Counting Carbs

A teacher candidate's blog focussed on tasty foods, diabetes awareness, and all things education

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Free Inquiry Update

March 20, 2021 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted an official update to my free inquiry project on home cooking and carb counting, so here we go!

In the past month or so we’ve been quite busy, so I haven’t been cooking as much as I’d ideally like to. With practicum coming soon myself (and most of my classmates too!) have been deeply engrossed in our students and preparation of units, lessons, and everything in between. I have, however, found some time to cook a few dishes and make some updates to my WordPress site that I will document in this blog post.

You must be wondering, what in the world is this dish? Lasagna, or maybe macaroni and cheese? The answer is neither! It’s a Japanese dish called カレードリア (Curry Doria).

Curry Doria is a three layered dish. The bottom layer is simply a bed of Japanese rice, the middle is a layer of Japanese curry (with pork, carrot, potato, etc), and the top is simply mozzarella cheese. This dish can be quite commonly found at Japanese supermarkets or convenience stores but I’ve never seen anything that was quite the same here in Canada. I personally absolutely love Japanese curry and cheese so this dish, while quite basic, is one of my all time favourites!

The next dish I made recently was キムチ鍋 (Kimchi Nabe), which somewhat translates to Kimchi hot-pot! The picture above fails to show just how delicious this dish was but trust me when I say that it was absolutely fabulous! The entire dish contained almost no carbs at all, as it’s basically all veggies (chinese cabbage, kimchi, mushrooms, etc), lean meat, and tofu! This is a great option for diabetics, or anyone who’s going for a low carb diet.

Lastly, while I don’t have any pictures, I’ve been playing around with my slow cooker a little in the last month. So far I’ve made BBQ pulled pork and savoury slow cooked chicken thighs and up next on my list is beef brisket! Yum!

Additionally, I’ve now caught up with updating all my home cooking posts with mini descriptions and carbohydrate information.

Until next time!

Free Inquiry Project Progress Week 3 – Descriptions, descriptions!

January 31, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Wow! Describing food is not an easy undertaking at all. Although I started this inquiry as an attempt to improve my cooking ability, I’m quickly realizing that I will also be expanding my vocabulary as there’s only so many times I can call something yummy or tasty!

Synonyms of tasty or yummy with far deeper meanings such as succulent, luscious, appetizing, inviting, tempting, delectable. These are parts of the English language that I’ve always been familiar with in the deepest part of my brain but are simply words that I’ve never frequently used before in the writing process. Considering most of my writing has been done as part of university classes, it makes sense that I’ve rarely used these words, I mean how often do luscious or delectable appear in most academic papers?

Now that I’m working on a blog for the first time, I’m learning how small things can make a difference in the user’s experience. One thing I realized today, for example, was that my food pictures were simply just too small to be inviting. By enlarging each picture my pages really came to life in a way I didn’t realize I was missing before.

One more new skill I learned how to do this week was edit and compress images. Earlier this week, I was attempting to upload a new header image to my blog but it simply kept giving me an error message, talk about frustrating! After some research and a bunch of failed hotfixes, I realized that I just had to decompress the images as they were of a too high pixel number and quality. Decompressing and changing the characteristics of pictures is something I’ve never done before so I’m quite proud that I was able to figure this out.

Overall I would say that week 3 has been successful so far. I’ve learned a new computer skill, refreshed myself on food lingo, and have started creating descriptions and carbohydrate counts for my food posts.

Until next time.

 

MLTS Film Reflection

January 18, 2021 / / 0 Comments

So who is the most likely to succeed? Not necessarily those who are proficient at writing tests or memorizing masses of academic information.

With standardized education focussing on tests and scores instead of “soft skills” such as critical thinking, confidence, resourcefulness, punctuality, time management, and collaboration, students are becomingly increasingly unprepared for entering the modern-day work environment. But how does society solve this conundrum? As mentioned in the film, our current educational model has been essentially unchanged since the days of Horace Mann and as a society we should ask ourselves, is this a good thing?

Although the economy continues to rise, human employment is becoming increasingly obsolete every year. And while the film mentioned mid-level associates and salespeople as those greatly hurt by the current technological revolution, how long is it before doctors, lawyers, or even teachers are replaced by more efficient, advanced machines or programs?

As the film mentions, we humans need to be creative. But how do we do so when our educational system  and its policies and “masterminds” stifle our creative minds at every turn? Perhaps we as educators need to be the change we see in this world. We need to help our students realize their greatest creative potential within the restrictions imposed on us by curricular standards and policies. As someone simply beginning his journey as a B.C. educator, I have yet to figure out how exactly this process will look for me. But to reference the film, I can confidently say that in my classroom I will be more of a “gardener” than an “engineer”.

image showing person walking in pre-painted footprints
Photo by Flickr user jfchenier under CC license: BY-NC 2.0

Welcome and Introduction

September 9, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

  1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
  2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
  3. Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
  4. Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.

First tasks you might explore with your new blog:

  • Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
  • Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “EdTech” category or sub-categories, Free Inquiry and EdTech Inquiry). We have also pre-loaded the Teacher Education competencies as categories should you wish to use them to document your learning. If you would like to add more course categories, please do so (e.g., add EDCI 306A with no space for Music Ed, etc.)
  • See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the course categories assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
  • Add pages
  • Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works)
  • Under Appearance,
    • Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
    • Customize menus & navigation
    • Use widgets to customize blog content and features
  • Delete this starter post (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep for reference)

Do consider creating categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to use the course topic as the category as opposed to the course number as those outside of your program would not be familiar with the number (e.g., we use “EdTech” instead of “edci336).

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

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