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.