Restaurants – Higher Thinking with Max Marks

So Dell called me today to ask if I’d gotten my package again and I explained to them that I didn’t trust them with my property, and that “Claws” is not only not my name, but to my knowledge it isn’t even a proper name at all. They said they’d call me back because I was obviously not satisfied with their service. I don’t know what they plan to do but at this point I’d just be happy to never hear from them again.

Again, as I’m typing this, there’s bread rising in the kitchen. Unfortunately, I may have made a mistake this time. I made the same bread with fried onions and asiago cheese, but this time I fried the onions with turmeric powder as well as cumin seed to give the dough a kind of curry flavor. It sounded like a good idea, but I just remembered that turmeric is supposed to have antibacterial properties, so it could kill the yeast and ruin the whole dough. I’ll have to remember to look up something about that. If I succeed, I’m dubbing this “Curry Cheese Bread”. That probably sounds really gross to a lot of people, but I have high hopes for it.

I got this idea when I went to Some Kinda Pasta for dinner today with Sam. I’m sure most people at UBC know Some Kinda Pasta by now, but if you haven’t, you really ought to. They’re highly specialized so they mostly just make pasta and sauces, but their specialization means they have really high quality. My favorite dish there, which I pretty much order every time I go there, is a curry chicken sauce, which is one of the best pasta sauces I’ve ever had. The flavor is just bold enough to make up for how bland pasta tends to be, and it doesn’t resort to use of the tomato, which in my opinion is the most horrid, barbaric ingredient ever to poison the culinary world. Tomatoes are so bloody acidic that when you eat anything made with them, you can’t taste a thing but the acidity of the tomato, and the actual tomato flavor masks everything else. When you put tomatoes in something, you’re just eating tomatoes, and in turn is a destructive force in any kitchen. You can’t enjoy anything that’s salty when you’re eating something made with tomatoes.

The curry chicken sauce at Some Kinda Pasta, however, gives a very nice salty and bitter taste with a sort of zesty spice to it that complements pasta very well. And for everyone who gasps at my harsh critique of the tomato, I’ve heard from those that enjoy tomatoes that the marinara sauce at Some Kinda Pasta is quite good too. Not that I’ll ever try it.

Anyway, the idea that a curry sauce interacts so well with unleavened dough led me to wonder if it would work well in bread. I’m starting small with turmeric and cumin, but if this works there are more possibilities.

I really did miss having a kitchen.

I hate imaginary numbers. They ruined math for me forever.

I mean, honestly. It’s not that I hate math. I love math. The logic of all of it is just so beautiful. I remember when I was first taught trigonometry, how astounding it was to me that you could calculate the length of a triangles other sides if you knew their angles even if they were composed of line segments longer than the entire planet’s circumference. When I was first taught that, it put a smile on my face all day. Sure, I hated all the memorization and formulae, but it was almost worth it when you arrived at a conclusion and knew it couldn’t be any different. Then imaginary numbers came along, and my entire world collapsed.

It was just like “Hey, you know all that stuff we told you to memorize and take to heart because we insisted that it would be easier than doing all the trial-and-error research that the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians did? Well now that stuff doesn’t work out for us, so here’s a number that doesn’t really exist. Use it.”

And the gods of math did weep, for yet another eleventh grader had slipped through the perfectly symmetrical cracks of their divine fingers.

I just wrote all that because I had no idea how to write an appropriate introduction. Introductions are just always awkward, whether they’re in speech or writing, because you always have to pretend you have both something interesting to say as well as a reason for saying it, when often you have neither, and all you really have is a desire to get a conversation going.

In any case, I’m Max Marks. Some of you might remember me from last year’s first year blog squad, which is why I now carry the title of second year blog squad. Isn’t the passage of time an amazing thing? I guess a lot has happened last year, though I didn’t do a very good job of documenting it. I’ll try to correct that a bit more this year.

If you read the admittedly better blogging of my lovely ladyfriend, Samantha, you already know I was originally going to room with her in Marine Drive’s tower 6, which required us to stay in subletted apartments for two weeks before MD6 actually opened, but as a result of UBC housing being really awesome we’re now staying in Fairview starting tomorrow morning. This is like a dream come true for the both of us. My only real complaint is one of our landlords doesn’t seem to want to give us our deposit back because we canceled before we moved in.

There weren’t exactly a lot of events leading up to this, but we had more than a bit of time to kill, as flights to Vancouver from Toronto were pretty hard to get (I’ll let you come up with your own joke about Vancouver being better than Toronto if this information provokes one to you) so my dad had to book a flight arriving on the 23rd.

There’s not a whole lot to do in Vancouver when you’re a broke college student with a week before studies, especially since the apartment we’re staying in has limited access to both television and internet, to the point that I’m writing this in a bagel shop. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do at all. For example, yesterday I went to get the rest of my books before the September 1st rush cleared them all out. It was at this point that I made an amazing discovery: The UBC bookstore hates philosophy students!

Seriously, for every book I went to get, it wasn’t on the shelf for the philosophy section. However, the books were in the store. There were dozens of them, in fact. They were just all given to the shelves for history and literature. Come to think of it, this could also just mean that there are a lot more philosophy students at UBC than literature and history students, but since pretending to be victimized is more entertaining, I’ll go with my previous statement.

I was also very surprised when me and Sam went for lunch at what I consider to be UBC’s best Japanese restaurant, Suga Sushi, to find that their owner, Ken Sugahara, was no longer the owner at all. I was flabbergasted to discover this. I mean, you can’t spell “Suga” without “Sugahara” A lot of you who frequent the University Village will remember Suga Sushi always had a banner above it announcing its “Grand Opening” which was apparently perpetually happening for upwards of three of four years. I always found that funny and charming. However, now the banner merely informs us that it serves both Japanese and Korean cuisine. Granted, that’s much more informative, not to mention consistent with reality, but I feel like I lost an old friend.

You leave town for four months and find out things have already changed. But I guess change is a good thing, so we shouldn’t complain about how fast it works.