The Bowdoin Gourmet

Each Friday I’ll be writting a haiku poem about the most inspiring food experience I had that day. Check back tomorrow for the first in the Friday Haiku series.

The entire Bowdoin campus gathered on the athletic fields this afternoon for the highly anticipated Annual Lobster Bake. We enjoyed some great weather, caught up with friends returning to school, and savored some very special food.

As I walked to the lobster bake I was still coming down from the sushi high induced by the spicy tuna rolls I had for lunch. Yet I anticipated more seafood goodness to come; this was surely to be a memorable meal. In the moments before I arrived, I recalled the experience of having my first lobster at this same event last year.

As usual, dining services had the serving logistics figured out perfectly; we breezed through the line and quickly found a table. I ended up getting a good-sized lobster, a roasted potato, a very colorful garden salad, and some homemade fish chowder.

The lobster and vegetables were all as good as I had hoped and expected. Being such an amateur with respect to handling lobsters, it took me a while to get to the meat, but that only made it taste better in the end. I spent so long with the lobster that the chowder got cold, so I’ll have to try that some other day in the dinning hall.

All in all, the lobster bake truly lived up to its history and hype.

I was excited today because it was the first day this year that the Bowdoin café had sushi available. Sushi is my single favorite food, so this was a big deal for me.

The café actually serves sushi every Wednesday for lunch during the school year, so today’s lunch was just the first of many sushi moments to come.

I ordered the spicy salmon rolls and they really impressed me. The chef had judiciously applied the spicy sauce so as not to overpower the fish, and the salmon itself was impeccably fresh. I seldom find salmon rolls this good even in sushi restaurants.

Serving excellent sushi is another aspect of the Bowdoin dining services that really distinguishes them. Again, I feel very lucky to be the beneficiary of their work.

What’s the best way to eat a grapefruit? To be honest, I’m not really sure, so at breakfast this morning I experimented with some different methods.

For the first grapefruit, I used one of the special grapefruit knives with a bend in middle to cut the grapefruit directly out of its skin. The idea here is that the knife has a similar contour to the inside of the fruit, so you just move it in a circle along the inside and then out pops the nicely separated flesh.

Well, not really. As you can see the knife did not match the contour of the grapefruit very well, and the result is a combination of wasted fruit stuck on the skin and malformed flesh left to eat. I figure there has to be a better way.

Indeed there is. The inspiration for this second method is actually oranges, which I usually just peel and then eat in wedges. If it works for oranges, why not grapefruit?

The peeling goes easily once you get it started, which you can do by sticking a fork tine between the flesh and skin at the circumference of the fruit and making a small break in the skin. Once you have all the skin off, you’ll want to go back and peel off the white, bitter pith.

This leaves you with a less wasteful and more pleasant looking piece of grapefruit than the first method. Next, I thought I would just break the fruit into wedges by peeling the sections apart. In fact, you can’t really do that with a cut-in-half grapefruit because it leaks sticky juice all over your hands.

So instead just use a sharp, serrated knife to cut it into wedges. This leaves you with tasty, bite-sized pieces of citrusy goodness
that you can eat with a fork.

I’m curious if anyone has a different / better method for eating grapefruit. If you do, please post a comment and let us know about it!

Last night I walked with some friends from Howell House to the local Indian spot Shere Punjab. I enjoyed the company and the exercise, but the food failed to impress.

When I’m trying a new restaurant, as with Shere Punjab last night, I usually go right to the seafood section of the menu. Not only do I love seafood, but seafood dishes are particularly good for distinguish great restaurants from mediocre ones. Only a special restaurant can obtain truly fresh seafood and prepare it in a way that both highlights and builds on seafood’s delicate flavor.

I took the food back to the dorm, opened the container of Seafood Medley Masala I had ordered, and immediately felt discouraged. The dish had an unappetizingly uniform orange-brown color, with no garnish whatsoever to make it more appealing. Regardless of its depressed appearance, I gave it an honest taste.

