The Bowdoin Gourmet

Yesterday afternoon’s convocation marked the official beginning of the 2011-2012 school year. After first-year students and a smattering of upperclassmen, faculty, and staff listened to speeches given by President Mills, Professor Thompson, and Dean Foster, the student body traveled to Farley Fields for one of the greatest meals of the year–the annual campus-wide lobster bake. Instead of attending convocation, however, I became one of many behind-the-scenes players for making the logistically-complicated lobster bake event a reality. Long lines of tables spread across the green topped with buckets, napkins, and lobster-eating instructions to help everyone from the experienced coastal lobster eaters to mountain people, like myself, who’ve grown up rarely even seeing lobsters. Come 4:45 the first of the students began to trickle in, and it only got busier from there.

Of course, while the lobster is the spotlighted feature of this meal, earning a spot in the event’s title, there was much more to be offered. For those people less inclined to get intimate with their food by tearing apart a recognizable large marine crustacean, there was sirloin steak, grilled chicken breast, and grilled eggplant to fill in as a main dish. Additionally, guests were offered tossed salad, tangy coleslaw (the best around in my opinion), corn on the cob, roasted potatoes, fish chowder, drawn butter (for the lobster), cornbread, watermelon, lemonade, and Maine blueberry cake. Did your mouth just drop open in surprise at the length and variety of that list? Yeah, I thought so. No worries–all the easier to lift that fork of deliciousness into your mouth.

Speaking of forks, one of the first thing that comes to mind for a big outdoor event like this is: “ahh! what about the waste produced by paper plates and disposable utensils?!?” It’s true that feeding the student body such a meal on athletic fields requires changes to how students are served and dishes are washed in in the dining hall, but props to Bowdoin Dining because the utensils, cups, plates, bowls, napkins, and tablecloths used for the lobster bake were compostable, so a hard-working crew bagged up those items and the leftover food scraps in compostable bags, and I carried them to a big bin that will eventually be taken to a composting pile. Much better than amassing that volume of used paper products, is it not? Although I think dining has done this in the past, this was the first time I’d learned about just how much of the waste being produced was able to be composted.

In any case, the event seemed successful, thanks in no small part to both the supervisors who communicated through radios where more food was needed and so on and the chefs, line servers, waitstaff, salad room prep crew, and many more who carried out all the vital tasks for a smoothly-run function. While I jumped around a bit doing a variety of odd jobs from serving to hauling trash bags, I had the pleasure of getting to watch people as they went through the lines with exclamations of awe and excitement for such a meal and as they met up with people they hadn’t seen for the whole summer. Bowdoin Dining brings happiness to students yet again. Welcome back everyone and let’s look forward to an amazing school year fueled by fantastic food and effort from our beloved dining services.

Despite the incredible distance between me and my pa on Father’s Day, I still had the opportunity to attend a Father’s Day lunch with my Maine “family,” which meant that I got to do a bit of cooking.

Always show up with some sort of food to social events. This time it was coconut macaroons, a quick and tasty gluten-free dessert, made like so:

First, you beat:

3 egg whites

1/3 cup sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

And then add:

1 1/2 cups of shredded sweetened coconut

Scoop into round balls on a greased baking sheet and bake at 350 F for approximately 10 minutes.

Let them cool before attempting to removing them from the pan.

So I just found out yesterday that June 18th is “International Sushi Day,” as claimed in 2009 by Chris DeMay, the administrator of the “Sushi” Facebook page. So, hey, it may not be an officially legislated holiday, but who’s complaining?

Coincidentally, my roommate and I planned to host a B.Y.O.I. (Bring Your Own Ingredient) dinner party last night long before we knew that such an event was occurring on this fine Saturday. The results of making it “bring your own ingredient” meant we got to fill our sushi rolls with avocado, summer squash, kohlrabi, green pepper, and shrimp. For those of you who’ve never made sushi before, it’s quite easy. Here’s how:

First, you must cook your sushi rice just as you could cook other rice (2 parts water to 1 part rice) for about 20 minutes. Then you stir in rice vinegar, about 1 tbsp. per cup of rice.

Then you prepare for rolling. Now, normally this process is done using a bamboo sushi rolling mat, which you can keep clean (because the rice gets stuck in it very easily) by putting it in a gallon ziploc bag.  Somehow, however, my rolling mat was misplaced in the move from my during-the-semester dorm room to my summer apartment. Being Bowdoin students, however, we had the wherewithal to develop a solution in a matter of minutes…so if you’re ever in need of a sushi rolling mat, simply slide a ~1/8 inch stack of paper into a gallon ziploc bag and you’re ready to go.

