Chai Squares

I saw this typo for Chi Square a while back and thought it’d make a great recipe idea. Turns out I was right: these bars won a prize at my department’s World Statistics Day bake-off.

Start with Mark Bittman’s blondie recipe (copied/adapted from here), and add some of the spices that go into chai tea.

8 tablespoons (1 stick, 4 ounces or 113 grams) butter, melted
1 cup (218 grams or 7 3/4 ounces for light; 238 grams or 8 3/8 ounces for dark) brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch salt
1 cup (4 3/8 ounces or 125 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon cardamom
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
scant 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter an 8×8 pan, or line the pan with aluminum foil and grease the foil.
Mix melted butter with brown sugar. Beat until smooth. Beat in egg and vanilla.
Combine salt, flour, and spices. Gently stir flour mixture into butter mixture.
Pour into prepared pan. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until barely set in the middle. Cool on rack before cutting them.

Enjoy!

Hot Pot recipe, and stages of learning

I use Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything all the time, and I can really identify with his “four stages of learning how to teach yourself to cook”:

First, you slavishly follow recipes; this is useful.

In stage two, you synthesize some of the recipes you’ve learned. […] You learn your preferences. You might, if you’re dedicated, consult two, three, four cookbooks before you tackle anything.

The third stage incorporates what you’ve learned with the preferences you’ve developed, what’s become your repertoire, your style, and leads you to search out new things. […] This is the stage at which many people bring cookbooks to bed, looking for links and inspiration; they don’t follow recipes quite as much, but sometimes begin to pull ideas from a variety of sources and simply start cooking.

Stage four is that of the mature cook, a person who consults cookbooks for fun or novelty but for the most part has both a fully developed repertoire and — far, far more importantly — the ability to start cooking with only an idea of what the final dish will look like. There’s a pantry, there’s a refrigerator, and there is a mind capable of combining ingredients from both to Make Dinner.

These phases seem to apply in other areas as well. Consider foreign languages: first, you parrot your phrasebook word-for-word. Next, you learn to plug in new words or conjugations and combine pieces of several phrases. Third, you’ve started to grasp the grammar and the structure of the language; you have enough vocabulary to get by in basic scenarios, though you enjoy learning more. Fourth, you’ve reached fluency and “the ability to start [speaking] with only an idea of what the final [sentence] will look like.”

Anyhow, when you spend most of your time in stage 2 or possibly 3, it’s a pleasure to reach stage 4 sometimes — just coming home and BAM! making something tasty with whatever’s in the fridge + pantry. That happened recently with some shaved beef my fiancée and I found at Trader Joes, combined with memories of a delicious hot pot restaurant in the DC area. I didn’t have any mala spice available (too bad, as it does indeed cause a delicious “neurological confusion”), and I make no claims to authenticity, but it was a seriously tasty recipe-less culinary adventure. Recipe follows, although there are no proportions — everything is “to taste”!

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Tidbits of geography (and of cake)

Futility Closet has plenty of great trivia. I want to share some of my favorite geographical tidbits from there, since I have maps on the mind lately.

Most major landmasses are not antipodean to others. Digging a hole straight down and through the earth, US kids would hit open ocean; only Argentine or Chilean kids could dig a hole to China.
Parts of the continental US “can be reached by land only by traveling through Canada.”
There are lakes containing islands that themselves have lakes with their own islands… Google Sightseeing and Elbruz have more nested lake-island recursion examples.
Nested geographies can be administrative too: There is a Belgian town located inside the Netherlands, and this town also contains Dutch parcels inside its borders. This creates interesting issues with taxes, banking, or even which nation’s ambulance responds to an accident.

While we’re talking about shapes and areas, here’s a more mathematical-geometrical question: What’s the most efficient way to carve up a circle to fit inside a square of slightly-larger surface area?

Round peg into a square hole, er, that is, cake into pan

I baked a cake in a round 9″ pan, so the surface area is $\pi*r^2 = \pi*4.5^2 = 63.6 \text{ in}^2$ . I wanted to transport it in a pan with a lid, and I have such a 8″ square pan with surface area $8^2 = 64 \text{ in}^2$ . What’s the best way to fit it in, with the fewest cuts and least wasted scraps? (Well, not really wasted, I’ll eat them gladly 🙂 )

Share what you learn

Shawn Cornally always has good ideas about how to keep high school useful:
“I want my student to be able to produce something from this study that lingers instead of just rots on a hard drive, because, like church, school shouldn’t be about the building.”

That also reminds me: I should make a list of my favorite simple-but-useful cooking science tips. For example, after I learned just a bit about the science of gluten in flour, it made so much more sense why you knead bread so thoroughly but you only mix muffin batter “just until combined” (lumps okay).

Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking is an awesome resource for such things. I also just got Jeff Potter’s Cooking For Geeks this week so I’ll be checking that out too.