Certified for Microwave Cooking

These recipes brought to you by Litton microwave cooking products! Not really, but I did use the company book, Microwave Cooking – Convenience Foods. Despite being hideously out of date (published in 1981), it still lives with the real cookbooks, and not in the "camp" library with Knitting with Dog Hair (a youngster from 1997), Attractive Lawn Furnishings (1946), and The New Joys of Jell-O (1973). Of course, when I glanced through the book on Tuesday, I didn't really expect to find anything edible. Probably because of the 80's stigma. Or that it's a promotional cookbook. From the 80's. I was pleasantly surprised to find at least two recipes that I could work with.

Tonight's dinner came out of the Litton cookbook, although, of course I had to add a pinch of spice to the food, as everything looked (and no doubt tasted) a little bland right out of the microwave. For the roll-ups, I used seasoned roast beef deli slices instead of old, dried beef, and baked the whole mess in the t.o. to bring out the flavors without making the food soggy. For the Wild Rice Casserole, I added the spices instead of the recommended sour cream, though I wish I had used real roasted chicken instead of canned – the whole dish ended up tasting like tuna, I think because the cans looked so similar that my brain was switching the flavors around. Still, everything in the book, even with alterations, makes a satisfying meal, and it all came out of two dorm-style appliances at around 10 minutes. Sweet.

Asparagus Roll-Ups

Things pilfered from the pantry:

hollandaise sauce

1 bunch asparagus spears

1 package roast beef deli slices

1. Microwave asparagus in 1 inch water for 5 minutes (crisp) or 7 minutes (mushy).
   
2. Drain, roll bunches of five spears up in two slices of roast beef. Bake in the toaster oven on 375^OF for 6-7 minutes.
   
3. Whatever kind of hollandaise sauce you're using (mix, store-bought, or homemade), make it now while the roll-ups bake.
   
4. Serve drizzled in sauce.
   

Wild Rice Casserole

Things pilfered from the pantry:

2 packages Uncle Ben's 90-second wild rice

1 package frozen chopped spinach

2 cups cooked, chopped up chicken (or 2 cans of chopped chicken)

1/8 teaspoon cumin

1/8 teaspoon basil

2 cloves garlic

1. Microwave rice by package directions. Microwave spinach in a large, 1 quart, casserole dish for 4 minutes, stir with a fork, and microwave an additional 3 minutes.
   
2. Mix together chicken, spinach, and rice along with seasonings and pressed garlic. Microwave 2 minutes.
   

Enjoy!

My Toaster Oven (Which Is Magical)

My toaster oven is my favorite piece in the suite's kitchenette. Our teeny tiny workspace came with a small refrigerator, sink, and microwave. And about one foot of counter space. College juniors and seniors cannot be trusted with ovens or stovetops; we'd obviously be blowing up buildings because we haven't evolved from our high school chemistry days of (intentionally) failed Bunsen burner experiments. On a tour of my future home for nine months in the spring of sophomore year, I started drawing up mental lists. Microwave cart for extra counter space, the unused rice cooker from my parent's pantry, maybe some portable burners, a nice wok, and, definitely, a toaster oven. A BIG toaster oven.

[Wok, wok, wok! P.S. My hand looks really weird in this picture! :-P]

And I got one. It was my main birthday present that summer. It was big enough to fit a nine-inch pizza (which I finally tested this November) or a mini-meatloaf pan. But it also does things that it shouldn't be able to do, magic things.

This is the time of year when I stop going to the grocery store twice per week (I am terrible at planning lists in advance and always manage to forget the ginger root). Instead, because I really don't feel like transporting home ¼ of the refrigerator along with my essentials when I drive home for Winter Break, I try to use up everything perishable. Everything. So I saw this half-bag of cookie dough in the back of the fridge, and thought I'd like to try making more of my cheesecakes with a variation on the crust. The result was passably tasty, as my guinea pig suitemates avow, but seriously skewed my ideas of how toasters ovens actually work.

I started with a thin layer of cookie dough (chocolate chip) lining the tins of a muffin tray, popped them into the t.o. for 6 minutes, and out came… muffin-like things. What? I guess maybe there isn't as much difference as I thought between muffins and cookies. The only other explanation (which makes more sense, considering the incredible variety of food it can cook) is that my toaster oven is magic. I feel like this could easily be true, and maybe not even limited to my own t.o. You see, a similar thing happened to one of my suitemates: she was baking cookies, and got scones. I like to think about toaster ovens as magic, because that would make me a magician. Coolness!

Bick-its

On special occasions and at least once whenever our relatives from Maine visit, my grandmother makes meatloaf and these biscuits. They're as much a staple of my childhood as sweet potato casserole, chicken pot pie, pinwheel cookies, or (yes, even) spaghetti. I love them more than cheesecake, saving room for at least four or five at the end of any meal they grace with their presence. These biscuits (or in our quirky rural-Mason-Dixon-line-farm meets Northern-Ball-mer (Baltimore) meets Towsonite-suburbia slang: bick-its) don't have anything fancy about them, they aren't exotic, or even particularly unique in recipe from other baking powder biscuits (in fact, the baking powder I used had nearly this recipe printed directly on the side) – but in the eight or so minutes that they spend in the toaster oven, they transform from just anybody's dough to my Mammaw's biscuits.