So, take a sheet of nori, and place it shiny side down on the rolling mat. Begin pressing rice (it should be somewhat cool if at all possible) onto the nori in a very thin (<1/4 inch) layer. If the rice layer is too thick when it gets rolled you’ll just have one really big bite of rice, so go for thin as possible. You can dip your hands in cold water to help prevent sticking as you go along. Leave a little edge at the top for sealing the roll later.

Then you add the yummy stuff. I love love love avocado. And squash. I actually really like various kinds of raw fish on my sushi, but did you know it’s a common misconception that sushi is raw fish in rice. Sushi actually means “vinegared rice,” so it’s really only describing how the rice is made. Sashimi is the type of sushi that involves raw fish (I highly recommend it), but we figured that fish coming from the generic grocery store was probs not sushi-grade, and that could get sketchy. Anyway…as I was saying. The filling…it should be placed about in the middle of the roll, or a tiny big closer to the side nearest you. (This particular role has avocado, green pepper, kohlrabi leaves, and shrimp–a crustacean that I only recently came to like.)

Then you begin rolling. The key is to keep it tight–to keep pressure on it at all times. When I was showing people how to roll, the best analogy (especially for this crowd) I could come up with was that you want to roll it like it’s your thermarest sleeping pad and you don’t want to pack it rolled but partially filled with air. So fold the bottom edge away from yourself and sort of press all the fillings back into that crease you’ve just made, tucking the edge you’ve just lifted down and towards the filling. Without letting go, continue rolling toward the far edge. As you near the edge you’ve left bare, wet the seaweed so it sticks easier and roll until the seam is on the bottom. Give it a firm but gentle squeeze (really, it requires finesse) and then you can start to cut it. Try to use a sharp knife and saw back and forth, don’t press down or the whole thing could get ugly.

See, Bowdoin students eat well during the summer, too! Of course, the dining halls are open (I was very happy to see the dining hall staff last week at the campus “picnic” in Thorn), but I have to say, I love having a kitchen in my immediate vicinity to have at it. I’ve made quite a few other things in the past four weeks (ahh! can you believe my summer fellowship is half over?) that I’m hoping to post in the near future, such as the recipes I developed for homemade (gluten-free and dairy-free) “Nutella,” cinnamon granola, and curry buckwheat patties.

(Btw, obviously my friends were thinking of the photogenic combination of green shirts an avocados in sushi when they got up on Friday morning… )

Bowdoin students are not alone when it comes to thinking about food….

http://www.onlinecollege.org/2011/06/07/40-formidable-college-food-bloggers/

Man, I wish I had eaten lunch at Thorne on Tuesday. Sure, the Thorne lunch menu is usually awesome, but I wish I’d eaten there for something other than the food. Thorne was the location of a flash mob at 1:20 pm on Tuesday.

For those of you who don’t know, a flash mob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, often after being just another person in the crowd beforehand, and perform some sort of act, whether dancing, freezing in place, taking of their pants (I’m not kidding–there was an underwear flash mob in New York City while I was there in January), etc. The acts generally have little purpose other than for entertainment, but  that is purpose enough.

This particular flash mob was choreographed by the Bowdoin Department of Theater and Dance. I’m not sure if it was choreographed by professors or students, but the group involved multiple dance classes from the semester.

Enjoy!

Bowdoin College Flash Mob (This link will take you to the video on YouTube.)

Holy c0w, what a menu tonight! I think we all were a little overwhelmed at how many sweet (or if you’re from around here, “sick”) options there were. First, it was chicken pad thai night, which, regardless of whether or not someone might call it “authentic,” is delicious. Further, our salad bar was graced with the presence of mushrooms. There was Mayan Vegetable Stew. The display cooks were serving grilled apple and cheese sandwiches (one of the best combinations of all time), and the salad room employees produced a most delicious wild rice and quinoa salad.

What was super fantastic about the meal was the extreme color variety, temperature difference (both warm and cold foods of varying degrees of warmth and coolness), and texture variety.

Here’s one of my roommate’s plates to show some of the above mentioned offerings:

Mmm, melty-cheesy-appley goodness on cinnamon raisin bread…

The wild rice and quinoa salad (that also included craisins, raisins, citrus vinaigrette and a smattering of little vegetables) was a crazy combination of tart and sweet and chewy and crunchy. Blew my mind. We also debated what constitutes a “salad,” since so many things get the word tacked onto it like fruit salad, jello salad, potato salad, bean salad, etc. even though salad refers to green leafy vegetables. We were only able to get as far as “a combination of food products that are mixed together…” before we found loopholes in every further detail such as temperature, presence or absence of vegetables, whether it could be a dessert, etc. We’re used to the idea of a “fruit salad,” but that’s not a conceptual category for everyone. In any case, whether we consider a mixture of rice, quinoa, dried fruits, and vegetables a “salad” or not it was delicious!

