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.