Physoc Meeting in Leeds, UK

Last week I attended The Physiological Society Cardiovascular Themed Meeting with Prof Johns, Maria, Chunlong and Ahmed. To be honest, I think this is one of the best meetings I've ever been to! The symposiums were really interesting, with a very impressive list of speakers. They also served unlimited wine and beer at the poster session! I'm telling ya, the British really know how to host an event! Why don't they do these things at US conferences?

Here is Maria at her poster, either estatic that she met one of the speakers, or delighted that there was an open bar. Chances are probably both. She had three glasses of wine that night, which made for an interesting experience when she had to explain her data. I found it to be quite entertaining!



Here I am with Prof at my poster. I only had half a glass of wine. If I had three, I probably wouldn't be able to recognize my poster.



Lab group photo (Ahmad, Hassan, me, Maria, and Prof)

A Physiologist's Guide to Wine

This book by Peter Wagner has to be the best wine guide out there! It is absolutely hysterical! Physiologist or not, this book will definetly make you laugh (although there are few extra physiology jokes in there as well). You have to make a donation to The American Physiological Society (www.the-aps.org/donate.htm) to get this book, but I'd say it's well worth it.

Some of my favorite lines:

On assessing taste - 'After all, the stuff has a low pH, and in the back of the pharynx near the glottis, acid tends to cause unpleasant reflex activity. But intake to little, the wine gets lost in drool. You will need to self-calibrate the sample size, and only exeperience will tell you what's right for you'

On describing the color of white wines - 'For whites, colors range from that of clear water cascading down Mt. Rainier to that of urine after a day spend in the desert running in slower and slower circles...' (The environmental and renal physiologists will appreciate that one!)

On evaluating the aroma of a wine - 'Remember, this is not hard science, and you will not have to produce a t-test to support your conclusions. You will be judged by the firmness of your tone and by the arcaneness of your words, not by the accuracy of your observations - just like the symposium speakers at EB'

He even includes a scatterplot of perceived quality of wine vs. cost per bottle (including r-squared values, which ended up to be around 0.1). Seriously, this book is brilliant!

Experimental Cooking - Roasted Parsnip and Parmesean Soup

As many of you know, Sean and I love to cook. We each have our specialties - Sean prefers pastas and BBQing, while I enjoy Asian recipes, party foods, and soups. Baking is my weakness, but I'm working on it! As for who's the better chef...well I guess that's up for debate depending on who you talk to. Sean thinks he's better than me, but I beg to differ. Overall, we tend to get pretty good reviews.

Personally, I like to use cooking as a way to de-stress and detach from work related things. I usually dedicate one day on the weekend to 'experimental cooking', by which I try new recipes and cooking styles. My inspiration comes from allrecipes.com (which has pretty much every recipe you could ever want..it is awesome!) and a UK magazine called Delicious. For those in Ireland, you can find this in any shop. For those in the US, you can check out the recipes on www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk.

From a recent cooking experiment, I decided to make a Roasted Parsnip and Parmesean Soup. Its somewhat labour intensive, but turned out to be delicious! I topped it with green onions, croutons (the caesar salad type) and some toasted almonds (which was Sean's addition). We decided the almonds were nice, but masked the flavour of the parsnips, so better to go without.



Here's the recipe if anyone wants to try it:

Ingredients:
2 large parsnips
50g Parmesean cheese, grated
1 potato
50g butter
200g shallots / green onions
2 tbsp plain flour
1.5 litres hot chicken stock (or veggie stock for vegetarians)
4 tbsp cream
1 tbsp green onions
Croutons

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Cut parsnips into chunks and boil in salted water for 3 min. Drain and place on baking sheet.

2. Toss parsnips with olive oil and sprinkle with a small amount of parmesean cheese. Roast for 30min until golden brown.

3. Peel and cube the pototo. Boil potatoes in salted water and boil for at least 10min until soft.

4. Melt butter in saucepan and saute the shallots for about 10 min until soft. Stir in flour, then stock, and finally the parsnips and potatoes. Bring to boil and simmer for at least 10 min.

5. Using a hand held blender or food processor to blend the soup until smooth.

6. Shortly before serving, return blended soup back to the stove and gently simmer for 5 min. Stir in cream, parmesean cheese, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

7. Top with fresh green onions and croutons to serve.

Happy 1st Birthday Noah (and Happy Easter too!)

Our friends Tony and Meenakshi invited us to their house today to celebrate their son, Noah's, very first birthday! It was a rather large gathering of friends and family and we had a great time!


Here is his birthday cake...



In addition to great party, there was also a wonderful spread of food (including homemade samosas by Min's sister, Geeta). YUM!!




For Noah's birthday, we decided to get him a Brio train set. He's still a bit young for it, but we know he'll grow into it. Sean said his parents brought back these sets from Sweden and he loved them. In fact, Sean wanted to play with the set we bought yesterday, but I told him that he could only play with it if Noah said it was OK. After much pouting, he agreed. They hope to have a play date soon. This is the one we bought...