The Barry Table

It's about food, sure, but just like Barry tables across Chicago and around the country, this is also a place to share ideas, make plans for family reunions and boast about recent accomplishments, food-related or not.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Autonomous Mobility Chefs

We've been having long nights (and days) in the lab lately and those hours just aren't sustainable without eating well. Last night when hungry and cranky Steven said "Tomorrow let's make soup". On his way to school today he stopped at the Chinese grocery store and picked up some ingredients. I grabbed a box of vegetable broth from my cupboard.



Steven showed up with a wonderful array of ingredients. Spongy tofu, firm tofu, Napa Cabbage, Bokchoy, Enoki mushrooms. He even found some Chinese barbeque sauce that was 素食 [sù shí], which like 素菜 [sù cài], means vegetarian.

Finally the collection of Indian spices from Keyur and Krunel helped add a bit of spice to an already flavorful soup. Our only regret is not doing this sooner.

Now I think I'll take after my father and rest my head on the bench for a bit before working on Stochastic Processes some more.

4 comments:

Brian and Sheila said...

I love soup.

Pam Barry said...

That soup does sound tasty. Is spongy tofu the same a dried tofu?

Kevin said...

Is spongy tofu the same a dried tofu?

I don't think so.

This tofu was like what you get in a stir fry from a Chinese restaurants (Well China Wok on Livernois at least). It's not very dense and if you bite a cube in half you can see a bunch of air pockets inside. But the skin is free of holes.

The English on the package said "Soft Bean Cakes" whereas the firm tofu said "Spicy Firm Bean Cakes"

Patrick Barry said...

That soup does sound delicious, though I was wondering if a bunch of hungry robot builders and programmers might not need to add some rice noodles to the next batch.

Speaking of robots, I saw the monstrous Cloos welding robots that S&C is using for Vista today. They have three or four of them and each welding booth with its towering articulated arm is the size of a one-car garage, I would say. Very impressive. And the way they talked about the robots during the tour, it sounded like they were working, though Kate Uttich would probably know more about whether they've got them truly debugged.

Speaking of which, how's Thor Pro coming along?