The Last Day of Spring Break

I was hoping to get through grading entirely by the end of break, and I'll barely crack about half the submitted papers - but I'd already suspected this might be the case and I've resolved to push the re-write period back a week to give students a little longer to get and deal with paper feedback. I'll have to get them to understand that they shouldn't put off efforts to revise until they've gotten their paper back from me - but they probably won't revise significantly, anyhow. We'll be doing in-class discussion and workshops, but I don't have all that much hope, really. I've had a majority of students actively raise their hands to tell me they don't care about the readings or discussions in both my sections, so I'm clearly fighting an uphill battle. Frankly, it shouldn't be a fight at all, but here we are.

So, despite working my ass off (and the greatest effort in grading is surely emotional labor), I didn't get all my work done and I figured the lack of results meant I'd continue to work straight through the weekend. That's not really especially fair to myself, though, and I'm not actually behind on meeting my time frame (pushing back project proposals a week basically meant I pushed back every instance of work the same amount), so I will actually take Sunday off to relax, read, and maybe take some notes on other stuff I've been neglecting.

I've been listening to a lot of Metric, lately, and we ordered their earlier works - I think, on the whole, I almost prefer the stripped down semi-jazz of Grow Up and Blow Away to the denser alt synth-pop of Fantasies - right now, anyhow. They're legitimately different enough that their fears that the original album sound of Grow Up probably would have been panned, but I especially appreciate the difference in sound.

The bechamel sauce was a success and, so, the mornay also ended up pretty successful. (That's not really a correct logical construction, they just both turned out fine. Especially considering that mornay is just me whisking cheese into a bechamel.) I actually hadn't made a roux before, and lately I've been using them quite a lot, and I'm frankly a little surprised that I didn't really fuck up the sauce because that seems like the kind of thing that would be really easy to do. I'm not nuts about bechamel, really, and I think I actually added a little too much nutmeg, but it's a little bland. I think I can tell why the Brown Hotel prefers to make theirs with full cream rather than milk or even half and half, because it's more volitile but it also adds weight to the sauce that isn't there without it. Of course, the dish I made with the mornay was already pretty fucking heavy - the Hot Brown sandwich doesn't play, friends. It was really good, but I'm pretty unlikely to ever make it again. It's just too much. The only reason I made it was to put the sauce into practice, but my general preference towards a cleaner, more vegetable-based diet means that making a turkey, bacon, and cheese sauce sandwich that you broil in the oven seems doubly heavy.

But, hey, at least I can make it!

 Amusingly, the next thing I'm making is hollandaise and the only thing that comes to mind (except, strangely, roasted asparagus topped with hollandaise) is the famous eggs benedict. So, you know, get ready for another heavy-ass meal, yeah? (I don't know what I'm going to do with the Veloute or theEspagnole yet. God only knows, really. I guess, in a lot of ways, expanding past what I'm already familiar with is the point, though.)