Yummy foods

Just to make you drool...

On Valentine's Day my housemates and I made pork chops and risotto with broccoli (click for recipe), with white wine.



And for Mardi Gras, I made this King's Cake for my Italian class to have during our espresso break halfway through our seminar. It's actually just cinnamon buns formed into an oval, with colored frosting and a coin baked in. The coin comes from the Three Kings / Mardi Gras tradition of baking a baby into the cake. The person who finds the baby is the king or queen for the day, and also must provide the next King's Cake. My Italian class is all about Boccaccio's Decameron, in which a group of seven young ladies and three young men escape the plague of Florence in 1348, and go to the country and tell stories for ten days. Each day there is a different king or queen who picks the theme of the day's stories, and then picks the next king or queen. Our professor had provided cookies to go with the espresso until this past week, but he decided that since there are 10 of us in the class and 10 weeks left, from now on we'll take turns bringing something to go with the espresso. Therefore, the person who found the coin in my King's Cake has to bring something next week, and will be the queen of the day. So I thought that the King's Cake fit in very well not only with the celebration of Mardi Gras, but also with the theme of our class!

Lisa Kudrow is speaking at graduation

Vassar just announced that Lisa Kudrow (class of '85) is speaking at our graduation in May. I've seen her speak on campus before and really enjoyed it. We're very excited because last year's speaker was...really boring. Although now this will make seats at graduation even harder to snag, if you're one of my blog readers who's planning to come (it's first come, first seated). Luckily, I'll have a reserved seat. ;)

The past two weeks

Happy February! Hopefully it's happy and not just plain freezing, which is all it's proven to be so far. I changed the header photo once again - it's the beach in La Rochelle, France in August of 2008, to remind me of summer and warmer days to come.

The past two weeks have been unbelievably busy. I started my last semester at college, which alone brings its own set of stresses, and I've maybe over-committed myself just a bit as well. I'm taking three seminars, which all have to do with the Italian Renaissance, which is very confusing when I have to keep dates and themes straight. I'm taking a class on Dante's Inferno (okay, late medieval, not Renaissance), Boccaccio's Decameron (we get espresso and cookies half-way through the 3-hours seminar; much needed caffeine at that point), and an art history seminar about Raphael. I'm also auditing a class on Dutch and Flemish art. In addition to that, I'm taking a jazz dance class, singing in choir (which rehearses 3 days a week for 1.5 hrs each day), teaching tap, and conducting an Italian language drill session. Yep, I've been keeping busy.

I've also decided to do a service trip over spring break, which I'll get credit for as well. It's through the Vassar Jewish Union, and it involves building houses in rural Louisiana on the Gulf Coast, an area that was hit hard by Katrina but received less aid than the city of New Orleans. The trip will also include discussions about community service and social justice in Judaism. I didn't decide to go on the trip because of the Jewish aspect, and I think there will be other non-Jews (don't know about half-Jews like me!) on the trip but I think there will be very interesting discussions. We'll spend the last night in New Orleans for Shabbat and explore the city then. I've never been to the South (although I know New Orleans has a culture all its own) so I'm looking forward to seeing a different part of the country, and doing something way out of my comfort zone.

As usual, my housemates and I have been cooking wonderful meals. On Saturday I made an onion and pepper quiche all by myself, and then we baked dark chocolate brownies with peanut butter swirled in. And watched Breakfast at Tiffany's!

Onion and pepper quiche

Dark chocolate peanut butter brownies

Audrey Hepburn singing "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's: