What do you know... I can cook! (Unfortunately, cooking plagiarists is frowned on.)

[corrielle]

I came back from my parents' over Thanksgiving with an inexplicable urge to meal-plan and eat out less.  Maybe it was seeing my parents come up with tasty, healthy meals night after night.  Maybe it was the realization that I eat out a lot.  Whatever it was, it had me dragging out cook books and printing out adorable meal plan calendars from websites for hyper-organized housewives. Kelli and Rae got into it to, with yummy home-made burritos (and tomatoes for "alternate universe Emily") and hamburger stew that gave us leftovers for the rest of the week.

So far, the experiment has been a great success. Notable dishes I've put together include:

Chicken with Marsala mushroom sauce.  It's my favorite thing to eat at Olive Garden, and I know how to make it now!   Time consuming, but delicious.

Italian White-bean stew.  This was different than anything I've tried to make before, but turned out really well. 

Beef and onions cooked in beer.  Just as good and hearty as is sounds.

Spinach, grape, and walnut salad. Really tasty, and I even made home-made dressing for it!

I'm loving this "have dinner plans that will most likely result in leftovers" thing.  We'll see how long this lasts when school starts again in January.

Speaking of school... I'm posting because I had to take a break from grading.  I got a really severe case of plagiarism and had to calm down before I graded the rest out of fairness to those remaining students.  This plagiarist was clever. She didn't take all of her material from one source, she changed references to earlier points she hadn't included so they seemed to make sense... and about 90% of her paper comes word for word from various free essay sites and enotes discussions of her topic.  I gave her a zero.  When I see her on Tuesday and she tries to apologize and asks what she can do to make it up, my answer is going to be "nothing."  The last time I'm going to see them is the day of the final, there is no time for revision, and I don't think I'd give her the chance to do so even if there was.  This wasn't a case of accidental plagiarism.  This was a case of copy-paste cheating at its worst, and it's put me in a horrid mood. 

What's worse is this: I came up with a "myths about plagiarism" presentation that I give to my my developmental and freshman composition classes, but I didn't give it to the class that this student is in because she is from my one and only Intro to Literature class. They're supposed to know these things already, but it is quite obvious that they don't.  Or at least this girl didn't.  It's never fun to have illusions shattered, but better that than blithely go along thinking that beginning lit students don't need to have it spelled out for them.  Next semester, my lit class is getting my long plagiarism spiel just like all of my lower level classes. It takes up a whole class period, but I think it pretty much eliminated most serious, intentional cheating in the classes where I gave it.

Whew.  Nice to have that out of my system... Now I can focus on more important things, like getting the rest of my grading done, the Christmas party I'm helping to host tomorrow, and the two Christmas fic exchanges I'm taking part in and haven't even begun to think about...

At least the Christmas tree is upright (though undecorated) and fit in our living room (with about two inches to spare).