Graduation and Beet Chips

I apologize for the hiatus from blogging, but I had to briefly graduate. My blog is not for naught, and its loose ends are not yet knotted. I'll still be cooking between class when I start my biophysics PhD at Stanford in another month.

Even though I'm not yet enrolled, here's a neat recipe. I had to use my mom's mandolin (the one she expressly forbade me using). It's nice having an equipped kitchen. Maybe the best part is being able to use two all-clad sauciers!

Anyway, I just came into a lot of beets. We're getting a bit bored of Beet and Potato soup, and these are a nice change - they taste great, and not too beety. Yum.

Beet Chips

Ingredients
+ Beets, peeled/rinsed
+ Salt (optional)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350F. Slice the beets 1mm thin (I cut them 1 mm thicker, and they turned out a little soft). Do not slice your fingers - blood is difficult to discern from beet juice.

Lay out pieces on any kind of baking tray. Sprinkle salt if desired. Bake for 15-20 minutes, keeping an eye after 15. Remove and let harden/cool. Eat.

Source: Fix Me A Snack

(click for high resolution)

Your taste in music.

Here's a quatrain I wrote while coming up with something to write about:

The sound of music, the taste of food
Help find my lyric, help change your mood.
Follow the metric, its not poetic,
but a recipe that serves two.

Now here's a cover by a band called "Cibo Matto". You should listen to it while reading the rest of this post.

Cibo Matto (meaning crazy food in Italian) ... are a New York City-based band formed by two Japanese women, Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, in 1994. The lyrics in their songs are primarily concerned with food and their sound has been described as a combination of "Jazz, Hip-Hop, Brazilian music, African Drumming, and Disco samples". -Wikipedia June 2011

Do I have any choice about liking this band? Do you?

Now here's a recipe that I am making tonight, credit my dad.

Smoked Salmon Spaghetti

Ingredients
+ One pound spaghetti
+ Heavy Cream
+ Salt, Pepper
+ Shallots
+ One tablespoon butter
+ ~4oz Smokes Salmon, wild like the wind.

Preparation
Cook Pasta.

In another pan, bloom the diced shallots in the butter. Add the heavy cream.

Do not add the salmon.

Add cream mixture to cooked/drained pasta. Now add smoked salmon. Salt/Pepper to taste. Serve.

Beet Generation

"Ah Sal you are all right.", said Remi Boncoer as Dean and I walked into his house. He patted me on the back, and avoided eye contact with Dean, who looked hurt, but only for a second. His expression was replaced by swaying and longing for the last fifteen dollars we spent at the bar that night.

Lee Ann came around the corner from the kitchen. She saw Dean and halted and sped backwards back into the kitchen. Remi glared a Dean and followed her into the kitchen. They began arguing in whispers, but not quietly so I could hear everything and so could Dean. I looked back at him and his eyes returned to normal. He rubbed his belly and sweat was beading on his sunken cheeks. He paid no attention to the hisses around the corner.

Dean walked over to the set table, talking on the way "My pa made this for me, back in Denver." The idea that his wino father ever cooked anything surprised me. I thought of boyhood Dean kneeling over the trashcan fire in an alley of Larimer street, hiding from the rain under his father's coat. I was so tired and broken, so beat that I couldn't think of anything else.

My eyes must have glazed over because Dean walked towards me and stopped when his face was only a few inches from my face and he yelled with a full mouth, "Try this - you have to!". Remi's French accent was still audible two rooms away now, and I knew I would have time to try some without him noticing. Using two fingers so as to not make a mess I tried one of the red cubes. The taste reminded me of dirt, or earth, but it was also tart, and it was such a beautiful color. It was the first real food I had eaten in two days.

"What is it?" I asked and sneaked another piece, but Dean was already gone. I heard his footsteps walking towards Remi and Lee Ann and his booming voice "Hey Lee Ann! My pa made this all the time! Lee Ann! How do you make it? Lee Ann!"

It took longer than I thought to find the kitchen, since the floor was moving from the booze. I sat down on a chair by the door and must have passed out for a second, since by the time I caught up to Dean and Remi and Lee Ann they were all quiet and leaning on the counter. There was blood on Dean's hands - he was peeling beets and cubing them. Remi saw me walk in but said nothing and turned his gaze back to the cutting board. It wasn't blood as I thought; it was the juice from the beets.

