Culinary Adventures

I love food. Because of this, life in the dormitory can become a bit trying; though the dining commons at my university are certainly among the better sort (as in, the food is largely identifiable, and even tasty), they still commit heinous crimes such as thickening the lemon bars with gelatin, and dumping runny oversalted sauce all over the stir-fries. Occasionally, in a fit of environmental responsibility, one of the commons will have 'Green Monday' which means that everything on the menu will be vegetarian.

Fortunately, my house is equipped with a kitchen, and, when I'm fed up with spagetti and microscopic fragments of meat, I can cook for myself. Or whoever decides to help me and pay for the food.

This evening, we decided to cook a chicken. We flavored it with honey, soy sauce, garlic and star anise, and then cooked it for an hour and a half in a covered container in the oven. It was served with bok-choi and rice/potatoes, all steaming hot, and everyone settled in and enjoyed the respite from mass produced food.

At least, that was the plan.

Let us consider the dormitory kitchen, or, for that matter, any kitchen shared between fifty people. Let us consider the pile of dishes on the counter, the sticky residue in the sink, the refrigerator that reeks of mold. Let us consider the much-abused dishwasher, the ragged sponges. Then let us add two very OCD people trying to utilize these facilites.

The first thing we found was that the chicken pot had gone missing. Fifteen minutes or so of diligent searching was rewarded when we found it in the fridge, serving as a sort of glorified tupperware to an odd concoction of apples and rasins. After dislodging this, we had to wash the pot.

Which presented a new challenge. The sink wasn't draining properly. We ran the garbage disposal, and were rewarded by a fingernail-sized piece of metal hurtling from the interstices of the drain. Then the dishwasher started making funny noises. Further investigation revealed that the much-abused machine had decided to try to do its job without water. Environmentally noble, yes. Effective, no. This being a dormitory, half the dishes were there. Cue swearing. Cue dishwashing. Cue water being on too hot. More swearing.

Things seemed to be going smoothly (we propped the bok choi pan up so that it didn't lean drunkenly over to one side due to its convex bottom) until we got to the potatoes. They were greenstruck. We peeled them, bunged them in the microwave, and perched to watch it with hungry eyes. Three minutes passed. They were not done. Seven minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen.

One potato burned onto the bowl, but only one. The rest were raw. The swearing reached new heights of creativity. We gave up and had leftover rice. We put the rice into the microwave. Twenty seconds. Nothing. A minute. Lukewarm, good enough. It was 8:40 at this point, and no one was in much of a mood to wait longer.

The only redeeming point of the meal was the chicken. It turned out well. But we turned to our homework afterward with the distinct feeling that it was the lesser frustration.