fish food

it's what.. 7th or 8th week already?! you know you're a quarter system college student when you have no idea what the date is, but measure the time in weeks numbered 1-10. busy and unmotivated i've been.. so that means more ghetto foods that perhaps aren't so good. various combinations of pasta, cabbage, radishes, eggs were the norm last week.

and tilapia. one of my favorite fishes.. it's got a mild taste, freshwater, farm raised so don't have to feel guilty about overfishing.. and basically tastes great any way you make it. my favorite incarnation is "qing jing lap yu"/"plain steamed tilapia" you can find in canto chinese restaurants that serve "hak fan" and the like (hey! nj star isn't free anymore!). anyway, didn't feel like going all the way to 99 to buy a fish that i would have to clean etc, so i settled for a fillet i found at Henry's. usually i'd be of the mind that fillets aren't fresh enough, especially at an american market.. but.. i really wanted fish that day. so i took it home and pan grilled it 'cause i was afraid it wouldn't be fresh enough to steam. slightly fried up some green onions in hot oil and poured that over the top with some soy sauce. so cooking fish.. i have no idea how to judge when it's done other than poking at it--unless i'm steaming. kind of lame, but it's done when you can smell the cooked fish scent then add 3 mins.

lunch is almost too pathetic and gross to mention. imagine a canned corned beef sandwich with raw broccoli and celery. exactly.

the science and engineering library at ucsd also has a food science display on now.

curiously enough, the school also houses part of the American Institute of Wine and Food collection from:

Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera... dell’ arte del cucinare (1610), with its beautiful woodcuts of the Renaissance kitchen and culinary implements; Amelia Simmons’ American CookeryA House Servant’s DirectoryHow We Cook in Los Angeles (1894), with more than 600 recipes from more than 200 named Angelenos; and Acerca del chocolate (1730), a manuscript from Mexico that is an attempt to rebut the Church’s strictures against the consumption of chocolate. More contemporary works that help document the culinary history of today may also found in the collection, e.g., Piret’s: the George and Piret Munger Cookbook (1985), six cookbooks from Alice Waters’ famed Chez Panisse restaurant, and Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook.

the only thing missing is a culinary school program here like at cal poly pomona