New Apartment!

I am now successfully moved into my new apartment in Ann Arbor!  Hurray!  There are still a few things to sort out, such as having my carpets cleaned because the hot water tank flooded my place the day I moved in, but all in all, I'm close to being settled.

On top of that, I managed to finish a project I had set for myself this summer.  My mother keeps her recipes on index cards in a box, sorted by type, and I've was trying to create a recipe box for myself, copying over all of the ones she has that I'm interested in.

There were two minor problems with this.  First of all, my mother has a lot of recipes, so my hand kept cramping up from copying them over.  Second, copying a recipe isn't much good if you can't follow it.  While I know most cooking terms, one area I do get confused about occasionally is mixing.  There are a lot of different ways to mix ingredients together, usually dependent on what the ingredient is or what effect you want to get.  And mixing incorrectly can really ruin a recipe.  When I was watching "Good Eats" the other day, the host, Alton Brown (one of my favorites, since he's the geek of the Food Network), said that something as simple as stirring muffin batter for too long can ruin its consistency, making the muffins tough and leaving "wormholes" in them when they bake up.

Chem Is Try

Well I certainly found a gem among my files-- all of the papers, notes and lab reports from my honors chemistry class in high school.  Not only is this a find because it's over seven years old now and I can't believe I still have it, but also because my life has had a severe lack of science in it since I graduated high school.  This definitely falls into the category of "things I might no longer know", although not because I didn't learn it well.

My honors chemistry teacher was fantastic.  I doubt she'll ever read this, but Alice Frazer, you remain one of the best teachers I've ever had.  For those of you who didn't know her, I'll give this evidence-- among her AP Chemistry students, seventy-five percent received a five on the exam, the highest score possible.  The remaining twenty-five percent received threes or fours, which were also passing grades.  No one failed.  That takes some serious teaching skill.  On top of that, she had an impressive history working in the chem field before becoming a teacher, so she had practical knowledge and really interesting stories.