Kitchen Tour

New house, new kitchen, means I have been cooking like a fiend. Here's the stove area (note the Alton Brown cookbooks and Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking"). This is more space than we had in the last apartment already.

And this pretty much doubles it (there's another cabinet to the right and a pantry and fridge to the left). I know its kind of a disaster in this picture, but I was in the middle of making a savory cheesecake and lasagna.

Did I mention this is a zucchini cheesecake? We've been getting random batches of zucchini, squash and cucumbers for the last few weeks. What the hell was I supposed to do with it? We made bread, chocolate cake, this, pickles, stir fry...the list goes on.

The final product on the cheesecake. This will be lunches for the week. Ended up tasting a little more like a quiche than a cheesecake.

Then there's this beast, the boiling water canner I bought from Wal-Mart for 10 bucks. And no, there was no where else I could have purchased it from (I've only got one store in town, and they don't sell this stuff at Target, etc. which is an hour away anyway). I've been slaving over this thing off and on for the last two weeks.

But check it out! Pickles! A version of Alton Brown's "Kinda Sorta Sours". This involve more vinegar, and thicker slices, but damn, they taste good already (they'll taste bettern in 4-6 weeks). I can't even explain how weird it is that I made something that will still be edible in 12 months. I also made piccilli (my recipe is different than what's on Wikipedia), which is a sorta cucumber, etc. relish. Then I went crazy.

Ah, fresh cherries. Why did I buy fresh cherries? A) I hope my wife will make a cherry cobbler (even though she's not a cherry person), B) I wanted to try "Brandied Cherries". Of course, since we're talking about me here, this turned into:

Vodka'ed cherries. They aren't even supposed to be good until 8 weeks.
They are really easy to make though. That was last night. Today/tonight, I went really crazy:

Yeah, I bought a case of peaches. As in, 25 pounds. That's around 1/3rd of the total there. Again, I'm hoping for cobblers from my wife, but in the meantime, I turned off the AC and started heating up the kitchen to can some peaches.

That's a canner, a pot with boiling sugar syrup and peaches, some heated mason jars, and a big vat (~1 gallon) of peaches soaking in "anti-browning" solution. The temperature in this room was easily 15 degrees higher than the rest of the house.

And after 3 hours, 15 pounds (or so) of peaches have been canned and are ready for deliciousness in the middle of december.

Of course, I had to 'brandy" some as well. Needless to say, I'm both thrilled and exhausted.

In Milwaukee, at SETAC

Someone has tickets to the Milwaukee Bucks game!

K always drives. He also parallel parks...really close to the curb.

The main ceremony was supposed to take place at 6 30....Central Time.
Oops.

Here I am, in Milwaukee. Looking up, at a mirror.
This was even a little weird in real life.

I'm in Milwaukee. Attending SETAC.

The Colts are on....

I drank a beer and three glasses of wine.

I ate some food.

I registered and got a neat bag of stuff.

I don't believe in organizations and their ability to cause change....but hey, this is kinda fun.

K and D are here. I'm way more drunk than them.

Boston Sucks.

Some title

- I just ate dinner. Apparently the largest chicken in the western world died so that I could eat tonight. Seriously, I just ate a chicken breast that was easily 15 lbs. I am full!

- I went with beer and coke.

- Allow me to rant a little about Oklahoma. I like OK a lot, the air is so much cleaner than anything in Indiana, the temperatures are warm. We’ve got hawks, owls, bats, and bald eagles gracing our skies. I’ve got the best fishing spot in 300 miles on my doorstep.

But seriously, can we get people to pick up their damned trash?

On every road in the area (on the OK side) the ditches are littered with garbage. Everywhere! There are cans, bottles, scraps of paper, trash sacks, magazines, paper plates, and every other kind of random trash you might imagine some idiot throwing out the window. I can’t even believe it! The scale of the problem is enormous, and I’m sure that’s why nobody has done anything about it. You could get those convict crews out in the ditches for 15 hours a day and you might never finish a twenty mile stretch. I can’t even imagine where to begin.

And then there’s the scene down by the bridge we sampled at today:

Fantastic, I’m sure that’s where we should be dumping our old furniture.

- I met a guy today named Buck Ray. Yeah, I live in Oklahoma. I couldn’t make that up if I tried. In fact, we spent a good 15 minutes trying to come up with a better ‘western’ name and couldn’t. Tex Oklahoma? Jim Bob Joe? I got nothing. (That isn’t to diminish the guy. He seems articulate and educated, he’s got a MS. I just think that’s a crazy name.)

- Yeah, this is the beast I drove around today. I miss Daisy (the van I drove through Chicago and the north woods 20-odd times a summer for two years).

- While we were out sampling for benthic invertebrates we came across these ‘nests’ of caterpillars in the trees along the side of the road. Anyone know what these are called? Kind of freaky looking.

- Guess who’s happy that Texas is out of the tournament? This guy! Maybe when KU plays next week I’ll actually be able to watch a game!

