Surprises: Healthy Banana Nut Muffins

My dad had a heart attack last weekend.  He quickly realized that his body was not functioning properly, called my mom who was next door, and within seconds she had him in the car on the way to the hospital.   I'm sure she covered the 5 miles in record speed.   Luckily, our local hospital, which primarily caters to the white, upper middle class residents of our town, are experts in heart care.  They recognized and treated him right away, so any damage was limited.  But, my dad, a fit looking 65 year old, who has been on a low cholesterol diet for 30 years and cholesterol medication for 20, has four severely blocked arteries.  He will need additional procedures to alleviate the blockage.

I was in California when it happened, and only made it back to Chicago on Wednesday.  My dad had just been discharged from the hospital.  He looked great and sounded like his normal self, although a bit weary.  He is on house arrest for at least a month and has already started to get bored.  Luckily, he has our two dogs to keep him company.  They are quite a handful.

I've been cooking my parents foods that are low fat and cholesterol-free since I got back (which has only been two nights, so it hasn't been a challenge).  I decided to restart this blog so that when I go back to my apartment this weekend, I can easily share recipes with them and with my brother and sister, who might also want to incorporate more of this style of cooking into their repertoire.

I came up with these dairy and oil-free muffins after reading through a fair number of recipes.  Before my dad's heart attack I had already begun experimenting with using applesauce and yogurt in place of butter in baking recipes with quite a bit of success, so I wasn't afraid to try cutting out all milk derivatives.  Nonetheless, I was quite surprised at how well these turned out.  They will never replace a rich, cakey muffin, but they are dense, nutty and moist.  Perfect for a wholesome breakfast.

Surprisingly Good Healthy Banana Nut Muffins

INGREDIENTS

Dry Ingredients
1	c whole wheat flour
1	c wheat bran
2	tsp baking powder
1/2	tsp baking soda
1/2	tsp cinnamon
1/4	tsp nutmeg
1/2	tsp salt
Wet Ingredients
1/2	c applesauce*
2	egg whites
2	large very very very ripe bananas
1/4	c honey
1/2	cup chopped walnuts
	Turbinado sugar for garnish
Add Ons
1/2	c dried or frozen blue berries
1/2	c small chocolate chips
1/2	c chopped fresh/frozen cranberries
	*Make sure its unsweetened

INSTRUCTIONS

1.	Preheat oven to 350 and either grease muffin pan or line muffin pan with baking cups.
2.	Mix all dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Set aside.
3.	In a small bowl, mash bananas until all large chunks are gone. Add the remainder of the wet ingredients and stir until mixed.
4.	Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Stir in the walnuts and any other add-ons, such as frozen or dried blueberries or dark chocolate chips.
5.	Scoop into muffin pan, just under filling the cups. They will rise only a little bit. Sprinkle with remaining walnuts and garnish each with a pinch of turbinado sugar.
6.	Bake for 25 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted in the center of the muffins comes out clean. They will be a fairly deep brown color, but not burned. Cool for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool further. They will keep well for several days in an air tight container or a few months if frozen. Refresh by sticking them in the toaster oven for a few minutes.

A Return to Blogging?

Perhaps.

On Friday I handed a draft of my thesis to the members of my committee.   Berkeley does not have a thesis defense, so all that stands between me and a PhD are three signatures.  Hallelujah!  I am decidedly sick of my thesis topic and ready to move onto the Next Big Thing, although I'm not sure I'm ready to leave Berkeley.  I want to write about what has happened in the last nine months and what I plan to do in the future, but I don't want to get carried away on my first post-thesis (draft) post.  That's how injuries happen.  So, in the following, all you'll get is a recipe.  But it was yummy, and it gave me immense pleasure to be cooking, guilt-free, in the kitchen again.