Lee Ann was dictating her recipe: "Not so big, or they wont cook. Okay now just add olive oil and salt and put them in the ov-" but she couldn't finish because Dean had left the room and we heard the front door slam. I had found a chair by now and we had nothing to say to each other, but Remi looked happy staring at Lee Ann.

Dean walked back in with the bottle of Chablis wine from the car that we couldn't bring ourselves to finish and forgot in the trunk. It had been open for months. He uncorked it and the entire kitchen smelled like rotting vinegar and before Lee Ann could protest he poured a little on the Beets. "My pa did this I remember because he said he never wanted to waste the wine, even when it was bad."

I was happy the oven was already on, and Dean opened it and the gust of warm air made me shiver more than anyone else has ever shivered in San Francisco. He singed his arm hairs putting the beets in the very back of the oven - it must have been hundreds of degrees hot. I began feeling feverish and I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up at noon and I felt alright, and Dean and Lee Ann seemed to be getting along. He made the beets again that night and I tried some again and he was right it tasted delicious and we talked about starting a beet farm. Dean's hands were permanently stained red. At the end of the second day in San Francisco, Remi was concerned that he was getting old and Dean spent two hours talking about how excited he was about life and the things he was going to do.

Later that night Remi caught Dean trying to make with his girl. Lee Ann was not that kind of girl but it didn't matter, Dean's hands were red. I never saw Remi that mad and he told us to leave his house, even though it was Lee Ann's house. I told him I would come back without Dean but it Remi said he didn't want me to. We never unpacked the Buick so we got back in and started driving. The car was really quiet and Dean knew I was angry so he said "Now Sal, Lee Ann was the one who started it. I was trying to get her to stop but you know I miss Denver and anyway we were out of Chablis. There was no reason to stay without those beets." He started rubbing his belly and driving with his knees. We were driving back to Denver.

Cook Pasta as Risotto : Asparagus Pastotto

So there's been a recent interest going around about cooking pasta as one would risotto. I first read this advice in this season's Cook's Illustrated, but apparently it was also written in the NYT recently. In both places, it was just a two-sentence snippet with no recipe to back it up. Was this just another far-fetched excuse to add (even more) butter to pasta, or a treasonous disfigurement of Italian culture?

So I took the advice to its fullest meaning - after finding a suitable recipe for Asparagus Risotto (from NYT), I added a sprinkle of Ctrl-f Ctrl-v, I had myself a de-bonafide Pasta-Risotto recipe.

A quick google search confirms that I am not the first to test this recipe, or to coin "Pastotto". Still this recipe came out pretty darn delicious, and I hope you give it a try! I added at least one family secret, and tested the dish's robustness as left-overs.

Asparagus Pastatto

Ingredients
+ One bunch Asparagus (it's in season!), cut into 1-inch pieces
+ Chicken or Vegetable Stock - 4 cups
+ One pound of your favorite pasta - I used Fusilli
+ Splash of white wine - I used Pancake Cellars 'Big Day White'
+ Two tablespoons butter
+ One Onion, diced
+ Salt and Parmigiano-Reggiano to taste

Preparation
Add the stock to a small pot and keep it warm under low heat.

Boil half the asparagus for five minutes in two cups of water. Drain the green water into the warming stock pot. Blend the boiled asparagus with a food processor, blender, or hand blender. Set aside.

Melt half the butter in a large pan with rounded edges and high walls. Once the butter has stopped bubbling, add the onion and let it soften, five minutes. Add the pasta and coat it as evenly as possible with the butter and onion, for two minutes.

Add a splash (half cup or so) of white wine and let it boil away while constantly stirring. Don't forget to pour yourself some wine to drink slowly throughout the cooking process.

Now, start adding about the broth a cup at a time. Also add the other half of the uncooked asparagus, as well as the pureed asparagus. Continue in this fashion until the pasta is cooked - watch out! Pasta takes significantly less time to absorb the water and finish cooking - it took me about an hour.

Finally, once the pasta is tender, add a half cup of grated Parmesan, another tablespoon of butter, and cover the pot. Do not touch the pot for five minutes.