On an interesting side note, there was an unusual happening at Thorne today. Some friends of mine decided to mix things up a bit and eat their dinner in the servery…As you can see, they’re having fun in the process.

Many students’ meals may have looked somewhat similar to the above photo last night. Chipotle Tomato soup, couscous salad, chicken with gravy, and a quesadilla, or some variation like that. It looked and smelled delicious, and the owner of this particular plate can affirm that it was delicious indeed.

On my plate were some simple ingredients from the salad bar and mashed potatoes…

Now, you maybe were told growing up not to play with your food. It’s true that there are some situations and some types of “play” that are inappropriate for playing with one’s food, but I also see food preparation as a creative process. There is a high degree of creativity that goes into cooking and baking, and that creativity doesn’t have to be lost when operating in a dining hall without kitchen appliances at hand. Granted, my construction of a broccoli forest 1) is not particularly new, considering broccolis are often equated to trees (plus see Molly Katzen’s “Enchanted Broccoli Forest” cookbook) and 2) doesn’t actually change the food that I’m eating. Even so, a broccoli forest (with carrot understory) is exactly what became of my plate.

And if you were a kidney bean walking through the forest, your view would be something like this:

Of course, we couldn’t just leave it as a broccoli forest. The addition of fairy dust, aka pepper, turned it into a real wonderland.

The creation and consumption of this forest was not merely a ridiculous practice of playing with food, but also resulted in discussion of deforestation and other pressing environmental issues of our time.

I didn’t get a chance to write last night, but it was a night worth writing about. Thorne had a themed dinner for Cinco de Mayo, which included all sorts of tasty things like Chicken Tortilla Soup, Gazpacho Soup, Chicken Mole, Fish stew, Mexican steak (what makes a steak Mexican?), Black Bean and Sweet Potato Burritos, Nachos, Green Beans, Spanish Rice, Cornbread, and Mock Margaritas. The menu brought quite the crowd–the staff managed to keep up with the 1018 diners over the course of 2 1/2 hours.

I got to try some of the black bean and sweet potato burrito filling without the tortilla, and it was excellent. Full-flavored with a little kick to it. Additionally, I made my salad more exciting (Salad Tip #3) by adding salsa, guacamole and sour cream to it. One of my roommates also commented on the nacho bar area, citing three main benefits: the guacamole, warm chips, and black bean salsa.

And here is the mock margarita operation happening in the dining area of Thorne…

Since this post has rolled over into Friday, I’ll share a new discovery I made this morning. So you know, cream cheese and jam on a bagel is one kind of typical breakfast. Bagels are unfortunately off limits to me. (Sad, because they are my favorite bread product of all time.) But I came up with an idea to mix up my usual morning cereal–simply by warming some cream cheese until it was soft and then mixing cream cheese and jam into my cereal. Sounds a little weird right? You can judge if you want, but I gotta say–bagel or rice chex, it’s all a carbohydrate that serves as a vehicle for flavor right? Granted, you miss out on the chewiness of the bagel, but a crunch is nice too. This method of cereal eating is the perfect solution to soggy cereal. There is nothing worse in the morning than soggy cereal. I often use cottage cheese (protein!) or yogurt on my cereal to avoid this problem, because if I do add a milk or rice milk, I find myself eating much too quickly only because I don’t want the cereal to get soggy. So if you are a soggy-cereal-hater try this. You might like it.

I also worked as student manager tonight. It was incredibly slow despite a tasty menu that included some delicious salmon with avocado relish (avocados two nights in a row!) and smoothies made by our display cooks. We hypothesized that because Greenstock (an environmental-awareness type event) was happening near Moulton, people may have gone directly from that event to dinner at Moulton.

That’s enough for now–I’ll be up at 4:15 am to go watch the sunrise on Popham Beach! But it’s Friday…(ahh, can’t get that stupid song out of my head…) so it’s Haiku day….

Guacamole twice

Wishing dinner shift was busy

Still, great student crew

Oh boy…haiku writing isn’t one of my talents as you can see…

So, a couple of things:

First, I realized that my posts really only gave an image of dinners, which are obviously not the only thing Bowdoin Dining is serving. I considered writing a post about my breakfast, but knew that I might put a reader to sleep with my somewhat repetitive gluten-free breakfasts that cycle between rice chex cereal, peanut butter and jelly rice cakes, and potatoes with nutritional yeast + fruit with any of those options. Hey, it gets me by, but it doesn’t even begin to show what IS at a typical Bowdoin breakfast.

