…but Trader Joe’s frozen Potato & Cheddar Perogi are utterly awful. I figured this out first and only time I made them, but TSB didn’t get the memo and left a box in my freezer one night when I offered to make her something else.

I broke a tooth this morning on my way into a meeting, and combined with my lack of time, money and food in the fridge this week, I decided that the pillowy soft perogi could be my dinner solution.

I boiled them, fried them in butter and smothered them in cheese I smuggled back from Vermont, but they were still horrible. I should have just skipped dinner.

To lighten my spirits, I’m going to use my new toys to make a fried egg out of mango juice and coconut milk. I’ll let you know how it turns out…

Not too shabby, huh?

I was just reminded that the art museum where I work is having a community open house, and that I am, of course, expected to be there all day, but it’s the same day as my Lunar New Year dinner party, which means I might have to reconsider what I am serving and I definitely need to plan preparations that starts this weekend, working on it every night so I will be ready by next Saturday.

I suppose this is the lifestyle to which I need to become accustomed, if I want to have a social life. For those of you that don’t know, as of this week, I am working three jobs: 40 hours a week at the art college, plus teaching another class there beyond full time, and I am the Visual Arts Educator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which involves teaching an after school printmaking class, among other responsibilities, like the open house.

I love the irony! Literally, as I finished writing that last paragraph, my boss walked into my office and asked if I could work this Saturday (don’t worry Ryan, it was during lunch. I’m not blogging on the job).

Before this weekend, I need to: choose recipes, clean my apartment, finalize my guest list, send invitations

Shrimp and pork potstickers
Crab Mangoon
Vietnamese spring rolls
Steamed BBQ duck buns
BBQ ribs

Noodles: glass, rice, egg
Broth: vegetable, chicken
Sauces: peanut, curry…
Veggies: snap peas, cucumber, beet, carrot, jicama, broccoli, pumpkin, tofu, cabbage, peppers, sprouts, carrot, spinach, mushrooms…
Seasoning: Sriracha, soy, hoisin, chili paste, rice vinegar, mirin, sesame oil…
Toppings: sesame seeds, scallion, lime wedges, cilantro, mint, peanuts…
Meat: chicken, beef…

Oranges
Wonton Cannolis filled with fruit, nuts, something creamy
Steamed lotus nut buns

Here’s what I have discovered since my first experiment:

• Carrot Juice requires less sodium alginate. I could have gone with ½ teaspoon per cup.

• Rather than pour water back and forth between bowls through a strainer, I added another cup of water to the bowl and set the strainer inside, so that once I had dripped in enough juice, I simply lifted the strainer and rinsed the pearls within.

• With a smaller tipped syringe, I can drain the “noodle” and then refill it with something else, potentially making a many-layered tube.

• You can make larger “ravioli” by pouring a big glob of juice in a little bowl and then pouring calcium water over it.

• The ravioli can be drained, inflated and resealed, making balloons of carrot juice jelly. They don’t stretch particularly well, but can be inflated at least to their original size. Yeah, I have no idea what practical purpose this could serve, but hell, I had fun figuring it out. I was like a 12 year-old kid with a chemistry set.

• Once the pearls gelled all the way through, they reminded me of Orbitz, a fad soft drink from the late 90s that had little gel balls suspended in it. I think that it may have been the same thing, but wikipedia says it contained gellan and a Perdue chemistry class page said it was xantham gum.

• Carrot Pearls mixed with mango juice and Veev makes for a cocktail that is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. I think that goes for Veev on it’s own as well.

I expected the process to be highly exacting and scientifical, but my first attempt at fake-it-‘til-you-make-it molecular gastronomy was spot on. Should I have hyphenated “spot-on”? It seems like the sentence already has too many little lines.

I mixed a cup of mango juice with a teaspoon of sodium alginate (not as scary as it sounds. It comes from seaweed… well, maybe that sounds scary too), turned on the heat and whisked the hell out of it. Once it started to boil, I let it go for a minute, strained it and dripped it into a bowl of water and calcium carbonate (it’s the main ingredient in Tums and a calcium supplement often added to soymilk). The result was a mound of shiny little pearls composed of a thin gummy layer surrounding a core of juice that popped when bitten into.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with my new creation. I think it’s time to make some funky cocktails.

Seeing the chemistry sets at Blue Bottle yesterday has inspired my first foray into molecular gastronomy. I was reading a blog about how hard it is to come by the chemicals needed to make carrot juice caviar, and it turns out that the writer’s mail-order supplier is only a couple blocks from my office, so I will be checking out Le Sanctuaire this weekend. Khymos seems to be a good starting point for some fun experiment ideas.

I’m hoping to host a Chinese New Year dinner party in a couple of weeks, so perhaps by then I will have devised something fun and strange to add to a couple of the dishes.