Monday, January 23, 2006

Dischi volanti e quantum computers

Tonight there wasn't too much left in our refrigerator.. mostly, some stuff that I bought for emergency cases. But in the end, what I made turned out really good, so I want to share it with you.
I called it 'Flying saucer' for how it looks like:

If you want to make it, you need to have some tortilla bases - in this case, I had a spinach tortilla that Crissy once suggested to me, and that you can find at Whole Foods. Purtroppo, non credo che questo tipo di tortilla si trovi in Italia.. non sono sicura se si trovano nemmeno le tortille normali.. boh?
Then, you need to have some cabbage (also an old one is fine), and some canned tuna. How much? Well, it depends on how many people want to eat it.. for four people, half of a small cabbage and two tuna cans will be fine.
Put some olive oil in a pan, fry one garlic clove, and add the finely cut cabbage, the tuna, salt, hot pepper if you like, some vinegar (I'd say three tablespoons for four people). Cover it and let it cook for half an hour. Taste it, adjust salt, and if you like, add some soy sauce and also, tonight I added some maple syrup. Let it cook for another half an hour, add pepper, and this part is done.
In the meanwhile, you will prepare the rice. This was quite easy for me, since Lucas's sister nicely gave us a steamer, which does it all by itself.. so, for the brown rice that I used, 70 minutes cooking were fine.
Then, since I still had some basil from the Thai dinner and I didn't want to throw it away, I decided to make some pesto to add on everything. If you don't know how to make pesto.. well, it's quite easy, and again, there are many possible variations depending on what you have in the fridge. The only necessary thing is basil :)
Tonight, I put the basil, some almonds, a garlic clove and some old and hard asiago cheese in the blender, chopped it finely, and added some olive oil and salt. The original recipe calls for pinenuts instead of almonds and romano cheese instead of Asiago. If you don't like garlic, you can do without. Pour the mixture in a bowl and cover with extra-virgin olive oil.
Ok, you're pretty much done now.. Heat up the tortilla for 30 sec in the microwave, and put the cabbage/tuna mixture on top, then the rice, then pour a little pesto sauce on top, and if you like, add some pieces of raw tomato..
The result was really delicious. You can eat it all wrapped like a burrito (like Lucas did) or with fork and knife (like I did...).

So why was there quantum computing in the title of this blog? Well, because during the dinner we actually talked a lot about nerdy things :) - from perturbation theory to quantum computing.. So, Lucas is skeptical that quantum computers will ever work.. More or less, he said, it would be too nice if they did, since so many difficult things could be easily solved - like the many-body problems that he's working on, meaning that he would be out of job :) :)

No comments: