here we go again...

the food blog is up and running and located at epicurean-adventures.blogspot.com - run by my best friend and fellow foodie, rachel, and myself, it will hopefully prove to be a fruitful product of our time off. not a whole lot's been written yet; i'm in the midst of developing my own sticky bun recipe and hopefully we will whip up a batch of rachel's caramel apple biscotti, a product of her autumn recipe developments. in no time we'll have a bakery-worthy repertoire and no store front from which to sell it. oh well, we are but 22, after all.

also reading bill bryson's new contribution to the vast "who was william shakespeare" library. his has been the most eye-opening not for any new biographical developments but as a non-scholar, bryson lends a sort of realism to shakespeare studies that other scholars tend to neglect. he quotes an unnamed scholar who says "every shakespeare biography is 5 percent fact and 95 percent conjecture." that leaves most scholars with the increasingly difficult task of trying to write new and interesting things about a figure who died 400 years ago and whose biography remains as much of a mystery as ever. that's why we have so many books about horticulture in shakespeare, and "linguistic and informational entropy in othello." basically, it's pretty disheartening. i'm not going to lie, i spent the bulk of my undergraduate years with the idea in mind that i wanted to be a shakespeare prof. it seemed logical enough, i liked studying him and the whole of elizabethan literature and drama the most and what the heck else am i supposed to do with a degree in english besides reluctantly follow in my parents' footsteps as a librarian. granted, i've only been out of school for a month, but i'm already spending most of my time watching food network, wishing i worked at charm city cakes, looking at recipes, and all but completely forgetting that i am applying for grad school. oh yes, it is an identity crisis. i still want to go to grad school, if for nothing more than to know for sure whether or not academia is my calling and to settle somewhere new and possibly more permanent than montreal. don't tell my parents.

upward, onward, and into the kitchen to roast some veggies...