This morning I was at Moulton for breakfast–a location which typically includes fresh melon, multiple kinds of muffins, pancakes or french toast, scrambled eggs, scrambled egg whites, breakfast potatoes, some sort of sausage or bacon, a fruit sauce, sometimes a breakfast sandwich, eggs cooked to order, and hot cereal. Yeah–pretty overwhelming, huh? Maybe it’s a blessing that I don’t have to choose between all of those tasty choices every morning! Anyway, I happened to be eating breakfast with some great people this morning, and the focus of our discussion was Phase II Registration. Phase II happens after students have registered for courses and found out what classes they got into. The process opened at 7:30 am this morning, and Phase II leads to the well-known student campouts outside the Registrar’s office. Usually just a few students will stay overnight, but many come and join throughout the very early morning hours. The result? For the student sitting next to me this morning, “It makes you hungry!” The below spread was described as a “post-Phase II” breakfast–not just powering a student for his day but helping him recuperate from the early morning waiting in line to change courses.

Moving onto dinner, we ate at Thorne tonight and this time there was a gluten-free rice noodle dish that Eric was making in the BIGGEST wok I’ve ever seen. When you’re cooking for ~800-900 people, you have to go big or go home. And well, dining never goes home, so they get really big things like giant woks and giant pots.

An exciting aspect of the night was the peanut butter and jelly bar. Most nights of the week there are display cooks in the servery preparing something in addition to the hot line items. The display cook offerings vary from egg scrambles to chicken-ranch melts and from Vietnamese Noodle Soup to…well, the peanut butter and jelly bar!

But don’t be fooled. This is not just an ordinary peanut butter and jelly station. First, there is a wide variety of reads from the typical sandwich bread to various toasting breads such as banana bread or cranberry bread. These breads are arranged in a most aesthetically pleasing manner, first by a non-student employee before dinner and then throughout by our display cooks. Second, in addition to peanut butter and several types of jelly there is almond butter, marshmallow fluff, Nutella, chocolate chips, coconut, and probably other spreads and toppings that I didn’t even see in my quick pass. The peanut butter and jelly bar is fairly new addition to the menu rotation. That’s another neat thing about display items–dining is open to suggestions and is willing to try something to see if it’s popular and feasible. Peanut Butter and Jelly Bar obviously was. It’s great to see students get so excited about this hands-on food opportunity.

Normally I work on Wednesday evenings as Student Manager in Thorne, but tonight I wasn’t working since I switched shifts with another student on another day of the week. Since I don’t schedule anything for when I expect to be working, I had a rather open evening. What did that mean? I spent a much longer time socializing at dinner than usual. One thing you learn when you come to Bowdoin is that meals in Thorne and Moulton are important social opportunities that should be taken advantage of. Of course, visiting over dinner isn’t the only way students are spending time with friends, but a common phrase around here is the question one asks to another who they haven’t seen or spent time with lately–”Hey, d’you wanna get a meal sometime?” You see, it’s all about finding an excuse to sit down with great people and have conversation about anything or everything.

There are activities that occur during this time as well. There is, of course, the infamous Pepper Flip (maybe more on that later?), but creativity happens as well. For instance, tonight we made a simple sculpture with dishes and utensils…

And we decided to write silly phrases in every language the three of us knew…

As you can see, I obviously had too much time on my hands this evening. One could argue that that time should have been spent doing something like writing a paper, but the fact that I hung out in the dining hall for a longer time instead highlights an important point about dining: The eating experience at Bowdoin isn’t only about consuming tasty and nourishing food. Maybe sometimes it’s about catching up with someone you haven’t talked with for a few weeks, or about playing word games with your roommates, or about debating the benefits of social science courses and of physics courses, and more.

So tonight at Thorne wasn’t an ideal night for the gluten-free students among us. I wish that I’d had my camera with me for last night’s dinner that featured such deliciousness as vegetable stew, but for tonight I had to look beyond my own plate for more photogenic offerings. The menu at Thorne tonight is a popular one–chicken nuggets and vegan sesame nuggets, along with quesadillas, ravioli and grilled cheese with tomato soup. Though I’ve never really understood why what is it that makes something as simple as a chicken nugget so popular (although I do have some conjectures about how that item might fit into a “novelty” category extending from people’s childhoods), there is no denying that those nuggets bring crowds. Luckily, my roommates have a wide variety of preferences, so I am able to provide images that show a broader sample of tonight’s offerings.

There is the grilled cheese panini, zucchini, and vegan sesame nugget plate…

Ravioli, red quinoa salad, and black olives…

Tomato soup, carrots with hummus, and an impressive salad (with applesauce–that was salad tip #1)…

At first I thought I might be stuck in the salad doldrums–you know, all the salad bar options are great, but since it’s the center of my dinner every day, I’m always looking for ways to mix it up. It just so happened that the nutritional yeast container was recently refilled. So Salad Tip #2 is to add nutritional yeast to salads! Not only does it have a distinctive nutty flavor, it’s rich in B-complex vitamins and is a complete protein (though you would have to eat a lot of it to get significant amounts of protein). It’s not “yeast” in the sense of active yeast that we make bread with, but is instead a deactivated form of yeast.