Uncover, mix thoroughly, and serve immediately.

Pastotto Pancakes

As leftovers, you can always panfry your risotto/pastotto with a little butter. The pasta does not hold together as well as risotto traditionally does, but it's still quite tasty.

Here is the finished product. Enjoy!

Kumquat Marmalade Recipe

Just around this time last year, I binged on kumquats from the farmer's market. The sweetness of the kumquat rind and acidity of its pulp made my teeth unbearably sensitive for the next week. Just looking at my left-over kumquats made my mouth ache. Instead of throwing them out, I made a really successful marmalade! Unfortunately, the season was over before I could make more.

I've been waiting all year to make the recipe again, and this time I took some photos with which to share the recipe. I've listed the ingredients in terms of how many kumquats are used.

Warning: This recipe should be started the night before...

Kumquat Marmalade

Ingredients
+ Kumquats (as many as you have!)
+ Sugar
+ Water

Preparation
Wash all the fruit and remove any green stems. The photo above shows the kumquats without the stems. Don't worry about removing the seeds in this recipe - they're mostly harmless.

This is the most labor intensive part. Start slicing each kumquat thinly. I usually cut them in half length wise, and mince them like I would some garlic cloves, as in the macro shot below. It takes about 1 hour for me to slice 100 kumquats. I had blisters by the time I was finished.

Now soak the rinds and pulp in three times their volume in water for twelve hours, or over night. The next morning, bring them to a boil until all the rinds are very tender. This takes up to an hour.

Like this! See that film on the top? You're going to want to remove that at this point.

Now it's time to add the sugar! Add the same volume of sugar as you have fruit, and bring it back to a boil. At this point, I start bringing out spoonfuls of the liquid (be careful, it's kind of hot) and putting them in the freezer to bring them to room temperature quickly. Every 15 minutes, check the consistency using this method until the desired spreadability is achieved.

Then fill sterilized (or at least clean) jam jars 90% and close them tightly immediately. As they cool, the warm air in the 10% remaining will cool and form a vacuum inside.

See for yourself:

Career Goals

I have a pretty hands-off upper-division writing professor at UCI. That doesn't stop said professor from assigning menial chores to keep us busy and out of his hair. In particular, last week he decided that we should write up our career goals, and our qualifications for those goals. Here are mine - enjoy!

---

(click for bigger pdf version)

If this elicits a response from the professor, I'll post an update. To be clear, I've been completely transparent with the professor about my dissatisfaction with his absolute lack of feedback.

I've been pretty terrible about keeping this blog food-centric. I'll post something about food before the end of the weekend. Maybe it'll be my Dad's Marmalade Jam recipe:

Calories and Growth

We finally got around to planting seeds in the Ants in your Plants garden today. We had a really great crowd! You can check out more photos here.

Now that we're well established, and that we have a regular schedule, there are a few projects I want to complete (...and start) at the garden before the end of the Spring. We need a rodent fence, maybe a live webcam, some picnic tables, composting, and a pizza oven!

But what's interesting is that we worked really hard to plant every thing today! I can hardly believe that humans can maintain a farm and still reap net positive calories from the land. It's especially relevant for me: tomorrow I am biking 200km (124 miles) around orange county tomorrow. On these long bike rides, your body is limited by the rate at which your body can digest calories. In fact - you have to be eating constantly - the average human body can only digest about 300 Calories an hour. Moderate biking is about 500 Calories an hour - see a problem there?

I want to give a shout out to my dad, who I'll be joining tomorrow morning on the tail end of his 600-km bike ride. Yes, it takes more than 24 hours to ride. Yes he sleeps - but not more than a couple of hours. Yes, he has to eat A LOT. Here's the route that I'll be joining him on. Feel free to him positive vibes.

Oh man that's cruel. He'll have finished this route before starting the one up there. No carbon fiber bike can make 600km even remotely easier. Most of the gear that they do have is to help carry food. The wife of the late Sheldon Brown (famous for his online bike articles) rode 1200km with an entire roasted chicken. Classy.

Anyway, as the garden grows, I'll keep posting photos of the seeds as they start sprouting. We planted over 50 varieties in all! That's so many!

