‎Courtesy of Spoonhau5

Interested in taking a free, local culinary tour? How about an international one? Check out Linda Yung’s, A11, N13, blog, Spoonhau5, and discover her favorite (and not so favorite) eats around campus, the greater Boston area, New York City, and abroad.

Enjoy bringing the heat as much as you love eating things with it? Linda also posts delicious recipes, some of which she develops herself, and others that she has learned from family members or adapted from cookbooks and blogs to fit a healthier profile based on her studies at the Friedman School of Nutrition. Among her offerings: simple prosciutto and melon appetizers, red wine braised short ribs, and dirty blonde brownies.

As a busy student (she triple majored in International Relations, Biomedical Studies and Chinese), how did Linda get started on her blog? Linda gave me the scoop on Spoonhau5.

The blog developed in phases, she said, starting first as a platform where she could review restaurants she had visited and document her experience. Once she entered Friedman, Linda decided to add another dimension to Spoonhau5, and started incorporating nutritionally-informed blog posts. However, “[she] realized early on that [she] was much better at writing restaurant reviews, so now it’s mostly restaurant reviews.” Linda is contemplating adding food news and policy commentary into the mix though, so keep checking back.

And even though her fun and witty blog may be another a fun hobby, keeping a consistent blog isn’t easy – each post Linda publishes takes a few hours to create. But because she finds good food inspiring, it’s something she really enjoys doing. In fact, if you ever get the chance to dine with this food connoisseur, you’ll likely find her snapping pictures of all the dishes for future posts.

Linda also gave us the scoop on her favorite eats on and around campus. The results:

• Tufts Dining Services‘ best dish is their butternut squash bisque, which she always gets when available.
• When finding herself with a coveted free morning on the hill, she’ll run over to Magnificent Muffins and Bagels, where “they have the best breakfast sandwiches in the greater Boston area. A tomato, egg, and cheese on a scooped-out toasted spinach bagel with a medium iced coffee (and a chocolate chip muffin if you’re feeling wild) is all you need to get your day going.”

Is your stomach growling yet?

Detailing their visit on Tufts Hillel to Haiti, you can read about the students’ amazing efforts and experiences. They were not only able to get down and dirty, helping repair a damaged amphitheater built by the past Haitian president, Jean Aristide, but were also afforded the opportunity to teach English and play with local students, as well as meet with village leaders to discuss ways to further community development and citizens’ access to health care.

In between the learning and hard work, the group also got to visit Port-au-Prince, French-inspired art galleries, and take in the breath taking beauty of Haiti’s rural areas. One Tufts’ blogger writes,

“[We] were captivated by the natural beauty of this country, but were also saddened in a way that the lacking infrastructure and actual government support for tourism in Haiti has caused this native resource to be totally under appreciated by the majority of the world.”

Take a look at some pictures from the amazing trip below:

Photo Credit: Tufts Hillel to Haiti, http://www.jdcentwine.org/trips/tufts-haiti-2013

Photo Credit: Tufts Hillel to Haiti, http://www.jdcentwine.org/index.cfm?go=main.viewPost&PostID=923

Photo Credit: Tufts Hillel to Haiti, http://www.jdcentwine.org/trips/tufts-haiti-2013

A Tumblr entitled Tufts Tails is a space for Tufts 2017 Jumbos to upload pieces of their essays to share with other interested classmates and prospective students.  From rainbows and parakeets to photography and Disney, you’ll see just what these newest Jumbos have to say about their lives, Tufts, and their nerdy sides.

Tufts Cycling is now on Tumblr!

The group, made up of both road and mountain bikers, will post photos and videos from their races and other team rides on the new Tumblr. Pictures from the Rutgers race weekend and the Men’s A Circuit Race at the Philly Phlyer are up now - check them out!

Begun four years ago, “Put Me In Coach” is a place where Woolf shares his published articles from the Tufts Daily and his high school newspaper, as well as assignments from some of his Tufts classes. Other posts include Woolf’s opinions about various apps, sports culture in the US, media at Tufts and much more.

Recently, he wrote an entry entitled “The Boston ‘White’ Sox, Tiger Woods & Representing Race in American Sports.” Read the intro to his post below, and check out the full post here.

After reading Sharon O’Brien’s piece on the ethnic and racial history of the Boston Red Sox, I was shocked to discover that my hometown squad was the last team in Major League Baseball history to integrate. Growing up in a suburb just outside of Boston, I became a Red Sox fan at a very early age. The first professional sporting event I ever attended was a game at Fenway Park. As I grew older, I began to follow the team religiously, closely studying the makeup of the roster each year and slowly learning more and more about the franchise’s heartbreaking reputation as the team that, in my father’s words, could be counted on to “always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Here’s an excerpt from a post she wrote entitled “Risk-Taking and Feminism: The Limited Entrepreneurial Education of Girls”:

We need to cultivate a culture that tells girls to take risks just as much as it tells boys to, and reinforces the idea that a failed business or underground activity in their young years will not turn into a scary mark on their permanent record or a trip to juvie. Many of the entrepreneurs that the Western world worships (George Foreman, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Richard Branson, Simon Cowell to name a few) were rebellious risk-takers in their young years. They were also all male. The women who are prominent entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires/billionaires went through more traditional paths.

From the Music Machinery Blog

Two participants, Barbara Duckworth and Jennie Lamere, joined up to create a program that would give its user movie suggestions based on its sound track. Basically, users could put in their favorite artists and the program would suggest a movie that had a soundtrack with similar sounding music. After working hard on their program all night long, Barbara and Jennie received the rookie award which was for the best project by a team with a majority freshman and no upperclassmen.

From the Music Machinery Blog

For more information about their work, visit Barbara’s blog post.

For more information on The Hackathon in general, visit their website.

From tastytufts.com

If you’re over buying the usual chocolates brands for Valentine’s Day, Tufts Culinary Society is here to save the day.

The society recently posted about the best tasting chocolate alternatives to the standard Hershey’s kiss. Some of the new contenders include the “Caramel Toffee Bar” from Bapchi, which they argue to be satisfying but hardly worth it’s price tag, and “The Espresso Bar” by Zoe’s Chocolate Co., which for they found to be the perfect mixture of creamy espresso flavored white chocolate and rich dark chocolate.

For more outside-the-box Valentine’s Day goodies, check out the blog post here.

The new site will be equipped with responsive design, a technology that automatically fits the size of the site to the size of whatever screen it’s being viewed on, allowing readers to enjoy TuftsLife on their laptops, phones, and tablets. The site will also include a new apps section to highlight Tufts apps like JoeyTracker and BookSwap as well as a more organized structure for viewers to “get the stuff you want at a glance and be able to dig deeper for more useful stuff.”

If you’re interested in being involved in the exciting re-launching of the beloved Tufts site, contact officers@tuftslife.com and check out the TuftsLife blog.

JumboStudy is a new and easy way for students to form study groups for any class and even helps with setting up a time, location and study topic. Students login with their Tufts username and password and JumboStudy matches that username with the class and project sites that the student is a member of in Trunk.  

For more information on the AT Fellows and the other useful programs they offer, check out their website.