While I used it here on salad, I consider it a legitimate addition to almost anything. It is commonly added to potatoes or eggs. Some people describe it as having a “cheesy” or “creamy” flavor, so it’s often used in vegan recipes to simulate cheese. I grew up eating nutritional yeast on popcorn–just sprinkling it on lightly buttered or oiled popcorn (to help it stick). Sooo good.

As usual, my roommates and I partook in our daily tea-drinking…not an unusually or exciting event really, but the brightly colored tea bags always remind us that we want to dye something. So if you’re ever looking for a craft project, look no further than tea for natural dyes…

I was hoping to post yesterday since it was time for a Friday Haiku, but there just wasn’t time before I headed off campus for a Coastal Adventure Alternative Ivies trip. One of my roommates and I led this trip to create a chance for students to get off campus and relax and to have fun on Ivies Weekend in a more low-key manner. Our first stop was Popham Beach, which provided a perfect Haiku…

Chill at Popham Beach

Walk to island at low tide

Seagulls steal bag lunch

Indeed, we had to recover the remains of a student’s bag lunch after the gulls (Herring Gulls to be exact) swept to snatch the lunch and flew down the beach with it. Although this trip isn’t directly associated with Dining Services, I’m sharing pictures because I think it’s easy to get wrapped up in what’s directly around campus and not think about the beautiful areas around us. Our afternoon on Popham Beach was followed by spending the night at Bowdoin’s Coastal Studies Center on Orr’s Island. There was quite a bit of cooking involved, as well as Apples to Apples…

We were at Popham Beach at low tide, so there were plenty of low-tide terraces to explore. Even though we were on a solely non-academic trip, we can’t help but bring our excitement about knowing about things around us–while I shared some thing I’ve learned about the ocean, we also had an ornothologist in our midst who taught us to identify different kinds of birds.

And, of course, as I said–a lot of cooking! We made fried rice for dinner, which is super easy but also delicious. We just cooked the rice and sauteed onions, garlic, peppers, and broccoli. We then scrambled a couple eggs, added the veggies and rice with liquid aminos (gluten free soy sauce alternative). Plus the magic ingredient–cinnamon. Though most people (at least in the U.S.) associate cinnamon with sweet foods, it’s really great in savory dishes such as this one.

For dessert, we made our own ice cream. I mixed 1/2 gallon whole milk with 3 cups sugar and a lot of vanilla extract. We divided this mixture up into little ziploc bags which we put in gallon ziploc bags with ice and salt. Saltwater has a lower freezing temperature than freshwater because it’s a solution, so by adding salt we bring the system temperature down to around 26-27 degrees Fahrenheit. This works because water has such a large latent heat of fusion/melting. Because a lot of energy has to go into the ice to bring it from solid to liquid, the temperature will stay the same for a long time–a temperature that is low enough to make ice cream mixtures freeze. Because the ice cream mixture is also a solution, it won’t freeze if put in a 32 F system. Anyway, then we massaged those bags, played catch with those bags, juggled, and so on until we had ice cream. Key Point: Wipe the outside of the little ziploc bag before opening it, otherwise the ice cream will get really salty.

Apples to Apples. If you’ve never played it, you’re missing out and should play it at first opportunity. Enough said.

In the morning some of us got up at 5:00 for a sunrise walk on which we found all sorts of neat things…

Interesting things like seaweed, which isn’t a weed at all, but is instead a multi-cellular phytoplankton. This picture shows the little gas pockets they have to stay in afloat so that they remain in the euphotic zone.

I just can’t get over how amazing the coast is. Coming from Montana, I am constantly excited by new landscapes and environments to be explored!

Tonight Thorne had an Israeli themed dinner.The Israeli part of the menu included Lamb Curry, Baked Fish with Parsley Sauce, Chicken Schwarma Panini, Fried Falafel balls, Middle Eastern Olive bar, carrot and sweet potato Tzimmes, Israeli couscous, and Challah, and for dessert, Apple Cake, Rugelach, and Umm Ali. It looked and smelled delicious! Unfortunately, nearly everything contained gluten in one form or another. (Really, it makes sense, since Isreal is in the Middle East where the packages of wild grasses–including wheat and barley–were probably domesticated.) So the best I could do was photograph the food of one of the people I was eating with…

And, of course, the people matter too! I’m lucky my friends put up with me taking photographs at the dinner table. Thanks Eron!

