Today was the first day of a new phase, CUL104 Culinary Skills Development, for me at school.  It was a great day!  The two halves of our class are back together (and tired of me singing, "Reunited and it feeeeels so goooooood...").  It felt good (and smelled SOOOO good) to be back in the regular kitchen.  We refreshed our knife skills (mine are very rusty but at least my knives are freshly sharpened) and made stock and clarified butter today.  We are going to need a lot of them in the next ten weeks.  I loved smelling all of the veggies we were chopping--carrots, onions, shallots, garlic, celery, fennel, parsley, etc., etc.  This is the phase where you eat the best.  International is a close second.  They switched the classes for everyone with this new phase so that we will have lecture before lab from now on.  That means we will be eating at lunchtime instead of breakfast.  It felt funny to be ready to leave when Lab was over but I guess we will get used to it.  This first week is all about vegetables and vegetarian cooking.  I am especially looking forward to making lasagna on Thursday.  We will make even the pasta and the sauce, of course.

My friend, Katie, of River City Images borrowed Julianne yesterday.  She wants to add Senior pictures to her business and needed someone to experiment on.  She took some gorgeous pictures!  I can't wait to be able to show them off (in about a week).  We had a blast.  I took a few fun pictures of J & Katie and some of the old house, Thornhill at Faust Park, which was our third location.  We started at Old St. Charles and from there got sidetracked by a beautiful field on our way to Bush Wildlife Refuge (didn't quite made it there).  Julianne changed clothes several times.