None of the Parents, All of the Pie

Blog readers, I know you've all been wondering what classically American dessert Bean and I could have possibly concocted. Or, you know, maybe not because there's really only one.

That's right, everyone. It's time for Apple Pie a la Nug and Bean.

Writing a blog post has never made me so nostalgic for last week.

We had been looking forward to making this pie with our buddies Domsicle and Grape ever since Bean went apple picking, and we were counting on it to be a bright spot in a difficult day. It needed to be perfect, and epitomize all that is good about America in general. With this in mind, we proceeded with our usual slap-shod approach to doing things.

Americana Part 1: Mac and Cheese

Last weekend was a marathon of one of college eating's most essential staples: free food. And (as often happens on weekends when normal routines are broken) when free food was not available, Nugget simply forgot to eat. As a result, we don't have too many cooking adventures to share with you from the last few days. We did, however, kick the weekend off with a dinner party with Domsicle and Grape (the younger-sister-formally-known-as-Grace) on Friday night, which resulted in some truly delicious discoveries. Nugget is going to blog about the super-exciting dessert we made that night (cliffhanger!), but in the meantime, I would like to present:

Broccoli and White Cheddar Mac and Cheese (aka one of our new favorite recipes).

Guess Who's Coming to Brinner

 

with

I'm sensing a theme on SGDF. Bean always looks normal and I smile like a serial killer.

Yesterday evening, after going to a lecture given by Alexandra Fuller, Bean, NutMeg and Sassafrass (NutMeg's roommate) and I met up for that holy meal known as brinner, or, less succinctly, breakfast-for-dinner.

Let the Record Show:

If this post sounds at all odd to you at any point (I mean more than usual, wise guys), bear in mind that last night I totally won Library Chicken. I'm running on about 3.5 hours of sleep and the ever-satisfying thrill of victory.

Library Chicken and College Snack Time

Tonight, Nugget and I are playing a game we call "Library Chicken"-- neither us can leave Case-Geyer Library until the other one does. It is a truly heroic test of will, academic attention span, and caffeine intake. Strategic breaks are key to my long-term strategy to defeat Nugget in this epic contest, so instead of continuing to read about Freud and Einstein, I thought I'd pause to share some miscellaneous thoughts on the miscellaneous college meal: snacks!

Last weekend, I went with Colgate's Newman Community to an apple orchard called Beak & Skiff for a day of apple picking and general frolicking. The day brought to mind childhood memories, falling leaves, and all that is good about Central New York. After our rather disappointing dinner on Tuesday night, we turned to the bounty I had brought home to redeem the evening, making ourselves a study break snack of apples, maple candy, and apple cider.

In my mind, this is an example of all the best qualities of food; like pitzelles and hot chocolate at Christmas or pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving, apple and maple are flavors I look forward to all year. They create a special moment out of a particular time of year, and lend themselves to some pretty snazzy food photography.

Norman Rockwell wishes he had painted this
almost as much as you wish you were eating it.

However, on a night like tonight (aka most nights), snacks don't reach this level of perfection. Instead, they are generally pure junk that serves to fill the void that sleep leaves behind.

Here's what our fuel for Library Chicken has been:

If Martha Stewart is the champion of the classy snack, then tonight we are following the lead of another Food Philosophy Icon: Louis CK.

Ok, so that's not the best advice to post on a food blog.

What can we say? Smart girls love dumb food.

P.S. I am totally going to win Library Chicken. Emma is quickly descending into a delusional state.

We Shop Badly, But Make Some Mean Rapini

In many respects, yesterday was a no good, dirty rotten, very bad day for me and Bean. But mostly for me. There are many dangers specific to college life, but perhaps none so insidious as sleep deprivation. I'm honestly not sure if that is the true root of my series of failures today, but it's my go-to-scapegoat.

Allow me a brief anecdote to illustrate the pervasiveness of today's theme: my shirt was inside out all day and I didn't notice. In this day and age it's hard to tell a seam from a stylish accent, but I've never heard of a stylish accent tag.

But to be honest, today's real villain isn't lack of sleep. It's Price Chopper. Specifically, whoever is in charge of designing their packaging. Here's what I have to say to them:

Spice Up Your Life!

