I've spent the last six weeks flying back and forth across the country and working 13 hour shifts at CVS. It's been a while since I have been this exhausted and sick, but it's almost over. One seminar presentation and three more death-shifts left and I will be free.
In the meantime, I orchestrated another dinner party as stress relief! So this will be a picture heavy and content light post. I stumbled over to Buster Blue's house and we all started come cooking.
The menu consisted of prosciutto and cheese turnovers:
Herbed crispy chicken strips with dill:
Why dinner parties are awesome and not at all stuffy and lame.
When I moved from dorms to an actual apartment, I discovered that I quite like cooking. I gathered old, rejected cookbooks that belonged to my mother and started my process of learning how to really cook - mostly by opening the book to a random page and making whatever I landed on. Through this process I discovered a few things.
First, lemon is my nemesis. Second, I should not be allowed to use a broiler. Third, cooking is made even more enjoyable by doing it for other people. I'd create chocolate souffles, and strawberry cheesecakes, oreos, and all manner of delightful snacks and pawn them off to the people at work.
I then moved on to food themed parties. Pi Day was my most successful, followed closely by an evening of Mexican Food and Sherlock Holmes. Why Mexican? British food is kind of nasty. Call me biased, but mistaking blood pudding for chocolate pudding (served at breakfast, no less) when I was in England tainted my opinion forever. Getting a mouthful of congealed blood when my tastebuds were expecting the heaven that is chocolate pudding ranks near the top of my worst food moments list.
When I was back in Idaho for that fabulous research rotation, I discovered that my mother had found these two books.
They're freaking fantastic, and I order you to all go out and purchase them immediately. You can do so here and here.
Armed with these, I have embarked on a dinner party frenzy. The book Small Parties has meal plans for themed parties. Small Plates is a collection of individual dishes I pick and choose from to form the greatest menus imaginable. Every recipe I've made out of these books has been unbelievably delicious.
Chicken Piccata Brochettes, Molten Chocolate Lava Cakes, Prosciutto and Cheese Turnovers - the list is endless. And, now that I have a group of friends in Reno, I've got a ready made set of people to dinner party it up with.
It's fantastic.
I unfortunately have a tendency to not consider taking pictures of my culinary masterpieces until they've already been devoured, and the few I managed to snap during the last dinner party (which was mostly desserts) didn't save to my camera. So I don't have photographic proof of the wonders of dinner parties.
I am, however, planning another one to take place very soon. Expect a blog of nothing but pictures.
I had my finger inside a patient's foot today.
Yes. INSIDE. In a gaping wound that was oozing pus. I stuck my finger inside a patient's foot AND HIT BONE. My preceptor kept telling me to stop being such a weenie and squeeze it harder. *hork*
I was going to come home and make some delicious food, like fresh rolls and egg salad for sammiches, or lime meltaway cookies. Problem is, every time I head for the kitchen, the only image that pops into my head is the oozing hole. This is not conducive to cooking. Or eating.
A few days ago, though, I made steamed pork dumplings. And had to face one of my weaknesses. If I were a cookery-themed super hero, this would be my greatest nemesis - secondary only to that bastard lemon.
Oh, don't laugh at me. You know those murderous tubes of dough strike fear into the hearts of the strongest men. Beowulf would hesitate before opening one of these monsters. I followed the instructions on the tube exactly - unpeel paper. Press on seam with spoon. Nothing happened.
AND THEN IT EXPLODED OFF THE COUNTER AT MY FACE.
Look. Look into the doughy face of EVIL.
If it had teeth, they would have latched into my jugular.
Anyway, I flattened out the individual rolls, filled them with a mixture of ground pork, water chestnuts, spring onions, and spices, then stuck them in a cobbled together steamer. I should probably invest in a real steamer, because while my tin foil on a pot worked, the dumplings ended up stuck together.
I can't eat the leftovers tonight, though. because my brain has been forever scarred by the fact that I had my FINGER IN A FOOT TODAY.
And here I went to pharmacy school because I didn't want to touch people.
And here I thought I'd post more during rotations because I'd have more time.
While I didn't have much in the way of at-home work on that first rotation, the ten hour+ days were sort of killer. And then I got sick, which has carried through to now.
