Merry Christmas Everyone

Merry Christmas Everyone

Have been busy.  Things happened.  Including not blogging and delivering my first set of triplets.

Andy and me after we finished running.  Look tired? I can't walk.

Running a lot.  Every Sunday a 10 mile jog around the lake leading up to running a half marathon yesterday, and now limping around.  I think I bummed my knee.  Anybody know a good orthopedist?

My publishing debut

Getting published in a cookbook.  This humble potato soup recipe, one of my first blog entries, was picked by the editors of a lovely website Food52 to be published as part of a compilation of recipes on their website.  The cookbook is beautiful and is evidence of the wonderful and inspiring home cooks across America.  You should buy it for Christmas.

Baking hundreds of cookies, including these beauties.  I just love the Christmas palms. Frosting them took forever but I think they were worth it.   Here is a good guide about how to decorate sugar cookies with royal icing.  I used Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook for my recipes.

These cookies were inspired by this lovely idea.  Basically, they are citrus based cookies (I used James Peterson's pate sucree and added the zest of 2 grapefruits and 2 oranges) with a grapefruit juice glaze and charred brulee style with a torch.  They have that lovely crispy deep caramel flavor that I just love. 

And I've also been doing just a bit of work. 

How have you been?

What to do when life gives you a case of lemons? Get Married!

The funniest part about writing this post is that I was that without even thinking I felt my fingers grace the “R” key for “R1 Gynecology (or L&D or OB Clinic) Progress Note".  Sadly, the reflex for writing anything down at this point is for patient documentation. 

Not that this is a bad thing.  I like my job and I’m settled into the fact that this “being a resident” is also my primary role as a human.  Match day is over, which means that there will be 20 new suckers coming our way to relieve us from being the most clueless members of the OB/GYN department, and oh, by the way, I got married in the hubbub of intern year.   Plenty to celebrate.

Spring is here and life is new.  The holidays were hard and the only research I did for the blog was a paper written about intern burnout and mental illness. It’s amazing how much a week of vacation, seeing family and going out of town for a weekend can renew the soul. 

The wedding was a beautiful and intimate affair.  It’s such an incredible blessing to have people that you love surrounding you and as much as I moaned and groaned about the party planning and its complete consumption of any semblance of a life, it was nothing short of perfect.  The food which we hand-picked was awesome thanks to Beyond the Box Catering and Chef Doug Brown.  They made the exact Tex-Mex inspired gourmet that we wanted and there was surplus and beyond.  (PS, I was the naysayer that told everybody that unlike other brides I would pig out at my wedding but with the nerves and the dress constricting all digestion, even I struggled to swallow every bite.)

I purchased a case (200) lemons and a case (245) limes for decorations/floral for the nuptials.  Well, needless to say, they were not all consumed at the wedding and I came home with approximately 70 pounds of fruit.   No scurvy in this house!  Our collagen synthesis is up to speed and we are in a race against the fungus among us to not mold our zingy fruit.  Linus Pauling would be proud.  (PS, did you know that he as the Nobel Prize winner for much vitamin C research consumed 10g of vitamin C a day?)

I can tell you now that there are many great things you can do with so much citrus, also with all new knives, pots, pans and everything glorious.  I made a beautiful chicken dish with a whole chicken cut up into pieces, half a red onion finely diced, four cloves of garlic finely chopped, sesame seeds, fresh cilantro, about a cup of soy sauce, half a cup of brown sugar, the juice of twelve limes and a dash of sesame oil cooked in the oven until golden brown.  The citrus is surprisingly subtle.

Also, I made this lovely pine nut lemon saboyan tart which is much more beautiful and better elucidated by the lovely Carol Blymire of a retired blog “French Laundry at Home”.   This recipe comes from the French Laundry Cookbook; the book is written by the inspiring Thomas Keller based on his four star Napa French restaurant.  Everything looks so delicious yet within an experienced home chef’s reach.  You should ask for it as a gift too.  

Happy New Year

I’ve started to write a million blog posts but I haven’t quite been able to finish.  As much as I wanted to celebrate the holidays with y’all, I just couldn’t.   I feel in desperate need for free time lately.  The good thing--intern year is officially half over.  It’s pretty incredible to think about how much I’ve learned in the past six months and how much I’ve seen.  I have delivered over 50 babies and done 30 C-sections, and that’s just in the 3 months that I was on obstetrics.

The past couple months I’ve been off service on internal medicine.  I had to take my white coat out of the bag to start the rotation.  I’m learning a lot and the people are very nice, but I’m just homesick in a lot of ways.  I haven’t had enough time to see my family in quite some time, and I really miss OB.  I was just starting to feel happy and comfortable as an intern in obstetrics as I switched to something completely new and different; it felt like starting all over again.

I love being a doctor, but it’s really hard.  It’s not the hours or the daily grind of the work per se, it’s just that being a doctor is now synonymous with being me.  Work isn’t just work when it involves life and death.  It isn’t just your job when you catch an exhausted mother’s beautiful newborn in your hands.  It isn’t just a vocation when you declare a 32 year old dead from a horrible cancer on New Year’s Eve and tell his family that he isn’t there anymore as they look at you with their hopes shattered. 

