Black and Gold Victory Brownies

So, you may have noticed that the New Orleans Saints are going to be in the Superbowl for the very first time in their 43 year history. To say that New Orleanians are excited about this is an enormous understatement. It has been said that New Orleans has two religions, Catholicism and Football, and I think they may be overstating the catholic part. People here took to the streets, cried, hugged strangers, and shot fireworks when the Saints won the national football league conference championship game.

For most of this fall complete strangers would decide to have football related conversations with me in unlikely locations. For example, once I was greeted with an enthusiastic "Who Dat!" at the gas pump. Another time a man and I had an in depth discussion of passing tactics in the deli line at Wall-mart. I am not exactly sure why, but for some reason it was clear to the true locals that I was following the football season closely. Colin were I listening to every game on WWL "the Saints radio network", hosted by Bobby Hebert (pronounced Ea-Bear) the "Cajun Cannon" and Hokie Gajan, both former Saints players. We really enjoyed listening to the games, but we missed being able to see the plays being discussed due to our lack of a functioning tv. For the NFC championship game we went to a friend's house and were able to actually see the game. I made brownies to celebrate this, and thus the Black and Gold Victory Brownie was born. Basically these are Nigella Lawson's super delicious brownies with peanut butter and Reece's peanut butter cups added. I have included the recipe below, but I warn you that they are not for the faint of heart.

Side view of Victory Brownies, showing their height and composition.

Top view, showing decoration using peanut butter cups

Black and Gold Victory Brownies

• 13 ounces best quality bittersweet chocolate
• 1 2/3 cups softened butter
• 6 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 2/3 cups granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 medium sized bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups
• 2 cups natural ground peanut butter

1. Preheat oven to 350° and grease a 9 x 13" pan.

2. In a double-boiler, or a small pan melt the butter and chocolate.

3. Whisk until well blended and let cool.

4. While chocolate is melting, whisk together the eggs, sugar and vanilla until frothy and slightly lighter in color.

5. Gently fold the cooled chocolate mixture into the eggs, and whisk until well blended.

6. Fold in the flour and salt and mix well.

7. Add 1 cup of the peanut butter to the batter and mix well.

8. Cut up about half of the Reece’s peanut butter cups into fourths.

9. Gently stir in the quartered Reece’s peanut butter cups.

10. Pour into the baking dish and cook until a crust forms on top.

11. When cool, frost with remaining peanut butter and dot with remaining peanut butter cups.

Classes Spring Semester 2010

In case anyone wants to see what I am taking this semester, here is my schedule:

Mondays:
12:00- 1:00 Departmental seminar.
A class I have to attend and get no credit for, woo-hoo! Various faculty members and guests give power-point presentations on their recent research.

1:00-2:00 TA hours.
I am TA'ing Epidemiology II this semester. Epidemiology II is significantly harder than Epi I is, and I fully expect lots of panicked visits from students.

Tuesdays:
10:30 -11:45 Regression.
A bio-statistics class in regression techniques. Supposedly much easier than last semesters Categorical Data Analysis, but we shall see.

Wednesdays:
9:00 -11:45 Reproductive Epidemiology.
I am really looking forward to this class, since I know very little about how to measure birth outcomes, which is probably what I am going to be looking at in my thesis research.

1:00-2:15 Epidemiology II (the class I am TA'ing for)

Thursday:
10:30 -11:45 Regression.

Friday:
1:00-2:15 Epidemiology II (the class I am TA'ing for)

Nature blogging, Racoon edition!

Why, hello there.

Last weekend, we were at home being domestic and doing some chores. Colin was in the attic investigating a possible roof leak, and I was sitting in the bedroom working on some Biostatistics homework. After about ten minutes in the attic I hear Colin call for me, saying that I have to come see something. I obliging trot over to the attic stairwell, mumbling the equivelent of 'this better be good darn it, I was in the middle of something...' to find Colin staring out the window. I go stand next to him and look outside at the veiw of Ent, the enormous tree that lives in our backyard. At first, I see nothing unusual, and then suddenly I spot the raccoon lumbering along a tree branch towards our neighbors roof. For a moment I thought the racoon was going to jump from the branch down on to the neighbors roof and then scramble down to the ground from there. He looked down onto the roof and seemed to be assesing his chances of a soft landing. After a few minutes, he turned around and headed back on the branch towards the tree trunk. At this point we quickly retrieved the camera and shot a couple of photos of our stripey new friend as he descended the tree and wandered off into the underbrush.

