Night out

January 19th 2007 will be a night that I will remember for probably ever. I attended a special dinner with two great friends. This dinner was as the Green River Cafe here in East Lansing. The Green River is special to begin with because it is one of the few places around that support the student organic farm on campus, as well as other local and organic suppliers. Some groups collaborated to have a special meal featuring a young Chef recently coming out of the French Laundry and moving on to other things. When I heard about this I jumped on it and had to call some friends to support this and have a great night out.
The menu was all vegiterian and consisted of
Soup: Squash or Creamy potato Leek
Salad:Mixed greens with toasted walnuts, dried cranberries and homeade organic balsamic vinagrette
Entree: Witnter Vegetables over couscous or Roasted Vegetable Kabobs
Derrert; A very generous portion of Michigan apple crisp with organic oats, walnuts and vanilla icecream
(And it was only $14!)

This was a fantastic evening full of great food, great music and most importantly great company. It just reinforced in my mind the meaning of sharing a meal together. A meal is more than food it can be an experience. It was just heart warming and inspiring to eat an entire meal from food that was grown with care and prepared in a great way that used the flavors in their best way instead of overseasoning, and masking the natural beauty of the food. Being surrounded by people that care enough to come to a dinner devoted to thinking global but eating local was just amazing. I couldn't stop smiling and thanking my friends for coming out with me and making the night so special. It was great to feel that excited about something, I haven't felt that great and hopeful for the world in a long time.

The owner of the resturant liked this night so much that he wants to have more groups involved in a monthly evening like this. Meghan who is in the food science club with me jumped on the chance to host the next one. Hopefully it will be just as successful.

New Semester

I am pursuing my undergraduate at MSU in Food Science Technology. I am so happy for this new semester. It seems like I am finally going to be getting my hands dirty with real food science stuff. My previous semesters were filled with general prerequisites such as chemistry, organic chemistry, calc, biochemistry, and others. So this semester I am taking the following:

Intro to food Engineering
Microbiology
Microbiology Lab
Food Sensory
Cereals Processing
And for fun Jazz and society which is part of the required social classes

Other good news is that I am HACCP certified! I passed my food safety class and got a good enough grade on the project that I can be certified. I am so happy that all of my hard work paid off for that. The project came up right before finals and was very tedious, but in the end I guess well worth the efforts.

So far I am really looking forward to everything. Although with 16 credit hours, work and other extracurricular activities I really need to use my time wisely and I'm a little worried that I won't be able to put as much time into everything as I should. I am also trying to find a summer internship. Luckily internships in the food science field are paid! And paid well! But because of that they are obviously very competitive. Some of the internships are also longer than the summer, which would put graduation back a bit....but depending on the opportunity might be very well worth it.
I have been a little discouraged with finding an internship. Last semester I interviewed with 3 companies and didn't get any of them. But in reality that isn't bad, and many people were interviewed as well.

Getting to the food aspect of this blog. Today I prepared a little spin on a chicken Waldorf salad. I used poached and shredded chicken, green grapes, carrots, and pomegranates. I had this in a pita for dinner, I don't really know where the inspiration for this came from but it was very satisfying. I have been looking for creative, tasty, healthy meals that I can prep early in the week to have for later. Some days I am just not able to have lunch, or only have about 10 minutes to eat it. Last week I made some homemade chewy granola bars that I hope to experiment with a little more. The binder is peanut butter, honey and brown sugar- I added odds and ends of nuts, cereal, and dried fruit that I had left over from making a type of trail mix. They turned out pretty well but I would like to change it up a bit and maybe get some different flavors in there.

I realize this post is a little schizophrenic in a way, with lots of direction and not a lot of substance. However that is the kind of life I'm living at the moment. Hopefully things will slow down soon so my head can stop spinning but that's unlikely. I know I don't have a lot of readers (if any at all), and really that is fine for me because my blog is young, I'm doing this for myself, and I feel I haven't developed a writing style yet. I just felt I needed to get a post up before it is too long in-between posts and I get out of the swing of things even further. I hope that as I am able to actually cook more and post more the writing will improve and I will gain a better style of sharing my thoughts, concerns, and passions.