- So, Kobe Bryant scored 115 points over the weekend. Meh.

A day in the life

(Notes: Don't forget to read Part 1 of my 3 part series on scientific misconduct.)

(Also, all the pictures below can be viewed much larger if you click on them.)

Many people have asked me, in the last few weeks, what I do down here on the Oklahoma-Texas border. Well, I’m going to tell you. Using pictures (so maybe people can read past the first paragraph!!).

I’m working on algae that cause fish kills. On Thursday, just down the road from us, some people started reporting dead fish on the lake behind their houses. So JE (the other postdoc), AE (his wife and the lab tech), and DH (the professor on this project) went down to investigate. Here are some pictures:

Notice that the water has a very murky appearance. This is probably due to the presence of a mixotrophic algal called Golden Algae. Mixotrophic just means that the algae acts like a plant and like a predator, using sunlight to produce energy, and eating bacteria and protists to get nutrients.

Usually, Golden Algae kill fish by causing hemorrhaging (bleeding) around the gills. This gizzard shad doesn’t seem to show any hemorrhaging, the gills look pretty normal. The fish had probably been dead for awhile, so this might not mean anything. The hemorrhaging isn’t as obvious if the fish has been dead awhile.

We checked several fish for bleeding around the gills, but none seemed to have it.

This white bass might have had some hemorrhaging, but it isn’t dead yet either.

You can see from this picture that the fish kill didn’t seem to be very species specific. We saw largemouth bass (shown here), green sunfish, bluegill, threadfin shad, gizzard shad, drum, bighead carp, and white bass. These are fish that feed on lots of different food sources and in different places in the lake.

This is a little hard to see, but this is a pool along the shore that had little fish (I can’t remember what they are called). As we stood here watching the fish in this little pool we realized they were dying as we watched. We decided to take some of the water from the lake back with us to see if it was still toxic. The number of Golden Algae in the water was really pretty low, so we wondered if the fish kill was being caused by low oxygen levels the previous night.

The next day we came back to measure oxygen again and to see if there were more dead fish. This is JE with an oxygen probe.

When fish kills happen, pelicans show up. There were some pelicans out this morning.

There were also lots of turkey vultures. These guys appeared to be eating stuff along the shore.

The day before we had brought water back into the lab. We then added fathead minnows to that water to see if it was still toxic. The bottom right tub is just plain water. The bottom left tub is ½ lake water and ½ regular water. And the top middle tub is all 100% lake water. As you can see, the lake water killed all the fish. That water definitely appeared to be toxic.

My wife and I decided to visit the part of the lake that has been having major fish kills three of the past four years. This is what we saw there:

This is a stretch of beach in Lebanon Pool. You can see here several dead gar and carp.

This gar was probably 5 feet long. The fish must have been amazingly beautiful when it was alive. Last year every single fish in Lebanon Pool was killed by the Golden Algae. Nobody could find a single fish in the entire pool in March of 2006. These are all fish that repopulated the area after last year’s wipeout.

We got pretty depressed looking at all the dead fish.

You can see that the pelicans were out in force. The Golden Algae toxins are broken down quickly by acid, so saliva or stomach acids in mammals, birds and most reptiles make them able to consume the dead and dying fish.

Pelicans are surprisingly beautiful birds.

This made us immensely sad. How did this turtle die, I wondered. The toxin needs a way to get into the body, and most turtles have an impermeable skin (soft-shelled turtles are an exception). Then we found this, still living turtle (this is a little disturbing):

This is difficult to see, but it is clear what’s happening. The Golden Algae toxin has gotten in through the turtle’s eyes. This turtle was alive, barely, but did not respond when we picked him up. He didn’t respond to sounds or visual cues. The poor animal was clearly on the verge of death. We didn’t think there was anything we could do to help him. JE later suggested that we might have been able to douse him in clean, pure, freshwater. I’m not sure that would have done any good.

This is what worries a lot of people. This is a striper, a cross between a white bass and a striped bass. The economic basis of recreational fishing in Lake Texoma is stripers. We didn’t see many of them dead along the shore, but they are definitely at risk when the Golden Algae is blooming.

We’re trying to learn more about how the Golden Algae kills fish, so we’re doing simple (and complex) experiments in the lab. Here we’re raising Golden Algae in flow-through containers known as chemostats:

We can then use that Golden Algae to conduct toxicity tests on fathead minnows.

On the right hand side of this picture you can just barely see a small fathead minnow baby.

We set up a lot of these babies in all different concentrations of Golden Algae.

Then we count to see how many Golden Algae cells it took to kill the fish.

There are lots of complications that I’m glossing over, but this is basically what’s driving my research. I hope you enjoyed my photoessay!

So the weekend...

Straight up brilliant people.
1st annual convention.
2007, Ha Ha Tonka, MO.

Ahh, brief recaps:

Thursday Night:
For some reason the weekend revolved around playing games designed to let everyone know that the other people in the room think they are:
-a scary driver
-not from earth
-bad smelling
-‘modest’

There was drinking as well.