Look what we got! Bean and I are officially spice girls.

I know what joie de vivre smells like: this box.

Massive strides have been made in the war on blandness. Our friend, Chef Spaetzle (an actual chef), recently rocked our world by sending us a myriad of spices. We now own things I have never heard of. And I thought sumac was a tree. Whatever it is, it smells awesome.

Overwhelmed by the plethora of potential flavor, we decided we had to make a pyramid.

This package fixed a major problem in our lives. In addition to being constantly cramped for time and funds, there's a lot of stuff that we just don't have. Stuff that makes the culinary world go round. Prior to our spices' arrival, Bean had a stressful dream about thinking that every recipe in the world called for cumin.

Adult readers (if you exist), take pity on your college-aged relations. They're probably living like the Europeans did before the Silk Road -- vaguely unsatisfied and confusing 'salty' with 'delicious.' Rather than that iTunes gift card, this Christmas give the gift that keeps on giving: a spice rack with all the essentials. It'll stop them from plotting to shanghai their roommates and sail off in search of the Northwest Passage.

Thanks for broadening our culinary horizons, Spaetzle.

Nugget and Bean Make a Big Italian Mess

Hey there, blog readers! Today was an exciting day in the land of Nugget and Bean. The interest house where I live (and Nugget pretends to live) has organized a food co-op for Monday night dinners this semester, and this was our day to cook for everyone. Unfortunately, we also had a Writing Center staff meeting that didn't end until 5:15 PM, leaving us with a serious time crunch.

So of course, we decided to attempt a full Italian dinner: chicken parmesan, eggplant parmesan, tomato sauce, pasta, garden salad, and sauteed broccoli rabe. There was no other logical option. And by "there was no other logical option," I clearly mean, "Nugget and Nutmeg both came up with a million simple and delicious suggestions, and I somehow managed to talk Nugget into this one."

It was either this, or try to take over the world again.

The Squash Chronicles Continue

2) SPAGHETTI SQUASH WITH ROASTED BRUSSELS SPROUTS AND CHICKPEAS

Nug makes a breakthrough in food photography. So classy!

We were hoping that this recipe would restore our faith in squashdom and it totally did. We got the recipe from FatFree Vegan Kitchen, and if every recipe on that site manages to be this tasty, it's going to earn a position among my favorites.

Elements of Excellence:

1) Brussels sprouts. I genuinely wish these had been a tangible, edible part of my childhood. They are not the harbingers of nastiness that popular culture makes them out to be.

2) Basil. The recipe calls for dried basil, but we didn't have that. We did, however, have some fresh basil that is miraculously still living in a glass of water on my window sill. We chiffonaded (yeah, I really wanted to use that word again) it up and sprinkled it on top of the dish.


3) Sheer volume. Spaghetti squash is the Mary Poppins carpet bag of the vegetable world. You start scraping with a fork, it starts coming off in shreds, and it just won't stop. Yay leftovers!

4) Homeyness. I can picture eating this dish out of a bowl in front of a fireplace. This is unlikely to happen for me though, because Colgate bricked up all the fireplaces on campus. It's like they think we shouldn't be in charge of fire or something.

Cooking Method 1
I was trying to smile and not to burn myself.
Multitasking is not my strong suit.

What We Learned:

1) Bean's stomach waits for no one. Seriously, for someone with an enormous attention span for academia, she's like a bored kid during a long car ride in the kitchen.

2) This led to a more useful discovery: spaghetti squash is a very forgiving vegetable. When roasting proved to be too slow, we moved to the microwave with no ill effects (as far as we could tell).

3) Like most new 'chefs' we have absolutely no sense of timing.

Cooking Method 2

4) This is an incredibly forgiving recipe. Everything stayed warm enough and retained enough structural integrity that when we finally put it all in the wok, it came together as if we had timed everything properly.

5) Brussels sprouts aren't spelled "brussel sprouts."



Cautionary Tale of the Day:

No. Wrong. Bad.

This actually happened during our first squash meal, but let's go over it now. You are making pasta. Your house's only wooden spoon is a glorified tongue depressor, so you're using a metal spoon.

 Do you A) rest it on top of the open pot of boiling water? Or B) put it absolutely anywhere else?

