12/100: Nectarine and blackberry gobbler!
Hello everyone!
Sorry for the delay in blog post, but it's been quite an exciting week: I submitted my paper! This is one of those VERY big milestones in my graduate career because after submission I can schedule my defense date, write my thesis, defend, submit my thesis, and GRADUATE. Literally people, those are my last steps in graduate school! I can barely believe it, and I've been letting the moment soak in slowly. I think once the paper moves into official "under review" I will schedule my defense date and move into full thesis work mode.
Yes, I am absolutely inundating you with all of my future plans, but this is a good sign for me! I think one of the difficulties about graduate school for me has been the lack of fixed time tables to execute a plan. I've been working on this exact and specific paper for 5 years, and I've had all the data for ~3 years- that's a long time to hold on to something! Though we always said we were a year away from publishing the paper, I've been crafting it and shaping it and refining it and perfecting it for the past 3 years. To finally push this baby out into the world is a huge relief and a huge feeling of accomplishment and excitement for what's next. I can't wait to have other professional faculty members reading my paper and giving it their full attention. They will probably tear my paper to shreds, but I am so excited to see where my paper has legs and where it does not. Plus, hopefully they'll be able to beat my committee members to the punch, so I'll get extra preparation for my defense. In total, I'm starting to look to the future and make plans, and that makes for a happy Ellen.
It's been an optimistic week for me, for more reasons than one. I've had amazing talks with friends new and old, I booked a spontaneous vacation to properly celebrate and prepare myself for this new finishing phase of graduate school, and I've been tapping more into what brings me joy (like ping pong and bowling and puppies!). So, long story short: I've been a little slow with baking this week because graduate school (and life) is moving forward!
So, this past Saturday I had the pleasure of baking with my dear childhood friend Lauren. I wasn't entirely sure what to bake and a lot of ideas were swirling around in my head. As I've gone through this baking process I've noticed myself listening to the generation of "ideas" and where they come from. So bear with me for some Ellen-philosophy!
The other day I asked some friends of mine whether they were idea people or execution people. They both trended toward being people with big ideas, where as I was loud and proud about being an executer. I love making a plan and figuring out all of the holes and where things could go wrong and fixing the holes before they start or learning from the holes in retrospect. I think even on this blog I see this pattern: I love to explain about the process and the flaws and the ways it can be improved, but very rarely do I get into the genesis of "why I decided to bake something." So, with idea generation on my mind, I wondered: what inspires an idea?
The largest idea generator I have in my outside-of-work life is this baking blog. Every week I have to come up with two new ideas! For me, I've noticed my ideas generally come from two main factors: people and curiosity. In some ways, people factors could be seen as extrinsic, and curiosity factors could be seen as intrinsic. For people, the ideas come in a multitude of ways:
1) a challenge: if someone can tell me that something is incredibly hard to bake, I absolutely want to try my hand at it (there's some Alex Honnold in me there haha)
2) a memory: what did I really enjoy doing with my family or enjoy eating in my childhood, and how can I optimize or refine that experience
3) a person: who do I want to make smile today, what is their favorite baked good and what recipe would fit that
For curiosity the ideas come in two ways:
1) working with a completely novel ingredient
2) learning a novel skill
Marrying these two factors is generally when I hit my baking "sweet spot" and I am VERY pumped to bake. In sum, I think for me idea generation comes from talking to a ton of people and gathering thoughts or inspiration, and then checking within myself to see what brings me curiosity and a drive to push the envelope forward and research. Knowing where my ideas come from in baking is ideally an extension to understanding my idea generation in work, which is something I want to harness and wield fully in my future jobs. Give it a thought and see where your idea generating place is :)!