Displaying head down climbing technique.
I did not even know raccoons could climb both head up and head down!

Last shot before he lumbered away. Check out those awesome paws!

Surfing Safari

I took surfing lessons while we were in Hawaii. This requires a back story. In order to encourage you to read the back story, I am going to cleverly place the photos at the end of this post.

First, the back story. Last year while we were in Hawaii, I made the decision that I wanted to learn how to surf. At the time, however, my swimming prowess had severely atrophied. Nora would not allow me to take surfing lessons unless I strengthened my swimming ability, since she was afraid that I would drown since I cannot float in water.  

So at the beginning of the academic year in August, we started going to the gym almost every morning. We did weights and swam. At first, I was a pathetic swimmer; I could barely make it across the pool without running out of breath or exausting my arm strength. But I slowly got better. I'm still not where I would like to be in terms of bodily strength and endurance, but I was strong enough to maneuver the board and to swim myself around without getting too tired. I feel much better health-wise than I did when I started (I sleep better, am in better mood, etc), so the experience has encouraged me to continue to swim and improve my health.

Now for the awesome photos that Nora took of me surfing. First, here is me sitting on my board waiting my turn.


And here is an action shot of me riding a wave in.


I'm the surfer in the front. This also shows off both Nora's impressive photography skills, and her camera's powerful zoom.

Friday Cat Blogging: Snake Edition

Alex, the younger of my step-brothers, has a pet boa. Nora and I met Cookie Monster (that's what Alex calls him) for the first time while at my parents' house. Isn't he cute?


Cookie Monster eats mice, apparently. As opposed to cookies.

BONUS UPDATE: We also have an update on Poggibonsi, the cat that Nora sent to her parents. While we were at Nora's parents' house, we got to check in on him and his progress. They think he is a Maine Coon, which means he should eventually get big. Right now, he is just really fluffy.


Overall, Poggi seems very happy to be in his new home, and get along very well with his older brother Ruffus.

Back from Vacation

We're back in New Orleans from our various vacations. We both apologize for the relative silence. But fear not; tomorrow will feature some awesome animal-based blogging.

Classes start up again for the University on Monday. Nora still has classes to take; she will probably post her schedule at some point. I am fully done with classes, and my teaching doesn't start up until a few weeks into the semester. So I just have research fo a couple of weeks. I passed my qualifying exams; I was formally notified the day before we left (which was apparently a bit slow). I'm told that I passed them quite handily, which I'm glad to hear. It's a huge relief to be done with them. They are enormously (surprisingly so) time-consuming to prepare for, so it's good to have that extra time again. And they are the big hurdle at which most physics students drop out of grad school. So it's good to be past that finally. On to research!

I will be presenting a poster at the American Chemical Society meeting in March in San Francisco, which is exciting. We are presenting a bit of work I did over the summer and the fall in between studying, and am continuing between now and the meeting. My time between now and the meeting is likley to be taken up finishing some experiments and assemblying the poster.

Friday Catblogging: Mid-week, ladder edition

Nora apologizes for me being a loser and not blogging enough recently. She is far too busy at the moment with exams. But we present a cat-based episode from earlier this evening.

We had an "incident" with the smoke detector. The battery was running low, so I climbed up the ladder to unplug it so it would stop beeping at us until we got new batteries for it. When I unplugged it from the wall, it started screeching very loudly and at a high pitch. All three cats stared at us and started meowing as if we had caught some exotic high-pitched bird. Eventually we figured out how to get the battery out, and it finally shut up.

But the cats had to examine and climb all over the ladder before we could put it away. Tony in particular wanted to examine the new hole in the ceiling, thinking the bird lived there.


Oprah enjoyed the chance to use her awesome climbing skills to climb up and down the ladder repeatedly.


Hodag just stared at Tony and Oprah as if they were idiots. He seems to have gotten used to his humans doing weird and stupid things, so he did not expect to find anything interesting in the ladder.