I finished my hospital rotation with massive increases in both knowledge and self-doubt. There's no way I know enough to be a pharmacist at this point. My God, I'm going to be in charge of sick people and making clinical decisions without anyone to point out when I've done something stupid. Luckily I have almost a year left to cram in as much information and experience as I can.
The hospital rotation ended up being fairly awesome - I got to see an open heart surgery, make new IVs, was allowed to evaluate patients and make decisions (thankfully nothing I proposed doing would have directly led to anyone dying!). I'm now a week into infectious disease, which is shaping up to be a lot more work. It's great, though. This is the kind of work I want to be doing as a pharmacist.
The preceptor has me going on rounds right now though, which is utterly terrifying and makes me feel completely stupid on a daily basis. I'm taking the stance that this is good for me. Because this is only the first week, I still don't really know what I'm doing. So when the ID specialist turns to me and asks a question, pretty much all I can do is make fish faces while my brain short circuits. I'm hoping this will improve.
Not much else has been happening. I go to the hospital, run around all day, come back, study whatever it is I'm doing the next day, and then pass out. This weekend is another glorious three dayer, thanks to the 4th. I had hoped to make it up to Tahoe, but the traffic was pretty crazy and I didn't have anyone to go with. No, parents, I'm not going hiking alone, so I won't be eaten by bears/mountain lions/crazy mountain men. I listen to you sometimes.
This weekend has been more eventful than most, though. I went on a library adventure and ended up with a slightly ridiculous amount of books. I also went to the most awkward baseball game ever last night. Details another day, I'm still recovering from the social doom.
I also made bread today. I love everything about making bread - the smell, the feel of the dough, punching the crap out of it after the first rise . . . The only problem is with the crust. For some reason, every time I make bread in this oven, the crust is incredibly hard. I have no idea how to fix this. All of my ideas for making it softer were shot down by Cody, the more experienced bread maker, because they apparently would only backfire in the worst way possible. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I know I've said this many, many times before, but I really am going to try harder to post more. And maybe there will be an accordion post soon, as my roommate is on her off rotation and thus not around to be driven to insanity by my playing.
Or, what I do when I actually have some.
The last three years of my life have been spent either sitting in class, going to work, or studying. I have had precious little in the way of free time - or, rather, time not spent feeling guilty about not studying. Now that I'm working four ten-hour shifts, I get three day weekends. Glorious three day weekends. Three days of NOT HAVING TO STUDY ANYTHING.
This was going to be a long-overdue accordion post, but my roommate got home early and I didn't want to subject her to the horrors of accordion practice. We've only lived together for three weeks. I'd rather wait a bit longer before she loathes my very existence.
That said, I spent this weekend in a cooking fervor because it was snowing and I was too much of a wuss to go hike. Yes, snowing. I feel like I never left Idaho.
First, I made mushroom soup. I probably should have gotten more than one type of mushroom, but it was still pretty tasty. This recipe could use some tweaking though, so I'll be experimenting with this again. I might post the instructions once I'm satisfied.
Then I was hunting through my cookbooks and found a recipe for caramel pecan rolls. Note the total lack of pecans in the picture - this is because pecans are insanely expensive and I am poor. Someday, when I am a pharmacist and won't balk at paying $4 for a tiny bag of pecans, these rolls will be covered. Even without gold-encrusted nuts, these were pretty tasty.
-- slight interruption due to cooking disaster followed by airing out of the apartment --
I just attempted to make lemon chicken for a salad. I followed the recipe exactly but halfway through something went terribly, terribly wrong.
Our smoke detector is quite loud, in case you were wondering. And it seems that evil bastard citrus is still determined to be my cooking kryptonite. This is where I fall to my knees and scream "LEMOOOOON" at the sky a la William Shatner.
At least there wasn't any fire.
It's an only slightly belated blogpost!
I've had a decent couple of weeks. Halloween was pretty fun - I spent the day watching Supernatural with Sarah. She was crocheting an octopus and I was working on the Darcy sweater of doom. It's in moss stitch, so it takes forever.
The pharmacy school has a Halloween party every year, with a dessert contest. I made pumpkin cookies and a haunted house cake. It was an awesome cake, if I do say so myself.
I also made pumpkin cookies with cream cheese frosting. They were delicious, and won me the contest. Which got me a Texas Roadhouse coupon. I used it the other night with the ever delightful Dan and the food was actually pretty good.