No Knead Bread

New York Times no-knead bread, crackling out of the oven, with birds in the background.

You can get the awesome recipe here. This should be in everyone's cooking repertoire, no question. Hopefully this link will continue working even after NYT starts its digital subscriptions. If it doesn't, comment this blog and I'll reproduce it here until they come up with a student subscription plan.

Good start to the quarter...

Addendum: I've added my own version of this recipe. 

Bubble and Squeak

It's just around St. Patrick's day, and cabbage consumption is on the rise. Seeing it around the grocery store made me think of Bubble and Squeak - a cabbage potato recipe with a fantastic name. Actually the name is motivated by the sound the dish makes as it cooks.

It's perfect for the end of Winter. My mom made it for my brother and me all the time as a quick meal. So I made it again tonight. It's surprisingly tasty, for such a simple recipe.

Bubble and Squeak!

Ingredients
+ Potatoes, a few medium ones
+ Cabbage, a large head, or two small ones, chopped up
+ Salt
+ Olive Oil

Preperation
Boil cabbage and potatoes for twenty minutes. Drain, and throw it all on a hot pan with olive oil. Sprinkle a decent amount of salt and let it brown a little, stirring occasionally. You can choose to add sausage or other meat of some sort, but it's pretty good by itself! Pairs well with cold weather and potato famines.

On Food and Bias | Wine, Foie Gras, and skin.

Today in my advanced physics lab, professor Kirkby discussed the importance of unbiased data analysis. In particular, he talked about how scientists can use a chi-squared test as a way to objectively assess the validity of one's error bars. That got me thinking about bias in the food industry.

Just last weekend, I went wine tasting in the Santa Cruz mountains, as part of a visit to Palo Alto. I was surprised by how reasonable the tasting was. Picchetti (above) winery offered 5 1oz tastes for only $5 dollars. The cheapest bottle of table wine was $21, but the price of tasting is refunded if you buy anything.

Our host - pictured above, teaching us how to taste wine - described the history of wine in California. In particular, he recounted a 1976 wine competition later known as The Judgement of Paris. It was one of the first blind-wine-tasting competitions in which California wines were invited - before that, France was neck-deep in its own pride to take them seriously (as a French citizen, I can say this). Beyond anyone's expectations, the American wines snagged first place in a significant number of categories. The results and ensuing controversy/embarrassment sparked and fueled the wine industry in California.

Though there is no doubt that Californian wines have merit, it's interesting to note that the results of the competition were disputed for a few years. Sure - these were motivated by nationalist interests, but they were not mathematically unfounded. Specifically, the Judgement of Paris competition only had about 10 judges with no common grading rubric. The resulting scores for each wine had huge deviations among the tasters. In the end, only two of the average wine scores could be identified as statistically significantly successful. In other words, the other wines were statistically indistinguishable (their error bars overlapped).

Since, the controversy has calmed, and the Judgement ultimately improved the quality (and quantity) of wine in both Europe and America. (Cool fact: Forbidden Wine is wine produced in Islamic countries, where alcohol is not religiously allowed. For example, Morroco makes about 40,000 bottles of wine a year. The majority is not exported).

It seems unbelievably appropriate, now, to bring up another French-California food topic that has recently grown in controversy! That's right - Foie Gras - literally "fatty liver" in French - is pureed liver of duck or goose. The fowl are force fed, and animal rights activists recently successfully introduced a law in California banning the production and sale of foie gras. (I wont go into this today, but I think the process is no less cruel that the conditions subjected to all other conventionally raised cattle. Stay tuned for a post about a field trip to witness cattle butchering and gutting.)

Akin to wine tasting, a recent study asked the question: Is it Foie Gras or Dog Food? The study gave 18 people 5 different pureed meats, only one of which was dog food. Only three subjects successfully identified the dog food. The report concludes "People cannot distinguish dog food from pâté intended for human consumption". Hell, what subset of the population eats foie gras (or dog food for that matter) often enough to readily remember its taste?!