I don't know how they do it, but they do. When I smell the crisping dough, I am instantly transported back to my grandparents' rancher, Mainer cousins at my side making stick-and-duct tape swords, or careening around the basement on the old red tricycle, or messing around with the pop-O-matic on the Trouble set. My memories are almost always linked in to food, a mutually beneficial relationship for both of us. Yet even without twenty-odd years of memories tied in to these biscuits, they still smell doughy and rich coming out of the toaster oven, and make excellent jam and butter vehicles, as my suitemate remarked while she scarfed down six of them.

Baking Powder Biscuits Bick-its

Repurposed from the dining hall:

1 cup milk

½ teaspoon salt

Bought at the store:

2 cups flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

4 tablespoons shortening

1. Sift flour, salt, and baking powder together. Use a colander over a large bowl or pot, tightly holding colander and bowl or pot together at the rims and shaking side to side, thus avoiding turning your kitchen or dorm room into a flour bomb detonation zone.
   
2. Cut in shortening with two knives until it is mostly mixed but still a little lumpy.
   
3. Pour in milk and stir until all dry matter is absorbed.
   
4. Drop rough, tablespoon-sized portions onto an ungreased baking tray. Bake 7-8 minutes on 450^O F in the toaster oven. Yields 30 biscuits, though only 24 are pictured because my suitemate ate 6 before I took pictures. : )
   

Enjoy!

The Best Vegetable

Throughout my childhood, sweet potato casserole reigned king of the tubers at my family's Thanksgiving table. It's a ritual: a mere half hour before the meal my stomach will roil in need of that salty sweet perfume wafting up the stairs from the kitchen, but I have to wait, or burn my fingers on the oven-hot, sweet potato innards. My mom's recipe, one from Bette Haney – who originally had it from Mrs. Maggie Schenault of Alabama – clipped from a newspaper, is a dessert that needs no marshmallow fluff because it's really a pie without a bottom crust masquerading as a vegetable. My favorite Thanksgiving vegetable.



One year my mom tried to make baked acorn squash instead of my sweet potatoes. My whole family had been changing up the traditions for a few years, most memorably swapping one giant turkey – difficult to roast without drying it out – for a couple of capon chickens, and adding in my step-dad's carrot soufflé. I love that soufflé (another cleverly disguised dessert mingling with the dinner foods) and I did like the baked acorn squash (though I probably eye rolled through it that first year). Still, my sweet potatoes had that mythic cloak curling coyly about them from the time when adults went into the kitchen and feasts magically came out, all while I played with Barbies and half-listened to the parade on TV.

Bette Haney's Sweet-Potato Casserole with Praline Topping

(Halved for toaster oven convenience.)

Bought at the store:

Potato Mixture:

1 ½ large eggs (I know, half an egg, right? But if you pour it out and then divide half off to not use, it works.)

2 lbs sweet potatoes (Although if they've still got leftover sweet potatoes in the dining hall, they'd save you a bunch of steps and time. You'd just have to scrape off any offending marshmallow bits before use.)

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup melted butter

2 ½ Tablespoons heavy whipping cream

½ teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ teaspoon allspice

Topping:

½ cup packed light-brown sugar (You'll want to do the packing, it'll give you more sugar if you cram the measuring cup full than if it's just loose.)

1 ½ Tablespoons flour

¼ cup finely chopped pecans

1 ½ Tablespoons softened butter

1. Peel, boil until soft, drain, and mash the potatoes. Or clean 2 lbs of dining hall cooked sweet potatoes and start from there.
   
2. Beat potatoes and eggs together (make sure you've got a big bowl for this). Mix in remaining Potato Mixture ingredients until you've got a smooth paste.
   
3. For the Topping, stir sugar, flour, and pecans together. Work in the softened butter.
   
4. Pour Potato Mixture into a greased baking dish. Sprinkle Topping evenly over everything.
   
5. Bake 50-60 minutes at 350^O F until the topping is browned and bubbling and sending out perfumed feelers.
   
6. Arrange loose pecan halves in a pattern on top.
   

Enjoy!

Pepper-stuffed-Apple-stuffed-Peppers

These are not your typical stuffed peppers. I've never liked stuffed peppers. Probably because they taste like Bad Mexican. Bad Mexican is heavy on melted cheese, heavy on greasy beef, and manages to taste like beans no matter what is in it. Bad Mexican is unhappy American food that changed its name (Good Mexican, of course, doesn't get better than beef quesadillas at Frisco Burrito in Towson. Super fresh sour cream; succulent, sizzling beef; otherworldly pico de gallo; and perfectly crisped tortillas. If you've had them, you know what I mean and why I don't feel bad about giving them free advertising. If you haven't: it's time for a pilgrimage.)

I don't like not liking food. I needed to take the Bad Mexican out of the stuffed pepper. I needed to use the fresh ingredients taking over our kitchen closets.

