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.