Warm Spring Root Vegetable and Lentil Salad over Braised Greens

Kyle also distributed a draft of his thesis on Friday, so in celebration on Saturday night, I cooked for the first time in weeks.  For much of the past month our diet consisted of burritos, pizza and Indian take-out, so I was in the mood for a vegetable-heavy healthy meal.  I wanted something that tasted healthy.  A trip to my favorite grocery store left me with several bunches of beets, a couple bunches of beautiful multi-colored young carrots and a mysterious green that looked like a white kale, but that doesn't seem to exist.  I was a little uncertain what to do with it all, but I found some lentils in the freezer and the following dish was born.  The weather here in Berkeley has been unusually gloomy and I think this salad captures the it's-raining-and-i'm-still-wearing-sweaters part of spring.

For the salad:

2 cups of cooked french lentils*
2 bunches of beets or 4 large ones
2 bunches of fresh carrots, sliced lengthwise into spears
1/2 cup of pepitas

1/3 cup of balsamic vinaigrette
(mix 2-3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar and thrown in a bit of nice mustard. adding a pinch of herb de provence is a nice touch)

For the greens:

3 cloves of garlic, sliced
1/3 cup of white wine
1/3 cup of water
1 bunch of kale, or collards,  or mustard greens,  or chard + any good greens from the beets

olive oil
salt and pepper


Turn the oven on to 350 F.  Wrap the beets in foil.  Roast them until tender, which can range from 30 min to a half an hour.  While the beets are cooking, throw the pepitas in a roasting pan and put them in the oven on a different rack.  Roast until nicely browned, approximately 5 min, although it will depend on how hot the oven is at that point.  In the meantime, slice the the carrots into thin strips, toss with olive oil and salt.  When the pepitas are done, put them on a plate and transfer the carrots into the roasting pan.  Put the pan back in the oven and cook the carrots until browned, 10-20 min depending on the size.  I had two bunches of pretty multi-colored small carrots which did not take long.   While the carrots are cooking, heat the olive oil in a sauce pan over medium heat, add the garlic and the stems of the greens.  Cook until the stems are soft, then add the leaves, wine, water and a few pinches of salt.  Stir then cover and cook for 10 min or until the greens are tender.   Once the beets are done, peel them and cut into bite sized pieces.

Mix the beets, carrots, pepitas and vinaigrette together.  You can put them into a covered oven safe bowl and put them in the still warm oven to warm through until you are ready to serve.  Heating them up will sweeten the balsamic vinegar, which is a nice touch.  Serve over the greens.  Some feta or goat cheese would probably be a good addition as well.

* Lentils freeze well, so I often make a whole pot of them and then put them into the freezer in small containers for later use.

August Tour

I'm writing this post from the comfort of a Canadian railroad car, beginning the last leg of my August tour.  In mid-July I was asked by the collaboration to give a talk in Boston on August 11th and present a poster in Toronto on August 22nd.  It seemed silly to go back to Geneva in between the two conferences, so I threw in visits to Berkeley, Naperville and Ann Arbor in between them.  It's been exhausting and I'm happy to say that I will be in Toronto for nearly a week.  I may even get to unpack my suitcase.

Getting asked by the collaboration to go to these conferences may sound like a big deal, but, in reality it is quite normal.  In our field collaborations rather than people are asked to give talks, and we use our favorite tool, committees, to divy up the engagements.  Talks are assigned to young people on the job market or to senior people as a reward for their service to the collaboration.  There is a priority list which makes sure that the talks are evenly divided so that no one gets overlooked.  Its a quirk of our system that often the presenter gives talks on analyses he or she has not worked on.  Its a legitimate method because each of us are authors on all of the analyses so we should be able to talk about any of them, but in reality the speaker has to do quite a bit of homework to put together the talk.  Half of my talk at the MIT concerned an analysis I didn't work on; it was useful to learn about it so that I could present the material in a coherent way.

Two days before I left Geneva I made a tomato tarte that was as good as it was simple.  It comes from David Leibovitz's blog, with very minor modifications.  David's recipes are always excellent, and this one is no exception.  I used an assortment of heirloom tomatoes of different colors which had a very pretty effect.  Its a very buttery crust, so you might want to try something a bit healthier, like this one.