Thought experiment over- how did all of that get us to nectarine and blackberry cobbler? Well, I had the extrinsic motivation of Lauren liking something fruity. I kept looking over raspberry cookies or fruity shortbreads, but none of those items were really sticking out to me as a home run. I kept searching through lots of recipes, each one not really calling out to me. In this searching process, I remembered cobbler, a childhood favorite of mine (my mom makes the best!). I was fully sold because I hadn't made a cobbler before, which meant learning a new skill. Clearly I've tapped out on my cookie baking for a bit!
Funny thing to note: cobbler is crazy easy to make. I used this New York Times Recipe for nectarine and blackberry cobbler and, as I have learned to trust this site, it was a great success. If you can find the right fruit at the right ripeness, you're essentially good to go. But, I'll take you through the steps! First, we gathered the ingredients.
The oats, (some) sugar, flour, butter, and salt were all for the crumble topping that I was making for the cobbler. The sugar and corn starch were for the fruit! Lauren cut up the nectarines and mixed the fruit with the sugar (to sweeten the fruit) and corn starch (to thicken up any of the fruit juices so it wouldn't be a puddle when baking).
I took care of the dry ingredients. I'd say the biggest pain about the dry ingredients was not having a food processor. I'm really on the verge of buying one, but nevertheless I incorporated this butter by hand (well, two hands and two knives). I diced the butter into tiny squares, but as butter does they look like they're all clumped together. Then, I took the knives and crossed them together (actually together, so they have to make that metal clinking sound!) until all of the butter was peppercorn-sized. That was about 15 minutes of cutting and all the patience I had.
Lauren and I were nervous about the size of the vessel we were putting our cobbler into. It was a 13" by 7" dish and the nectarines were quite spread out. I think we were both envisioning a little more fruit depth. There were even places where the topping was touching the bottom of the pan! However, we had committed to our vessel so we trucked forward.
We popped the cobbler in for 45 minutes. You know the cobbler is ready for the topping is brown and fruit is bubbling!
And let me tell you- it was AMAZING. It may have looked weird at first. Maybe you think it looks weird present, but it tasted fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I renamed it Gobbler: cobbler so good I gobbled it right up! I'm a sucker for crumble topping and this crumble was delicious and sweet and buttery. The fruit was perfectly sweetened- definitely not a sugar bomb. The blackberries were a little sour, adding a nice foil to the tangy yellow nectarines and sweet crumble. This disappeared at my house the night of. When the summer comes and it's fruit season, it's safe to say there will be a lot of cobbler in our future!
Thanks for reading! I've got a baking adventure planned this weekend, and it will be a very special one, so stay tuned!
Sorry for the delay in blog post, but it's been quite an exciting week: I submitted my paper! This is one of those VERY big milestones in my graduate career because after submission I can schedule my defense date, write my thesis, defend, submit my thesis, and GRADUATE. Literally people, those are my last steps in graduate school! I can barely believe it, and I've been letting the moment soak in slowly. I think once the paper moves into official "under review" I will schedule my defense date and move into full thesis work mode.
Yes, I am absolutely inundating you with all of my future plans, but this is a good sign for me! I think one of the difficulties about graduate school for me has been the lack of fixed time tables to execute a plan. I've been working on this exact and specific paper for 5 years, and I've had all the data for ~3 years- that's a long time to hold on to something! Though we always said we were a year away from publishing the paper, I've been crafting it and shaping it and refining it and perfecting it for the past 3 years. To finally push this baby out into the world is a huge relief and a huge feeling of accomplishment and excitement for what's next. I can't wait to have other professional faculty members reading my paper and giving it their full attention. They will probably tear my paper to shreds, but I am so excited to see where my paper has legs and where it does not. Plus, hopefully they'll be able to beat my committee members to the punch, so I'll get extra preparation for my defense. In total, I'm starting to look to the future and make plans, and that makes for a happy Ellen.
It's been an optimistic week for me, for more reasons than one. I've had amazing talks with friends new and old, I booked a spontaneous vacation to properly celebrate and prepare myself for this new finishing phase of graduate school, and I've been tapping more into what brings me joy (like ping pong and bowling and puppies!). So, long story short: I've been a little slow with baking this week because graduate school (and life) is moving forward!
