Holiday Raisin Couscous

This is part of a larger recipe for Chicken with Lime Sauce and Raisin Couscous, which originated at some point from the Food Network web site (I’ve been unable to locate any further information on it or to find the original entry, so I don’t have any proper credit beyond this).  This is only for the couscous part, which I make during the holidays.

1-3/4 cups chicken broth
1/3 cup raisins (adjust to taste; I usually go for more like a half cup)
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup couscous

In small saucepan, combine chicken broth, butter, raisins, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  Boil 2 minutes over high heat.  Stir in couscous, cover, and remove from heat.  Let stand five minutes, fluff with fork, and serve immediately.

Projected Winter Quarter Schedule

My hoped-for Winter electives are as follows:

  1. PB AF 594, Economic Approaches to Environmental Management, (3 credits, description)
  2. INFO 498, Special Topics in Informatics: Programming Semantic Structures (1 credit 2 credits, description)

Which results in the following schedule (I’ve added in likely work hours):

Projected Winter Quarter Schedule

The number of credits for INFO 498 may shift slightly upwards after I talk to my advisor (Update 11/26: actually, it shifted upwards because I wanted a bit more exposure in this area, though my advisor indicated there’s not really a maximum number of credits that UW students can enroll for.  It’s now two credits.).

King County Metro: To Increase or Decrease Fares?

This strikes me as sort of a chicken and the egg problem – do you lower fares to increase ridership or do you increase ridership to lower fares?  The editorial acknowledges the issue of access, though, which seems to me to be more and more important the further you get from the Seattle metro area.

I’m lucky in that I live in an area where there’s at least five routes that run through regularly to various areas (a good chunk of them to the UW), but that wasn’t true in Olympia, where I was so far away from bus access that it was a literal impossibility to use the system, even if it was substantially cheaper than driving.