Friday Night:

Well we went to the world famous Bridal Cave. The east wall of the cave (east? West? Who cares..) had a ‘drapery’ with over half a billion square inches of surface area. Oh, and we had the world’s most boring and unresponsive tour guide. Imagine someone constantly rambling on about the ‘mysteries’ of the cave, the ‘symbolism’ and doing it all with a dreary, uninformed monotone. Yeah, good times.

Way at the back of the cave was a naturally occurring pool. The cave had been isolated until the 1980s, except for a little passageway that you could barely fit a person through. Yet at the bottom of the pool was a bunch of lumber and a wooden ladder. The pool was called the mystery pool, and the mystery is: How the hell did that ladder get there?

My explanation: The some employee building the cave’s lighting or something dropped a ladder in there and then came up with the bull-shit explanation that ‘it was there when I got there!’ Right guy.

After we got out of the cave we went to the top of the nearby hill and climbed up to the top of a forest-fire watchtower. Amazing view. Very beautiful despite the rain.

Then we grabbed some groceries, ate a fantastic dinner of baked rigatoni, guacamole, Caesar salad, other stuff, and drank. We drank a lot. I went to bed at 11 because if I had stayed up any longer I would have kept drinking.

I lost at Scrabble but by the time the game was over I couldn’t remember how to play. I drank a lot.

Saturday:

Finally, sun! An unbelievable breakfast casserole, then off to the Ha Ha Tonka state park. We saw a snake, we saw skinks, we saw 1 crayfish fighting another crayfish. The trip reached its high point as we sat skipping stones along the shores of the Lake of the Ozarks. Ahh...happiness.

Then that night we cooked burgers (mine was bison) and played what can only be described as an incredibly tense series of games.

First off we played 4 rounds of Catchphrase. The teams were girls versus boys. Let me begin by pointing out that the guys went 4-0. Let me continue by pointing out that everyone became increasingly competitive as the guys were racking up the wins, to the point that in game #4 we had one cheating ‘incident’, multiple ‘discussions’ about the rules, and after the game the women didn’t want the guys to have any of the strawberry shortcake. I’ll also point out that the guys would have been even better if I hadn’t cost them 5 FREAKING points by being an idiot (said the word 3 times, couldn’t figure out what I was reading once, couldn’t figure out how to convey the concept once).
I can’t remember all of escalating comments that ensued, but I remember laughing so hard I started to cry. There were comments about the guys being lucky, about the guys not likely to get lucky in the future, about whether or not the guys were going to get to walk home. Seriously, it was a good time.

Then we played Pictionary. Of course it was guys versus girls. The girls started off with a tremendous run, crossing half the board with 4 straight successful attempts and 3 straight 6’s. Whoa. The guys started mentioning that ‘lucky’ comment from earlier. Then the guys came roaring back. The guys ran to all the way to the finish spot while the girls were still 15 or so places back. Of course, the girls then responded by taking control and answering a ton of correct answers and both teams were on the finish spot.

At which point the guys won.

From the girls, dead silence.

From the guys: “Hey man! High five!”

Oh man!

Then I won at Scrabble (2^nd time in my life).

There was some other fun stuff that happened as well:

-We stopped by Bass Pro Shop on our way. Got some shirts. On the way back we stopped and ate at Hemmingways, which was largely forgettable except for a tomato bisque that I could have eaten all day. Sooo good.

- On the way up we also stopped at the Springfield Brewery. That place was fantastic. I had their Santa Fe pasta. So delicious. A Tex-mex-italian thing. Man it was good.

- There was a place by the side of the road selling bison, so we picked up a bunch of bison as well. Including bison brats. Now I need to get myself some good beer to simmer them.

- We also stopped at a Wendy’s for dinner. I kinda like Wendy’s. How lame is that?

Pictures

So, tonight I tried to take some pictures of stuff. I don't really know why, except that I'm kinda bored. Here's some pics of our crayfish: Steve "Dusty" Irwin:


"Hi, I'm Steve Irwin. Everybody calls me Dusty. I'm a girl, so the name is a bit weird.
I hate the world, and my place in it. I have a new tank that is 5 times bigger than the old one. I don't like it. This is my mountain. I used to like it, but now I really don't."


"Look at my massive claw. I made him take a picture of my claw close up. I can't believe he couldn't get the damned camera in focus. Why does he suck so much?"


"This is me angry. If I could make noises, I'd make some kind of RAR sound right now. But I can't. So I won't."

The crayfish has spent the 4 days since I put him in his new cage just walking around, trying to flip himself out of the water, and generally letting us know that he hates us tremendously.

I also tried to get creative and take a picture of the growler I got from the Bricktown Brewery in Oklahoma City. Turns out it was really hard to get the effect I was going for (white lettering on a black background. This is the closest I could get to a nice picture.



Ok, well, picture fun-time is over.