This dish flat-out failed my ‘seafood test’. The overwhelming richness and spiciness of the sauce masked any flavor that the scallops may have had, and the only thing I could taste besides the sauce when eating the shrimp was an unpleasant fishiness.

I had some success salvaging the dish by mixing in a lot of basmati rice, but by that point it had clearly failed to live up to its $15 price point.

I’ll probably give the Shere Punjab one more chance, perhaps trying a different portion of their menu, but I frankly won’t be expecting much. The seafood has spoken; the Punjab was mediocre.

I dropped into Moulton this afternoon to grab a quick lunch before going to some meetings. I put together this tuna, leaf lettuce, tomato, and Swiss sandwich between multigrain bread slices with Dijon mustard. This sandwich really hit the spot. The tuna and Swiss together made the sandwich pretty salty, but the really ripe tomatoes and fresh lettuce helped balance the flavors.

Speaking of tuna, I’m really glad that Bowdoin offers plain, dry tuna at their sandwich bar. Tuna is a great, healthy choice for sandwiches, but mixing it with a bunch of mayonnaise, as in a tuna salad, really defeats the purpose. So having this dry tuna lets students enjoy a tasty and healthy sandwich.

Continuing with the healthy theme, I rounded out the meal with some steamed veggies. As with the breakfast fruit bowl earlier today, the contrasting colors make the dish really appealing. Putting together a nice medley of vegetables is just another little thing that Bowdoin does to make their students’ dining experience more enjoyable.

Today I started breakfast with some fruit, as usual.

The blueberries in the fruit salad added a lot of visual appeal, even though you really don’t taste the berries that much over the strong melon flavors. I always find it more enjoyable to eat foods that look appetizing as well as having good flavor, texture, etc. Adding the blueberries is a great example of the subtle things that Bowdoin does to improve their students’ dining experience.

The cream cheese and cinnamon toast pictured above is a personal favorite of mine that I make all the time at Bowdoin. I just toast whole wheat, spread a thin layer of low-fat cream cheese, and sprinkle it all with some ground cinnamon. The contrast of the warm, crunchy toast, the cool, rich cream cheese, and the spicy cinnamon all makes for a tasty breakfast side dish.

The main breakfast course featured blueberry pancakes, scrambled eggs, and Canadian bacon. I appreciate that Bowdoin offers different pancake flavors, and I especially like blueberry.

I’m also really glad that they seem to be serving Canadian bacon more often this year, as I think it’s a healthier alternative to the more traditional breakfast sausage or American bacon. In fact, I put a comment card in their suggestion box telling them just that. The dinning staff replies to all student comments and then posts the comment and their reply in the dinning halls. I’m curious to see how long they take to reply and if they are planning to offer Canadian bacon often in the future. Look for an update on this in a future post.

Breakfast is far and away my favorite meal in general and in particular at Bowdoin. I usually get up early and head over to the Moulton dining hall to get my mornings started
right. Today was no exception, and I indeed had a very nice breakfast.

The picture above captures my single favorite aspect of Bowdoin’s dining service: their abundance of fresh fruit. I love fruit, and I really appreciate that the school makes such a concerted effort to provide fruit at all meals, year round.

Getting fresh, ripe, tasty fruit up to coastal Maine year round is surely an expensive, difficult, and time-consuming task for the dining services staff. But their dedication really pays off; Bowdoin has the best selection of fruit of almost any dining establishment that I have visited, including most restaurants.

However much I love fruit, I can’t make a whole breakfast out of it. After my daily fruit fix, I often get something from the main hot food line. Today I picked out this delicious plate.

I get breakfast sausage and home-fried potatoes fairly often, but this banana bread French toast was a new find. It tasted delicious, though it was quite heavy, even for French toast. A generous serving of sweet maple syrup helped to cut the toast’s richness and balance the flavors in this satisfying breakfast course.

Today, as part of our orientation activities, we had brunch with community leaders from Brunswick, the town in which Bowdoin is located. To say the least, this was a special brunch.

