UVM Blogs

I am home today with a powerful cold and intense laryngitis.  My thoughts, quite logically turned to soup and digging through the vegetable drawer and pantry I found I had the ingredients to cook up the perfect […]

What is JiTT?
Just in Time Teaching, or JiTT, is a model first proposed by Novak, Patterson, Gavrin and Christian (1999) that combines web-based resources that help students prepare outside of class with active […]

After several weeks of steeping the cherries in rectified spirits, I drained most of the liquid, some of which I will save and serve as cherry vodka.  I left a couple of cups of liquid in the growler with the cherries and sprinkled in about 1/2 cup white sugar, swirling the contents to mix the sugar [...]

Pole Beans, early summer, Zakarpattia Beans have considerable significance in the cuisine of Zakarpattia.  One of my favorite dishes is terta fasol’ (mashed beans), made from dried kidney beans boiled and smashed with oil and large amounts of fresh chopped garlic , served as a spread with fresh bread.  The dish seems faintly out of place, more [...]

Corn harvest, Zakarpattja   At a recent family gathering my relatives clamored for a traditional dish made from cornmeal, of which my father is the acknowledged master:  fried cornmeal mush.  Mush has a long tradition in American regional cooking, as well as in the cuisine of immigrants.  While my father’s family eats mush in a [...]

Red and Green Hot Pepper Vodka Rosie Schapp, the New York Times Magazine “Drink” columnist, is featuring one of my vodka infusion recipes (for hot pepper vodka)  in her wonderful July 8th column devoted to drinks of Poland and Ukraine! Here’s the link:   “Drink:  Hurts So Good” The photo at left is the only bottle [...]

Glass of young vishnivka Every year when the dark sweet cherries come in I think about vyshnivka, a delightfully rich, deceptively easy-to-drink flavored vodka made by soaking cherries in strong vodka (usually 140 proof)  for a couple of months, after which the alcohol is drained and reserved and sugar is added to the cherries, which sit some [...]

As we move into summer I have been thinking about sunflower seeds and all the encounters I have had with them in Russia and Ukraine over the years, starting with toasting mounds of seeds in an old skillet suspended over a campfire in Siberia and watching everyone’s hands and lips turn black from splitting the [...]

A recent New York Times article on effective study techniques also points the way toward good course design that supports learning and retention of material and concepts. For me, the real “takeaway lesson” of this article was that diversity of stimulus associated with learning is a key element in information retention. How many of us [...]