We finished up the second infectious disease module before Halloween, so this last week was a lovely rest period. It would have been more restful had I not decided to do NaNoWriMo again this year. It's the hardest year for me so far, largely because I did not have time to really formulate any plan of what I would be doing. I'm stumbling in the dark and have fallen behind on word count. I'm sure I'll catch up though . . . maybe . . . It would probably help if I spent less time reading Steig Larsson's series and more working on the nano.
It's been a shamefully long time since my last post. I blame insane classes, high work schedule, and the fact that I've been basically dropping comatose into bed when I come home. It's been a hard semester. We're wrapping up the cancer module right now - this post is a brief break in the sea of ridiculously hard to spell drugs I'm adrift in. I'm having a difficult time forcing myself through this last push of intensive studying. It doesn't help that I tanked one of the exams and am therefore on the borderline of two grades, or that I don't want to specialize in oncology.
Thankfully spring break is in two days and I'll be able to relax then. We'll be between modules so unless I want to read ahead on GI/hepatic stuff, I'm free from studying woes. I also have most of the week off from work, so I plan on playing video games, reading through a stack of books, and playing my accordion. There may be a road trip with Dan in there as well.
As I haven't updated in forever, I also haven't mentioned my current boyfriend. His name is Dan, and he's a good mix of nerd/outdoorsy. He enjoys discussions of chemistry and video games while at the same time taking me longboarding and snowboarding. Having a boyfriend who lives a block away is very strange. Pleasant, but strange. We can have dinner together at the drop of a hat, or he can stop by and play some Modern Warfare with me, or any number of things I'm very unaccustomed to.
One last thing before I dive back into the world of cancer and pain treatment - Pi day was this Sunday and I managed to convince my fellow students to participate. I made blueberry, chocolate truffle, and lemon meringue, while two others made pecan and banana cream. It was a delicious success. I'm not counting my mental block regarding all things lemon that ended in the lemon meringue resembling more neon yellow goop than anything in pie form. I can't make lemon bars either . . . it's a citrus-y tragedy.
There will be more posts from now on as the next module is rumored to be the easiest we have and I'm planning on actually using my camera more. And playing/recording the accordion playing. Now that I have a full size I'll be able to expand what I can do (if my arm holds up, that beast is heavy).
- SqueezeBox
There was supposed to be a post coming up last week, but I had a big exam and then the flu, so it didn't happen. Priority was given to lying in bed feeling sick and miserable. I'm feeling better now, for the most part.
The day before Halloween was the pharmacy school's Halloween party, and I entered the dessert contest with this delightful gem:
Oh yes, that's a spidercake. Not shown are the innards that ooze out when the body is cut. It's very simple to make and hilarious to watch people eat, because they have this look of abject horror when the guts come pouring out.
Make four round cakes, two large and two small. Cut the middle out of one of the big ones and fill it with green jello. Frost over the top, put the second big cake on, then frost over both. If you're feeling particularly morbid, you can do the same with the small cake and have a spider leaking brains and visceral organs.
I used licorice for the legs and found some gummy eyeballs that worked out nicely.
The spidercake won the contest, but the prize was a big bowl of candy. I probably spent more on the ingredients . . .
In other quick news, I won a free Dell Netbook from Shopko . . . it's much nicer than I expected, and has better specs than expected. I'm pretty pleased, as this means I can keep my electrical hazard of a power cord belonging to the Toshiba safely strung up on my desk and not risk electrocuting myself/classmates during lecture. The netbook is also named Tartarus.
Also! It's November and thus time for NaNoWriMo. I was going to do a historically accurate analysis of the social mores of opera (following a castrati, composer, nobleman financier, soprano, and stage hand - and I promise it wouldn't be boring), but I really don't have the time this year to make sure it is, well, historically accurate. Instead I'm doing a fairly random urban fantasy that involves whales and a surprising number of nosebleeds. It's much easier to just spit out, and I think the opera story really deserves to be done properly.
There may be another accordion video coming up this weekend, but I have to work tomorrow and study for a positively delightful exam over medications for high cholesterol and ischemia that I'll be taking on Thursday . . . in all probability, it won't happen.
- Squeezebox
The egg was not looking forward to its batter-y fate.
Andy was, though.
