The Benefits of a Functional Kitchen and a Hungry Boyfriend

Back in November, my lovely partner Alex moved to be with me here in Virginia as I work on my PhD. We managed to find a cute, spacious place at a price significantly cheaper than what a small apartment in Blacksburg (where the university is located) would cost. With more room and now more affordable, shared expenses, I’ve been making a real effort to cook and try new recipes. This has been great for a few reasons: 1) the place I was living before didn’t have a kitchen, so I primarily ate ramen, hummus and pita, or grocery store sushi most nights and I actually found myself in the ER with nutrient deficiencies once (whoops!), 2) grad school can take a toll on my mental health and creativity, so having a new thing to work on really helps the ole brain, and 3) I now have a hungry man living with me who not only appreciates the effort, but helps finish the food so I’m not eating leftovers seven days in a row!

Since all this cooking means finding our yes/no/maybe’s of recipes, I figured it would be fun to share the best. I thought about making separate posts for each recipe we liked, but since what I’ve made lately is all just a click away, I decided on just rating them and adding the link in case someone else wants to give them a try. If I have family recipes or something I came up with myself, I may just make a blog post for it, like I did a while back for my kolaczki cookies.

To make it easy for myself to update, I added a new page to my site, linked [HERE]. You can also use the tab that says “food -> recipes” at the top. If you’re into trying new recipes, hopefully you’ll find it fun to keep up with the wins of my recent home cooking (and maybe give them a go yourself!).

Happy reading,
-Beppa

Why complain science is slow when you can just hit it with a sledgehammer to painfully die?

The media paints an unrealistic expectation of science, from mainstream news to niche research articles. We see results coming from labs worldwide described in such a timeless way, as though the idea was quickly generated, the experiments run, and papers soon after published. Even for those involved in the field, who know how tricky or time consuming some protocols can be, can feel this way. A paper can say that a transformation was done to generate a mutant, but how many days, weeks, months, or years did it take? All that work in designing and making the DNA insert, prepping the media, doing the transformation, testing colonies, finding out none are valid and doing it all again? Or waiting for a necessary supply to come in that is on backorder? Maybe testing a different transformation method, or seeing if an ortholog in another species is temperature sensitive and redoing everything all over again at a few degrees lower? Rarely, unless of course for a good story, are these things told. It is just the end result, the summation of this work and time that we see, which, although this is mostly all we need to be informed, can feel daunting when you have to do these things yourself. I jokingly propose there be a “total time spent” listed on each paper.



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