How To Not Burn Everything Down
Learning by doing: The Petite Ginger's Guide to College Eating
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Beans, Beans, (Not Bacon) and Beans
This one began with three hungry girls…
We began by flicking through a college themed cook book (read: this means it was meant to be a nice and simple recipe to follow), settling on one that only had two steps and three ingredients(one of which is butter and should be put in everything and two of which are in the title of the recipe). Did we follow the recipe? Do we ever follow the recipe? Are chemistry jokes funny? Answer: Sometimes but not now and probably not soon (what do chemists call a benzene ring with iron atoms replacing the carbon atoms? A ferrous wheel…)!
Black Beans and Onions
Ingredients:
- Butter, borrowed from Shorney community fridge (vegan substitute not found)
- An onion, actually purchased
- Black beans, kept on-hand by the ever resourceful cooking buddies
- Meat (optional)
- Rice, actually purchased
- Salsa
- Strawberries
- Heavy whipping cream
- Honey
What you do:
- Chop up the onions, toss them in a pan with the butter, make them nice and soft and slightly less white.
- Pour the black beans and salsa into a pot and put the pot on a burner. Feel free to stir but don’t feel required.
- Start the rice. If you know how to cook rice, you’re in luck. If you, like myself, are mildly inept then all you really need to do is read the package, pour some rice in a pot, heat it up, add water. Don’t worry about measuring. You should probably stir this one. You want the rice to end up soft and chewable, not crunchy.
- Pour the onions into the salsa-bean mixture. If you’re using meat, first learn to cook it, then add it to the mixture. We were going for a low effort meal, so instead of meat we added a bit of salt and pepper.
- Serve all that yumminess up!
What you do for desert:
- Chop the strawberries. Or don’t.
- Pour the heavy whipping cream into a bowl, grab a whisk, grab a friend, and begin. Keep the whisk moving quickly back and forth in the cream. Continue until you get tired, tap your friend in, continue. slowly add the honey to taste. Continue whipping. Forever, or until the whip cream is less like liquid and more like whipped cream. We took the extremely lazy route and just poured the cream and the honey into a blender for a few seconds. Yeah…
- Nom. Roll back home.
This one ended with three happily overstuffed girls.
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Smitten Kitchen
Noms
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Meal-X
Meal-X (or meal exchange if you’re stuffy) is Denison’s grab and go way of feeding their students. Meal X is for students (like myself) who hate crowded dining halls and would rather wait in line for a half hour for a salad than search through the dining hall like it’s high school (“ermh, can i sit with you? no? oh, that’s ok, i like eating in the bathroom…”). Plus, Meal X is available from 5:30-9(I think) on weekdays while the dining halls close by 7.
Meal X is also known to be healthier and more filling. So for nights when I plan on holing up in the computer lab and typing, this is my ambrosia.
Ingredients:
Spinach, grilled chicken, chickpea, cucumber, craisin salad
Raspberry vinnagrette
French fries
Lemonade
School ID (aka swipe card aka key card aka you-don’t-exist-here-if-you-don’t-have-even-though-your-picture’s-ugly card)
What You Do:
1. Find somewhere to sit or stand, anywhere in the world
2. Stuff that gaping hole you call a mouth
3. Use your now free time to work/study/type/write
*Note: meal x is actually a really fun way to catch up with a couple friends without the
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TACO NIGHT
Wednesday night is rock climbing night, where I climb in a van full of my peers and travel to a shack in the middle of a field filled with rock walls. Afterwards, like any hungry college kid, I logically craved tacos. As it so happens, I had a surplus of meat in my dorm fridge…. good thing I thought (salty salty salty) I’d be cooking for 5+ people.
Ingredients (most of which I actually purchased):
Dirt/sweat from climbing (optional, I guess)
MojoFlo concert (also optional, I suppose)
2 pounds of ground beef (or veggy ground beef; and you probably only need 1 pound for three girls)
1 packet of taco seasoning (I like to use the IGA brand because it makes me feel ritzy and it’s this nice neon orange color)
2 packets taco blend cheese (but really you only need one and any cheap cheese works)
2 tomatoes (but one of these should be eaten whole as a snack)
1 bottle of Realime (or other kind of lime juice)
Some Tequila (which we didn’t have the opportunity to use)
Some cheap lettuce
Taco shells
Bacon
*note: I chose most of my ingredients based on three factors: does it say ‘taco’ on it? is it cheap? is it bacon?
What you do:
1. Get out your tiniest knife and tiniest frying pan to go with the tiniest kitchen on campus.
2. Heat up that pan to medium-ish, get wiggy about having to actually touch raw meat (you know, now that you decided to start eating meat again), and slap a good deal of the beef into the pan. Listen to that bitch sizzle. Brown all the meats (which in cooking language means make sure ALL the pink is gone; this involves sort of stirring and slicing the chunks up and calling in your supporters to check if it’s okay).
3. Toss in some of the taco seasoning, fake lime juice (which coincidentally tastes a bit like kitchen cleaner - who knew?!?), Tequila (if you can), and pepper. If you have to cook the meat in rounds due to an inadequately sized pan make sure you don’t use all the seasoning on the first go. Actually, make sure you don’t use all of the anything. We want our meat to be moist and flavourful; nobody likes a premature and heavy hand.
