week 4

I think that my group and I made a lot of great progress throughout our project. I can definitely say that my skills and abilities in the kitchen have improved a lot. I found many different recipes that I believe I will make at home often. It was also interesting to see that our best dishes came in our final two weeks, so we were able to see the progress that all four of us had made. I also believe that I was able to try different restaurants in Portland that I would have never tried, for example, the Colombian food cart downtown. It was the first time that I tried an Arepa and the first time that I realized there was Colombian food in Portland. I learnt a lot more about the South American scene of food in Portland than any other type of food we tried. I think critiquing the food became quite difficult because we had so many different things to write about in our blogs that we didn't have enough room to write a critique like the ones we read online. I think that we were all able to talk about which restaurants and dishes were our favourites and why with each other, so in some way, we were still able to keep that aspect of our project a little. 

I would recommend this project to another student because, at the beginning of the project, I felt like I knew quite a lot about the food industry in Portland, but there were so many places that we went to that I did not know about at all. It really gave me a different perspective about the types of local restaurants in the city. I can also say that you will have a lot of new places that you will be going to a lot after the project.

I would say that these passion projects were good because I feel like people really get into them. At first, our project may have looked like not really anything but I did actually learn a lot of new things and skills that I will take with me for a very long time. Cooking certain dishes being one of these skills. 

I would say that the school should continue to let people work in cohorts because you'll learn a lot of new things from your peers. Especially for my project, if I had done it individually, I probably wouldn't have tried a lot of the new places that I did. I only tried them because my partners knew about these places and had been there before. It was also fun to cook with my friends since I believe that we were all in the same boat when it came to our cooking skills. So I can say that I believe letting people work in groups is a great aspect of the projects.

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