Monday Night Dinner

There is a general truth that if you feed them, they will come.

In college they always had problems achieving quorum at Plenary* until they closed all the dining halls that day and only served food at Plenary. This doesn’t necessarily say much about the student investment in the democratic process of student government. It does however say a lot about how to get 1200 college students to turn up for something.

So far the most successful program my roommate has ever run for teens in her library is the one where she brought in cupcakes for them to decorate. College students will show up for food in general. Teenagers will show up for sugar.

I don’t have a problem getting people to come to Dinner. I do have a small problem getting them to turn up on time. However, the universal truth of Dinner is that if you serve it, they will arrive. It’s like magic. As soon as you put food on the table, the door will open and the missing guests will appear. This works so often, that on the rare occasion that it doesn’t work, I’m always surprised.

* Quorum is required to reaffirm of the Student Government Constitution and the Honor Code. You’d think with how central the Honor Code is to life at Bryn Mawr it’d be easier to get people to turn up, but you’d be wrong.

Chicken Fingers
Scalloped Potatoes
Apple Sauce
Broccoli
Salad

Scalloped Potatoes

The Joy of Cooking gives you two cloth bookmarks to place as you will in the book. I use them for the recipes for biscuits and scalloped potatoes. The biscuits make sense. I make them all the time, and no matter how many times I make them I can never remember exactly how much baking power and baking soda I’m supposed to use. I watch people on TV make biscuits with a pinch of this and enough flour and I’m in awe.

The scalloped potatoes make less sense to bookmark since I don’t actually make them all that often. I use the Joy’s recipes for quiche and custard more often than I need the recipe for scalloped potatoes. But somewhere along the line it got bookmarked and it seems like it would be breaking with tradition to change it now.

Recipe previously given: Scalloped Potatoes & Kitchen Toys

Chicken Fingers

Recipe previously given: Corn Pudding & Other Gateway Drugs

Apple Sauce
It’s that time of year again. All the soft fruits are gone from the market, and we’re down to the apples that will have to carry us through to the Spring. It’s early enough in the Fall/Winter months that I haven’t gotten enormously tired of apples yet, and this is the first apple sauce of the Fall.

I read an article in the New York Times the other day about root cellars making a come back. All I can say is that some people clearly have more space than I do, and that equally clearly they don’t have damp cellars. Every house I’ve ever lived in that had a cellar, had a cellar that was damp and I suspect that any fresh food left down there would rot long before the end of winter.

Interesting side note, we once accidentally petrified pears in the bomb shelter (all Swiss houses have a bomb shelter, it’s required by law). Actually, now that I think about it, the bomb shelter would probably be a great place to have a root cellar. Even not sealed against a nuclear winter it’s practically a hermetically sealed environment. The pears certainly didn’t rot, they just desiccated and became stone like, and they were just laying on a tray that got taken down there during some round of lightening cleaning because there were guests coming (I’m assuming that’s how they ended up in the bomb shelter, but I don’t actually remember). It’s probably a more practical thing to do with a bomb shelter than stocking it with canned food and camp beds (also required by law) against the unlikely event that someone decides to bomb Switzerland.

Recipe previously given: Bangers & Mash

Salad
I order my salad (and pea shoots – so yummy) from a local organic farm. I know they’re not growing them outside anymore, so I’m assuming that they’re being grown in a green house somewhere. I know they’re wildly out of season, but it’s a local greenhouse and I’m okay with that. Winter is a long season in the Northeast, and I refuse to live with what the grocery store calls salad for the next six months.