Why this blog? Part 3: Jamie's America

Initially, I was only going to write the ZINE article in the style of a blog, mostly because I am lazy and didn't want the stress of producing 500 words of cleverness and comprehension (almost all writing attempts are meet with mental blocks completely disproportionate to the gravity of the task). 

But whilst I was running my column* in the lab, my mind became flooded with ideas and by the end of the task I had secured this blogspot web address. Let's just say that the column took twice as long as normal and my final product was not as pure as previous attempts. Oops.

So here is the plan. Jamie's America is both a cookbook and a TV show running on Channel 4. In this series, he visits five different places in the US of A (Los Angeles, New York, Louisianna, Wyoming, Georgia and Arizona), and tries to get to the heart of what fuels the food and flavours of that area. Interesting choices, me thinks. 

Source

I will try a recipe from each location and document it here. Then viola! I can just edit it for ZINE. So you can think of this as my notepad.

I also want to make this useful for you, so I'll give my two pence on what it's like to shop for ingredients in Cambridge (grrr...) and cook and eat well while being a busy student. So please check in every now and then if these interest you.

There's not really much left to say except that I hope you enjoy it! 

First stop...LA!

*A "column" is a synthetic chemist's** way of saying that they are using the technique of column chromatography to separate components of a reaction mixture. 

Basically, when we put on a reaction to change A to the product B, we usually also get a number of other products as well, such as C and D. These usually arise from competing side reactions and/or decomposition. 

If a reaction gives few of these other products, we say it is a "clean reaction" (although the opposite is never described as "dirty"!). 

But if not, we can put the whole mixture down a long vertical glass tube that is packed with a material (usually silica) that makes B, C and D come out the bottom at different times. 

It all depends on how much the silica likes B, C and D. The more they like each other, the longer it stays in the column, so pure B can be separated from C and D. Clever, huh?

**A "synthetic chemist" makes molecules! (yes, there are other types of chemists...)