Title: Five flavors Dr. Inman came up with for the daily protein slop
Author: Shenandoah Risu
Rating: PG-13
Content Flags: candid chemistry
Characters: Dr. Inman, The Destiny Crew
Word Count: 1,241
Excerpt: A zing of orange, and presto – Heinz 17.
Author's Notes: Written for challenge #094 "Recipes" at the LJ Comm sgu_challenge. I don't actually know Dr. Inman's first name, so as usual, I used the actress' name (Chelah Horsdal).
Disclaimer: I don't own SGU. I wouldn't know what to do with it. Now, Young... Young I'd know what to do with. ;-)
Thanks for reading! Feedback = Love. ;-)

oOo

Five flavors Dr. Inman came up with for the daily protein slop

Everybody likes vanilla.

Right?

I mean, there's a reason why it's the most popular ice cream flavor.

Besides, it's inoffensive, goes with just about any other flavor, and it's easy to reproduce even if you don't have vanilla beans at hand. In fact (take it from a chemist!) very little out there is actually made with real vanilla beans, which are difficult to grow and harvest (it's an ORCHID, for Erlenmeyer's sakes!), but the actual flavoring agent – vanillin – occurs in nature in other places. Scorch a nice oak barrel properly and the whiskey will have a distinct vanilla note. You can also synthesize vanillin from coniferin, a glycoside of isoeugenol found in pine bark. So yeah, Camile, Chloe and I are working on that. We're always on the lookout for intergalactic pine trees!

But, and here's the big BUT, if you have to eat it every single day for every meal, vanilla gets real tired real quick. And so after Colonel Young asked Becker to come up with new recipes he literally begged me to come up with new flavors.

Anything BUT vanilla.

Lucky for me, like any self-respecting chemist would do, I had already started to experiment with that.

1. Chocolate.

It seems like such a simple thing, right? But chocolate is one of the most complicated flavors out there to produce in vitro, because chocolate is a mix of many ingredients to start with. I am a chocolate addict, I'll be the first one to admit that, and so that's the first thing I tried, knowing fully well that there was no way I could succeed without actual cocoa beans. Greer found some acorn-type nuts on New Eden, and he and Becker made coffee out of it. I faithfully collected all the grounds, so coffee-flavored protein slop was one of my first creations. Luckily we brought tons of those nuts with us, and nobody is allowed to compost the grounds until I've used them. So, even though chocolate is still a long way off I'm making some progress with the grounds and a paste of finely ground raw nuts. It tastes like really bad chocolate at this point, but maybe in a couple of years I'll find the proper spices and a good sweetener to add. And as long as Greer stops by at least twice a day with a big gun in tow I'll have an incentive to make it happen.

2. Banana.

A few months in I discovered some bottles of liquid in a storage room. I think they were meant as a lubricant for some unknown machine, but when I opened one and waved my hand over it to take a cautious sniff it smelled a lot like banana. And sure enough, my basic kit identified it as something closely related to isoamyl acetate (C7H14O2). I combined that with a crystalline substance I found in the water of the Ice Planet and - Bingo! After that is was simply a question of finding the exact quantity needed to bring out the banana flavor – a micro-droplet per bowl is quite enough. Lisa Park adores the banana slop. Scuttlebutt is it's being used for quite different purposes in her quarters, and it somehow involves Greer AND Volker at the same time… hey – whatever works for them. They're so cute together, those three, so what's a little kink on top of that?

3. Lime.

In the same batch of chemicals there was a big tub of what was unmistakably strong floor cleaner. You've probably experienced this before – like those green gum drops that are supposed to be lime-flavored, and they really taste like Pine-Sol. Bad mixing, I suppose. I futzed around with it for some time (and yes, this is a scientific term if you're a chemist!) , and when I thought about combining it with an extract from the skins of those nasty-tasting little spacequats (as Eli calls them) that Dr. Perry likes so much (I assume she still likes them even though she's now a program or something), that's when it all clicked, because that gave it the required tartness and acidity. Vanessa is a sucker for lime-flavored slop. She even helped me create a green coloring agent!

4. Ketchup.

Once we were able to grow our own tomatoes, making ketchup was a logical next step. Becker was the hero of the month when he combined those little tommies with purple sweet potato vinegar, seawater, fruit puree and herbs. I had no idea that so many of my fellow denizens never got over their "ketchup stage" as kids (you know, when EVERYTHING tastes better with ketchup on it). So when they voted for Brody to try making ketchup schnapps (and he managed, and BOY was it ever GOOD!) I knew they'd come to me next. Thankfully, I only had to enhance the flavor a bit – carefully drying the paste and pulverizing provided a perfect flavoring agent for slop. I added a little bit of Octyl Acetate (C10H20O2) which is easy to make with the chemicals I found in the storage room. A zing of orange, and presto – Heinz 17. Eli, Dunning and Scott go absolutely nuts over it.

5. Jalapeno.

Totally accidental discovery here. We have so many purple sweet potatoes here on board that we try to come up with all kinds of uses for them, so every part of the plant is used. There is a waxy substance in the roots, and TJ discovered it burns like hell on cuts and then makes the whole limb go numb. She was super excited, because she finally had an alternative to the jungle squid poison for topical analgesics. I discovered it was heavily imbued with capsaicin, which is of course (CH3)2CHCH=CH(CH2)4CONHCH2C6H3-4-(OH)-3-(OCH3). That's a complicated molecule and hard to copy with what I have on the Destiny, but Rush, who apparently has no taste buds at all (a trait he may be sharing with a lot of his kinsmen due to overexposure to alcohol at a tender age) volunteered as a test subject and declared it to be "on par with a Red Savina", which I understand is brain-meltingly hot with 580,000 units on the Scoville Scale. I wear goggles and gloves when I handle the concentrate. Poor Colonel Young can't go near it, either – he used to have a stomach ulcer, and anything that hot aggravates it (and I really don't understand how he still manages to down Brody's hooch, but he assures me he pays dearly for it later).

So, I've come up with quite a few flavors. What I'm working on right now is peanut butter, Jolly Rancher watermelon, cinnamon and Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes (don't ask).

It's not what I wanted to do with my life – to be a flavorist – but I'm pretty much the only one on the Destiny who knows enough about chemistry to tackle this one, and since I have few other useful talents other than unskilled labor, I guess that's my niche, and I'm okay with that.

Just between you and me – I just finished making a really good Green Apple flavor. It's my birthday present for Brody. I know he'll want to try it out right away, and of course I'll help, and well, we'll see where that leads us… 8D Because, forget about Scoville Scales. Brody is seriously hot.

Ahem, anyway. Signing off,

Dr. Chelah Inman

Thanks for reading! A comment or feedback would be awesome.

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