If you answered A, you're dumb because steam is hotter than boiling water, and metal is a conductor. You are, however, in good company. Try not to curse too much when you leave important pieces of your flesh behind on the spoon.

Squash on Squash on Squash Part 1

Hamilton (the town that Colgate is in) has an amazing farmer's market every Saturday, and last week Bean and I got a little crazy with the squash. To use up our preponderance of squash, we decided to try two new recipes in which squash plays the starring role.

1) PASTA WITH ACORN SQUASH AND PANCETTA

We are both big fans of acorn squash and figured that this recipe sounded and looked pretty tasty, and that the marriage of acorn squash (which we both believe is truly maple syrup's soulmate) and pancetta was intriguing.

What Worked:

If it looks like this, it's not crispy enough.
You want those babies brown, trust us.

The pancetta. It's the bomb. I am continually amazed by the amount of 'exotic' food that Price Chopper has. The sliced pancetta we got there was so handy. We just rendered the crap out of it.


What Didn't:

To be honest, almost everything else. The first mistake was totally on us. We overcooked the squash a little bit.

These are too crispy.
However, with some more oil and maybe some salt,
 we think they would make great "french fries."

After that though, I call shenanigans. First of all, the original blog image shows the squash holding itself together, being friends with the pasta without glomming all over it, and generally looking presentable. Our pasta, however, could only be described as "glop in a wok." 

Is it possible that this is due to our lack of culinary skills? 

Why no, how silly of you to ask.

Here's the other thing. Pasta is starchy. Squash is starchy. And it's also not a sauce. So the result is a slightly dry, heavy, starchy, mushy thing with small bites of delicious crunchy pancetta. So the moral of the story is:

Their pasta + reality = our pasta
Yup. Just compared TSwift and Ke$ha to pasta.

On Peanut Butter

I'm going to make another weird analogy.

Here it is:

Peanut butter on a spoon is the snooze button of hunger. They are both magical, counterproductive to most of my goals, and I make frequent use of them.


In the PB spoon's defense, of its 190 calories, only 140 are from fat. That leaves 50 to be made of other things.

Now in haiku form:

Peanut butter spoon,
You extend our happiness.
And also waistlines.

As they say in Ireland, Sláinte!

This past summer I went to Ireland for a month with Colgate as part of an Extended Study on Irish literature. It really was incredible and very educational, not only regarding Ireland's history and culture, but also in the ways of adulthood (minus cooking). There is nothing quite like having your debit card eaten by an ATM in a foreign country for bringing you up to speed with modern electronic banking. I eventually did get the card back, but I had to have a lengthy conversation with the bank people while climbing Ben Bulben.

"Professors, why are we climbing this mountain again?"
"Yeats wrote a poem about it."
"Did he climb it?"
"Of course not."

Tonight my Ireland friends and I are having an Ireland-themed reunion. In preparation for the festivities, a few of us got together to make scones, an Irish staple. Seriously, the saddest thing about coming back to America was the general dearth of tea and scones. I do order tea at diners now. The waiters look at me funny and bring me Lipton in chipped coffee mugs.

We made Cream Scones, and they're 1) delicious, and 2) idiot proof. We got the recipe from Honey & Jam, which is an all around great site. We put chocolate chips in one batch (just stirred them in when we put in the heavy cream), and gave the other a cinnamon swirl. This was surprisingly easy -- just dust the dough round with cinnamon, fold the dough in half, repeat. The scones only take about 30 minutes, including baking time.

Mmmm ... I can feel my fake Irish accent coming on.

This seems like a good time to mention that our interests also extend to beverages. Purely in the abstract, of course, since neither of us is twenty-one. However, in Ireland the drinking age is eighteen.

Let me share with you my favorite Irish alcoholic beverage:


MEAD.


Mead is the drink of the gods. It's sweet without being cloying, and delicately fruity. I don't know how widely available it is, but we had it at a "medieval" dinner at Bunratty Castle. How was this medieval feast, you ask? Picture the early bird special at Medieval Times. Add Ireland's most lipsticked and inappropriately hairy geriatrics, and a group of twenty or so confused college students. Yeah, it was like that.

Going Greek?

