Today it suddenly turned cold. Well, not exactly suddenly. Yesterday, after having 70-degree weather for two days straight, a big rain and wind storm blew this cold-front (or should I say, season) in. I was beginning to get worried that global warming would keep the cold away this year! And today, as I was walking to class, through the wind, my eyes caught a glimpse of little white things swirling with the yellow leaves .... snowflakes!
The heat in my apartment has come on just in time! It was turned on two days ago. So things are nice and toasty inside.
I stayed warm today by eating a big meal of traditional north-east Chinese food with five of my freshmen students. One of the homework assignments that I've assigned my freshmen is to have lunch with me. Despite my insisting that we would follow American customs and "go dutch," each pay for our own meal, these girls somehow ended up paying for me. It's the Chinese custom, they insisted. To this I replied, "next time we'll have to 'go dutch,' I insist." Or maybe next time I will pay.
I also stayed warm today by making a batch of oatmeal-chocolate-almond-butterless (butter is expensive here) cookies for some students that were coming over to visit the foreign teachers this evening. One of the students came an hour early, so I invited her in to help me bake/experiment. I say experiment because I was not exactly following a recipe, and when baking cookies on cake pans in a tiny oven that is partially broken, you can never be certain of your results. But, they must have turned out well since they are now all gone!
Oh, and of course, I stayed warm by teaching (I usually work up a bit of a sweat with all the moving around the classroom, calling on students, writing on the board, etc.) both in the morning, a class of 20 freshmen english majors, and this afternoon, a class of 50 non-english majors.
So though it was a cold and windy day outside, my day was full of warmth.
Sounds like a great day. I did some experimental baking today too, but was basing it off a recipe. I made whole wheat rye dill bread. It's yummy.
ReplyDeleteI think in general you can replace butter with oil in cookies, but you will loose some of the loft that occurs when the small bits of butter melt in the baking process. The cookies tend to turn out flatter.