it’s been 2 years and 4 days since i started my phd, and here we are celebrating. i cooked dinner for 12, vegan and gluten free (apart from the plan b dessert pie).

there were metaphors flying around like crazy at dinner. best explained by a run down of the food we ate.

first up, the invitation:

oops it’s been 2 full years of phd living and i nearly forgot my annual ritual of a dinner to mark the passing of one year and the arrival of another.

but no worries, i’m on top of it (just) and would like to invite you to come share dinner with me on friday march 4 (it’s a few days past the march 1 marker, but it reflects what being at the end of my second year feels like: missing deadlines and a bit unprepared).

as usual it’ll be a sit down dinner, with the silver cutlery perhaps. vegan and gluten free, and stories to go with the food.

let me know if you can make it (ie rsvp by next tues, mar 1)

xxxjessie

ps i did think about how i wasn’t feeling in control of things and wouldn’t mark the date this year, and perhaps instead would cook you all a frozen dinner to have at your leisure. but then paul pointed out how that would be just as much work, so i’m just cooking you dinner to eat together instead.

the first course was a vegan tom yum soup.

i used a jar of tom yum paste to make the soup (no shrimp paste or soy in the jar!). it boiled for ages on the stove with mixed asian mushrooms all chopped up, and some other freshness like a few stalks of lemongrass and a couple of kaffir lime leaves. i added some coconut milk at the end, and some excellent firm silken tofu in cubes, a handful of bean sprouts and these frozen mock prawns i found at the asian grocer in chinatown. made from yam, not gluten, they even tasted like prawns.

the jar of paste was a metaphor for not having to do everything form scratch, not having to reinvent the wheel all the time, and not feeling like there’s no-one else out there able to do what you need or want.

second course was two varieties of mock fish, with greens, oily eggplant and rice.

there were a couple of metaphors flying around the table here. one was in the mockness of the fish – sometimes things don’t have to be exactly what they claim to be, and they still taste good/are enjoyable/suit the purpose. or that you can get away with dishing up something that isn’t actually what you call it. kind of like research in that you don’t need to make or reproduce something exactly, and that in fact the ‘mockness’ of what your research is makes it unique.

the second metaphor i really felt during the main course was one of getting other people to either do your work for you, or help you with your work. there were 12 of us at the dinner table, which was two big tables pushed together, and whilst i was the host, i needed others to do things like ‘carve’ a fish, and pass dishes around. paul mc’d (kind of), others took photos, and the collobrativeness of the dinner really did reflect how i think the phd is going for me. using other people’s work, working with others on projects that will end up in my phd, and so on.

dessert was the biggest metaphor of all.

i had originally planned to make these pandan rice balls. i bought the ingredients (with a special trip to china town to get the pandan juice), and when i got home started to make them. i realised pretty quickly that i’d bought rice flour, not glutinous rice flour, and that the two are very different things. i tried to make it work, mixing things together, following the recipe. but the rice flour was not sticking, and i realised they weren’t going to work. i had a little teency breakdown, then workshopped it all, and realised i could make a different dessert. so i made a vegan coconut pie (from vegan with a vengeance), and added some pandan flavour (and colour!) to make it green and a tribute to the failed dessert.

this was a great moment of dealing with failure, or something going wrong, or fucking up. i worked through it, and made do with what i had (and knew). it was a relief, and it worked, and i made do. like i do as i stumble through the phd.