Heirloom Tomato Tarte

4 or 5 medium sized heirloom tomatoes, sliced 1/2 inch thick

1/2 a small onion sliced as thinly as possible

A few tablespoons of dijon mustard (I used the unground à l'ancienne style)

plenty of fresh thyme, leaves only

salt and pepper 

olive oil

8 oz goat cheese; it's best to use one with a rind of some sort.  mine was very slightly aged so had a thin rind. 

tart dough:

1 1/2 cups  flour
4 1/2 ounces unsalted butter, chilled, cut into cubes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
2-3 tablespoons cold water

First make the tart dough.  Mix the flour and salt in a bowl.  In a food processor, stand mixer or using your hands, mix or pulse the butter into the flour until the mixture has a crumbly texture and there are no large pieces of butter left.

Mix the egg and 2 tablespoons of water in a bowl.  Add to the food processer and pulse until the liquid is  incorporated and the dough holds together.  Add the extra water if needed.

 On a floured surface, roll the dough into a ball.  Roll until it is about 1/4 -1/2 in thick.  You can get it into the tart pan with an ingenious (and probably standard) method that David outlines: you flour the rolling pin and roll the dough up around the pin to transfer it to the pan. 

Press the dough into the pan and dock it with a fork.  Preheat the oven to 425F.  

Smear the bottom of the crust with the mustard.  You can put a nice thick layer on if you like mustard.  Then spread the onion on top, followed by half of the thyme.  

Arrange the tomatoes on top in concentric circles.  Mine didn't overlap, but they probably could without too much trouble.  Arrange the cheese on top and sprinkle with the rest of the thyme.  Add salt and pepper to taste and then drizzle with olive oil.

Bake for 30 minutes or so.  Be careful to check that it doesn't burn--as you can see from the picture below, mine was a bit charred.  Serve hot or warm.  I had leftovers on the plane and they were nearly as good as when it was fresh!

  

A winner and loser on the NYTimes

Denis Overbye, number one science writer for the New York Times, has to be one of my least favorite science writers. Well, let's face it, I don't know very many science writers by name, but if I come across an article about the physical sciences in the New York Times and it makes me groan, it was usually written by David Overbye. He got a lot of mileage out of the black hole LHC hysteria, and more recently, propagated unfounded rumors from a known rumor monger blogger of a Fermilab Higgs discovery. He has a penchant for sensationalism, and when he covers topics which delve into the 'mysteries of the universe' he likes to milk them for anything he can get, imagined or not.

He recently published an essay titled, "Rumors in Astrophysics Spread at Light Speed", which discusses the role of rumors in the physical sciences. It starts off pretty badly with an anecdote about an astronomer who said something at a public outreach talk that was misconstrued. Overbye calls this "2 sigma blues" which has nothing to do with the anecdote.  A 2 sigma result means something very precise, statistically, it is certainly not related to poor word choice.  What he really wants to talk about is a rumor that was started about a month ago by a physics-blogger-trouble-maker-rumor-monger, who said there might be a hint of the Higgs at FermiLab. This little rumor flared up all over the internet and generally pissed the FermiLab scientists off because they didn't want to be seen as crying wolf.  Overbye then philosophizes about why he thinks rumors like this get started.  Its certainly not his worst article, but it still makes me groan.  I just wanted to complain for a bit.

On a positive NY Times note, I found an excellent recipe for a provençal style potato and tomato gratin. I was shocked at how well it came out.  I made a few slight modifications, so I rewrote the recipe here.  You should use good tomatoes and good potatoes--preferably not the baked potato type.  I used some fingerlings and some other random variety I found at the market.