I ended up with a sweet, vegetarian friendly twist on a savory, bean-y staple of the Bad Mexican type. Instead of rice, I used pumpernickel bread to fill out the stuffing, and instead of melty nacho cheese or tomato sauce to bind it all together, I used mustard. I was first introduced to the delight of apples in spicy mustard one July when it was time to use up ungifted Christmas gift basket non-perishables. What I wanted was an excuse to throw out some dreadfully pungent and therefore unusable mustard (and I've always been a ketchup girl, anyway). Apparently, dreadfully pungent mustard plus super sweet apples equals delightfully stimulated taste buds on both the sweet and tangy receptors which makes mouths happy. I wanted to carry that experience over to my stuffed pepper makeover, so I replaced the beef (which in this sort of preparation tends to be greasy no matter what the cook does) with apples and peppers. Kind of like stuffing a turkey with minced turkey innards, I guess.

I can't think of stuffed peppers as Bad Mexican anymore; I can only think of this, and that's a good thing.

Pepper-stuffed-Apple-stuffed-Peppers

Bought at the store:

4 apples (Cortland, Winesap, or Gala. 2 for the stuffing. The other 2 to be stuffed, if you want more sweet than savory in the final product.)

3 slices pumpernickel bread

3 ½ Tablespoons Dijon mustard

parmesan cheese

chili powder

rosemary

garlic salt

Harvested locally:

5 green bell peppers (3 for the stuffing, 2 to be stuffed. If you're not stuffing the apples, use 7: 3 for stuffing, 4 to be stuffed.)

2 medium spicy red mystery peppers

1. Carve the cores out of two green peppers and two apples.
   
2. Dice and mash the remaining apples, green peppers, and the pumpernickel slices.
   
3. Stir in sliced red pepper rounds, mustard, and spices to taste.
   
4. Pack the cored peppers and apples with your stuffing, top with an extra dusting of chili powder.
   
5. Bake peppers for 15-20 minutes at 400^O F and apples for 10-15 minutes (until they begin splitting and bubbling out of their skins) at 400^O F.

Enjoy!

A Good Place

Ah, party prep. I'd forgotten how much it eats my life. But it's all good. It's good to have a goal, to have a grand, tenuous idea that exists only in my head become a witnessed reality. It's good to try more than one new thing at a time, because it magnifies the feeling of accomplishment in the end result. Not only did I do this, I also did that and that and I made them all work together.

But even at this early stage, I'm wrestling with the success of my ideas in the details. (Remember how I said there would be tears and disasters?) Last night I started with the spider cookies and they look vastly different from my mental image of them. Granted I wasn't be able to frost them until today – frosting is one of those delicate processes best not attempted in the wee hours of the morning and they were entirely different beasts then, much less like that image – and that is affecting my view of the final result.

What I have are flatish sugar cookies with spoke-like pretzel protrusions that only look like spiders if I'm looking at them all squinty in the half-light. It doesn't help that I started by chopping each two inch pretzel stick in half – some of the spiders are so stumpy that I wonder how they would propel their fat bodies around. Eventually I cottoned on and left the pretzels full length, but there's nothing I can do for the poor dachshund spiders.

My suitemate accurately compared the dough-ball form to the soot-spirit things from Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, which of course, made me love them more. Those soot-spirit things are adorable! But my store-bought dough flattened on baking. My suitemate suggested adding baking powder. I perversely continued to make flattened soot-spirit dachshund spiders. Now they look like this one after he was smooshed under his piece of coal. Which I find somehow even more adorable. I think I found that place where I've succeeded in my own failures. It's a good place.

Tomorrow morning I'll craft my rice krispie treat witches, find (and carve??) a pumpkin, and prep the pizza ingredients, at which point I've run out of things I can do until immediately before people arrive on Friday.

Spider Sugar Cookies

Things you can procure at the dining hall:

thin pretzels

red hots

chocolate sprinkles

Things from the store:

sugar cookie dough

melting chocolate

1. Preheat toaster oven to 350^O on Bake.
   
2. Mould dough into ½ inch thick spider bodies. Poke eight pretzel legs into the bodies, at least ¼ inch from the edge of the dough.
   
3. Bake for 15-20 minutes for each batch. (I know, it takes a loooong time, but it makes the room smell delicious while you can work on other tasks.)
   
4. Melt chocolate in the microwave (one 5 oz. bar takes 2-3 minutes).
   
5. On a sheet of wax paper or other protected surface, coat each baked spider body with the melted chocolate. Generously sprinkle. Affix as many eyes as suit your fancy to the body, about ¼ - ½ inch from the edge. If they keep falling off, use a dab of the melted chocolate frosting.
   

Enjoy!

Seasonal Cravings

In the past, I've made this sandwich with plenty of substitutions: rye for pumpernickel, provolone slices for brie, raspberry jam for cranberry sauce. With something so simple to assemble, it's fun to play around with components, especially when you want to use only what you can find at the dining hall. But they're really a different sandwich than the one I was craving. When the first tangible signs of Fall blow into town, I start craving something seasonal.

