francy-food-blog

[francy-food-blog]

Social Sushi

Going out for sushi with my friends is one of my favorite traditions.  When we’re exhausted from studying all day at school, we like to kick back, relax, get some sushi, and gossip about the latest drama at school.  We’d talk for hours and hours sitting in a noisy, cramped restaurant, waiting for our server to bring us our food.  Sometimes it would take 5 minutes, and other times it took nearly 45 minutes to get our food.  No matter how long we’d wait, it would still taste just as delicious as before.  Our conversations would be littered with pockets of silence while we all sat and popped the beautifully presented sushi into our mouths.  I would immediately taste an explosion of different and unique flavors, a hint of unexpected sweetness here, a trace of unknown spices there.  Each bite would reveal a new taste, all combining into an indescribable mixture of flavors so delicious that we would lose our train of thought in our conversations.

No matter how small the sushi rolls seemed, they would always fill me up.  After about 30 minutes of relishing in and savoring the exquisite, unique taste of each roll, I would be completely stuffed.  Yet, my hand would still reach out and snatch up whatever leftovers were remaining on my friends’ plates, unable to help myself from having just another bite.  Then, completely filled to the brim, my friends and I would continue cracking jokes and gossiping for hours after, long overstaying our welcome at this crowded and cramped little Japanese restaurant.

[francy-food-blog]

Changing Tastes

I used to always order chicken tenders at fast food restaurants.  They were clean.  Simple.  Easy to eat.  Nothing at all like the slovenly mess of a burger.  Burgers used to disgust me to no end.  The goopy ketchup would drop off the side of a limp, exhausted bun, muddled with uneven specks of sesame seeds.  The thin, greasy patty would always slip out with every bite, almost as if trying to escape its inevitable end.  I could never quite grasp the full flavor of this meal because every element of a burger, no matter how well-placed, would always slip, spill, tumble, and drop out at some point during my meal, leaving me with two squished, useless buns, holding together nothing but the bloody remains of smeared ketchup.  It was a nightmare.

                                                          For years, I stayed away from burgers, haunted by the image of its disorganized dismemberment.  Instead, I stuck to the classics: chicken tenders and fries, but eventually, I found myself one-on-one again with yet another burger.  But this time, I knew exactly what to do.  My friends explained to me the correct way you were supposed to hold one: fingers and thumbs spread out across the entire bun, ready to catch anything that dared to escape.  We practiced and perfected our form while the cooks assembled their ingredients.  Finally, after an exhausting full minute of preparation, it was time.  My burger was here.  I picked it up, remembering the correct procedure and arranged my fingers in the right position.  I took my first bite.  Everything stayed in place, the way it should, and I finally got to experience a burger in its entirety.  Instead of tasting stale bread and an overwhelming mouthful of goopy ketchup, I relished in the sweet bite of a sliced tomato, the hard crunch of a leaf of lettuce, the smoky mouthful of a well-grilled patty, and the slight kick of red onion rings, all tossed together with a rich mixture of whipped mayonnaise and ketchup.  I devoured the rest of the burger without dropping a single ingredient on the plate.

All my life, I’d written off burgers as too difficult to eat and too messy to deal with.  If I had just put in the effort to eat a burger the way it was meant to be, I wouldn’t have wasted all this time running away from something I ended up loving all along.  Now, reflecting back on my burgerless childhood, I realize that the least I can do is try to make up for all the delicious meals I missed out on, no matter how unhealthy, debilitating, damaging, or diabetes-inducing it may be.  One burger at a time.

[francy-food-blog]

Reunited at a Restaurant

Sitting on a hard wooden bench, immersed in the loud chatters of conversation and the echoing clinks of utensils, I sat, surrounded by my best friends who I hadn’t seen in 2 months.  We waited anxiously for the server to announce that our table was ready, all of us bubbling with hunger.  This was the first meal we were going to share together since coming back from college.  We couldn’t wait to delve right back into our usual after-school tradition of slurping steamy, savory pho from Kevin’s Noodle House.  

Amidst the chaotic restaurant, we could see the bussers, quickly trying to clear the many tables, working hard to seat the three families waiting next to us near the entrance.  The longer we waited, the more hangry we got.  We were bordering on the verge of insanity when the waiter finally told us our table was ready.  With collective sighs of relief, we headed towards the table and sat down, already knowing what we wanted to get.  The waiter promptly took our orders and shuffled back into the kitchen.