That’s all the writing I’m going to do for now–I have a lot of school work to get done tonight to make up for the fact that I’m leading a Coastal Adventure (Alternative Ivies Trip) tomorrow and Saturday and working in Thorne Saturday and Sunday. As a cool aside, look what I came across today on my way to class…

It may be kind of hard to see, since it’s not a very good photograph, but someone made a giant spider web out of string. I think it might be part of the Public Art class, but who knows? It was a neat surprise–it’s not everyday you come across giant spider webs!

The added publicity from the Bowdoin Daily Sun today, along with some tweeting, led to much discussion with my peers tonight at dinner regarding the nature of this blog. Questions included, “Why are you taking pictures of your food?” “So are you being a food critic or a food observer?” “Can you provide an unbiased view of the food if Dining Services connected you to the opportunity of taking on this blog?” “Won’t your dietary restrictions inhibit your ability to portray dining accurately?”

Regarding critique versus observation, I think there will be some of both. It’s true that I’m likely to view a lot of what happens  in Dining as positive–a lot of positive things said about our dining on non-Bowdoin related websites regard our excellent food and efforts at finding local and/or sustainable options, but there is something to be said for the people behind all that food. Even when something goes amiss, I know that not only have people spent hours preparing to feed the mass of Bowdoin students, but they’re going to do all they can to keep things running smoothly.

But I don’t think it’s really about being positive or negative. Instead, I’m hoping to give people a chance to see some of the nooks and crannies of dining, whether it’s a new way to combine food in the salad bar or an interesting snippet about how a dish is made, or maybe about some of the challenges people in various positions in the dining hall face. Think of it as participant observation. Because I eat here and work here, I get to participate in multiple manners, and all the while, I’m soaking in what’s happening around me. I’m attempting to portray both the production and consumption processes existing within dining at Bowdoin.

In terms of whether or not I am able to give a full and accurate picture of the food at Bowdoin due to my dietary restrictions and mostly-vegetarian status, I’m hoping to expand my view beyond the plate in front of me. After all, the manner in which I play with the salad bar every night (since it is almost entirely gluten-free all the time) will likely get boring to the general public. (Although, I did get a comment from someone today who said she tried applesauce on salad after reading the blog–and actually liked it.). So below is my dinner–the salad consisting of lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, kidney beans, and beets, plus the Pad Thai that Eric was making tonight. I know “ethnic food” is a topic of discussion around here–those students coming from such metropolitan locations as New York, Washington D.C., or Los Angeles have had many more opportunities to eat foods from various countries of origin made by people coming from those areas. I can’t claim to have any such experience, but I can appreciate the fact that I get to eat tasty noodles, because Pad Thai is made with rice noodles. That occurrence is enough to make me excited!

But really, I don’t want to give a false representation of Bowdoin’s offerings. So I capitalized on the dinners of people surrounding me to capture a few more images of dinner at Bowdoin.

First, since it’s passover, dining has been providing meals. Tonight’s involved chicken and sweet potatoes in a beautiful presentation…

Additionally, tonight was “decorate your own cupcake” night, one of the many hands-on desserts Bowdoin offers. The cupcake bar brings back great memories of one of my first-year roommates who came back with a cupcake once, stating, “The frosting is really the reason why I got this…” One of my current roommates didn’t quite get the mountain of frosting I’ve seen on some cupcakes, but she provided a great explosion of color.

And the mini M&Ms in at the cupcake station…this is one of life’s persistent questions: why do mini M&Ms taste better than regular M&Ms? It just doesn’t make any sense!

I mean…here at Bowdoin we certainly pursue much more complex and more important/meaningful questions in our studies…but still…why???

Ahh, so I was going to post earlier this week–the above photo is from Tuesday’s dinner–but as is the case with Bowdoin life, things were rather busy in the height of the week. In any case, the above dinner features eggplant, a vegetable whose name and appearance are not considered particularly attractive to many people, but whose flavor and texture are most excellent. Bowdoin’s Garlic Grilled Eggplant with Feta, Tomato, and Herbs is a perfect example of just how awesome eggplant can be. Thick slices of eggplant are grilled (there are great visible grill lines) and the topping is added, I think, before it is broiled for a moment to heat the topping. (I actually didn’t get the chance to peek into the kitchen on that particular night, but similar dishes are done that way, so it’s maybe a good guess.) I just love that this particular dish has oomph in flavor and texture. You know, the eggplant–that purple, bell-shaped vegetable you might see in grocery stores but probably never buy–is kind of pretty. And did you know that it can be used in all sorts of recipes as a replacement for meat? Recently I’ve had several friends at Bowdoin approach me asking for advice about how to navigate meals, especially in Bowdoin’s dining halls, after deciding to follow vegetarian or vegan diets, and among other words of guidance, I recommend that they take full advantage of the vegetarian options offered on the hot line, as well as get creative with the impressive array of options in the salad bar. For people who like certain meat-dishes or who maintain the concept of a meaty-centric meal, eggplant can be the perfect solution. It’s not that it tastes or feels like meat, but it’s heartiness makes it suitable for many of the same things for which meat is used.