I take issue with the study on several levels, but one this is clear from all these above examples: taste is an incredibly liquid, subjective sense. Consider how much smell plays an affect on taste, especially in a small kitchen:

My kitchen is tiny. When I cook something, my nose is inundated with everything we boil and broil. (Above, Ari, Mike and Jake are making a Poor Shepard's Pie). By the time we sit down, the receptors in my nose have been saturated by the ubiquitous smell of my food, which ends up tasting bland as a result.

For a long time, I would step outside for thirty seconds before eating to try and clear my nose. These days, I employ a neat trick I learned from a friend. I don't know how it works:

Smell your skin to reset your nose.

Ring Road and Radians

Preface: I'm almost embarrassed to post up a math discussion of such a simple problem, but the answer is nonintuitive enough to be interesting. Please share your thoughts!

Today is something a little different: math. I'm sure some of you have already lost your appetite - but hang on for a second. This is sort of interesting.

TL;DR I math'd a graph for Anteaters who don't know whether to take inner or outer ring mall.

As I'm sure many people do, I always wonder if I'm walking to class via the most direct path. It's a matter of efficiency and elegance. It's also a matter of trying to get to class on time.

So in the midst of mentally minimizing my mileage at UC Irvine, I considered the two main paths that make up the campus.

If the above image is not clear, the campus is pretty much a donut (geographically, demographically). (I live right next to the star-trek library on the bottom left). In fact, it's two concentric circles, one slightly smaller than the other. One can more or less travel between the two circles. The idea can pretty much be distilled as in the following image:

Lets say you're at your computer science class on the south west side of campus, and you want to get some Peets coffee on the north of campus. Both points are on the outer circle, but you have full access to the inner circle. You want to get caffeinated as soon as possible, and you ask yourself: should I cut to the inner path (red), or travel on the circumference (orange)?

We can find the conditions for the paths to be equal by setting the last equation to zero. By inspection, we find that at two radians exactly, the paths are equal.

I arrived at this answer the first time I formulated this problem, but it seemed so strange for two reasons. Firstly, the functional is independent of radius. Secondly, my intuition thought that it was strange to find an integer value of radians.

I asked my friends to find my error, and it wasn't until Mitchell Hsing pointed out that math doesn't lie that I reconsidered the validity of this conclusion. Assume for a second that it's correct:

Absurd!! Regardless of the relative or absolute sizes of the circles, the two paths are always equal at an angular distance of two radians. If you know any reason why this should be intuitive, or why it isn't, add a comment!

Anyways, I since made a handy cheat sheet for UCI to help you decide whether you should take the inner or outer path. It's a little simplified, but I hope you enjoy it! You can download the full version here.

Bread Pudding Recipe (by popular demand)

Sadly, today marks the first time in two years that Lees - a Vietnamese sandwich shop by UCI, raises its prices by 5¢. The food isn't terribly good, but they make fresh baguettes from scratch, all day. For one dollar, they'll hand you a still-crackling crusty baguette that burns your hands. More importantly, for the same price, you can buy TWO baguettes from the day before.

Woah. I know what you're thinking - you're thinking: "I thought this guy pretended to have standards!" It's true, I do. But I promise that when I buy day old bread, it's for one reason only: bread pudding. There is no easier, cheaper way to fit protein and carbs into a dozen students at a potluck. It's pretty much impossible to mess this up.

I learned that a lot of American's think of it as Southern food, but it turns out people have been sneaking day old bread into desserts to serve to unsuspecting guests for centuries - well, really, ever since the invention of sliced bread! Much more historical details here.

This recipe pairs well with "A Sunny Day in Glasgow".

Bread Pudding Template Recipe
(ie. Be sure to deviate from this recipe)

Ingredients
+ baguette, or other bread, that's too stale to eat
+ a few cups milk
+ a few eggs (1 egg per cup of milk)
+ 1 cup sugar for every 4 cups milk)
+ dash of salt
+ deep casserole dish

Preperation
Preheat Oven to 350F/177C/450K

Slice the bread up into a few pieces, with a few inches of thickness each. Use a hacksaw or axe if it's too stale. Keep the bread in the casserole dish while whisking/mixing together eggs, milk, sugar & salt until combined. It should be a pale yellow color.

You'll have to mess with the amount of the mixture, since it'll depend on your bread density and amount. Generally, I make enough mixture to reach a third of the height of the bread. At that point, I squish the bread into the mixture to help it soak up the liquid. If your bread is too stale, leave it for an hour. Add your dried fruit now too (I like raisins best).

