Sidewalk chalk and homemade yogurt!

Happy Spring from EcoHouse!!

This is Madeline here and it's my first time posting on our house blog! This was the first week back from Spring Break and although the weather didn't feel like April should (it snowed...grrrr, Iowa), we made the best of it in our little corner of campus.

(Is that grass a little bit green?!)

The sidewalk chalk made an appearance, as did the hacky sack. Vincent revealed his ninja-like hacky sackin' skillz, while Jacob and Tom kept it goin in stride. Adri and I made valiant attempts but sadly our clumsiness won out over our grace. 

I found myself with some free time this week and decided this was the week to make the first batch of communal yogurt! This was four times the batch size I usually make, so it was an interesting challenge with our limited pots, ha. We'll be making this much yogurt on a weekly basis now, and I'll teach the house so that the cooks can rotate each week. WOOO homemade yogurt!

We opted for two kinds of yogurt: whole milk and 0% (skim) Greek yogurt. We used Kalona milk, which is an organic farm about an hour from Grinnell whose cows are grass-fed, and it's so delicious!! I incubated the yogurt in pots on the radiator in the living room. Gotta get creative...

I also made a couple batches of "inception cookies" because why not put cookies in cookies...? Thin mints chopped up and baked into regular chocolate chip cookie dough, topped with sea salt. I think these cookies made me some friends.

A few other happenings:

• Jacob also graced us with his first post-Spring Break loaf of bread! This one was onion, sunflower seed, and rosemary, topped with some cheddar. No picture unfortunately (it was gobbled too quickly...) but it was beauuuutiful and tasty as ever!
• Silvia Federici visited campus for the Center for Prairie Studies series "(Re) Considering the Commons" this week, and Vincent and I got to have dinner with her and a few other students. She spoke on women, labor, reproduction, food, the commons, and other related topics. She inspired some great (albeit sometimes, ahem, heated) discussion on campus!  
• Hannah is going to be putting together a new art project that some house members will participate in. She'll be creating a Tumblr of letters on the topic of mental illness, and the letters will be addressed to all sorts of "recipients" (disorders, grief, ourselves, people who have passed away, people who are still or used to be in our lives). A few of us will be contributing and knowing Hannah it will turn out wonderfully! 
• We finalized our list for who's going to live in the house next year! Woohoo! It was quite a doozy but we did it! HUUUUUUGE, eternal thank you to Adriana for the countless emails and hours she spend this week trying to finalize our house plans. We owe you. 

I thought a quote from Alice Waters would be a nice way to wrap up this little foodie blog post:

"Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education." 

-Alice Waters

Love,
Madeline & EcoHouse Spring '14