The other half of my plate is that “getting creative with the salad bar” part of my meal. I end up focusing my meals around the salad bar often, because it has a plethora of naturally gluten-free foods–essentially a wide variety of vegetables and legumes. On this particular night, we had the wonderful pleasure of baby spinach leaves, to which I added tomatoes, beets, garbanzo beans, kidney beans, and applesauce. Yes, applesauce. The practice of topping my salads off with applesauce gets a lot of strange comments and looks from friends and passersby alike. You, too, may feel that such a combination is far outside your comfort zone, but I highly recommend it. Although Bowdoin’s homemade salad dressing are superior in flavor, as a personal preference, I’ve never cared too much for salad dressing on my greens. (As a side tip: salad dressing on rice is great!) By adding applesauce to one’s salad there is the added benefit of a serving of fruit and an added flavor combination of savory vegetables, earthy legumes, and sweet fruit (in the form of puree, of course). You’ll certainly hear more about some unique food combinations I’ve discovered in the Thorne/Moulton territories in the future.

And also, another awesome thing about my dinner was that it looked kind of like a face. Meet what you eat–”hello eggplant-eyed applesauce-mouth friend!”

Another neat thing dining did this week was tonight’s dinner, which was based primarily off Maine-produced ingredients in honor of Earth Day. Of course, Dining Services is always committed to using sustainable food systems as much as is feasible over the long term, but I love the local-food focused dinners, because I think it expresses not just food grown in close proximity to Bowdoin, but the surrounding traditions that arise out of the food production possibilities of Maine–the seafood-based items like shrimp cakes and chowder, the beans in baked beans and hearty vegetable soup, and so on. On another local food note, we’re lucky enough here in Maine to connect with local farmers through CSAs (which stands for Community Supported Agriculture). While I’m doing research on campus this summer, my roommate and I will have fresh vegetables brought to Bowdoin weekly as a result of our Hatchet Cove Farm CSA share. Is that cool, or is that cool? Yeah, I thought so too.

Oh, and in the past Mark wrote Friday Haikus…I am not a poet. But still, maybe I’ll give it a try.

Shrimp cakes and chowder

Seafood has its place in Maine

As do potatoes

The title to this post may be a little misleading. How, you might ask, can I be writing “welcome back” when we’re in the final weeks of the spring semester?

In fact, it is a welcome back to the blog posts on Bowdoin Gourmet. Perhaps after laying inactive for a couple years, this blog has lost its previous following–I may be writing tonight to an imagined audience, an audience that I hope over time will come to expect updates. (Then again, I did find this site as a prospective student in my obsessive Google searches about Bowdoin.) And by “I,” I mean me, Danica, a member of the Bowdoin Class of 2013 and the new Bowdoin Gourmet.

In any case, it’s been quite some time since my predecessor, Mark MacGranaghan ’09, has had the chance to eat at Thorne or Moulton and blog about it. I was recently asked to pick up where he left off and continue the process of giving an inside view of Bowdoin’s wonderful dining services. While I eat at Thorne and Moulton just like any other student, I have the added bonus of working as Thorne employee–a bonus for me in getting to know the great people who work there, and I hope a bonus for the blogging audience as an access point for understanding the inner workings of dining services. Just how do we live the legend of being the best dining service in the country?

Enough of the introductions–this evening’s dinner was created by a quick run-around the Thorne servery on my way to a Dining Advisory meeting.

This particular meal features the vegetarian taco filling–peppers, onions, and black beans–with guacamole, salsa, and sour cream, but without the tortilla due to the fact that I have Celiac disease, thus gluten is no fun to eat. (Perhaps more on that later–I will certainly try to add include some writing about “normal” food by living vicariously through my muffin-and-bagel-eating friends.) I rounded the plate out with a colorful assortment of broccoli, tomatoes and beets.

It is a little known fact that working as a line server on taco night requires great skill to serve the proper amount of meat or veggie taco filling with sufficient speed to keep the lines from getting long. Line serving, though considered one of the simplest jobs and often filled by first-year students, is a position that requires endurance and an ability to read people’s body language in a noisy servery. One of the perks of working as a line server is the opportunity to interact with hundreds of people–if only for a few moments with each person. After an evening of providing students with food, the line servers are responsible for cleaning the serving lines, as well as washing tables, which can make for a tiring night. Next time you go through the line at Thorne or Moulton, thank your line server and admire their taco-proportioning skills. Line serving is just one of the positions that makes our dining services run like butter. (More on that later.)

