Day 73 - January 19, 2010

Day 73:

Today I got to school and was told that I was making a ham for a lunch on Thursday. I pulled the ham out and weighed it to make sure we were going to have enough for the party. After we figured all that out we put it in the smoker. We were going to do some cold smoking with apple wood chips. Once that was going, there's not much else to do to it, so I just left it alone.

When I finished with the ham, Adrienne and I made parfait's with our leftover strawberry mousse from Marcie's wedding cake. We both decided that we couldn't just do mousse and whipped cream, that it needed something else so we decided to make some granola and put that with it. We found a recipe on Cooks Illustrated that looked good and got to work making it.

Classic Granola

1 cup walnuts, chopped
3 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup blanched almonds, slivered (or halved)
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1/4 cup honey
1/3 cup canola oil
1 cup raisins

Heat oven to 325 degrees. Mix first 6 ingredients together in a large bowl.

Heat syrup and honey together with oil in a small saucepan, whisking occasionally until warm. Pour mixture over dry ingredients. Stir with spatula until mixture is thoroughly coated. Put mixture onto a cookie sheet and spread into an even layer.

Bake, stirring and re-spreading mixture into an even layer every 5 minutes until granola is light brown, about 15 minutes. Immediately turn granola onto another cookie sheet to stop the cooking process. Stir in raisins, then spread granola evenly in pan. Set on a wire rack and cool to room temperature. Loosen granola with a spatula. Store in an airtight container.

Once the granola was finished and we tasted it, we both liked it a lot but agreed that for this dessert it needed to be a little sweeter. We decided to toss it in some brown sugar. That made it so delicious and it was my favorite part of the parfait for sure!

After we finished with the parfaits we decided we should go get information on our job seeking skills class that we needed to take. We went down the hall and talked to Sean about it and on our way back to the kitchens the fire alarms went off. We kept heading toward the kitchens and headed out in the back with the rest of our class. I was super grateful that it was not a -20 degree day and frigidly freezing, but the sun was out and it was not snowing! It turned out that a water pipe had broken, and some how the pressure of that set off the fire alarm...?? Something like that.

Anyway, after that I went over to the business department and talked to the lady about my computer literacy class that I also needed to take. I was able to test out of two sections, and it only took me 30 minutes - 1 hour. Nice! I was going to attempt to test out of the Word and Excel sections too, but after looking through the book I saw a few things I didn't know (I don't use Microsoft Office 2007...I use 2003) so I decided that I would just take those sections and have a refresher course. It wouldn't take me too long to get through it.

After I finished that, we pulled my ham out of the smoker and put it in the walk in to chill.

Anyway, that was about it for my day. Pretty eventful. :)