Walking into the dinning room, I was surprised to see tables set with white tablecloths, polished silverware, stemmed glasses, folded cloth napkins, and china. One of the students next to me whispered, “Its looks like a nice hotel.”

The food itself made the students and guests even more excited. I personally opted for the bacon quiche and heaping portion of fresh fruit salad, while others went for the fresh-baked blueberry muffins or the rich French toast.

When I commented on the quality of the meal, one staff member simply replied, “…we like to treat our students right.”

Needless to say, I really regret not having brought my camera to this brunch. On the other hand, I bet we’ll have several other special events like this later in the year that I can photograph.

Our orientation leader said that dinner would be a very casual affair, which it was, but the food was still great.

I especially appreciated that my Kung Po Shrimp actually had lots of shrimp; in other establishments, including restaurants, the cook often skimps on the meat in dishes like this – not at Bowdoin.

I just returned to campus today for orientation activities. For breakfast, Bowdoin dining services prepared a Continental spread, including fresh-baked pastries and bagels, homemade granola, and a variety of fresh fruit. Nothing fancy, but tasty as expected.

Lunch was my first meal in Moulton, one of the two main dining halls on the Bowdoin campus. I made a ham, roast beef, tomato, and baby spinach sandwich on a Kaiser roll with whole grain mustard. The salad featured greens from Bowdoin’s organic garden and was topped with tomatoes and crumbled feta. The Granny Smith rounded out the delicious lunch.

The orientation participants enjoyed a catered dinner outside of Ladd House. Dining services prepared a huge variety of dishes, included ribs, grilled tofu, baked beans, corn bread, garden salads, and a variety of deserts. I opted for the barbequed chicken, pasta salad with sun-dried tomatoes, and the fruit salad. The tender chicken, savory pasta salad, and sweet, fresh fruit reminded me of what I have to look forward to this year.

The Princeton Review has ranked Bowdoin as having the best campus food in the country for the second year in a row!

I hope to show through the Bowdoin Gourmet blog what makes Bowdoin’s food so special that it earns accolades like this one. Look for the first food post later today!

• I have a passion for good food.
• Bowdoin College serves good food; perhaps the best among all colleges in the country.

I am in unique position to offer an inside look at the Bowdoin College dining experince, long recognized as distinguished but never truly revealed to those outside of the Maine college campus.

There is a lot to reveal . As an outsider looking in on a college campus, its easy to forget or dismiss the importance of good food for ensuring students’ well being. But when, like me, you’re eating the school’s food 3 times a day, 200 days a year, it takes on enourmous importance.

Bowdoin’s great food makes my college experience much more enjoyable. It helps me feel happy and healthy, and I feel very lucky to be at Bowdoin in part because of it. With this blog – the Bowdoin Gourmet – I therefore hope to show others what dining at Bowdoin is really like and to highlight the impact that Bowdoin’s dining services has on so many people.

I think that BowdoinGourmet will attract a diverse audience of readers:

• Students from other colleges, wanting to know how their food compares to Bowdoin’s
• Parents of college students, curious about how their children eat at school
• Prospective students, wondering what they can look forward to if they choose Bowdoin
• Food journalists, looking for the inside scoop on the fabled Bowdoin dining experince
• Fellow Bowdoin students, seeing how their gustatory habits compare to mine
• and General foodies, captivated by Bowdoin’s unique culinary experience

I look forward to blogging the Bowdoin Gourmet, sharing it with readers, and participating in the discussion that are sure to ensue. Enjoy!

I’m returning to Bowdoin on August 23rd, so that’s when you can expect to see new content on BowdoinGourmet.com. Until then, I’m working on setting up the website and thinking up topics for feature stories. Since I want to have lots of delicious pictures on the blog, I’m also improving my food photography skills.

Just to whet your appetite, here are a few of the things that I’ll be bloggin about when school starts:

• The Annual Lobster Bake – A Bowdoin institution
• Tasty produce from Bowdoin’s own organic garden
• Amazing fresh fruit at the breakfast bar
• Make-your-own gourmet sandwiches for lunch
• Dinners featuring food from local Maine farmers