Apparently my inner calendar is fast-forwarded by at least a month and the holiday I anticipating is Thanksgiving, not Halloween. Perhaps that's because I personally eat at least three full Thanksgiving meals on Turkey Day, which either makes a person love the food or loathe it. Thankfully, I love it so much that I just can't wait another month to have it and when the dining hall didn't have absolutely everything I needed, I just had to follow my grumbling gut to the store.

I didn't use anything from the dining hall this time and I really wish I had. What should have been a ten minute jaunt to Acme to grab some sandwich fixings turned into a thirty minute slog through congested aisles and stagnant check-out lines. There are three times when no one who values their sanity should brave the grocery store: before a snow storm, after a long rain storm, or the weekend before a major food holiday (and aren't they all food holidays? Christmas dinners, Halloween trick-or-treating, Thanksgiving feasts, Valentines baked goods, Fourth of July barbeques…). Two out of three applied today – brilliant foresight, Olivia.

Back in the tranquility of my suite, I unwrapped the turkey from its filmy deli plastic , dolloped out the cranberry sauce, coated the bread with a creamy layer of brie, and clicked the timer on the toaster oven over to eight minutes. As it ticked, the buzz of the crowds in Acme faded away into the sizzle of roasting turkey and melting brie. There's just something about the first real days of Fall that send me craving the sleepy sweetness of turkey and cranberries. Since it's too early for Turkey Day itself, what I needed was this preview of a full belly, set against the backdrop of falling leaves and falling temperatures. If I closed my eyes it almost tasted like November. Craving satisfied.

Ante-Turkey Day Sandwich

Bought at the store:

¼ pound turkey deli slices

brie cheese (spreadable)

pumpernickel bread

whole berry cranberry sauce

1. Spread brie thickly on the bread. Layer on turkey and cranberry sauce.
   
2. Toast for 5-10 minutes.
   

Enjoy!

Food for a Rainy Day

A few days ago, reader Aubrey made a request in the comments section which I wanted to address with its own post. She wrote:

Over Fall Break Alexis and I went apple picking, and I was having so much fun climbing trees that I didn't realize how very many apples we had picked. We ended up picking just over half a bushel. Alexis flew them here in her carry on. And now, well, we have nearly half a bushel of apples that are starting to rot. What can we do with them with a toaster oven and microwave?

I immediately thought of "happle" bagel sandwiches. It's a recipe I've been making since I was little, out of my spiral-bound cookbook for kids with illustrations of tap-dancing tunafish cones and pirate map muffins. The book itself is currently resting on the shelves of the package room at Central Services. Tomorrow I'll have it in my hands again (and maybe have pictures), but today I made these from memory.

The artichoke salad failure still haunting me, I forged ahead yet again without a printed recipe, but this time I had sense memory to help me out. Sometimes I need food that is predictable, food that isn't a wolf in sheep's clothing, that won't bite me on the nose with vinegar-poisoned fangs when I least expect it. Sometimes I need food that I know will not char to a crisp or melt into a viscous soup. Sometimes, on days when I haven't seen the sun and the internet is spotty and I'm still sleep deprived from the scant two hours I got on Monday night… I just need food that tastes like home.

Next week I'd like to experiment and see if I can whip up a fun and funky apple dish. I already know that I like apples in things like Waldorf salads and sushi, and that they work really well with a plethora of chicken preparations. For now, for Aubrey and anyone else with an abundant autumnal harvest, I give you something reliable to warm you up inside on a chilly, rainy day.

"Happle" Bagel Sandwiches

Nicked from the dining hall:

½ cup shredded cheddar cheese

1 gala (or hand-picked) apple

1 plain bagel

cinnamon and sugar

1. Lay bagel halves on the baking tray and sprinkle cheese onto each bagel half, as if you were making sauce-less pizza bagels.
   
2. Top with apple slices and dust with a generous amount of cinnamon and sugar.
   
3. Toast until all the cheese has begun melting, about 6-8 minutes.
   

Enjoy!

Notes on an Eggplant

"Eggplant, basil, spinach, & chile salad" is on permanent earmark status in my copy of Quick & Easy Healthy Eating. The page is stained with past successes (and at least one abysmal failure). Smudged marginal notes hungrily circle the printed words. They advise not to mistake garlic "clove" for garlic "bulb" (a serious misreading, i.e. my abysmal failure, which led to sweating vampire repellent for an entire week), to use less chile powder (much, much, much less!), to remember to use a seriously big bowl for the mixing steps or risk flinging yogurt-soaked spinach into a lit gas burner.

The last time I made this, my last summer vacation ever was wilting away in 90 degree heat and sticky Baltimore humidity. My friends and I were ready to scatter once more, some more permanently than others, as college terms opened and far-away jobs beckoned. There was time enough yet for one more backyard barbeque.

