Working and some food experiments

Things are starting to fall into somewhat more of a pattern. I've spent the past few days in meetings and working. The work I'm doing has mostly been on finishing up some papers from my postdoc, but I've also been working on my syllabus and course design. There are a LOT of meetings that need to be held to design a new University's overall majors, course requirements, handbooks, prioritize the next round of faculty hiring etc. etc.
Otherwise, not too many exciting things going on.... I came here to work and now the fun touristing part is pretty much over!
***************************************
I've been experimenting with making yogurt, which has been quite successful. I'm pretty disappointed in the quality and variety of yogurt here--there's only one kind that tastes very good at all and mostly the texture is gross and lumpy. The translation to english here is "sour curd" and that's pretty much what it is. If I had it in my fridge in the US, I would throw it out because it was bad. I made two experimental batches with two varieties of starter yogurt I had. One turned out very well and the other didn't at all. That's part of being a scientist--often experiments fail! But a 50% success rate is pretty good!
For the incubation, I just leave it on my counter overnight--the little bacterias love the 85-90 temperature of my kitchen! The texture turned out much better than what I buy in the store and the flavor, while still pretty sour, didn't taste "off". I hope to get some fresh, whole milk to use in the near future. All the milk in stores come in a plastic bag and I suspect some of it might be reconstituted from dry powder. Needless to say I'm not eating it on cereal or drinking it, so yogurt is a good way to get my dairy intake! You need to find someone who delivers fresh milk to buy it, and one of the Bangladeshi staff here said she would see if anyone was delivering in our area.

The other 'cooking' success I had was making some granita. I made it for a little birthday party for another faculty earlier this week where we were supposed to bring sweets. To start, I made about 5-6 cups' volume of very strong mint tea, added LOTS of honey and then about a 1/3 cup of Nescafe. You need to make the base much sweeter and stronger in flavor than you think for granitas otherwise they just taste like ice. Granita requires you to scrape the forming ice crystals with a fork periodically (about every hour or so after it begins to solidify) so it doesn't form a big block. I was just at home working on the computer all day, so that was easy. It turned out very good--the best use of Nescafe I've tasted so far! Now I can eat it as a little dessert, or put it in a glass for an iced coffee slushy! You can make granita out of just about any fruit, juice, puree or flavored liquid you can think of! A great way to use up excess fruit during the summer. I also made a batch with some mango juice from a box--it's a little too syrupy and sweet for just drinking, but when frozen is amazing.