First things first - the recipe for popovers you see below is from Alton Brown, and can be seen at foodnetwork.com. If you try to make them, though, do follow the directions religiously since it seems bread leavened by steam (as opposed to yeast, baking powder, etc) is really touchy stuff. I tried another Alton Brown recipe this week - Tres Leche Cake (no to be confused with the altogether different La Leche League Cake). I thought it was great but Jerome turned up his nose at it - his general philosophy is that perfectly good food can be ruined by adding liquid. He eats his cereal dry. Anyway, it was good. After attending the agronomy society meetings to man the deca booth, I looked at the cake and immediately thought of soil-water systems/water potential. I'll post some pictures so you'll know what I mean. No wonder Dad can switch seamlessly between food science and soil physics.

This week Mari and I started watching the newest season of "the Amazing Race". It's one of the 3 or so shows we actually put on the DVR to watch. For such a simplistic concept, it has proven to be a surprisingly durable format. If you haven't seen it, 11 or so teams of 2 people each travel around the world completing different legs of the race. They must follow the directions and complete tasks the show puts together. At the end of each show, the last team to check in gets eliminated, and the team that wins the last leg gets $1M. Anyway, the only reason I mention it is that I was pretty surprised to start watching this year and find that I know 2 people that are on the show. One is an engineer I worked with a little at my last company. The other is an investment banker that was a year ahead of me at school. They aren't on the same team - one I met in Philly, and the other in San Diego. All in all, a very strange coincidence. At least one of them was a casualty of the recent economic crisis, which explains why they have time to go running around the globe for a TV show.

I am enjoying the twitter streak for the Campbell family. I must admit that I didn't know what it was about before I started - I just thought I'd try it and see what happened. After doing it for a while, I still don't know why it works - it just does. Part of the reason I'm blogging this week, though, is to dispel rumors that microblogging is an acceptable substitute for good old fashioned regular blogging. That could never be true.