Last week, the mania of Sorority Recruitment took Colgate's campus by storm. Not wanting to be left out, Nug and I decided to go Greek as well. But instead of adding Greek letters to our wardrobe, we added some Greek inspiration to our dinner plans.

This.

Not this.

The result was a meal that took us just over an hour to prepare, even though it had MULTIPLE COMPONENTS.

Ha Jin makes Nug have thoughts

Colgate has a lot of great classes, but hands down one of the coolest has to be Living Writers. You read books written by people who are actually alive, and then those living, breathing people come talk to you. In the flesh. It makes me want to roll around on the floor and giggle, overcome with English major/book-nerd glee.

This year's theme is international writers, and they have a really great lineup of people (Salman Rushdie is coming, people. Salman FREAKING Rushdie!). This week's author was Ha Jin, the author of Waiting.


First of all, he's excessively adorable. You know how adorable Bruce Banner is in The Avengers with his whole rumpled, slightly confused brilliant person routine? Ha Jin is like that.

One of these things ... is exactly like the other. (No, seriously, LOOK AT THEIR CLOTHES.)

Both of these things ... belong in my life.

Besides being eminently huggable, Ha Jin is an interesting, thought-provoking speaker. What I found most interesting were his thoughts on language. When students asked him to speak about his decision to switch from writing in Chinese to English, he said very plainly that he wouldn't suggest that anyone learn a second language and try to make a name for themselves writing in it. To do so, he said, was insanity.

The thing to do, Jin said, was to write in your first language and only your first language. But your first language doesn't have to be your mother tongue. Here first means primary, or first in your heart, rather than earliest. Jin thinks, rightly, in my opinion, that writing in a language is more than just putting words from a certain communication system down on a page. It immerses you in the culture, philosophy, and manner of thinking that comes with that language. So it's important that you express yourself in the language you are most comfortable with as a total package. Intriguing, no?

Dirty-Snow Goggles

When Nugget and I were setting up our fancy, impressive, high-tech new blog, we briefly considered choosing a picture of our school as the background for our various musing and misadventures. Ultimately, we decided to make a different artistic choice ("What in the world is a template? Why did our one picture turn into a million tiny ones? Hey, isn't that a button that will give us a nice pre-made picture of a book?"). However, the search for a picture of Colgate that represented our daily experience of undergraduate life proved to be enlightening.

If you were to drive up Broad Street and catch sight of Colgate tomorrow morning, you would see this:

And yet, when we were choosing a photo that captured the essence of our collegiate lives, we came up with this:

I can think of so many beautiful, perfect images from my time at Colgate: the stars over Whitnall Field on a snowy night, the bright yellow leaves on the tree outside my freshman dorm room in the fall, Hamilton decorated like a Christmas village around December, a sunny afternoon by the lake in summer. But at the end of the day, as much as college is the best four years of your life, it is also one long sleep-deprived slog. So when I'm sitting through a lecture at 8:30 AM on a Monday morning, after lugging my books home from the library at midnight the night before....

.... you can bet I'll be seeing the world through dirty-snow goggles.

Put a bird on it!

You know that Portlandia sketch, "Put a Bird on It"? If you don't, you should. It's about how hipsters put birds on things to mark them as their own. Like Zorro's 'Z,' but with feathers and a beak.

Anyway, the point of this is that the hipsters have realized that adding one exceptionally awesome thing to everything else elevates the composite level of awesome. During tonight's dinner (just leftover black bean soup because we were strapped for time again), we realized that we had found this to be true. But rather than advocating mass consumption of fowl, we hold that the world's most useful food is the quesadilla.

It takes five minutes. Less, maybe. And then you have a crunchy, salty, cheesy meal-enhancer that even someone in the most limited kitchen can make. So embrace the down-home deliciousness of the 'dilla.

Nug on the NY Times crossword and professors

Let the record show:

Bean and I had a good time on the crossword today. We almost finished, and our friend Rex Parker (okay, he's not really our friend, but he's very good at the crossword) validated most of our feelings.

Some feelings I would like to express:

1) The big, thematic answers were all puns that made you feel clever when you got them. Like "a Lebanese water passage" was "Beirut bay route."

2) The clue "family member, informally" (with the answer being "sis") is stupid because how are you supposed to know which family member? I was briefly convinced that "rel" for "relative" might be a thing.

