Snow and Delectable Creations

Snow and Delectable Creations


Hi again! Hope you’re ahving a great holiday season no matter where you are in the world! I happen to be at home in the great north: Canada! Life here is just a tad bit different from life on the sunny west coast of California. For one, there’s snow, and lots of it too. The temperature here gets pretty cold so I’ve been holed up inside most days, usually wrapped up in a blanket with a good book. Today the weather is slightly better at -12C (or about 10F) so I decided to go out for a walk in the woods. There’s something quite fresh about seeing your own breath and feeling the chill in the extremities of your fingers and toes. While heading back home I even saw some people out for a run, braving the cold. That’s a little taste of Canada for you!

Other than lounging around, I’ve been trying to improve my cooking skills. At Caltech we get food on the weekdays provided by Caltech Dining Services but on the weekends we are left to fend for ourselves. Over the course of first term I have experimented with many different ways of coping with the weekends. I survived some days solely on goldfish (those crunchy, cheesy, delish smiling fish-shaped crackers). Other weekends I feasted on chicken salad sandwiches from the C-store. Only later in the term, did I finally decide to check out the quaint little restaurants on Lake Street (about a 5 minute walk). There were also the occasional days when I was feeling especially productive and walked to the grocery store and came back to cook dinner. Cooking was really fun because it would usually end in a group of four or five frosh trying to figure out how to open a can without a can opener. We would always make a mess but in the end, we did manage to feed ourselves and that’s all that matters!

This was a particularly successful attempt at making pasta. Yum! I’d like to think that my cooking skills have improved slightly over the break. I have been cooking a bit and baking a bit. I added a few of my creations below: dark chocolate pomegranate bark and lobster tail!

Hopefully I’ll find the time to put my cooking to the test next term and perhaps there will be less midnight expeditions to the C-store for goldfish! That will be my goal for next year/term.

Bye for now and have a great new year!