Red Bean (or Green Mung Bean) Soup

Here are Chunyan's suggestions for making the soup, which I believe can be served warm or cold. We used to have the green one as a drink accompanying breakfast sometimes in China. The green version is supposed to cool your body down, while the red one warms you up.

Red Bean Soup

red beans (2-3 handfuls)
dried lotus nuts (about 10)
dried dates (about 10-15)
XI MI (西米 - tapioca) (0.5 - 1 handful)
1/3 of 1 stick of Chinese brown sugar

1. wash red beans, dates and lotus nuts, sink in the water for 2 hours;
2. boil the water, put the red beans into the pot;
3. after boiling, put the XI MI and lotus nuts in;
4. after boiling put dates in;
5. after boiling, cook on low for 2 hours (until the red beans look open like flower), put the sugar in, then cook on high for half hour (may add some water during this period, and you may half open the lid)

Suddenly busy

Visitor #5 is in town. Jess J. has been telling me about her time living in Korea. She taught English there and so she's here now visiting with her fellow English teachers from England and Ireland. Somehow she managed to live in Korea for four years without learning Baduk (or, for that matter, Korean). She did say that some of her students would go to Baduk classes after school.

Chunyan took Alicia and I out for dim sum this afternoon ("Chinese afternoon tea", she called it). 很好吃 - It was delicious. The waiter came by at one point and asked, "好吃吗?" ("Is it ok?"). Chunyan responded and, after he left, asked me if I understood. I told her that I had, but it takes me a minute; I don't realize that I understand in time to respond. She told us that the first time she had met a foreigner in China, they were on a bus and he saw some pine trees outside, so he pointed and said, "Christmas!". She said it wasn't until she got home that evening that she realized what he had said: "Oh! Christmas!"

We stopped by at one of the Chinese grocery stores on the way back so she could show me what to buy to make red bean or green mung bean soup. I bought all the ingredients, and she was trying to describe how to make it, but, even though it sounds simple, I'm a bit dubious. She says throw in a handful of this and a bit of that, but I complained that her hands are a lot smaller than mine. She says that all Chinese recipes are like this. "It's not like in Germany," she told me.

I might go out with Alicia and some of her other Mexican friends for tacos and dancing on Thursday. We'll see. I will definitely go with them on Sunday to the Blind Light exhibition. And on Saturday evening, I'm having Brenda and Alicia over for dinner. I haven't cooked in ages, so that'll be interesting.

Progress?

I just need some place
where I can lay my head

"The Weight"
J. R. Robertson

It looks like I finally got my program to work for Gamma_1(N). Of course, there's still so much to do. I need to:

1. implement characters other than the trivial one


2. modify it to work over \bar{\FF_{\ell}} instead of \CC


3. finish implementing support for Gamma_1(N) intersect Gamma(p)


4. maybe someday make it work for imaginary quadratic fields other than \QQ(i)

That's just for my code. Then I need to go back to actually formulating this conjecture and I also need to come up with Galois representations corresponding to the modular forms I will hopefully find.

wow