Provençal Tomato-Potato Gratin

2 garlic cloves

Olive oil

2.5 pounds tomatoes, sliced 1/2-1/4 inch thick
1.5 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
2 pounds potatoes, sliced about 1/4 inch thick
1 tsp herbs de provence 
.5-1 cup of grated gruyère



1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut one of the garlic cloves in half, and rub a 3-quart gratin or baking dish with the cut half. Oil the dish with olive oil. Mince the remaining garlic, along with the one you used to rub the dish and toss them in with the tomatoes. Add the thyme, and season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper.
2. Make a layer of half the potato slices.  Mine were all different sizes, so it was a bit of a mess, but I tried to make it in more or less one slice thick.   Then season very generously with salt and pepper. I'm not kidding, you really want to salt it.  Sprinkle with half of the herbs de provence.  
3. Layer half the tomatoes over the potatoes.  I had them all overlap a bit.
4. Repeat the layers with the remaining potatoes and tomatoes. Make sure you salt and pepper the second layer of potatoes. Pour any juices left in the tomato bowl over the vegetables.
5. Pour 3/4 cup of hot water onto the vegetables. Bake 45 minutes.  The recipe recommends pressing the potatoes down into the liquid after 30 minutes, I didn't find this necessary. After the 45 min is up, sprinkle on the cheese. Bake another 30 to 45 minutes, until most of the liquid has been absorbed by the potatoes and the gratin is lightly browned. Or really browned, as in my case.  Serve hot or warm.

How an Analysis Becomes Official

In my last post I alluded to the fact that it is no trivial matter to take an analysis from a bunch of plots that I have made to an official statement of scientific fact put out by the collaboration. The road to approval is so long because in high energy physics, all members of the collaboration publish a result, not individuals. In fact, from outside of the collaboration you have no way of knowing who performed which analysis by reading the documentation. Most other scientists find this arrangement very strange since generally papers are very explicit about the level of involvement each name on the paper had in its production. High energy physicists take the egalitarian view that since our experiments are so large and complex, they cannot function without all of the members, and that the contribution of the person running the pixel detector is no less important that the person who is searching for the Higgs. Therefore, every name (all 3000 of them!) gets put on all papers in alphabetical order. The approval process is designed so that all collaborators can have their say about each analysis, which generally means that any result coming out of a HEP collaboration has gone through much stricter peer review than the average journal article. It also results in a lot of headaches for the person trying to get the analysis approved.


To explain the process, I'm going to employ School House Rock's awesome and educational, "How a a bill becomes a law". Rewatch it if you haven't seen it in a while. It's pretty great.



The Bill in question is my analysis and I play the part of the congresman who proposes it. My advisor is represented by the people who ask for the law, because she came up with the analysis concept. The drafting of the law, i.e. the dirty work of the analysis, kept me at CERN until obscene hours of the night for days on end in May and June. The committee fits best into the role of the Analysis Reviewers and Editorial Board, to which each analysis is assigned. These people look at the analysis in detail and typically ask you good question which drive you back to your computer to investigate, and in the end produce a better paper.

Once the board and reviewers deem the analysis mature enough, the paper (which, in this case, is not destined for a journal, but will be made public) is sent out to the collaboration and they are given a week to comment on it. This stage is equivalent to the Bill going to the House and Senate (imagine we have a single legislative body). At the end of the comment period the analyzer gives a talk about it, which would be equivalent to a floor debate. This part of the process involved me flying to Copenhagen to give a talk at our Collaboration meeting to a room of about 300 people. It was a little intimidating, but also fun because I got to use a nifty nearly invisible microphone that went over my ear and an enormous screen (12 ft tall, maybe?). My talk went smoothly, with no interjections or grumbling when the Physics convenor spoke the magic words, "Does anyone object to this continuing to the next stage?". Some of the analyses were contentious and forced to revise before coming up for a approval again. In most cases I agreed that the analysis wasn't quite ready and felt that the approval procedure had done its job.

