Coquo ergo sum

A couple of weeks ago, we had a discussion in one of my classes about the evolution of the human brain in relation to the gut, and its effect on our diet.

See, humans evolved to have such huge, fuel-hungry brains, but managed it without significantly increasing our metabolic rates. We didn't even have to evolve a correspondingly large gut to provide all the fuel demanded by the brain -- in fact, the human gut shrank as the brain got bigger, which conserved on fuel by not needing quite so much energy to digest.

Okay, but wait. Doesn't that actually complicate things, since now it's even harder to digest food?

Here's the secret: cooking.

Yeah, that big brain's gotta earn its keep somehow. By cooking, humans are able to eat more easily digestible and calorically efficient foods, like meat. (As opposed to, say, grass, which requires a cow an entire day of chewing cud, plus four stomachs, just to get enough fuel to get through a day. Doesn't leave much time or energy for rocket science, does it?) A diet of easily digestible foods allows for more efficient metabolism, and, consequently, the reduction of gut size.

Totally brill.

Now me, I love meat: it's delicious. And I gotta hand it to our ancestors, they came up with some ingenious ways to cook meat. Plus, you know. Fire!

But a hunk of meat can never look as pretty as a perfectly ripe lemon.



This, my friends, was a beautiful lemon, perfectly yellow and oh! so fragrant. It added a great tanginess to these zucchini muffins.

My life in a nutshell

I finally got settled in my room, which is a big improvement in my living situation since the last post. For one thing, I'm not living out of a duffel anymore, and have more than six t-shirts and three pairs of jeans to choose from. It also means running out of underwear less quickly, so laundry less often! I moved into the room as soon as the last subletter left, and spent a whole day cleaning and unpacking instead of studying... Oops. :)

Well, so I will be spending the next ten months or so of my life in a room about the size of a nutshell. It is easily the smallest space I have had to occupy since the one-bedroom apartment in Eagle Heights in Madison, and then it was only because I had had to share the room with my mom and younger brother.

This room here is actually tiny.

The room came furnished with a lofted bed, a desk, half a chest of drawers (the bottom drawer is AWOL), a chair, and a bookshelf, all of the Ikea variety.





It's hard to snap just one picture that will convey a sense of the whole room because I can't get far enough back.

I actually don't mind having a small room since I don't have much stuff, and it's much easier to keep it tidy. What I do mind, however, is the nutshell of a kitchen.



Makes me really miss the kitchen of Hatherly College, stripes and all.



Hey, but I still have a kitchen! I don't have nearly as much time to bake and cook now, given that I have spent a staggering majority of the past month holed up in a corner of the (windowless) second floor of the med school library, and expect to continue this trend for much of the rest of the year.

However, de-stressing breaks are good for the soul. We just finished the first unit on Thursday, so I can relax just a little bit before jumping into the next unit on Tuesday. And you know what that means: Chinese takeout, hilarious Korean TV shows, a new YA novel, and baking.

Oh yeah, I've been fantasizing about my wild, wild weekend for a while now.

(By the by, Becca sent me the recipe for the Golden Grand Marnier Cake so I could share it here! Go check it out!)

Bidding a sweet farewell to mouse wench-hood

Something I just remembered out of the blue: On the Fourth of July, Robby passed around my desserts amongst his sailing team friends because I didn't want to have to carry half-full glass pans for four miles after the fireworks. Apparently his friends were skeptical at first -- Robby is quite the trickster -- but then bit into the food and remarked, "This is really f***ing good!"

I think that was possibly the best compliment I ever got on anything I made. ♥

Anyway, enough narcissism. Ahem.

My last week at work started off by sucking royally, and by Tuesday I was so fed up with it all that I actually just came home early to indulge in some baking therapy. To be perfectly honest, I had already been planning to bring a lemon cake for the animal facility staff on Wednesday, since Tuesday was the IACUC inspection (my very last!) and I wanted to thank them for being so awesome to work with for the past two years. So no, this was not quite as spontaneous an act of rebellion(?) as I made it sound. Bite me.

But you know, I put the cake in the oven, and it still didn't feel like enough. Enough therapy, I mean. So I made coffee cake muffins!

Becca got home from class just as I was pulling the muffins out of the oven.



The best part was that these were for us.