While we waited, my friends and I took turns describing our first couple months at college, catching each other on up on all the drama.  We gossiped and cracked a couple jokes like nothing had ever changed.  Nothing seemed like it had changed.  The savory scent wafting through the tables, the recognizable waiters and waitresses moving swiftly towards each customer, the seamless conversation between my friends and I.  It all seemed so familiar.

The waiter, returning with impeccable timing, served us our long-awaited kid-sized bowls of beef pho, the same meal we’d eaten together since junior year.  He politely asked if we needed anything else, thanked us, and left us to enjoy our food.  The overall scent of the restaurant intensified as the thick steam floated up from my bowl.  We all raised our spoons in a celebratory “cheers” as we dived into our meals.  As soon as the warm soup hit my tongue, it felt like everything was the way it used to be.  It seemed like we had just gotten out of class at 3:05 and headed downtown for a casual after-school snack, joking and gossiping about the latest news in school.  The familiarity of the meal (the scent, the taste, the environment) pulled me towards the past, drowning me in waves of nostalgia, while the conversation started to bring me towards the present.  They talked about their classes, majors, friends, passions, ambitions, and I realized just then how different everything was.  We were living separate lives in separate cities, exploring ourselves outside of high school for the first time.  Everyone was going through a whirlwind of new experiences that was altering us in some subtle way.  Though we were slurping the same thin, white noodles drizzled in the same spicy Sriracha sauce in the same restaurant with the same people, it had changed.  

In the short time we’d spent apart, we had all grown.  We’d expanded our identity of ourselves since leaving high school and evolved through our experiences in individual ways.  And only when I was surrounded by such a familiar setting could I notice these tiny little nuances that had taken root in all of us.  The nostalgic background emphasized everything that had changed, but the beauty of it all was that it still felt the same.  We still had the same connection and familiarity between us, no matter how much we’d changed on our own.  We still had the same laughs and storytimes we used to, only in a different context.  

And sitting there, in the middle of Kevin’s noodle house, my friends and I spent the remainder of the day, sipping on hot broth tinted with a hint of distinct, spicy Sriracha sauce, filling everyone in on our wild few months at college, enjoying our first meal out on our first day home.

[francy-food-blog]

Dining Common Hacks

The first time I ate at the De La Guerra dining commons, I couldn’t stop myself from sampling everything from the steaming, saucy stir-fry to the lightly whipped chocolate dessert.  Since then, I’ve gone to DLG around 84 times, give or take.  And no matter how delicious the stir-fry or how sweet the pie, once you’ve had it 84 times, you start to get a little sick of it.

Around week 8 was when my mouth started to go a little stir crazy.  I couldn’t take an entire year stomaching the same, identical food twice a day.  Instead of sitting in despair, picking apart a gray, unseasoned slab of soggy chicken, I decided to take matters into my own hands.  No longer was I going to be subjected to the stale, bland, flavorless monotony of DLG.  It was time to hack the dining commons.

The first thing that sprang to mind was to combine my two favorite things in the world: sriracha and burgers.  Instead of choking down the plain, tasteless calories of an bland burger, I decided to spice it up.  For this sriracha burger you will need:

A burger patty

2 lightly toasted buns

Mayo

Mustard

Sriracha

2 slices of tomatoes

1 Romaine lettuce leaf

3 red onion rings

Slather the buns with the mayo and mustard, then add a slight drizzle of Sriracha and spread evenly.  Next, assemble the ingredients of your burger together: patty, tomato, lettuce, and red onions, and enjoy your juicy, flavorful creation.

The next inspired meal idea came to me as I stumbled into breakfast one day.  The workers handed me lumpy, uneven scrambled eggs next to a pile of leaking, oily sausages.  Not the most appetizing looking meal.  I decided instead to combine them into a breakfast bagel.  For this meal you will need:

A bagel

2 scrambled eggs

¼ teaspoon of salt and pepper

Sriracha

1 sausage patty

3 red onion rings

1 sprinkle of cheese

Toast your bagel in order to get it nice and crispy, then drizzle a light layer of Sriracha on the bottom bagel half.  Mix up the eggs with a little salt and pepper and assemble the rest of the ingredients together.  And you can take almost anything your dining common serves and combine it into a breakfast bagel: potatoes, hash browns, bacon, etc.

