- The write/defend graduate thing - well, I've written about a chapter and a half. Well maybe a little more than that. I'm hoping to have a second chapter knocked out by the end of the week. But yes, I'm going to have to pick up the pace.
- Finding a job...I've applied for a couple things...and I've done a fair amount of browsing for pertinent postings. But I need to get some more applications out and find some more (in the sense of quantity and quality) appealing postings.
- Vitamins - I've actually been pretty good about this! I haven't been taking my vitamin every day, but at least several times per week. I'll consider this one a success.
I also talked about trying to work my way through my excessive stash of frozen cranberries, curry, rosemary, and cloves during the month of January. While I haven't polished anything off, I did use more of each of these than I typically would in a month.
- I'm down to one bag of frozen cranberries from 2 1/2 bags. They've gone into baked oatmeal, muffins, and cookies. I tried to "health-up" the muffins but subbing a small portion of the flour with whole wheat flour, subbing apple sauce for the vegetable/canola oil, and eliminating the crumb topping (sigh). I've been wanting to try the vegetable/canola oil substitution for a while. All the commentary I could find online said that it would change the texture, but that that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I do think it made the muffins significantly heavier and denser, but they were still tasty, so I don't think it was a bad substitution.
- While I only used curry a couple of times, twice per month is definitely higher than my average curry consumption rate. I still have a holy ton of curry though.
- I almost finished a bottle of dried rosemary! Fortunately winter generally means ample quantities of root vegetables, which are quite amenable to rosemary. I made mashed potatoes with rosemary as well as roasted miscellaneous root vegetables.
- The only thing I used cloves for this month were these gingerbread cookies that I made in the shape of kangaroos for Australia Day. If you're looking for a gingerbread cookie recipe, I highly recommend that one from Annie's Eats. They were delicious, stayed soft at least as long as they existed before being devoured, and got rave reviews from everybody. (And they used up a bunch of cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg!)
Sadly, we haven't had a chance to make anything with saffron. Hopefully we'll get to it this month. Fingers crossed! Aside from hopefully getting around to cooking with saffron, here's what I'm hoping to focus on this month:
- Pinto beans - last year we accumulated a ton from the CSA and just never used them. They're dry. They keep indefinitely. So we didn't worry about them. But now we have a ton. I did already get a head start on this by making this yummy recipe from Simply Recipes last weekend. We got cilantro in our share, and E had jalapenos from her mom, so it seemed like a good idea.
- Whole wheat flour - I bought it for one particular recipe, but haven't really used it otherwise. I used a whopping half cup in the cranberry muffins I made last weekend though. :) I've found a few recipes that particularly call for it - including pizza crust and more muffins. And I'm going to try to sub in a small portion of the total flour in a recipe for whole wheat more often.
- Drink mixes - random, I know. But I've got some Gatorade mix (left over from the Grand Canyon trip) and a bunch of EmergenC just sitting around. It should be used. Either would certainly be better for me than the Cherry Coke Zero I love so much (though not nearly as tasty :( ).
- Sprinkles - I don't know when, why, or how I got them, but I have them. We used a bunch for E's advisor's birthday last week, but Valentine's called for cute baked goods, which can easily accommodate cute sprinkles.
I'll be sure to report back in a month. :)
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