4. Ask your friend to use the tiny tool to slice and dice the tomato and lettuce.
5. Continue cooking the meat. You’ll be here for awhile. Sometimes meat takes a long time to get juicy, especially if you’re ill-equipped. Practice makes perfect in the art of meat, so don’t worry; you can get better over time. Maybe one day it won’t gross you out to actually touch it.
6. Once you’re done with the beef, pile it in a big ol’ bowl and admire your meat. I personally think it’s healthy love your own meat. Remember, if you’re the only one cooking your meat then you will always win!
7. We decided to take a break at this point to eat. If you have a higher endurance then proceed to step eight, if not then IT’S TACO TIME. Eat that shit up. Pop them into the microwave (because I dumped that jerk - the oven - over the weekend; he wasn’t getting me hot enough) to melt all the cheese. Go ahead and play in the meat - real college students don’t use/have utensils. When you get bored go on to the next step.
8. Now it’s bacon time! If you (like myself) are tired of touching on meat then call in a friend. Tag team that meat! With our teensy tiny pan we could only cook three strips at a time so we decided to chop up the piggy butt into more manageable bits. Be aware that cooking bacon in a dorm will cause the entire dorm (up to the third floor) to reek of bacon for hours. Bacon is also one of those foods that ends up being eaten as it’s cooked - this might be a good time to let the chef eat, too.
9. Anything left over can be put in one of two places: your mouth or the community fridge. The magical thing about community fridges is that things can be placed inside and never found again! It’s also a really great place to borrow butter from. Just remember to keep your Community Fridge Karma in check: if you borrow butter (say… for Crack) make sure you donate fake lime juice.
10. After you recover from your meat coma (or get back from your jog if you’re a super healthy vegetarian who used lightweight fake meat) it’s time to waddle across campus to the MojoFlo concert in the rain. It’s also time to smile and enjoy the freedom and resources you have and to be happy that your belly is full.
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CRACK (borrowed with slight adaptations from Smitten Kitchen)(in which I objectify my arbitrarily male oven)
Crack (& an explanation of the project)
I attend Denison University, an entirely residential four-year university located in the hills of north-central Ohio in the US. I adore my school, but one of the drawbacks of the independence of living away from my parent’s home is that I now rely on dining halls and my own ingenuity to feed myself. And I am always hungry, as I assume most petite redheaded women are. After one semester of using solely Sodexo Food Services to provide nourishment, plus three weeks back home spent gazing at recipes, Epic Meal Time, and My Drunk Kitchen episodes on the internet, I returned to The Hill wanting to cook. Being a mostly broke college student, I like to acquire ingredients (as opposed to purchasing them) whenever possible. It should be noted that when I describe an ingredient as ‘borrowed’ I generally have neither the intention nor the ability to return said borrowed item. But so it was that I became acquainted with the sketchy little kitchen in the basement of Smith Hall and the magic began.
CRACK (borrowed with slight adaptations from Smitten Kitchen)(in which I objectify my arbitrarily male oven)
Ingredients that I actually used:
21-ish off-brand Saltines borrowed form the dining hall
2-ish sticks of butter borrowed from the community fridge
About 1 cup solidified brown sugar, borrowed
2 1/2 dark chocolate Hershey’s bars (of three if you forget to eat half when you’re bored)
What You Do:
First things first: preheat your dirty little oven so he’s all nice and warm and ready (350 degrees F).
2. Lay out your crackers in a flat, thin pan. You could probably use a brownie sheet if you wanted, as long as it has a rim.
3. Put your sauce pan on the burner and get it nice and hot before you dump all the butter and all the brown sugar in at once. We are now in the process of making caramel. Stab at the butter with a spatula to break it up a little, then hurriedly stir the whole poo-colored concoction until it starts to smoke and bubble. Trying not to panic, let it bubble and smoke for about three minutes, or until you start getting seriously concerned about the smoke alarm going off – which ever happens first.
4. Now quickly (because it might thicken?) pour it over the crackers. Throw some salt on the floating fuckers then tip the pan a bit so all your crackers swim back to where they’re supposed to be. Stick that thing in the oven and set a timer for 15 minutes.
5. During those 15 minutes you should break up the chocolate bars into teensy tiny pieces that can melt easily. If your fingers don’t look dirty then you probably did it wrong.
5 1/2. Put these aside, check the timer, and begin stressing out about how you’re going to pull a super-freaking-burn-fingerprints-off-hot pan out of that slutty little oven. I recommend running up and down three flights of stairs, asking your neighbors for oven mitts, and finally asking your resourceful roommate what to do. If you’re following the Miranda Approved time schedule, you now have two minutes to grab a towel and pull the pan out of that promiscuous oven.
6. Slap the pan on the stove top, sprinkle on the chocolate bits, and pop the pan back into our sleazy friend. Immediately pull the pan back out and spread the melted chocolate all about.
7. Congratulations, you are now in the home stretch. All you have to do now is find a refrigerator big enough to take all that hot, steamy, sticky… pan. I waited about a half hour before I brought the nummy stuff up to my dorm room, but if you have a secure enough fridge you could theoretically leave it to cool overnight. Once you’re satisfied by how hard it is (okay, now I’m really done with the innuendos) you can have fun trying to get the cooked on sugar off the pan and into your gaping mouth-hole (I found that kind of twisting the pan helped, as did banging it into the staircase accidentally).
