Nice Evening Meal

Phew. Just finished dinner. It was a home cooked meal for once. Well, as home cooked as one can get when living in a guest house with limited cookware and spices, but nonetheless enjoyable and, at least for me, soothing. This week and next week will be stressful. My time here in Grenoble working with the Vivaudou Group is coming to a close and, as with all endeavors to achieve results, results are slow to appear, which is in contradiction with what I hoped to achieve here. Then again, I guess I couldn't really say how much work could reasonably be accomplished in seven weeks.

Cooking is nice because it provides time to reflect. In between chopping, sauteing, seasoning, and allowing each of the flavors to meld, the day's pace slows down and you can spend more time processing and assessing things you couldn't throughout the day. This evening was one of those cases. Lucky for me that I had a special treat. Anne brought me a bag filled with fruits (fruits, French word) and vegetables (legumes, French word) from her garden. =) I've a picture of the gifts below. The tomatoes were awesome. They had a sweet tinge to them and lacked the acid notes found in grocery market tomatoes. These, were real tomatoes ripened on the vine. Along with the tomatoes (tomates), there were zucchini (courgent) and squash. With the tomatoes I made a tomato salad with pieces of herb cheese. The zucchini was sauted in butter, along with some beets I had in the fridge. In addition, I made my own rendition of a croque monsieur by pan frying buttered bread with pieces of Gruyere cheese and ham in between each piece of bread and finally finished the meal with an apple and some bread and cheese. Yum.

Looking at it, I've at least come to better understand how to perform the basics of patch clamping and have been introduced to other techniques, like two electrode voltage clamp (TEVC) and droplet-interface bilayers (DIBs). Each time, I learn a bit more about the oocyte system I'm using, whether it be methods to stabilize membranes which show no promise and others which have shown hints of promise but require further investigation. Little by little, we'll tease out an answer, but in a short time, probably not. That's science. It's funny though, when you observe a different outcome you want to investigate it more and more and in doing so you've come to better understand your system of study. Since many of these experiments are new to both our groups, we are doing just that, and at the same time trying to provide a biological or chemical explanation for the outcome we see. That's why it's sometimes good to have a nice evening meal as it provides time to reflect on the days events, consolidate and organize the various attempts made and their respective results, provide an explanation or possible explanations for your results, and construct future experiments to support or disprove your hypotheses. Each takes time and why not spend some time thinking over some nice food.

Les legumes et fruits du jardin d'Anne.

Le diner