Shove it in the oven for 30 minutes, or until browning on top.

Serving
By itself, or Maple syrup or Ice cream. You can't go wrong.

Instant Granola Recipe

Yes, this author is a little obsessed with oatmeal, though certainly the subject is not nearly exhausted. In fact, today, I am happy to share the latest in oatmeal technology, and my first original recipe.

For too long, humans have been plagued with the question: steel cut, or rolled oats? Though I cannot provide a definite answer, this recipe is sure to add a new dimension. Here it is, in a metafictionalized script.

(TL;DR: The recipe is recapitulated afterwards).

All the butter to eat you with (a skit)
Act One of One

Scene 1

(Wolf and Pig and in their apartment kitchen)

Wolf: (exhasperated)

Hurry up, pig! We're going to be late for class!

Pig: Now now, Wolf, I am reading a blog about instant granola.

Wolf: Now? We (look at the time) ... we're already late.

Pig: Right! -- so who cares if we miss the midterm -- we can take physics tests any day.

Wolf: You've got to be kidding me... (drops backpack)

Pig: Breakfast is an important meal! (throws 1/2 tbs butter into a heating pan while reading this blog) I can't do math if I'm hungry... (adds 1 cup of rolled oats, with dash of salt and sugar) Do you want some?

Wolf: Huh? Are you frying the oatmeal? It's not making that frying noise thing.

Pig: Yeah, that frying sound is actually from water evaporating from moist food. If you fry something dry, it doesn't make noise.

Wolf: Cool!

Pig: Yeah I learned that from this blog. Actually the entire recipe is given in play form.

Wolf: You would read that blog.

Pig: Stop complaining, I'm making you food. Put on some music, will you?

Wolf: How's this?

Pig: I like it. Who is it?

Wolf: It's this pretty cool band from Long Beach called Avi Buffalo. I saw them live in San Diego - at Sushi.

Pig: You don't like sushi.

Wolf: No - Sushi - its this venue that looks like a living room. It's pretty awesome.

Pig: (Dancing now, a little like Thome Yorke in his new song)

Wolf: Haha you look like Thome Yorke. I don't know how I feel about their new album.

Pig: Yeah me neither.

Wolf: So... what about that oatmeal?

Pig: oh SHIT I forgot it! (stirs the caramelized oatmeal) oh it got a little brown. Toasty. That's cool. Burnt butter is a carcinogen, no?

Wolf: I've personally looked into it, and I can't find any evidence or papers supporting that.

Pig: Thank goodness. (Pours oatmeal into a bowl) Smell this.

Wolf: That smells heavenly. And buttery.

Pig: (poors a little milk into the bowl. Loud hiss escapes the bowl as milk hits the hot oatmeal).

Instant Granola Recipe (serves one)

Ingredients
+ 1 cups rolled oats
+ dash of sugar (.5 tbs)
+ .5 tbs butter
+ dash of salt (less than 1 ts)
+ any kind of pot

Preperation
Preheat pan, add butter immediately (before it gets hot).Add the salt and granola,ix together to coat the granola with the butter. As the pan gets hot, reduce the heat, and stir the granola every minute for 5 minutes. It should start browning slightly.

Add the sugar. The sugar will start caramelizing, so begin mixing immediately. It might get a little sticky and darker. At this point, the mixture is really hot, even if it isn't making any noise. You're done!

Serving
Poor directly into a bowl, and add some milk (or yogurt?). Some milk will steam off instantly, and the steady state temperature will be slightly warm - perfect for these chilly days.

Broccoli Soup Love

My wooden spoon finds the walls of a Le Creuset dutch oven drum, as the Zipf's law white noise from the simmering chicken broth complement the blanched broccoli's intimate crunch in my mouth, and I am engulfed by the thousands of clapping hands emerging from butter-deep onion. This is my kitchen's Avant-garde concert tonight.

A similar open jam occurred last week, though the recipe was ad-lib. Neither the reception, nor the texture, was as smooth.