The next snack that popped into mind was bruschetta.  For this you will need:

½ cup diced tomatoes

½ cup diced onions

¼ cup of cilantro

1 teaspoon of olive oil

¼ teaspoon of balsamic vinegar

¼ teaspoon of salt and pepper

1-2 slices of toast

Gather the tomatoes, onions, and cilantro in a bowl, add in the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper, and mix together.  Slice your toasted bread into four even squares and top with the tomato mixture.

Lastly, here’s a fan-favorite, extremely simple dessert you can make for every meal:

1 cup of root beer

2 scoops of vanilla ice cream

Plop your ice cream into your root beer, and you’re all set!

All of these recipes are adaptive, experimentative, interchangeable.  You can use these as a jumping off point to help develop some creative freedom in a place with limited ingredients and menus to create the best dining experience you can for yourself.  I mean, you are the one paying for it.

[francy-food-blog]

Friendsgiving

Sitting on a hard wooden bench, immersed in the loud chatters of conversation and the echoing clinks of utensils, I sat, surrounded by my best friends who I hadn’t seen in 2 months.  We waited anxiously for the server to announce that our table was ready, all of us bubbling with hunger.  This was the first meal we were going to share together since coming back from college.  We couldn’t wait to delve right back into our usual after-school tradition of slurping steamy, savory pho from Kevin’s Noodle House.  

Amidst the chaotic restaurant, we could see the bussers, quickly trying to clear the many tables, working hard to seat the three families waiting next to us near the entrance.  The longer we waited, the more hangry we got.  We were bordering on the verge of insanity when the waiter finally told us our table was ready.  With collective sighs of relief, we headed towards the table and sat down, already knowing what we wanted to get.  The waiter promptly took our orders and shuffled back into the kitchen.

While we waited, my friends and I took turns describing our first couple months at college, catching each other on up on all the drama.  We gossiped and cracked a couple jokes like nothing had ever changed.  Nothing seemed like it had changed.  The savory scent wafting through the tables, the recognizable waiters and waitresses moving swiftly towards each customer, the seamless conversation between my friends and I.  It all seemed so familiar.

The waiter, returning with impeccable timing, served us our long-awaited kid-sized bowls of beef pho, the same meal we’d eaten together since junior year.  He politely asked if we needed anything else, thanked us, and left us to enjoy our food.  The overall scent of the restaurant intensified as the thick steam floated up from my bowl.  We all raised our spoons in a celebratory “cheers” as we dived into our meals.  As soon as the warm soup hit my tongue, it felt like everything was the way it used to be.  It seemed like we had just gotten out of class at 3:05 and headed downtown for a casual after-school snack, joking and gossiping about the latest news in school.  The familiarity of the meal (the scent, the taste, the environment) pulled me towards the past, drowning me in waves of nostalgia, while the conversation started to bring me towards the present.  They talked about their classes, majors, friends, passions, ambitions, and I realized just then how different everything was.  We were living separate lives in separate cities, exploring ourselves outside of high school for the first time.  Everyone was going through a whirlwind of new experiences that was altering us in some subtle way.  Though we were slurping the same thin, white noodles drizzled in the same spicy Sriracha sauce in the same restaurant with the same people, it had changed.  

In the short time we’d spent apart, we had all grown.  We’d expanded our identity of ourselves since leaving high school and evolved through our experiences in individual ways.  And only when I was surrounded by such a familiar setting could I notice these tiny little nuances that had taken root in all of us.  The nostalgic background emphasized everything that had changed, but the beauty of it all was that it still felt the same.  We still had the same connection and familiarity between us, no matter how much we’d changed on our own.  We still had the same laughs and storytimes we used to, only in a different context.  

And sitting there, in the middle of Kevin’s noodle house, my friends and I spent the remainder of the day, sipping on hot broth tinted with a hint of distinct, spicy Sriracha sauce, filling everyone in on our wild few months at college, enjoying our first meal out on our first day home.