I consider that barbeque a success. Nearly half of the prepared food ended up leftover and organization blew out the window along with the broiler's billowing smoke. The boys, who should have, in theory, eaten the most food, were busy manning the kebab grill or running on all liquid diets. But good food was shared by good people, and we all had fun making it. And making fun of each other while we made it. One of the dishes served was my version of Hugo Arnold's "Eggplant, basil, spinach, & chile salad."

Last week's farmer's market yielded two lovely eggplants and a batch of pleasant memories to spur me into the kitchen to test the feasibility of grilling eggplants without a grill. Previously, I've always done it on a broiler pan (which without fail resulted in the previously mentioned billowing smoke and required a helper to constantly fan the smoke alarm). The toaster oven actually works better. You end up trading pretty grill lines for a less hectic, less smoky kitchen – a win-win situation in my book. I'll definitely be adding this one to my swarm of marginal notes.

Eggplant Basil Salad

(adapted from a recipe by Hugo Arnold)

Foraged from the dining hall:

1 cup cherry tomatoes

½ cup sunflower seeds

4 lemon wedges

Bought from the store or otherwise:

2 medium eggplants

1 bag baby spinach (on sale for $1.00 – score!)

1 cup plain yogurt

salt and black pepper

cayenne pepper

3 cloves garlic

olive oil

basil

1. Cut eggplant ¼ inch segments, hotdog-ways. Baste generously with olive oil and broil 3 minutes per side at 450^O F on Toast setting. Let cool and slice into bite-size pieces.
   
2. Whisk yogurt, 3 Tablespoons olive oil, mashed garlic, juice from the lemon slices, and spices (about ¼ - ½ teaspoon each, to taste). Toss with eggplant, tomatoes, and spinach leaves.
   
3. Serve chilled and top with sunflower seeds.

Enjoy!

Ramen Remix #2: Don’t Try This at Home

Ah, artichokes, they seemed like such a good idea at the time. They called out to me from the salad bar, canning oil glistening over a yellow-green mound. Despite this frankly unappetizing form, I knew that I loved cooked artichoke and artichoke dip, so I wanted to see what I could do in the toaster oven with what is essentially a perennial thistle. A little olive oil, garlic, and maybe some Caesar dressing, I thought, ought to do the trick. I should have done more research first.

On the Food Network's website, Cathy Lowe's Caesar dressing; calls for (among other things): 6 cloves of garlic, Dijon mustard, vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, and anchovies.

Bleugh! Vinegar plus vinegar equals indigestion. I knew that Caesar dressing was salty and tangy, but I hadn't really thought about what was in it when I filled up my take-out cup. I didn't help matters by saturating the artichokes (already suspended in oil and vinegar) in an olive oil, dressing, and garlic marinade. Broiling the whole mess was the icing on the indigestible cake. Made the kitchen "spicy" as my suitemate put it, wiping the tears from her eyes.

The resultant salad-like concoction was equally "spicy," and is currently roiling about in my stomach. I'm including the recipe here with notes as to how I put the nails in my cuisine coffin, but don't try this at home!

Caesar Artichoke Ramen Salad

Things you can appropriate from the dining hall:

1 cup canned artichokes (mistake #1 – if something stays well stocked for any length of time at WCDS, that's a pretty good sign that it's not fit for consumption)

1 cup cherry tomatoes

½ cup baby corn

2 cooked chicken breasts

1 cup creamy Caesar dressing (mistake #2 – should not be used as a marinade or in conjunction with something as heavy as artichokes)

¼ cup Feta cheese

Things you will probably have to buy:

2 packages ramen

5 cloves garlic (mistake #3 – garlic overload)

½ cup olive oil

1. Whip up a marinade out of 3 cloves of garlic, the olive oil, and three tablespoons Caesar dressing. Saturate the artichokes in this mixture for 30 minutes.

Caesar dressing a marinade does not make. If the dressing already had both oil and (6 cloves of) garlic already, just how potent was this stuff? Garlic count: 9 cloves.

2. Meanwhile broil the tomatoes at 350^O F for 15-20 minutes until the skins blister and pop.

This was step was actually rewarding. Kind of like popping popcorn, except with more juices (and therefore more mess later). On their own, my blistered, half-skinned tomatoes are mouth-wateringly good. Too bad I had to fiddle around with artichokes, too.

3. Fill two bowls each with a package of ramen and enough water to completely cover it. Cover and microwave on high for three minutes. Let stand (still covered) for an additional three minutes to get cooked ramen without boiling any water.

A reliable ramen cooking method. If you don't have a portable electric burner, don't let that limit you to no pasta! In a pinch, even a coffee maker can be used to heat the ramen water.

4. Broil the marinated artichokes for 20 minutes still at 350^O F.

Wrong on so many levels.

5. Mix everthing together with two additional garlic cloves added into the dressing and drizzled on top of the lot.

A recipe for a long and sleepless night. Garlic count: 11 cloves. 11!

Enjoy at your own risk.