People that aren’t in residency have said “you knew what you were getting into when you signed up for this.”  But how could I, or anybody in residency truly anticipate what would this would be like?  It’s an incredibly surreal experience.  The highs are unbelievably amazing and the lows are ship sinking.  Sure I knew I would work a lot, watch people die, and be far away from home.  The fact of the matter is that the amount of emotional, physical and intellectual energy expended as an intern cannot be quantified or described.

This post wasn’t meant to depress people or to have somebody send out a suicide watch.  I’ll be fine--in fact I’ll be great.  For my New Year’s resolution, I don’t want to change anything.  I can’t spend my whole life feeling bad about all the stuff I didn’t do.  I just want to keep the resolve to be myself even with constricted time and limited sleep--happy, loud and proud.  I dare you all to do the same. 

To Corn Beef--Part 1

I’m not a St. Patrick’s Day person. I love the color green, I like beer, and I love parades and festivities, but why do they all have to come together on this drunken, boisterous “holiday”? My good friend and next door neighbor is freshly imported from Ireland. He says they don’t even truly celebrate St. Patty’s over there, and he tells me that the British, not the Irish, eat corned beef. I know I’m being a cynical party pooper sitting at my laptop griping while many friends and classmates are out having a raucous time. Hey, I’m happy right here!

Fortunately, my fiancé feels the same way about these shamrock laden festivities. He probably abhors the holiday even more than I do. In fact we met three years ago exactly, on St. Patrick’s Day, in a loud bar. We were out celebrating with mutual friends. He was even less happy to be there than I was, as the drunk girls in mini-skirts poured beer down the back of our necks. The first thing he ever said to me was “I’m grumpy and I don’t want to be here.” We fell in love. Now we’re getting married, and I think I saved the relationship on its first day with corned beef.

Three years ago, I bought the beef pre-corned from the market and braised it on top of the stove with some cabbage and potatoes. Just as my relationship has progressed, I think my cooking skills have as well. This year I decided to make the corned beef myself. Luckily I have local guidance. I live in the same zip code as the wonderfully inspiring Michael Ruhlman. Ruhlman is a writer by trade but also an expert on food and chefs. He wrote the book Charcuterie on how to salt and cure meat, including corned beef. I put myself up to the Charcuterie challenge.

The secret ingredient to corned beef, it turns out, is sodium nitrite. For food preparation purposes, sodium nitrite is packaged as pink salt, curing salt or Prague Powder #1. Sodium nitrite is not easy to come by, and I spent two whole days in my car tracking it down. Even Michael Ruhlman himself didn’t know where to find it locally and suggested I buy it online. When I did find the illustrious pink crystals, the woman selling the salt to me told me not to touch it. How could I put something in my mouth that wasn’t safe to touch?!

Why is sodium nitrite crucial to the composure of corned beef? And is it really toxic?

Sodium nitrite has been used in food preparations for hundreds of years. Nitrites serve multiple purposes: they add to flavor, they both preserve meat and maintain the red color of the meat. Multiple studies show the effective bactericidal (bacteria-killing, just like homicidal is people killing) properties of nitrites when preserving meat.

In 1972, the Swift Company along with the FDA contaminated canned ham with various concentrations of Clostridium botulinum (botulism) and various concentrations of nitrites [1]. They showed that with higher levels of nitrites, botulism was completely inhibited. Although ridding food of botulism seems benign now, botulism used to be a serious threat.

Nitrites are also known to destroy other bacteria as well, although the effect is more complex. The effect of nitrites on the highly pathogenic and sometimes deadly bacteria, listeria monocytogenes, is heavily debated. Listeria has been isolated from nitrite cured meats such as hot dogs. The current theory is that nitrites damage the bacteria, but do not kill it. Once the bacteria consume the nitrogenous compounds, they can rebound and grow rapidly after the shelf life of the meat has expired [2].

To make your own nitrated meat, Ruhlman was kind enough to publish the exact corned beef recipe on his blog this week. While I normally write my own recipes or adapt them significantly, I followed the corned beef recipe point by point. I had no idea how to make it! For the recipe, go here. Just make sure to have a lot of patience, and that you plan at least five days ahead of time.  And to find out if corned beef is toxic…stay tuned for “To Corn Beef—Part 2”.


1. Christiansen, LN., et al. “Effect of nitrite and nitrate on toxin production by Clostridium botulinum and on nitrosamine formation in perishable canned comminuted cured meat.” Applied Microbiology, v. 25 issue 3, 1973, p. 357-62.


2. Nyachuba, DG.; Donnelly, CW.; Howard, AB. “Impact of nitrite on detection of Listeria monocytogenes in selected ready-to-eat (RTE) meat and seafood products.” Journal of Food Science, v. 72 issue 7, 2007, p. M267-75.