. However, @MattNoyesNECN, the meteorologist at New England Cable News, is tweeting up a storm (sorry, pun!). I also like looking at the data from NOAA, which has been much more useful to me than watching online videos of weather reports.

Time to get back to the storm. Stay dry everyone!

Since I’ve been living in Cambridge and have a fair amount of free time, I decided to sign up to be a participant in some Harvard School of Medicine research studies. Not the type of studies where they inject you with experimental drugs and perform psychological tests on you, but the ones where they need healthy control subjects to observe. I figured it would be more interesting than staying at home and I’d be helping someone’s research, which appeals to me. Plus they give you a few bucks for your time, so who am I to say no?

The first study was today, and it was… interesting. The research group studies vision using what the graduate students in charge of recruitment described as “boring video games”. The description was pretty accurate: I spent three hours in a small, dark room staring at a computer. What I didn’t expect was that the experiment were kind of tough. In the first one, I was shown a bunch of CT chest scans and I had to locate “tumors” as if I were a radiologist. The tumors were just grey spheres, but they were really hard to find! The software I was using was mimicking that used by real radiologists, so apparently I shouldn’t be a radiologist. All of my patient would have died. In the second test I “picked berries” by clicking on bright red squares while avoiding the dull red squares. They were practically impossible to tell apart. I really wanted to ask what that experiment was supposed to be testing, but I figured that, as a research subject, I probably wasn’t supposed to know.

Normally that would be the end of the story, except my appointment was made even more interesting because it was interrupted by an earthquake! It’s been a long time since I’ve felt one, so at first I wasn’t sure what was happening. I could feel the whole room swaying, but for some reason I though it was just a really strong wind. A moment after I realize what must be going on, a graduate student rushed in and asked me to come out of my testing closet an into the main room. Several students from California were discussing all the intense earthquakes they’d been through, but in the end nothing much happened. When we realized there wouldn’t be any aftershocks, everyone went back to business.

All in all it was an eventful day and I’d do it again (the vision study, not the earthquake). In fact they asked me to come back next week to do another three hours of different experiment. I’ll also be doing a sleep study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in September, so we’ll see how that goes. If you want to try a study yourself, here’s the website to check for openings: http://crnet.mgh.harvard.edu/.