• 1 large can brooks (or kunners) chili beans
• 1 large can tomato sauce
• 2 cans dark red kidney beans (add one for more beans)
• 1 can (15 oz) diced tomatoes
• 1 lb hamburger
• onions
• chili powder
• tobasco sauce
• other spices to taste

Brown hamburger, and onions.  Combine all ingredients in CrockPot and cook on low for 6-8 hours.

Ingredients (Sweet potatoes):

• 3 cups mashed sweet potatoes (~1 large 2lb 8oz can ‘Bruce’s Yams’)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk
• 1/3 stick butter

Ingredients (Topping):

• 1 cup ground corn flakes (or frosted flakes)
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• 3/4 stick butter
• 1 cup brown sugar

Directions:

1. Mash sweet potatoes together with vanilla, eggs, sweetened condensed milk, and butter (small bits of unmelted butter will be present after mashing)
2. In a separate bowl, combine topping butter with ground corn flakes, chopped walnuts, and brown sugar (make sure mixture is mostly uniform, no large chunks of butter should remain)
3. Grease baking dish
4. Spread mashed sweet potato mixture into dish
5. Spread topping mixture over sweet potatoes evenly
6. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes

The sweetness of this dish almost puts it in the desert category.  It’s very tasty–a wonderful thanksgiving companion to more savory dishes.

• 1 box family size brownie mix
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 3 tbsp. water
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup chocolate chips (or peanut butter chips or butterscotch chips)
• 1/2 of a jar of peanut butter (~16 oz)

Directions:

1. Combine brownie mix, flour, vegetable oil, water, eggs, and chocolate chips
2. Heat peanut butter in a small bowl for 30-60 seconds (until it can be poured out of the bowl)
3. Thoroughly mix 3/4 of the peanut butter in with brownie mix
4. Gently fold remaining 1/4 of peanut butter into mix (don’t mix completely, leave peanut butter visible)
5. Spoon dollops of mix onto cookie sheets (non-stick foil preferred), note cookies don’t spread out much during baking
6. Bake at 350 degrees for 5-10 minutes, depending on consistency of mix

Be careful to watch the cookies as they bake so you avoid burning the bottoms.  Don’t let them cook until they look like they are done.  Taking them out when they still look uncooked (but slightly crusted on the top) is fine.  The cookies will sit up and harden when cooling.  They are a bit different from traditional cookies as they are based on brownie mix.

Ingredients:

• 1 package rolled up croissant pastry dough
• 1 can fruit filling (apple, cherry, blueberry, etc.)
• Melted butter
• Large granule sugar

Directions:

1. Roll out croissant dough triangles
2. At the large end of the triangle, put a small amount of filling
3. Roll dough with filling up, starting from large end of the triangle
4. Brush butter over top of turnover
5. Sprinkle sugar over top of turnovers
6. Bake at 350 degrees for ~20 mins, or until pasty dough is golden brown

We’ve found that adding 5-6 cherries (with very little cherry sauce) is the right amount of filling.  Also, about 2-3 apple slices seems to work well.  Also, brushing the butter over top of the turnovers helps to brown the dough a bit.  The sugar makes them a bit sweeter and look pretty.  Also, as is probably true with most pastries, it’s better to let them cool on a cooling rack so the bottoms don’t get soggy (see pictures).

• Raw peppers (4-5): Red, orange, and yellow are best (green peppers aren’t as tasty)
• 1 cup white minute rice
• 1 pound hamburger
• 1 large can tomato sauce (29 oz)
• 1 small can diced tomatoes (14.5 oz)
• Salt / pepper / other seasonings to taste
• Shredded cheese (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Brown hamburger, drain
3. Cook white rice
4. Clean peppers, cut in half long way
5. Grease baking dish(es)
6. Mix rice and hamburger together
7. Mix in enough tomato sauce to coat rice and beef mixture
8. Mix in 1/4 can of diced tomatoes
9. Place halved peppers in baking dish(es)
10. Stuff halved peppers with rice/hamburger/tomato mixture
11. Cover peppers with remainder of tomato sauce and diced tomatoes
12. Bake in oven at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes or until peppers are cooked to desired crunchiness
13. Top with cheese before or after baking (if desired)

Ingredients:

• 1 (1 ounce) package taco seasoning mix
• 1 (16 ounce) can refried beans
• 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
• 1 (16 ounce) container sour cream
• 1 (16 ounce) jar salsa
• 1 large tomato, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
• 1 bunch chopped green onions
• 1 small head iceberg lettuce, shredded
• 1 (6 ounce) can sliced black olives, drained
• 2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese

Directions:

1. In a medium bowl, blend the taco seasoning mix and refried beans. Spread the mixture onto a large serving platter.
2. Mix the sour cream and cream cheese in a medium bowl. Spread over the refried beans.
3. Top the layers with salsa. Place a layer of tomato, green bell pepper, green onions and lettuce over the salsa, and top with Cheddar cheese. Garnish with black olives.

Source: Allrecipes.com

Surprisingly, making a roll that tastes good was quite easy.  Not surprisingly, making a roll that looked good was very hard.  I can definitely understand why people can study sushi making their whole lives and never master the art.  There are so many interesting tastes, ingredients, and techniques to explore–the variations are so numerous!  I’m definitely going to have to make more of this type of cuisine in the future.

