The other night Danny made Lazy Lasagna. The recipe was easy to make, but it tasted a bit bland. I think perhaps adding some spices may help. It did make quite a bit though and Danny and I have been eating on it for a few days.

After my parents left this afternoon, Danny and I took a long nap! I love a good Sunday nap!

I know I am mentioning cooking a lot but I have an update!

Today, my husband is home from touring and I wanted to make him lunch. He mentioned that we should go to Chipotle. I suggested I try whipping up something since I have these groceries now! I knew I could probably find a recipe for burritos and save the money.
I found this recipe at Tasty Kitchen:

It was really tasty and pretty easy to make!

I am going to take my great friend, Mandy’s advice and plan my meals for the week. She has suggested some great recipes in her blog “Life in Pink & Blue” and I making my list and am going to have a shopping day. I tried to pick easy to make recipes, since God knows if it’s too complicated, I won’t do it. Also, the recipes could not have perishable items, meaning, if I don’t get around to cooking it till 3 weeks from now, I’d be okay. I tend to buy veggies for meals and never get around to cooking them, then find them in the crisper dark and gross and sometimes growing friends!

The meals I have chosen, along with ingredients and recipes are:

• Turkey & Two Bean Chili
• Lazy Lasagna
• Soft Taco Casserole
• Creamy Italian Chicken

All of these recipes come from the site, Tasty Kitchen. Mandy seems to love the recipes she has found there and I trust her judgment, so I will try them too!

Possible setbacks: A few setbacks I foresee are:

1. Class. Monday and Tuesday I have class at 6pm, so I can’t imagine cooking after I get home at 10pm. Perhaps I can do it for lunch, but most likely, that won’t happen…but I will keep that option open.
2. Danny. My husband is coming home on Tuesday, yay! He has been guitar teching for a band for three weeks and is returning home. We aren’t sure what time he will come in, perhaps I can cook for him that night, but most likely, that last thing on his mind will be food!! tee hee
3. Friends. Lately I have been hanging out a lot with my friends Brian and Tom or Denise. They have been inviting me too hang a lot since Danny is gone. Also, when Danny is here and busy, we usually hang then to. Perhaps I can have a dinner party
4. Laziness. Sometimes, coming home from teaching all day, the last thing I want to do is cook. But I am hoping since I picked easy recipes that it will be easy and not seem like a big chore.

I’ll try and post when I actually get one cooked and have done a taste test. I need to find my crock pot!

Movie Poster

Tonight I saw Julie & Julia with some friends. It was a pretty good movie, but what I really liked was the entire Julia Child story. She was very interesting and I left wanting to know more about her. Of course, the big star of the movie (besides Meryl Streep’s acting) was the food! It all looked so good! I just felt like leaving the theater and basting something! Would I ever want to go through a cookbook like the character Julie did? Well, if I did I would not have picked that book for sure (sounded too difficult). But I wouldn’t pick something too easy. My idea of too easy is Rachel Ray or Paula Deen. It would need to be difficult enough to teach me things, but not so far out that I wouldn’t want to eat what I made.

I also think taking some cooking classes would be so much fun. I am great at making recipes (well, most of the time), but as far as knowing what flavors work well together and what doesn’t, I am clueless.

A few months ago my friend Meghan came over for dinner. We were thinking of where to go and she suggested we eat in. I told her I hadn’t gone grocery shopping and showed her my fridge. I had bell peppers, some old sausage, a box of pasta and some spaghetti sauce in the pantry. She whipped us up a feast. She just said this can go with this, add some of these spices and taste. It was awesome. Sausage and peppers with rigatoni pasta! I was so impressed. I hadn’t thought to put those things together, if I had I wouldn’t have thought of those spices! I wonder if one day I will be able to do that!

I do have several cookbooks, perhaps I should start having dinner parties for my friends. It would force me to step out of my comfort zone and learn some cooking! More than just eggs, migas, spaghetti and the general Mexican food like tacos or chalupas.

Lately I’ve been having a few issues with two of my classes.

XHTML/CSS

The first is my Intro to Scripting class. In the past, my web design classes were very small, just a handful of students. If one started getting behind, I could work individually with them while the others moved on. In such a small class it’s pretty easy to keep everyone moving forward. Interruptions are fewer and everyone is focused. This quarter I have a class of 16 (I told you my other classes were small, between 3 – 5 people!). It’s much harder to help students when they get lost. What happens is the leaders finish early and the slower learners get so far behind. I have been lucky to have very awesome students who offer to help each other if someone is having trouble (not all students are so kind). We are a week behind on what I want to cover in the class and I’m not 100% sure students feel comfortable with what they have learned. The content is pretty straight forward. I’m teaching xhtml, CSS and JavaScript coding, I’m not even sure if we’ll get to JavaScript at the rate we are going.

I feel I need to revamp my curriculum for larger classes, but how can I do it half way through the semester? Are some students so far behind they will never catch up?

Part of the problem is that I have web majors mixed in with other majors. So I want to go in-depth for that group, but does the other group really need to know the in’s and out’s of code? I can’t just split the class in half and give more work to some. Hm, I’m just not sure how to handle the situation with such a large gap. Also, there are one or two students who are web majors who are having problems too. I have offered tutoring but no one has reserved time.

Part of me wonders if perhaps instead of hand coding everything, I should have started on Dreamweaver (I normally reserve it for Intermediate Scripting). Coding by hand is tedious, but you really do learn a lot about the code. And from my other students who have gone through the class, they like that because Dreamweaver was a snap to learn since they knew what everything already meant. But like I said, with non-majors, do they really need to know it that well? Perhaps if I used a different editor (currently using TextEdit) to write code. There are some free editors that show color coding which I know would help. I could ask our IT about putting that in our mac lab. It is already week 6 (out of 11 weeks), I hope things start coming together!

Photoshop Icon

My other class, Digital Imaging I, focuses on teaching Photoshop as a design tool. I have the same problem between super technology savvy  students and ones who barely know how to open a file. Problems that should be easy to solve by now, are still giving students issues (like making a gradient). How do I backtrack while still moving forward? I have the problem of bored students and the ones who get annoyed at not being able to “get it”.

This is the first quarter that I have had such a big gap. So my classes, which I thought were designed pretty okay, need a lot of revising…but I’m not sure how to keep all students learning (and happy).

Now time for one whine. How can students forget their flash drives (so often)?! Sitting in a 4 hour class and not being able to save anything…especially when doing all this code or digital editing?!