Back to the Books

I had my first class of the new academic year yesterday. It was the field seminar in comparative politics. The professor attempted to cajole all of us non-first year, non-majors out of the course since there a few too many people in it for the government department's liking (>15) only to welcome us all back this morning realizing that we really didn't have much of a choice about having to learn the material from the course. The mandatory part aside, he does seem to have it structured in an interesting way, bringing in several colleagues to co-teach the themes that are their specialty. I am torn now because last night I'd resigned myself to helping him out and agreeing to just audit it; the upside for forgoing getting credit would be one less paper to write...which would hopefully mean less December stress. With the Chinese language fellowship (= no need to TA), I could still get enough credits by May to be done with the minimum course requirements but that would potentially mean less flexibility in the spring to take courses outside the department that they wouldn't credit towards the government requirement or to take a slightly lighter load...anyways, this has just been an overly wordy tangent to get to the main point which is that school is back on. Back to the weekly (or perhaps bi-weekly this semester) commute to Ithaca and the already-piling up pages of reading, which unfortunately means less time to spend in the kitchen and on the blog (I found out last year that I not really that good at multi-tasking).

Earlier this week, as a final little kitchen project before going back to the books [non-cookbooks that is], I made some whole wheat french bread (using whole wheat flour that Owen had just ground up from wheat berries using our hand mill) and yogurt cheese (which is so easy that it's definitely going to keep being made throughout the school year). Oh, and some undocumented sweetened condensed milk was also made.

Yogurt cheese (app. 48 hours out of the yogurt container)

Fruity cheese for breakfast (yogurt cheese mixed in with homemade and hand-picked black raspberry jam)

Hopefully, we'll still be able to meet our goal of cooking through the weekly CSA bag before the next delivery and have enough energy to keep experimenting with new ways to do it to document and at least sporadically upload. But for now, it's back to working hard for the money... (is it bad that I already can't wait for next summer??)