Saket Vora

Popovers! Just the name of them made me interested, and I tried them out for the first time on Sunday. Just a simple thin batter of milk, eggs, and flour, combined with hot fat (butter, in this case, instead of the more traditional beef fat) in a pan, and the result is quite transformative!

Preheat an oven to 425F with an empty muffin pan or ramekins inside. Whisk 8 oz of milk and 2 large eggs until smooth, then whisk in 4 oz of flour (just shy of a cup) and a teaspoon of salt. After it’s integrated, let it sit for half an hour. After you’ve waited the half hour, melt some butter (recipe called for half a stick of butter, but I used maybe 1/4th….your call) and have it ready. Take the pan/ramekins out of the oven, pour in the melted butter equally. Then ladle in the battery equally into the cups. It’ll already be sizzling. Bake for 10 minutes @ 425F, then lower temp to 375F and finish it for another 20 to 30 minutes. I think if you’re using ramekins, the diameter of the popover is larger so it’ll need closer to 30 minutes to finish cooking all the way. If you have a muffin pan or a real popover pan, maybe it’s closer to 20 minutes. The best part is when you open the oven and see them bloom! Take them out of the oven and serve immediately, they’ll start to deflate.

They are delicious…airy, buttery, rich. Mmmmm.

Red peppers were on sale for 50 cents each, so I bought some then roasted them in the grill until the skins were blackened. Immediately seal them in a ziploc bag to let them steam, then after a while you can just rub off the charred skin. I put them in an omelette along with the fresh popovers for a Sunday morning brunch!

A couple of weeks ago I received something unexpected in the mail – a check for $853 from Veer Labs, the entity my friend Naman had setup a few years ago to organize our efforts working on WaterPLUS, the UV-LED water purification idea. The team had done well in several social entrepreneurship-related business plan competitions and grant and the money was used to do research with the idea and fund prototypes. Bottomline though, the enabling technology (the UV-LEDs) were just not reaching scale (and thus low cost) fast enough. So the it seems that the money the group collected was sent back to all the folks involved.

I wasn’t budgeting with this money at all, it came out of the blue. Of course, there is this expensive lens I’ve been eyeing recently but that didn’t seem right considering the spirit that the money was ‘earned’. So I decided to reinvest it back to organizations related to international health, as well as other efforts that I support.

• $300 to Nyaya Health, a health organizing in Nepal that incorporates radical transparency into their operations (thanks Naman for the recommendation)
• $200 to Doctors Without Borders
• $100 to Park Alumni Society
• $50 to the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NC State (just the beginning)
• $100 to the Stanford School of Engineering (fulfilling a longstanding pledge I made)
• $75 to WNYC’s Radiolab program
• $25 to WBEZ Chicago, the NPR station that produces Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! and This American Life

I’m really lucky and fortunate to be where I am, and this is just a tiny, tiny, bit of what I can do to give back and help others out.

It’s almost TGIF, whew! It’s been quite a busy past couple of weeks. I was double loaded at work last week but that’s changed now. It’s been good though, meeting more people in cross functional teams and learning a lot from Leland. I’m really lucky to have mentors who have seen so much in this field.

Last Friday, Jordan came in town for a conference. Best of all, a fellow former intern — Ian, the original “super intern” — was here too. He and Jordan were co-ops in Apple iPod at the same time back in 2008, and Ian and I overlapped by a week. I actually was filling in his extremely large shoes, took over clickwheel validation for the Nano from him. Sean was also interning at Apple. Man, what an epic year. Ian is out here in the Bay Area for the next six months or so, he just has a class and a thesis to write at MIT and then he’s done with his Master’s in EE. Super smart, passionate guy. And really, really funny too. And when you put him and Jordan together, oh boy. I haven’t laughed this much in the past few months. On Friday night Sean, 4G Gregg and I met up with Jordan and Ian for a long dinner, then hit up this old bowling alley behind the Apple campus which was one of their old haunt three years ago.

On Saturday, I headed down to Menlo Park (where Ian is staying, not two miles from where I used to live in Menlo Park) and the three of us got dinner on University Avenue before picking Sean up and heading to HP Pavilion in San Jose. Three colleagues of mine — Sam, Julien, and Sheilah — play in an amateur ice hockey league. One game of their season actually takes place in the same arena that the San Jose Sharks play in. So we watched the Sharks play the Minnesota Wild, then the three of them took the ice after the game while the rest of us cheered (and heckled) them on.

The Sharks won their game, and Sam, Julien, and Sheilah also won their game. The three of them were on the same line too. Julien scored a goal late in the first, and then Sam got one in the 2nd. It reminded me of the time I used to go with Frieder to watch the Lund Giants amateur hockey team play at Ishallen in Lund. For like $5 you could be right up to the glass enjoying a game.

On Sunday we hosted Sunday night dinner. Ian came up and brought along these delicious stuffed mushrooms, and a few Flipfolks (i.e., colleagues of Troy’s at Flipboard. see what I did there?) came too. There was Tori and Tony (who, along with Troy, make for an amusing triplet of names), and Tori’s friend Vanessa. Tony was wrapping up his first week in the Bay Area — he just moved from Portland and started at Flipboard working on the front-end with Troy. It sounds like Tori is balancing back-end and front-end stuff, and Vanessa (hailing from Deutschland) is studying film & broadcast production at San Francisco State University. Quite an eclectic group of people, it was a lot of fun.

