So anyways, last night was my last class for the quarter. Nothing official yet but I think I have straight A's again. Hopefully at least. This quarter has been much more challenging than last. I think it has been a combination of working 20+ hours on the weekends, 20 hours during the week, mucho projects and papers and more challenging hands-on work.
Every week was multiple reports, hours of dish research and brainstorming. On the bright side I can tell you anything you would want to know about being a food journalist, cooking on salt blocks, how asthma has a link to fatty, greasy foods, and Jose Garces.
This quarter also brought its down sides: failing my first quiz (well D, but still), totally bombing on fish cookery and the reason why I'm updating from the ER. Here are my lessons learned.
Lesson 1
Don't try and save money by purchasing a study guide instead of the actual book. The study guide happened by accident but I was trying to save money. I swear on my dog that the listing on half.com said nothing about a study guide. $20some and a week later, my nutrition study guide arrived on my doorstep. I opened it up and thought "I could work with this." There were no pictures but pretty much all of the basics I needed to know. A summary, really. So guess what my quiz was on. A diagram of the digestive system. Why I need to be able to tell the jejunum from the ileum I'm not sure and since my study guide had zero pictures and half of the quiz was listing, from top to bottom, the digestive system I think you know how that went. Let's just say the only think I got right was anus.Diagram courtesy of vitallywell.com.
Wish I saw this three months ago.
Lesson 2
If you have no idea how to cook something, pay attention and practice. As much as I have tried and want to, I hate the taste of fish. Some of it is tolerable but mostly, no thank you, so I never make it. We needed to shallow poach fluke and cook red snapper en papillote. Everything about this class was foreign to me. I forgot to add butter to my parchment paper for the shallow poach and my fish broke in half. For the en papillote I didn't raise the fish off of the paper, so it burned to the bottom. I don't have a funny anecdote about this. It just sucked. So if you don't eat something or cook it on the regular, study it and practice. Otherwise you'll probably still suck at it. Like me.
Lesson 3
Exercise caution during random acts of kindness. Last Thursday, a classmate was rushing to the elevator. Being the sweetheart that I am (please hold your laughter) I put my arm out to stop the door from closing. At the same time, he kicked his foot out and got me square in the finger. It didn't hurt until Monday, probably from overworking it during my weekend shifts at the restaurant and here we are today in my comfy bed at the hospital. Anytime I bend it it gets stuck and I have to either physically move it back to normal or pop it out; both extremely painful. In ER pain scale terms, it's an 8. This time next week I will be en route to Costa Rica where I will need this finger for holding on to ropes while I rappel down waterfalls (cue sympathy.) I also need it for steering my car without turning on the wipers, writing things, and combing my hair. So for now, on my birthday I will sit and wait. I hope they give me my xray as a gift.I will try an get more updates out since I have been slacking and will post a link to my flickr page for pictures after the trip. And for any robbers reading this; we have a house sitter so don't even try it.