Nobody Doesn’t Love Cheesecake

"Cooking is like love, it should be entered into with abandon or not at all." – Harriet Van Horne

I would go further than Harriet here to say that food is love. Without love – love of food, love of people, love of self – food isn't food so much as barely digestible fuel to be shoveled straight down the gullet as quickly as possible, hopefully bypassing all taste buds in the process. Love is what guides our hands to the spice rack, to the tasting spoon, to the finger dipped hastily into the brownie batter while grandmom's back is turned. Love is getting your hands into the food and putting your mark on it, your own individual twist. Love is what is lacking from the college dining hall.

That isn't to say that there aren't a few lovely people working in my college's cafeteria; it's just that, in the mind of the corporation, they're used as cogs in a machine. Where's the wonderful stir-fry wiz who taught me (albeit indirectly) how to properly exploit every ounce of flavor out of garlic? Shuttled to the cashier's post in the student center's convenience store or not seen at all. Perhaps he is backstage, doing what he can to fix the overly bland food coming from the kitchens, but who knows. And where's the "omelet guy" who made weekend breakfasts – a scarce and unimaginative wasteland of breakfast sausage and syrupy pancake mush – worthwhile? Gone, in all probability, to make way for the new corporate regime. And there are others, shunted to shuttling burgers and French fries, restocking salad bars, and refilling milk bladders in the juice machines.

As an institution, WCDS squashes creativity and individuality. Recipes are corporately owned, ingredients come from Sysco in bulk, and food sits in cold trays from breakfast 'til dinner, leftover from a catered event for people more important than students. The stir-fry bar – such a hit with students that the line is often 30 minutes long – lies dormant at most dinners, and more and more frequently at lunches, too. The main dishes are almost all interchangeable: brown, starchy, and bland. Potatoes, chicken, spaghetti, rice, lentil cakes, French fries, burgers, pizza.

WCDS has to serve roughly 2000 people per meal, that's including staff, guests, and all enrolled students plus a bit of overestimating. WCDS's solution is to try to please everyone, with the philosophy that nobody doesn't like the most basic of basics. But what ends up happening is that they please almost no one. It's no wonder that when they actually serve a dish with some personality to it, like General Tso's Chicken (which was as bland as I've ever tasted that dish), the tray is decimated in less than one minute.

The next time that something remotely edible is served, watch the students. They line up, sometimes for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. When, finally, the (vastly underappreciated) dining hall worker fights her way to the top of the line, the saran wrap is barely pulled back before ravenous hordes descend on the "delicacy." Of the fifty or so die-hards hanging around in line for this one dish, only ten to fifteen people get a reasonable serving. Before Ms. Dining Hall Worker has made it back to the safety of the kitchens, her fresh steaming tray lies empty, scraped clean of everything remotely edible. Time it sometime. It's the most entertaining event the dining hall has to offer.

But where was I going with all of this? Well, my well-worn rant against WCDS culminates with dessert offerings. Nothing says I couldn't care less about you than pre-packaged desserts. "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee" indeed. There are quite a few WCDS desserts that this nobody doesn't like. And it's not that their desserts are awful, just that they have no love in them. I've worked in a bakery before – albeit as a lowly sales drudge who wasn't allowed anywhere near the actual ovens unless I had a mop in hand – and I feel that the quality of desserts at WCDS is going rapidly downhill. Although the bakery I worked for claimed to be gourmet, the great majority of their offerings came to them pre-mixed and pre-measured, only wanting to be popped into the oven to be called "cookie" and not "dough." I actually lost weight working in the bakery because the only things worth eating were the master baker's specialty cakes, and those came few and far between. Those specialty cakes though, man those were ACE. Rich, buttery rum cake with layers of bitter-sweet chocolate ganache dripping down the sides. Those cakes were loved, they were art. It was no wonder they sold faster than we could ring them up. Lucky for us, even lowly bakery drudges got samples before they went on sale.

But even on a home-based scale, I bet you could tell the difference between your grandmother's brownies and ACME's. There's no comparison. Even if granny relies on Betty Crocker to do most of the work for her, they'll still taste better than anybody else's grandmother's brownies. And that's because of love. Poured into every baking tin and absorbed from the atmosphere of family. Sugar, butter, eggs and baking chocolate never tasted better than when I was swinging my legs beneath my grandmother's laminate kitchen table, using my finger to clean the bottom of the mixing bowl. It was love, and it was delicious.

I'm not really sure what WCDS could do to put more love into their desserts. They are, as previously mentioned, preparing food for a largely anonymous, needy, unappreciative crowd. But when considering how ridiculously easy it is to hand-prepare even the simplest of cheesecakes, which would be child's play to convert to larger quantity without sacrificing quantity, it seems well, ridiculous that WCDS should serve pre-packaged, dry, and unloved cheesecake. And if that cheesecake they've served is not from Sara Lee, or Jell-O, or the venerable Ms. Crocker… then something is seriously wrong.

