Ivan's weblog

(Translated name: sliced Poblano peppers with cream)

This is one of my favorite Mexican dishes. I learned how to make them by myself out of despair.

• 8 Poblano peppers
• 2 white onions
• 1 pound Mexican sour cream
• 1 cube chicken broth
• Cooking oil

Peel the peppers. That’s the most complicated part, but I use this technique: put them in the toaster-oven until the skin “boils” and gets a bit toasted; then take them out of the oven and peel them. Open and rinse the peppers and remove the seeds. Cut the peppers into long, thin (1 cm) slices.

Slice the onions and sautee them in a pot. Add the chicken cube and peppers, stir for a few minutes and then add the cream. Let it simmer for a few more minutes stirring occasionally so that the cream gets impregnated with the peppers.

Serve the rajas con crema as tacos, tostadas, or quesadillas. Yields about six servings (depending on your definition of serving!).

Note: This rant is actually Fabiola’s idea, but I’m writing it down for the world.

When we watch Telemundo or Univisión, the Spanish-language cable channels, we notice that there are plenty of “public service” advertisements. Common themes include:

• Be nice to your neighbor
• Talk to your baby to help him develop his brain
• Be careful with pesticides
• Buckle up and use child car seats
• Leave dangerous substances out of reach of children
• Don’t smoke when you are pregnant

We can all agree that these are very useful messages. What is disturbing is that they are only shown in the Hispanic channels. This could be interpreted as implying that Hispanic people have less common sense or less education.

Oriana, a medical student from Colombia, is staying with us for a couple of weeks, while waiting for her apartment to become available. She contacted us because my email appears on the Yale Mexican Student Organization website. She is doing a residence in psychiatry in a New Haven hospital.

At the hospital, she came upon a patient, which I’ll refer to as José. He only spoke Spanish, and no one at the hospital could communicate with him without an interpreter until Oriana arrived. He was found in a nearby city, and he didn’t really know how he got there. He said that all of his close relatives were dead. Despite his problem with remembering recent events, he knew his name, the names of his parents, his hometown, and his school.

When Oriana asked us if we had any suggestions about how to track down someone in Mexico, the first thing that came to my mind was the web, of course. By searching through the Mexican white pages (available online), as well as various government websites such as SEP (Ministry of Education), INEGI (Population and Statistics), and SEPOMEX (Postal Service), we managed to find his parents, which were perfectly alive, and verify all the details. After a few phone calls Oriana could reconstruct part of José’s history and locate other relatives in the U.S. (all of them were alive, by the way). I hope all this will lead to him being reunited with his family. A series of coincidences led Oriana here, and the Web helped save the day!

While browsing through a tag sale, we came upon two books from the Yale library. They were about African-American history or something like that. Luckily, they were not really selling them, but giving them away, so I took them home. A quick search in the library website confirmed their status as “lost", so I went and returned them to the library. The librarian on duty didn’t really seem to know what to do with them, but I trust they will make their way back into the system.

While flipping through the new edition of Essentials of Computational Chemistry, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my article about semiempirical molecular orbital calculations of halogen-containing molecules is mentioned at the end of the relevant chapter (section 5.7.5).

This is a very worthy contender for the silly news section: Man Arrested for Using $2 Bills at Best Buy

Thanks to Anastassia, an incoming postdoc in our lab, now I know how to transliterate “Tubert” to the Cyrillic alphabet: “туберт". Today I found 71 results in Google. So there might be some Tuberts in Russia, but I’d have to decipher the pages first…

See this Checkerboard Optical Illusion. The squares labeled A and B are the exact same shade of gray. Everyone who sees it says “there’s no way in hell!”

Very interesting short films ;-)