Edna Lewis's Creamed Scallions (Page 575)

RECIPE #836

• Date: Thursday, September 25, 2008 -- 9pm
• Location: Bloomington, IN
• Kitchen: My Apartment
• Dining Companion: Matty
• Recipe Rating: B
  

I have been super-busy lately so I have been selecting a few recipes a week that are very, very quick to make. This recipe was chosen for that reason. Start to finish: 20 minutes. The procedure was extremely simple. Garlic was cooked in cream, which was reduced to form the sauce. Meanwhile, the sliced scallions were steamed until tender. The scallions were then stirred together with the cream sauce, some parsley, and salt and pepper. That's it! It was definitely an easy recipe. The result was good -- not great, but good. The dish had a nice flavor to it. I like the combination of onions and cream, so flavor-wise this dish worked for me. I wasn't so sold on the texture though. The scallions were tender, but they weren't as soft as I would have liked them. A few weeks back I made the creamed leeks from The Book, a dish that is very similar in spirit to this one. However, the leeks were cooked much longer that these scallions were, to get a much softer texture, and I definitely preferred that result. Texturally it wasn't ideal, but this certainly wasn't a bad dish. Neither Matty nor I are usually big fans of creamed vegetables, but we both liked this dish well enough.

Here is the recipe.

Although it still feels to me as though the semester just began, it is already exam time! This past week has been crazy. On top of various research demands, and the usual demands of teaching, I had to write two midterms. Writing exams always takes much longer than it seems like it should. My regular calculus students took their exam on Friday. My business calculus students will take their exam on Monday. When I wrote the regular calculus exam, I was a bit concerned that it was too hard. I thought the mean might be a little low, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for a first exam. If the mean is too high the students start slacking off, thinking the course will be easy, and that is not a good thing. So I wanted the exam to be a little bit on the tough side. Apparently, though, I overshot. After the exam on Friday I gathered with my three teaching assistants and we spent a couple hours grading the exams together. It was quite depressing. The mean was definitely lower than I expected. I put one problem on the exam that I knew would be difficult, and one other that I figured some students would have a problem with. The other five problems though were extremely straightforward. Nonetheless, my students did pretty poorly. It is hard when you are teaching a class for the first time to know what to expect. At least this exam gave me a better perspective on what the students know and understand. That's valuable even if the experience was more than a little depressing.

Here's hoping that my business calculus students do better on Monday! I think they will. Having taught that class before, I think I did a decent job of aiming for the difficulty I wanted.