So, this past Saturday I had the pleasure of baking with my dear childhood friend Lauren. I wasn't entirely sure what to bake and a lot of ideas were swirling around in my head. As I've gone through this baking process I've noticed myself listening to the generation of "ideas" and where they come from. So bear with me for some Ellen-philosophy!
The other day I asked some friends of mine whether they were idea people or execution people. They both trended toward being people with big ideas, where as I was loud and proud about being an executer. I love making a plan and figuring out all of the holes and where things could go wrong and fixing the holes before they start or learning from the holes in retrospect. I think even on this blog I see this pattern: I love to explain about the process and the flaws and the ways it can be improved, but very rarely do I get into the genesis of "why I decided to bake something." So, with idea generation on my mind, I wondered: what inspires an idea?
The largest idea generator I have in my outside-of-work life is this baking blog. Every week I have to come up with two new ideas! For me, I've noticed my ideas generally come from two main factors: people and curiosity. In some ways, people factors could be seen as extrinsic, and curiosity factors could be seen as intrinsic. For people, the ideas come in a multitude of ways:
1) a challenge: if someone can tell me that something is incredibly hard to bake, I absolutely want to try my hand at it (there's some Alex Honnold in me there haha)
2) a memory: what did I really enjoy doing with my family or enjoy eating in my childhood, and how can I optimize or refine that experience
3) a person: who do I want to make smile today, what is their favorite baked good and what recipe would fit that
For curiosity the ideas come in two ways:
1) working with a completely novel ingredient
2) learning a novel skill
Marrying these two factors is generally when I hit my baking "sweet spot" and I am VERY pumped to bake. In sum, I think for me idea generation comes from talking to a ton of people and gathering thoughts or inspiration, and then checking within myself to see what brings me curiosity and a drive to push the envelope forward and research. Knowing where my ideas come from in baking is ideally an extension to understanding my idea generation in work, which is something I want to harness and wield fully in my future jobs. Give it a thought and see where your idea generating place is :)!
Thought experiment over- how did all of that get us to nectarine and blackberry cobbler? Well, I had the extrinsic motivation of Lauren liking something fruity. I kept looking over raspberry cookies or fruity shortbreads, but none of those items were really sticking out to me as a home run. I kept searching through lots of recipes, each one not really calling out to me. In this searching process, I remembered cobbler, a childhood favorite of mine (my mom makes the best!). I was fully sold because I hadn't made a cobbler before, which meant learning a new skill. Clearly I've tapped out on my cookie baking for a bit!
Funny thing to note: cobbler is crazy easy to make. I used this New York Times Recipe for nectarine and blackberry cobbler and, as I have learned to trust this site, it was a great success. If you can find the right fruit at the right ripeness, you're essentially good to go. But, I'll take you through the steps! First, we gathered the ingredients.
The oats, (some) sugar, flour, butter, and salt were all for the crumble topping that I was making for the cobbler. The sugar and corn starch were for the fruit! Lauren cut up the nectarines and mixed the fruit with the sugar (to sweeten the fruit) and corn starch (to thicken up any of the fruit juices so it wouldn't be a puddle when baking).
 |
| My sous-baker. Not camera shy, just a goof! :) |
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| The fruit, sugared and mixed to perfection |
Lauren and I were nervous about the size of the vessel we were putting our cobbler into. It was a 13" by 7" dish and the nectarines were quite spread out. I think we were both envisioning a little more fruit depth. There were even places where the topping was touching the bottom of the pan! However, we had committed to our vessel so we trucked forward.
 |
| Nervous pouring. Does this look right?? |
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| You be the judge! |
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| Yummmm |
Thanks for reading! I've got a baking adventure planned this weekend, and it will be a very special one, so stay tuned!
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