I am a firm believer in coincidences. As such, when I received a Cook's Illustrated magazine today with a feature on Broccoli Soup, I thanked the many Gods of Probability and immediately dove in and tried to make it again.

Cook's Illustrated, a cooking magazine known more for its television counterpart, "America's Test Kitchen", does an excellent job of finding classic and modern recipes, optimizing the hell out of them, and churning them back out 15 at a time, five times a year. Their methodology is nothing short of scientific (gastronomics?). Melissa was kind enough to gift me a subscription for the holidays.

Melissa is also to blame for my recent broccoli binge, for mentioning off hand that a poster at the Science/AAAS conference last Fall claimed that broccoli helped the brain heal. As this PhD webcomic clearly illustrates, we can safely conclude that eating a little more broccoli directly increases brain size. Despite listening to 4 years of Melissa's advice, only my heart seems to be growing. Happy Valentines Day - I love you Melissa!

What is the garden?

The garden groundbreaking was yesterday, and I'm still overwhelmed by the amount of work that we accomplished. After breakfast and some speeches, about 200 UC Irvine students, staff and community members put together 35 beds, moved 10 tons of gravel and 5 tons of dirt. It was amazing to participate in a project that optimized itself. Each task group, like bed construction or dirt hauling, set the first derivatives of their respective equations to zero, and - on their own, without explicit leadership - became more efficient as the day went on. Yesterday was one of the happiest and most exciting day of my life.

This post isn't about the groundbreaking though.This post I want to dedicate to answering some basic questions about the garden. Questions that I wish we had addressed during the speeches yesterday. If you have other questions, let me know, and I will add them to this post.

What is the goal of the garden?

The primary goal of the garden is to provide UCI students an opportunity to learn about the food system through garden volunteering, workshops, and curriculum integration. Food production is NOT a priority. The garden is an extension of the classroom; it is not a farm.

Who gets to use the garden plots?

UCI already has a few plot-based gardens - they're very popular (Anthill Village Community Garden has a year long waitlist of over 100 people). We're not trying to compete - in fact, no single student will be alloted a single plot. There's no way we can meet the interest through plot rental.

Our garden will operate more like an urban farm - where the garden volunteers and coordinators have a global jurisdiction over all the plots. (See the last question for more information.)

Why a garden?

There are many reasons. Here are a few good ones. (1) We're the last UC without a student-run urban garden. (2) There's a lot of gardening interest at UCI - we have over 1000 hours of pledged gardening from the student body! (3) A garden can provide educational opportunities in three way - through passive exposure to the student body, and active participation in gardening or in workshops.

Why in Arroyo Vista Housing, on an old Volleyball Court?

Finding land for the garden was one of the hardest steps in establishing this project. All the land at UCI has been alloted for something since the early 90s. The Anteater Garden Initiative had virtually no choice in space. After months of negotiations, the former volleyball court turned construction storage was the ONLY choice offered by the administration.

We know that the Arroyo Vista Student Council voted for the garden to cover the south end of the Arroyo Vista field, and NOT the volleyball court. We were really happy to have the support of the AVSC, and we were ready to begin construction on the field. Unfortunately, Student Affairs and the Arroyo Vista Housing Office (Director Harvey) ignored the AVSC's vote, and offered the volley ball court as the only option.

The garden wants to maintain a positive relationship with the AV Residents and the Greek community, despite this conflict of interest.

How will the garden volunteering work?

Sign up at our website! Garden scheduling will be bi-quarterly (twice-a-quarter). After assessing every volunteer's availability, and hosting a couple of orientation events, we will have regular gardening hours a few times a week, coordinated by a garden commission volunteer coordinator. Throughout the quarter, all volunteers and volunteer coordinators will meet on a biweekly or monthly basis to address garden agenda.

Who is allowed to garden?

All UC Irvine Community Members registered as trained volunteers (training will be offered at the beginning of every biquarterly volunteering cycle.

Who decides what food is grown, and where the food goes?

This garden is student run and student funded. It makes the most sense for the garden volunteers to decide what is grown, and how the harvest will be used at the end of the season.

How can I get involved?