Following the sushi making/eating and beer drinking, we headed out (around 10pm) to play ‘bocce ball’ around Evan’s apartment complex.  I put it in quotes because, despite knowing the exact rules of the real game, I doubt we were actually following them at all.  Mostly we just made up a game using the ceramic balls from the bocce ball set Evan had purchased a few days before.  It reminded me of when I was much younger and we would make up games on our own and play for hours.  Apparently it takes late nights, sushi, and beer to do this now.  Regardless, it was lots of fun!

After we finished up signing all of the apartment paperwork we had about 30 mins to kill.  We stopped by Caffe Sole for a coffee and snack.  This may be the place I hang out if/when I’m not at the lab working.

We met with John around 11.  We chatted for a bit, got a brief tour of the building, found our future (though hopefully too needed) cubes, saw some big (though in the grand scheme of things not that big) machines that they use to run some simulations on, and had a (free!) lunch.  I really like the atmosphere (no pun intended!) there, it is very open, everyone is friendly and seems very approachable, and I immediately felt included and a part of the lab.  After lunch we chatted with most of the CS researchers there.  Every time I meet a new person or group of people that work in my field (or something close) I always seem to get along instantly with them.  I suppose it is the thinking alike thing that causes this…  Regardless, everyone seemed really nice, smart, and will be great to work with.

After another hour drive back, I met briefly with Michelle about the status of IEGen and her progress with the related full space tiling work.  Things are going well and I may actually be able to run some experiments soon!

Finally, we ended the day at Jim’s Wings on Elizabeth St, very close to Adam’s (soon to be) old apartment.  Hot wings go great with a few pints of beer.  We also discovered a small local ice cream shop where we enjoyed some tasty treats before I headed home on my bike.

I’m tired, it’s time for bed.

Saturday Kate and I made a trip down to Boulder to check out potential apartments and visit the NCAR Mesa campus.  What we learned was that this summer is going to be sweet!  Once we got to boulder, we headed up the mesa that the campus is located on.  We noticed a few things:

1. The building’s architecture is quite unique, and looks really cool.
2. The campus is essentially on the top of a hill in the middle of a natural area.
3. The views from the top (and from within the building) are really great.

It turns out that the NCAR Mesa lab is at the top of a mesa (who would have thought!), is the trailhead for some really nice trails, and is utilized quite heavily on the weekend by hikers.

After looking around quickly, we headed back down the hill to start apartment hunting.  We had done some looking around on Craig’s list and found a few potential places, but one was clearly the best fit for us.  Unfortunately at this point we hadn’t heard from the girl that was sub-leasing the place, so we were somewhat stuck.  To pass some time waiting for contact from her, we looked around for potential places using the more analog drive-your-car-around-neighborhoods-and-see-what-you-can-find method.  This was much more difficult than we’d thought.  Not much came from this.  We did, however, find the location of our potential apartment and realized we had to have it.

Across from the place we were hoping for we discovered a treasure-trove of stores and shopping options.  This includes a Chase bank, Papa Murphys take and bake pizza, King Soopers (for all of our shopping needs), a backpacking store and many more.  Best of all, the Mountain Sun brewery is also in this shopping center.  We ate lunch at Mountain Sun, made contact with the Liz (the girl sub-leasing the apartment we wanted), then looked for some more stores to shop at while we waited to meet with her.  We found a shoe store that was moving and had most of their remaining inventory at 50% off.  I found a nice pair of Asics running shoes for $50 rather than $100.  Good find!

After shoe shopping it was time to meet with Liz and checkout the apartment.  We really only need a small place, which is good because the place Liz has is only a one bedroom, but it’s a decent price, in a perfect location (across from the afore mentioned shopping-plaza-of-amazingness), and the dates fit our schedule.  We basically said we’d take it and that was that.

With apartment hunting all but taken care of, we headed back up the hill to do a little hiking.  There is a ‘weather trail’ that starts right outside of the office that leads to some other really nice trails further down.  Kate and I decided to head out and see what we could find.  We discovered some really nice views and got even more excited that we’d be working here for 10 weeks this summer.    The hike produced a few nice pictures, taken from my phone:

NCAR Mesa Lab from behind, notice the robot faces (4 of them!):

NCAR Architecture from the back looking East

My favorite, looking up a sun speckled trail:

Up the canyon trail

Finally, Sunday arrived.  We headed down to Denver and the Buell Theatre to see the final showing of Spamalot!, the monty python broadway production.  It was quite nice, full of laughs and monty-python-ish plot lines.  My only complaint was that they forced too many of the well known jokes from Holy Grail.  I found myself laughing more at the new material rather than the expected suff.  Nevertheless, it was a good show and we were both quite glad we made it.  After the show we stopped by Ling and Louie’s for dinner and had Wango Mango Chicken and jewled beef:

Wango Mango Chicken and Jewled Beef at Ling and Louie's

Overall, it was a great few days.  A good call before the work-intense week of this week.  Only 1.5 weeks left before SiParCS starts and I still have lots to do on IEGen and the journal paper…

Here is a taste of some of the recipies we’ve based our meals/snacks on lately:

• Southwestern pasta salad
• Sweet potato crisps
• Chicken burritos
• Mexican Manicotti
• Cilantro lime salsa
• Chicken veggie southwestern wraps
• Fruit smoothies

We’ve also got some great ideas for the coming days/weeks.

I hope to develop a recipe database soon.  This will allow each of the above listed items to be described in detail, including name, ingredients, preparation details, comments for making it next time, etc.  All this will be easily searchable for easy recall later.  I can then link to the recipe the night it gets made and comment on it in a blog post.  Now I just need to find the time to write the code for such an application…