Collegiate Diet

Was there ever a time when you got sick and tired of a certain kind of food? I'm sure you have. I used to always get tired of eating Filipino food, but when I went off to college, I realized that I missed it. A lot. Sometimes I even crave certain types of Filipino food that I would normally hate to eat. I guess you just don't realize how much you love something until it's gone. :P

Anyway, when I moved here, all I had to eat was food from the dining commons. At first, it seemed pretty cool since there were a lot of foods to choose from: pizza, burgers, pasta, soups, salads, make-your-own sandwiches, American food, "Mexican" cuisine, "Asian" food... the list goes on. After, say, the first two months or so, I started getting tired of dining commons food. I just got tired of it. Don't get me wrong-- the food is pretty good (when Noho and Jorelle visited, Jorelle ate A LOT at brunch), but after a while, you just get tired of the same old food everyday.

Looking for an alternative to dining commons food, Emi and I decided to utilize the dorm kitchen. At first, I found it kind of weird to cook food in a kitchen that is meant to be used by 60+ people. It was also awkward whenever I was cooking (ramen!) by myself and someone I didn't know walked in. I used to always force Emi to keep me company by bribing her with food (she could never say no since I cooked and she didn't).

We started out only making simple kinds of food: ramen from packets (which literally every college student is a pro at making), cup of noodles, microwavable chow mein-- all the stuff that you can easily make in 5 minutes or less. After a while, we started to get tired of eating ramen all the time, so I decided to venture out and try to make food that consisted of something other than dry noodles and hot water. By then, I started making more friends and went to the grocery store to shop for ingredients.

Since everyone was always busy during the week, we would plan out Friday nights where we would cook food and watch a movie. This system worked out well and was a nice way to end a hectic week and start a relaxing weekend. We did have a minor problem: we all had different kinds of diets. One of my friends, Trang, is vegan and we had to find a way to accomodate her diet with ours. Emi doesn't really eat meat or seafood, but she does occasionally eat poultry, so the one of the only meats that we'd eat together was chicken nuggets. I, on the otherhand, was open to anything and everything, but I would occasionally buy salmon and make my own food separate from Trang's and Emi's.

One of the first meals we made was tofu stir-fry and salmon parmesan (for me). It was pretty simple and we had a lot of fun cooking. We were in the kitchen for a long time and had to actually make two batches because the pan that we used was not big enough. Overall, it was a pretty yummy meal and we had tons of leftovers. There were six of us eating and watching Slumdog Millionaire, so you could just imagine how much food we made that night.

One of the batches of our tofu stir-fry

My salmon baking in the oven

There were also times when I wanted to cook food that I did not really know how to cook. One Friday, during Lent, Emi and I decided not to eat dinner at the dining commons. We went to the I.V. grocery store and looked for something to make for dinner. Being on a college student budget, we bought a pack of three-cheese tortellini and a jar of Prego italian sauce. I had some leftover parmesan cheese from my salmon parmesan, so I decided that I wanted to make baked parmesan-crusted tortellini. The process of making the dish is very simple: boil the tortellini, mix in with the sauce, and then bake. Despite the lack of complexity in a dish this simple, I ended up overbaking the tortellini. It was still pretty good, but the crust was just a little too hard. The sauce was a little too sour (maybe it's because I'm just so used to Filipino spaghetti), but it was easy to ignore since we were watching Milk that night and were distracted by Emile Hirsch and James Franco's handsomeness. :P

Despite overbaking, the inside was still pretty good

Emi and I are part of my dorm's programming committee, so we help with coming up with/setting up programs for our house. There have been times when we have a program that involves food and, for some reason, I always end up being in charge of cooking/baking. I don't mind cooking or baking, but I just find it weird that I am known as the "cook" and the "baker" of the house and in high school, I was also known as the same things. Go figure. :P I would put up pictures of food from past programs, but I'm sure that you've probably gotten tired of reading this (if you've made it this far!) and I didn't get to take that many pictures of the different foods.

So, what was the point of this blog? I don't really know, but I initially wanted to blog about the food we made tonight. I didn't mean for it to get this long, but oh well, it's already written. Anyway, the food we made tonight was something I found on TasteSpotting. I'm too lazy to look for the actual recipe right now, but it was baked tofu fingers and fried rice. After showing Trang the recipe, she started craving it and we decided to make it tonight. It's a fairly easy dish to make: we just marinated sliced extra-firm tofu in soy sauce and garlic for about half an hour, rolled them in Kraft Shake 'n Bake (it was the only vegan bread crumb-type thing that we could find) and baked them until they were golden brown. We had a Flight of the Conchords marathon while we ate.

They kind of resemble mozarella sticks

This is how one of our typical dinner & a movie nights
looks like

Totally irrelevant: I finally got to watch Star Trek today, and it was AMAZING... and not just because there were so many ridiculously good-looking actors! ;) The action scenes and story line were AWESOME. It seriously surpassed all of my expectations and is now one of my favorite movies. I REALLY WANT TO WATCH IT AGAIN!