And finally, spring concert season is taking shape! So far I’ve picked up tickets to Geographer on February 23rd, Warpaint on March 16th, Freelance Whales on April 14th, and Delorean on April 14th. Yeah, both playing on the same day. Looks like Troy, Steve, and I are gonna shoot for the double header! Two Door Cinema Club is also playing on that day (it’s right around the Coachella dates). I’m also looking at Royksopp on March 28th, and possibly Cut Copy on April 16th. Any other shows I should catch?

Been working ~15 hour days this week, except for one evening doing trivia night at a bar with friends.

My good friend Dustin, who has popped up here many times over the past year, is currently traveling across New Zealand on a touring bicycle. He started in the beginning of December, and has made remarkable progress so far. He’ll be returning stateside in about a month, to start full-time with our iPod hardware team at Apple.

I seriously encourage you to spend a few minutes over at his travel blog — Loaded Tour — to see some of the incredible photos of his journey. Check out this one in particular and just scroll down. Your jealously level will very likely start to rise dramatically.

I headed back to North Carolina for the week from Christmas through New Year’s Day. It’s been an annual trip for me, especially because the shared birthday of my sisters and I falls on December 28th, and now that the three of us are outside the nest, it’s the one time of year that we’re all guaranteed to be home for our parents. It was a wonderful trip — got to spend a lot of time with my friends too. I arrived on Christmas morning, and later that afternoon we opened a few gifts. I’ve been terrible with gifts lately. I’m more of the kind that gives gifts when I see the right thing, but I need to make more of an effort (seriously). My family was lovely though — Sapana got me Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman. It’s a cookbook that delves into the fundamentals of cooking (especially baking), trying to impart an practical understanding of how changing the amount and composition of flour, liquid, egg, and fat can transform into different things. Sachi got me a kitchen apron with the words “The spice must flow” emblazoned across the front — a reference to the most famous quote from my favorite book, Dune. So awesome.

Speaking of cooking….Sachi made some amazing French beignets (ala Cafe du Monde in New Orleans), and Mom made her homemade butternut squash ravioli with brown butter sauce, walnuts, and cranberries. Delicious!

This break, the family brought out dozens of boxes of old family photos stretching back 30+ years (that weren’t in albums already), and we set to work. We selected about three hundred photos from 3,000+, and I scanned them all into the computer. Still remaining: dozens of old VHS tapes that we need to digitize before it’s too late!

Woke up on the morning of the 26th to find 8 inches of snow on the ground! Definitely wasn’t expecting this! It was beautiful outside, and the main roads were paved so it didn’t impact much. Snow like this is rare for North Carolina, even at this time of year.

One evening we got a crew together — three of us, Pavak, Naman, Mike, Dale — and headed downtown and met up with Greg and Kelly for dinner at a new Asian restaurant near campus, followed by drinks at Foundation where Jordan joined us. On the 28th we were back in Raleigh at a sports bar for the NC State vs West Virginia football game. I even got Sapana to commit treason and wear an NC State hoodie. Great game and a nice crowd (we won!), then afterward we went to Big Boss Brewery. They have their own line of craft beers brewed locally, and they’ve got a World War II aircraft theme going on. I can see why my friends like this place a lot.

One afternoon Mom got us all in our Indian attire for some portrait shots outside. My cousin Anup is getting married this fall, and it’s apparently never too early to start preparing the wardrobe! I think they turned out rather well.

On New Year’s Eve, the family went to Market, a new locavore restaurant near downtown Raleigh, and were joined by Greg, Kelly, Greg’s brother Mark who was in town visiting, and Ben. Jordan O’Mara joined too, and even a surprise guest — Peyton! I lived with Peyton my senior year of undergrad, and he visits the Bay Area at least once a year to go climbing in Yosemite.

These are the best parts for me coming back to NC. I’ve known these guys for 7+ years now. We headed back home and as midnight approached friends came over too. Naman, Pavak, Mike, Dale, Nader (who I hadn’t seen in a long long time). Megha came, a classmate from high school is in Chicago with Sapana now, and Naman rescued his friend Anubha from a dinner party. Anubha is from Chapel Hill but is in med school at Stanford now.

Couldn’t ask for more. Friends, family, and a new year starting. Let’s make 2011 a special one.

In my effort to eat healthier and lose weight (read: work off the consequences of eating all the glorious food from winter break), I was looking for a healthy meal tonight and spotted a can of garbanzo beans in the pantry. I always keep a couple of cans around, usually for chana masala. Why not hummus? They sell those small tubs of hummus at the grocery store for like $3.50, right?

I discovered it was embarrassingly easy to make. As in, why haven’t I been doing this for years? A big part of the reason it was so simple was because of the handy food processor attachment to my immersion blender.

• drain/rinse 1 can of garbanzo beans and put into the food processor. add:
• juice of one lemon
• spices to taste: I used cumin, garlic powder (I was lazy, didn’t have minced garlic), paprika, salt and pepper.
• a couple of spoonfuls of water for smoothening the texture
• a glug of olive oil (you can just forgo this too for a healthier choice)
• optional: a few dashes of your favorite hot sauce (I used Cholula)

Blend, stir, blend until the consistency is to your liking. If it looks too dry, add another spoonful of water. Adjust spices as necessary.

Boom. This is enough hummus for two people, easily. I thought I’d compensate for no tahini sauce by adding some sesame seed oil, but it’s just too strong, don’t bother. Tastes great without it. What’s awesome is the flexibility. Throw in some olives. Red peppers. Jalapenos. Dollop in a few spoonfuls of plain yogurt instead of water for a lighter blend. Or go more authentic with more olive oil.

If you keep it simple and have an easy-to-use food processor, you could seriously make fresh, healthy hummus for two in like 2 minutes and ~$1.20 worth of stuff. Amazing.