Research Progress Blog #4

     Spring break went how I expected. We got home from our daily activities around 9, I would fire up my laptop, and just outline facts. By Saturday morning when we got home I had my organization down with my research but absolutely no flow. Realizing this made me very thankful that the due date was moved to Tuesday. That weekend I spent most of my time trying to make my sentences mesh and my paper feel less like a fact sheet.
  
     On Monday it actually wasn't freezing and if you know me then you know I can not stand the cold, so clearly I had to go outside. I live near Pioneer park so I walked to the park, ran around the track there, then walked back. Maybe it wasn't the most productive hour of my life but it felt good. It cleared my head and left me ready to get to work. The rest of my evening was spent trying to bulk up my now flowing paper with more research.

     When I went into my email to download my rough draft on Tuesday I saw I had an email from Cooking Light. I had messaged them the very first day we were asked to find someone to interview, so about a month ago. I received a response fairly quickly but it was just a sentence or two saying they just recommend everything in moderation. Well, the people at Cooking Light must forwarded my message directly to the chef because I now had this brand new source to use for my paper waiting in my inbox. As you can see in the photo pictured right she wrote a lot. I hadn't even asked an questions in my email; just a quick "Hello I'm writing a paper." Immediately I sorted through and added it to my paper. She covered everything from fats to sugars so I think it was really beneficial to not only my paper, but my understanding of how to change a preexisting recipe.
 
     One thing I've realized over the past few months is that this paper is always on my mind, in a good way. By that I mean in my free time, if I'm looking at recipes, instead of just getting ideas for my kitchen, I'm finding comments that lead me to research things for my paper. I never would've know to research about flax eggs if i didn't find myself casually scrolling through a vegan recipe blog. The research part has been so easy because I truly enjoy it. I said in my last post that I was worried I was going to be burnt out on my topic it and hate it by the end of this project but, just the opposite is happening. The more I find out the more I want to learn. When I learn about a new substitution idea I want to look into it more. Researching has also taught me tricks in the kitchen that I've been testing. One thing I've tried is replacing all-purpose flour with oat flour. To make the flour I took some rolled oats (like the kind you use to make oatmeal) added them to a coffee grinder and pressed go! I was left with a nice flour consistency that worked out perfectly in my muffins.

     The reason this paper has been tough for me is because I'm the type of person where if you give me an assignment that doesn't have an official 'end' I won't stop working on it. What I mean is that if I have 5 math problems for homework, I know once I get an answer for all five I'm done and can move on to the rest. Well with papers they never really have an end. You can't look at a draft and say its done, it could always use some editing. So Monday and Tuesday night I found my self constantly adding more and changing wording and by 11:30 on Tuesday night I was done. Done in every sense of the word. I had emailed it and never wanted to see it again. Because of this, on Wednesday I took a much needed break. I had already had all my sources in easybib so I created my works cited in seconds. After a days mental rest from working on this paper I took the comments made from onto my rough draft and put them into action. This weekend I am looking forwarded to starting my section five and tweaking sections 1-4 a little more.