3) The clue that tripped us up in the end was "red skinned food." The answer was "edam." The freaking Dutch cheese with the red wax. I still maintain that wax is not a skin.

Does not equal 

On to professors. Okay, haikus are a thing I do. I write them for NutMeg and Bean all the time. My least favorite game in the world is "guess what the professor is thinking." And all of my professors wanted to play that today, and were also gesticulating in a distracting fashion. I will now unburden my soul.

Dearest professors,

I can't know what you're thinking.

Just freaking say it.

Dearest professors,

Wild flailing will not make 

Me a mind reader.

Try the gray stuff, it's delicious!

Today Beaner and I made some black bean soup. We got the recipe from here, but I kind of feel like black bean soup, like guacamole, is more a process of combining loosely confederated parts than a recipe.

For example, the recipe calls for two 15 oz cans of black beans. We had three cans amounting to 53.5 ounces of beans. So we decided the only logical thing to do was to add all of them. And to throw in some panchetta because why not.

An interesting note on pancetta: if you throw it in the pan kind of furled up (we decided to chiffonade ours) it will open like a flower before your very eyes!

A few other notes on the process:

1) It might have been an intelligent to saute the carrots first instead of the onions, because those babys were just this side of raw.
2) If you don't have anything resembling a blender, mugging some of the beans with a spoon seemed to work okay for Bean.
3) The recipe says the soup should look like this:

But in our experience it looked a hell of a lot more like this:

Only even grayer and we didn't have the classy avocados. 

And it still tasted REALLY good. It also only took us forty-five minutes to make, and we were kind of distracted, and about half of those minutes were spent watching it bubble like swamp ooze. Might it develop a deeper, richer flavor and a more appealing color if left to stew longer? Perhaps. We will never know because we only had an hour to cook and eat before going to work and class.

Yet another victory for Nug and Bean! And we have enough leftovers to feed the population of Sri Lanka!

The Origins Post

As the great Leo Tolstoy once wrote, "well-fed college students are all alike; each hungry college student is hungry in her own way." Although the story of the transition from dining-hall life with a side of Ramen to complete culinary self-sufficiency, in all of its under-seasoned glory, is hardly a new one, each person has to experience it for themselves. There's no way to download the hard-won lessons of those who came before you. You cannot stand on the shoulders of giants in a kitchen. For one thing, most kitchen ceilings are too low to accommodate that sort of nonsense. But more importantly, you just have to figure it out for yourself.

 Every food blog, commentary, or recipe we've encountered celebrates the joy and art of putting a plate together with finesse, or the practical business of making food your children will eat. Perhaps this is because the amateur cooking adventures that are currently captivating us are passé to anyone who is at least two years older and wiser than we are. But then, what about all those people who are exactly as young and foolish as we are? Who is blogging for them? Where is the voice for those of us who just want to get through dinner prep without burning anything? Who is depicting the marvel of creating something edible out of a complete vacuum of context, knowledge, competency, or experience of any kind?

That's right. We are. Claire (aka Bean) and Emma (aka Nugget), college food bloggers extraordinaire.

This is a blog about smart girls cooking dumb food. It's about ruminating on eggplants in the middle of your English lecture, and passing off clean-up duty to your friend because you haven't finished your homework yet. It's about trying to schedule in a meal between your 4 o'clock staff meeting and your 7 o'clock class. It's about learning through experience what you had never absorbed any other way.

Our culinary experiences are defined by the unique challenges and rhythms of college life. So an accurate portrayal of one necessitates a description of the other. Also, we are nerds who like writing about school. So in addition to telling you what's for dinner every night, we'll also write about our classes, the crossword, and whatever else comes to mind.

But whether we're tackling academics or appetites, the same spirit of celebration prevails. Because this is college, and every meal's a triumph.

That's the spirit, Nugget! Appreciate that cupcake!

LET THE RECORD SHOW:
Full credit for being the first one to say, "Hey, you guys should have a blog," goes to Domi. Domi shall henceforth be known as Domsicle, because you can't be on our blog if you don't have a food nickname. Full credit for having all of our best qualities, and also one extra year of credentials as a 90's kid, goes to Nutmeg.