A beautiful Tucson sunset tonight + iPhone portrait mode + a smidge of the secret Adobe Lightroom sauce = impromptu photo shoot!
Please welcome the new member of XWC Lab, a new LAB member! Meet Lani, my new 2 year old yellow lab! Lani came to me via friend of a friend who was looking to rehome her.
She couldn’t be a more perfect dog! She’s still pretty puppy-like, has no bad habits at all, loves people, loves dogs, loves to chase the ball and bite the hose water. As I type she’s holed up in the bedroom devouring a rawhide chew. We even made a new dog friend in the neighborhood and they’re already besties.
Here’s a few more.
And here’s some derp:
Song of the day is in honor of Lani’s new name, which is Hawaiian for “Star” (I like stars ok?). Iz’s version of “In This Life”.
Resident pyramid expert Dr. Lauren Schatz defended her thesis work today, despite pandemic pandemonium. The field has decided to accept her (with minor revisions), and she will be joining the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico later this year.
We’ll miss her a lot, but every wavefront sensed by MagAO-X will have her fingerprints on it. Well, not literally, that’d be bad optical science-ing. But you know what I mean.
We had all kind-of forgotten how to do the in-person rituals of academia, but we “reserved” a “conference room” and used a “projector.” We also set up Zoom, for good measure (and for everyone beyond the tiny occupancy limit imposed by These Unprecedented Times).
Masks were worn by all non-presenters, fear not.
Best wishes in all your future endeavors, Lauren!
Drs. Schatz and Males post-defense. The women of Optics make sashes to commemorate defenses, and this one was made by Dr. Silvana Ayala.
Song of the Day
You’ll find in time All the answers that you seek Have been sitting there just waiting to be seen Take away your pride and take away your grief And you’ll finally be right where you need to be
“Different Now” by Chastity Belt
Bonus Lauren
Have you ever unpacked a new optic and it turns out it was actually Lauren? (Photo: Jennifer Lumbres)
Shortly after I began my Ph.D. studies at Steward Observatory, I noticed that the historic dome building (where they gave me my first homely office) was ringed by orange trees.
“Don’t try eating them,” I was told. “They taste terrible! They’re not edible; they’re only, what’s the word, decorative? Ornamental?”
In this post, I will seek to rehabilitate the reputation of the much maligned Steward orange.
I have been undertaking progressively more intricate cooking projects over the course of the last covid, and after SeriousEats featured a recipe for cochinita pibil on its homepage I knew I had to try. Cochinita pibil is a pork dish from the Yucatán region of México, best known to Americans as “where Cancun is.” The Seville oranges used in it are known for being sour, bitter, and generally unpalatable on their own, but impart a distinctive flavor to the dish. I tried finding them at local Mexican grocery stores, but struck out.
But… aren’t the Steward oranges sour, bitter, and generally unpalatable? Could they be the oranges I’m looking for? Fortunately the campus arboretum has cataloged every notable plant on campus, and I had only to ask:
Armed with this information, I went to harvest some ingredients. However, a problem arose.
Undaunted, I returned under cover of darkness with an improvised professional harvesting tool.
Attempting to look as suspicious as possible
The haul
The first thing I made with my sour oranges was some quick-pickled onions (another SeriousEats recipe). They were delicious. No food coloring required!
A bag of orange peels on the mantelpiece in the first act must go off in the second..
Red onion for color; bay leaf, black peppercorn, and allspice berries for flavor.
Chiltepín is a Sonoran thing, but also delicious.
Of course, juicing a bunch of oranges means you have a bunch of orange rinds left over. The Seville orange’s peel is full of flavor compounds, with writers sometimes calling it the “orangiest” orange. I couldn’t let that go to waste! Seville oranges are prized in the UK for use in marmalade, but, quite frankly, I don’t eat much marmalade. So I made candy instead.
So a-peel-ing!
I opened a new 4 lb bag of sugar for this and now it’s half gone.
That’s already two ways to eat the Steward oranges, and we haven’t even gotten to the main event yet. In cochinita pibil, the bitter (or sour, or Seville) orange juice is used in the marinade alongside a laundry list of spices—but no hot chilies. The flavor of the final dish is a bit smoky and earthy, and fairly orange in color (thanks to achiote), but you’ll have to apply hot salsa to taste.
3-4 oranges produce 3/4 cup juice
Orange you glad you didn’t get achiote all over your kitchen?
Ready, set, marinate
After a tedious overnight wait, it was time to parcel up the meat and veg. Though I’m not digging the traditional pit, I can still use banana leaves. Fortunately, Tucson’s excellent international supermarket had them in stock.
Trussed up and placed on a tray, it was time to grill. Or, I guess, smoke. (The grad-student budget version of a smoker is a grill plus a lot of babysitting.)
Smoker, meat parcels, my attempt to save thermometer probe from grill lid.
The (almost) finished product
The author with the fruits of many hours of labor
Success! Some corn tortillas and pickled onions were produced, and tacos were had by all. A poll of the individuals present for this pork fest indicated broad approval for this cochinita pibil recipe. More importantly, there were no leftovers.