Sign your email up at our ASUCI website - www.asuci.uci.edu/garden

You'll shortly be contacted by a volunteer coordinator to evaluate your availability, and let you know when the next volunteer orientation will be. There are also a lot of internship and leadership opportunities through the Garden Commission - the ASUCI entity that is in charge of running the background work, logistics, funding, budgeting, purchasing, coordinating, organizing, etc. If you're interested in getting more involved in the leadership, shoot us an email! garden@asuci.uci.edu

Have another question? Put it in the comments, and I'll add it to this post!

ASUCI Garden

I have a confession. For the last eighteen months, I have been working my butt off with five other undergraduates to establish the first ever, completely student run, education based, on campus food garden at UC Irvine.

Eighteen months ago, I halfheartedly proposed a new campaign to the Real Food Challenge at UCI - a student organization dedicated to increasing the procurement of environmentally friendly, socially responsible and economically viable food on campus through advocacy and education projects. The idea was simple: lets start a student run food garden that operates more like an extended classroom than a farm. The garden space would provide food education through volunteering opportunities, workshops and extension of university curriculum.

Alexandra Nagy - a good friend and fellow co-president of RFC@UCI, had suggested the same idea a few months before. So, we decided one day to walk into the office of the Director of Environmental and Campus Planning at UCI, and asked for a garden. He asked the most obvious question imaginable: how big do you want it to be? uh...well...we were really unprepared, and it was about at this point when I realized that this was going to be a longer project than I anticipated.

A group of five undergraduates began meeting weekly, and in no time, we had the support of hundreds of students, and several key faculty and administrators. In the Fall of last year, the Scholarship Opportunities Office helped me identify appropriate fellowships for which to apply, and then continued to provide essential feedback throughout the application process. In the end, I was selected as an alternate to the Strauss Fellowship Foundation.

Concurrent to the Strauss application process, we also applied for a grant from UCI's very own TGIF - the Green Initiative Fund, from whom we were granted over $30,000! I'm glad that I was able to use some funds from TGIF - which is student funded - to provide students with a new resource.

Finding land for the garden was also a lengthy bureaucratic nightmare worth noting - nearly all of the land at UCI has been planned for development, through the Long Term Development Plan established decades ago. In the beginning of September, we finally were able to settled on a quarter-acre plot of land in Arroyo Vista. This would not have been possible without the support from key administrators, including Vice Chancellor Dan Dooros and Director of the Student Center, and our advisor: Stacey Murren.

This weekend we are celebrating the groundbreaking of the garden. We plan to build nearly 50 raised beds in a day. We'll have free food, free tshirts, and plenty of work to do - all day! There will be painting, eating, planting, building and sweat. We expect upwards of 500 students to attend the event. I hope you can make it - more information is at this link.

I am graduating in the Spring, with a BS in Physics. It is heartwarming to see the campaign that I have worked diligently on for 18 months come to fruition, and I am overjoyed that I can leave behind a legacy at UCI and provide new opportunities to fellow students. Before June, I will help strengthen the foundation of the garden and do my best to guarantee its future success.

I must confess that this project is my love child - a bastard campaign that quickly grew beyond my expectations and took a lot of time from my academics and other interests. I've come to peace with this imbalance. Undertaking this project has only been rewarding an experience, and one from which I've learned more than I would have from any classroom. I encourage anyone with ambitious ideas to pursue them, for the sake of the experience. I am fully convinced that UC Irvine has more opportunities for undergraduates to pursue more cocurricular and extracurricular activities than even the most prestigious universities.

The garden would not have been possible without the encouragement and invaluable help of the following entities and people: The Scholarship Opportunities Office Counselors; ASUCI; TGIF; The Strauss Fellowship; Kevin Schlunegger; Megan Braun, Dan Dooros, Richard Demerjian; Sitara Nayudu; Logan Frick. Thanks to Linda Huang for designing our awesome UCI logo. The garden would have been downright impossible without the Anteater Garden Initiative: Alexandra Nagy, Alexandre Colavin, Lauren Hopfenbeck, Steve Han, David Lee, Sandy Chirico, Alexis Kim and the Real Food Challenge at UCI.

You can find more information about our garden at the ASUCI website. I also invite you to check out our original, 18 page proposal to student affairs.

I'll update this post soon with photos, timelapses, etc. from the groundbreaking ... in 48 hours!