Sadly, once ATLAS approves my analysis it does not go to Obama's desk. It instead goes to two of the three heads of management of the experiment: the Publication Committee chair, the Physics convenor and the Spokesperson. The first two read my analysis, and this is where it stalled a bit. I won't go into the details, but it was very confusing and frustrating. However, once those two "sign-off" on the analysis it is ready to go to the public and the long, arduous journey is over! The analysis now has the ATLAS stamp of approval.

I'm going to two conferences this August to present my work (and the work of others). Its quite exciting to know that for almost the first time I'll be showing plots that were made by me!

Something To Celebrate

This morning Kyle boarded a plane headed back to Berkeley, his seven week visit having passed entirely too quickly with decidedly too much work and not enough fun.  Despite the stress of collaboration approval deadlines for me, and the pressure to publish for him, it was great to share the CERN experience for a while.  We even managed to have a bit of fun on a trip to Sweden and on some weekend bike rides and hikes.

Overlooking Lac d'Anternne

Rather than wallow in loneliness on the evening of his departure, I thought I would finally share my first public physics result (!) and a meal that we had on the evening it became official.

While most theses in high energy physics are quests to understand one-in-a-million type interactions,  my thesis concerns relatively ordinary proton-proton collisions.   In these ho-hum interactions the protons interact a little bit, but not enough to produce the fireworks we are accustomed to seeing in the pretty pictures the experiments put out for PR purposes.

A W boson decaying to electron and neutrino: total propaganda

In the events I'm interested in the protons do not exchange quantum numbers, they merely jostle each other without combining to form new particles.  The jostling, however, does impart enough energy to one or both of the protons so that it disintegrates into many low energy particles.  The characteristic signature of these events is activity near the beams, but not a lot of activity perpendicular to the beams.  In particular I'm selecting events which have activity on only one side of the detector.  This requirement isolates these jostling type events so that we can begin to understand them better.  

A plot of the ratio of the number of events with activity on only one side of the detector to events with activity on either as a function of the ratio of jostling-type interactions.

These events are interesting to understand because they make up a non trivial component of the total proton proton interaction rate, but are hard to model theoretically.  They are also distantly related to what I think is the coolest measurement the LHC can make, which is the subject of another post.  Eventually, once I complete the analysis, I hope theorists can use the my measurement to understand these events better.  

In a latter post I'll go over what it takes for a result to become public (i.e. become collaboration approved), but for now it suffices to say, its nearly as arduous as doing the analysis itself.  When it was all said and done, Kyle and I had a little celebration at home, with a nice rosé de gamay, the summer speciality of this region, and the goat cheese and roasted tomato tart you see below.

Nothing beats roasted tomatoes

It doesn't really qualify as an 'original' recipe, rather it's a riff on this yogurt crust tarte fine at Chocolate & Zucchini.  I made the same crust she specifies, although I didn't have sesame seeds so I couldn't roll those into the crust.  I used goat cheese and milk for the spread and flavored it with chopped parsley, basil, lemon zest, salt and a tiny bit of red pepper.  Tomatoes were roasted the night before so it was relatively easy to put together!

 The next day I made a ghetto pesto by chopping everything by hand and topped the leftover crust with it, roasted mushrooms and the last of the tomatoes. Yum!  

My Return is Imminent

The first phase of my analysis is almost public.  It got caught up in a bit of politicking (what HEP analysis doesn't?) but hopefully within a day or two it will fully approved and I will be able to post some of the plots here!  I'll explain the process by which the experiment endorses an analysis when I post them, but it suffices to say that it is a slow, complicated, painful process.  Now that it is nearly over, I'll have some more time for blogging, which I'm really looking forward to.

I've mostly been cooking pasta when I have the time, but tonight it was so hot I made hummus from a recipe posted by David Lebovitz, which hit the spot!  Mine was rustic, as I have no blender or other electrified means of blending ingredients so I used a potato masher instead.  Still, with a salad and some freshly made (not by me) pita bread, it was a perfect summer dinner.