About Me

I’m the kind of grad student who turns down free food, just so I can go home and make my own. What fun is it if you don’t get to inadvertently coat yourself in flour in the process of cooking dinner?

When I’m not cooking, computing, or digging through 1960’s era equipment in an attempt to search for the one tiny half-broken gadget that just might make my experiments work, I’ll be outdoors somewhere, acquiring a few bruises on my bike or clearing a bit of trail. Or — with a bit of luck — starting a garden in the spring, with the help of a sustainable farming class and Eliot Coleman’s excellent book.

In other words, I’m a bit confused … I work in an energy-intensive job, but try to keep my footprint small elsewhere. And at the same time, I’ll buy the strangest looking vegetable in the market, just to go home and experiment, which makes the whole local / sustainable movement a bit difficult to participate in at times. Finally, as a student, I’m on a very tight budget. So this blog is meant to record my attempt at reconciling all these various aspects of life, while giving you a wealth of recipes, ideas, and bizarre 2 am monologues about my current thoughts on the state of the world. (Ok, I’ll keep the last item to a minimum — I promise!)

On another note, I’m off to Northern California, Australia (Canberra, Sydney), Germany (Cologne), and Poland (Warsaw, Ryn) this summer, mostly for work, but partly for fun. I’m a California native, but haven’t through Northern California for over a decade. Everywhere else is fairly new to me. If you have any suggestions (food-related or otherwise) for places to go and things to try, leave me a comment!

Alternatively, if you have a question or two you want to ask me directly, e-mail me.