To combat the scourge of the loveless cheesecake, I propose this recipe. Nobody doesn't love cheesecakes. (Unless you're lactose intolerant. Or just plain weird.) They fit every qualification for my kitchen: fast, cheap, and easy. Fast: the actual preparation time is close to five minutes. Ten tops. This is because all the baking can be done while you studious students are otherwise occupied. Cheap: every ingredient in this cheesecake was filched from the dining hall on top of a regular meal. Finally I'm getting my money's worth. Easy: see Fast and Cheap. Also, once made, these babies can last up to a week (if you hold off your roommates and, most especially, yourself with saint-like abstinence and a pointy stick), providing no-fuss breakfasts and desserts. This is a good recipe to make ahead whenever you have a free half-hour at home. Once made, anytime is cheesecake time.

The only problem I ran into in this recipe was the filling of the crust. The crust that I came up with – crushed Life cereal baked in a mixture with 3 TBSP butter – tended to pull away from the dish in a failed attempt to run away from home with the filling. Not that I blame it, the filling is so delicious that I would certainly run away with it if I had the chance, and the cereal crust itself never quite got to the gooey quality of graham cracker. (Perhaps I should have used more butter ;-P)

However, this was only a problem because I wanted my finished result to look extra pretty for the camera. A loved food does not have to be a pretty food. It will still taste much, much better than pre-packaged even if you have a few grains of crust dusting the top of the filling.

But enough of that fiddle faddle, let's get started.

Nobody Doesn't Love Mini-Cheesecakes

Things you can pilfer from the dining hall:

2 cups cream cheese

3 Tablespoons butter

2 cups LIFE cereal

1/3 cup sugar

Sprinkle of cinnamon

Things you will probably have to buy:

1 teaspoon vanilla

4 ceramic ramekin or Pyrex baking dishes (Two for a dollar at Target, and found cheaply at every big box chain store around the country. Look for something 8 oz in size and oven safe.)

1. Preheat toaster oven to 350^O F.
   
2. Double bag the life cereal. Now here's the fun part: crush the living day lights out of it. Crush it until everything is the same size as the gigantic sugar crystals that find their way to the bottom of the bag.
   
3. Mix the crushed cereal with 3 Tablespoons melted butter. (20-30 seconds in the microwave should do the trick). Line the bottoms and sides of your 8 oz dish with the mixture.
   
4. Bake crusts 14-16 minutes or until golden brown.
   
5. Mix cream cheese, cinnamon, vanilla, and sugar. This will take some time (and can be done while the crusts are baking) as well as some book-toting muscles if you either a) don't have a mixer or b) don't use soft cream cheese. Luckily, most dining hall cream cheese is soft and served in a tub. Try the blender if you must, but I found that hand mixing worked better and wasted less filling.
   
6. Remove crusts from oven and let cool 10 minutes.
   
7. Fill crusts with cream cheese filling.
   
8. Chill in refrigerator at least 3 hours. Eat whenever.
   

Enjoy!

Delicious Failure

It was a painful lesson, but I think I've finally realized that there is such a thing as too much butter.

I never used to think that there was such a thing. I was the type of kid who put so much butter on my mashed potatoes that they were literally swimming in butter soup. Not unlike the recipe I bring to you tonight, actually. But it makes me wonder where my butter obsession came from.

Thinking back on high school, I have a friend who then used to make her special kind of cake with six sticks of butter. Yes, you read that right: six. So it was more like fudge than "cake" per se, but the point is that it was utterly delicious. In that "Ah, I can hear my arteries clogging already" kind of way.

But even before high school, my family always said that, unlike chocolate, you really can put butter on anything. It's the flavor-booster of choice in my house, and I have to say that I've never been able to eat biscuits and jam without butter. It makes salty things pop and sweet things melt on the tongue.

But now I know that too much of a good thing can truly be too much.

What I was going for this time was baked cinnamon apples, not unlike those which, to me, make the perfect complement to Baby Back ribs at Chile's restaurants. What I got was baked cinnamon apple soup, so totally unlike the Chile's version that it's not even the same species.

Still, I think I can guess where I went wrong. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was the three tablespoons of butter. After my failed attempt, I looked up some recipes online and found that I had tripled the recommended amount of churned cow cream. Oops. That would be why my apples are swimming in a glistening lake of oil.

I could have stopped at this point and thrown the soupy concoction away, but despite (or perhaps because of?) my over-zealous use of butter, the dish smelled absolutely divine. The apples were moist and sweet, and I decided to just go for it and layered some on top of a scoop of vanilla ice cream. The piping hot apples and butter soup sauce made short work of the ice cream. However, while this looks like something to fill a slop bucket, the taste is out of this world. Truly. It is like a root beer float, if the root beer were replaced with apple-butter sauce. It eats like a soup, but tastes like dream.

I have modified the directions so that the soup phenomena may not occur so badly, although if you want cinnamon-apple-ice cream soup, please feel free to triple the amount of butter.

Look for more dessert ideas (and hopefully not disasters, although hopefully just as delicious) all this week.

Butter-Cinnamon Apples and Ice Cream

Things you can pilfer from the dining hall:

Vanilla Ice Cream

2 Gala Apples

Honey

Cinnamon Sugar

1 Tablespoon Butter

Things you will probably have to buy:

3 teaspoons Brown sugar

Oven-safe covered baking dish (Try your local second-hand store. I found mine for $2.00 at Goodwill.)