As a final addendum to this post: I have no idea who will read this blog. BUT, if you are a Bowdoin student (or even if you’re not) and have a question or suggestion, you should comment on this post or email me (dloucks at bowdoin dot edu) so I can have some fodder for future posts.

Happy eating!

Tonight in Thorne I enjoyed this brilliant dinner:

Salmon is one of my favorite foods, and it was particularly well done tonight. I liked how the spiciness of salsa contrasted with the rich flesh of the fish, as well as the brilliant red color that it lent to the dish. The sliced cucumber and minced parsley were both artful and delicious garnishes.

The vegetable side was also a standout; it defied the reputation of zucchinis as flavorless vegetables and demonstrated their full culinary potential. The key, I think, was that they were roasted just the right amount of time: long enough to make them tender-crisp and to bring out their savory flavor, but not so long as to destroy their integrity. That timing in combination with some superb seasoning made for a tasty side.

The pesto-tossed pasta with roasted vegetables, in the rear of the dish, was also excellent. I loved the earthy flavor of broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, and asparagus that dotted the pasta, as well as the bright, savory flavor of the fresh pesto. Its almost a metaphor for the Maine spring; at the same time having elements of both winter (the roasted vegetables) and summer (the basil pesto).

Altogether, I’d say that tonight’s great meal was one fitting with which to close the year. This dinner was a classic example of the delicious and healthful food that distinguishes Bowdoin’s foodservice.

I’ve had a great time writing the Bowdoin Gourmet, and your readership has made it a particularly special experience. Thanks for reading, for commenting, and for your interest in Bowdoin’s dining services and food at colleges in general. Campus dining is experiencing a sea change nationwide, and I’m thrilled to have been able to chronicle some of the leaders of that change right here at Bowdoin.

As I close out this blog’s last post, I’d like to offer a final thanks to the Bowdoin Dining Service employees. I’ve spent most of the space here this past year writing about the food, but my experience has taught me that its the employees in Thorne and Moulton that are ultimately responsible for Bowdoin’s great dining experience.

In a recent post, Bowdoin Gourmet reader Julie suggested that I try one of her personal favorite salads. I’m really glad that she made the suggestion and that I gave it a try, because this salad is awesome.

Julie’s original suggestion called for greens, sliced grilled chicken, sliced apples, shredded cheese, sunflower seeds, craisins, balsamic vinegar, and a pesto topping. I mostly followed Julie’s suggestions in making this salad, but I substituted raisins for craisins (no craisins in Moulton), omitted the sunflower seeds (I have a strong aversion), and left out the balsamic vinegar (I wanted to try the salad first without this very strong flavor). The net result:

What a brilliant mix of ingredients! I honestly didn’t have high expectations for this eclectic combination, but it really does make for a great salad. The pesto topping in particular was delicious and I especially liked it with the red apples. When I make this at home in the future (and I will), I think I’ll trade the red delicious apples you see in the picture for my personal favorite variety – the pink lady. The pink ladies are sweeter, crisper, and have the added bonus of not browning after being cut. Their almost magic. Like this salad.

Moulton had a rather unusual offering at lunch today: ‘handmade oatmeal pancakes with blueberry and apple raisin sauce’.  This dish would seem to make more sense as a breakfast item or even as a desert, but I wasn’t about to let culinary semantics stop me from trying it:

Now when the Moulton chefs said blueberry and apple raisin sauce, they probably assumed that students would pick one or the other.  They both looked really good to me, so I just grabbed a bit of both.

The dish was surprisingly delicious.  The pancakes themselves were substantial and independently flavorful; the mixed-in oatmeal gave the pancakes the flavor and texture to hold their own against the two sauces.  The sauces in turn were not to sweet, as fruit sauces often are, but instead balanced, semi-sweet complements to the savory pancakes.

The two main courses at Thorne tonight were “spicy Thai steamed mussels” and “grilled steak au Poivre with Dijon sauce”. Both were delicious.

Starting with the steak, I particularly enjoyed the presentation and taste of the Dijon sauce. The sauce was piped in a neat criss-cross over the steak, which was then sprinkled with some sliced green onions – very appetizing. I can’t recall ever having steak with a Dijon sauce, but now that I’ve tried it I realize that it makes perfect sense. I have Dijon mustard with roast beef sandwiches all the time; why not apply the same savory, spicy condiment to steak as well? I should also mention that the steak itself was very good (it was so tender that I was able to cut it with the standard-issue, safety-first knife, which is essentially a butter knife.)

The mussels were also very good. I enjoyed both the spicy Thai sauce and the generous sprinkling of onions and tomatoes in with the mussels. The sea-water brininess of the mussels, the spiciness of the sauce, and the bright, fresh flavor of the vegetables were all made more delicious by their suggestion of the coming summer.