1. Preheat toaster oven to 350^O F on Bake setting.
   
2. Peel, core, and slice apples into even sized pieces.
   
3. Layer 1/3 of the apples in the bottom of your baking dish. Sprinkle on 1 teaspoon Brown sugar. Layer in 1/3 Tablespoon butter. Drizzle honey. Cover layer with a thick coat of cinnamon sugar.

   

4. Repeat until all ingredients are used. The goal is something like baked apple lasagna, with apples for the noodles and everything else for filling layers.
5. Bake at 350^O F for 30-45 minutes. The apples should be bubbling and filling the room with wafting cinnamon apple smells before removal.
   
6. Carefully remove from toaster oven. Let cool 5-10 minutes. Layer over scoop of vanilla ice cream.
   

Enjoy!

Tuna Boats, or something like it

Being a creative cook doesn't always have to mean making up your own recipes. I'm going to share with you one of my favorite re-imagined recipes which I'm going to call "Tuna Boats."

Last year, my parents gave me my favorite cookbook ever, Quick & Easy Healthy Eating. But I'll tell you a secret: I've never made any of the recipes in it. I've come close, to be sure, but to me it's been more of an idea book than a fool-proof plan of what's for dinner.

I have learned pretty quickly that Quick & Easy, in addition to not being quick or easy most of the time, often requires wondrous and mystical ingredients. Like mackerel, which I can only find in the cat food aisle, or several miles away at the seafood market, which is not only out of the way but too expensive on my kind of budget.

So why, then, is Quick & Easy my very favorite cookbook? Because it is chocked full of great ideas. Take today's recipe: the original ("salad with tuna-stuffed bell pepper" by Conrad Gallagher) isn't actually that different at its core from my version, but it did require some extras that I'd rather not fool around with. For instance, it calls for making your own French dressing, which is only good for a week or two, and, I've found, is entirely superfluous to the actual taste of the food.

The original also has capers, whose only purpose seems to be making the tuna taste saltier. I've come to the conclusion that capers are, by and large, included in a dish to make it sound more chef-y. Really, any time you see capers, you could just add more salt and save yourself the trouble of buying a 12 ounce jar ($6) that sits around in your refrigerator so long that it's been to school and back at least three times before you finally pitch it, still half-full.

The original also calls for skinning the peppers. This was less than successful. After 10 minutes in the toaster oven, my peppers were nice and blistery, just as the recipe said. I sealed them in a large mixing bowl under saran wrap, just as the recipe said, and when they were completely cool, I pulled them out, ready to strip those peppers down to their tender, naked selves.

Alas, this did not happen quite so smoothly. Taking the skin off of those peppers was not unlike trying to scrape away layers of enamel from a tooth. I eventually succeeded in squashing my first pepper into a pile of unusable pepper goo and taking about a dime-sized piece of skin off the second before I decided to leave off with the pepper abuse and just leave the skins on. If anyone out there has ever successfully skinned a pepper, and has some tips, let me know.

So those things don't sound like good ideas, or at least they didn't to me. But the heart of the recipe is a good idea, and it's what I made today: yellow bell peppers stuffed with tuna salad. Plain and simple. This dish is supposed to be served cold over salad greens. My version does away with the salad greens, jazzes up the tuna, and calls for cooking the whole thing in the toaster oven, making it more like a tuna melt – except without the cheese or the bread. So really not much like one at all – than a salad.

The moral of the story is that all recipes can be taken as suggestions. Try it once the way that the original chef intended, but if you don't like the way it turns out: don't give up, just get creative!

Tuna Boats

(adapted from a recipe by Conrad Gallagher)

Things you can pilfer from the salad bar:

½ cup red onions

2 dill pickle spears

½ cup celery pieces (or 1-2 stalks of fresh celery)

1 cup tuna (sometimes this is on the salad bar at my school. If unavailable, use 2 cans of drained tuna)

1 – 2 tablespoons mayonnaise

Things you will probably have to buy:

2 stalks green onions

1 yellow bell pepper (yellow peppers are the sweetest of the commonly available peppers; orange bell peppers are a fair substitute)

1. Preheat your toaster oven to 350 ^o F.
   

2. Chop any "dry" ingredients (i.e. – everything except the tuna and mayo) to uniform size. If you have canned tuna, make sure to drain it thoroughly. Mix the chopped ingredients with the tuna.
   

3. Now you can mix in the mayonnaise. If you have added too much mayo, and everything is starting to look like tuna-soup, just add more tuna until it has the consistency you want.
   

4. Cut bell pepper in half lengthwise, removing the stem, seeds, and inner membrane. Fill with tuna salad mixture.
   

5. Bake the tuna boats at 350 ^o F for 10-12 minutes, or until the tuna has started to brown at the tips and the food is making a pleasant sizzling sound.

Enjoy!

(Carefully. Barbarian drooling of food juices may occur if you attempt to eat this without a knife and fork. In fact, it may happen anyway. This is part of why I call them Tuna Boats. Be prepared. Bring a towel.)