A Freshman Food Revelation

We’ve all hit that wall — the one that hits you as you walk into the regimented buffets of Lenoir or Ram’s and view the same salad bar, pancakes, falafel, and beef vindaloo that you’ve seen over and over again for weeks, wishing for something different. You stride past all of the baked, fried, and grilled things you’ve eaten with a growing sense of mechanism over the semester and let loose an exhausted sigh, as you dream about home-cooked meals and the luxury of variation.

I do like the food at Carolina Dining Services, and I’m grateful for the quality of my meal plan, but I’m a foodie at heart and I need excitement and change every once in a while — an inconvenient facet to include in a campus dining hall. So how do you beat that wall?

You can go out and accrue massive food bills on wonderful Triangle food (I’ve had to cut back) or you can make your own fare, just like home.

It’s nostalgic, it’s soulful, it’s fun…but it’s work. I like to cook and I’m trained to cook, but always too busy or too lazy to do it. My friends Hannah Siler and Adèle Bernard, however, are not, and they’re motivated in their culinary exploration too.

When I came back from Christmas break I returned to Chapel Hill with the Christmas family feast still stuck in my head — a rich layout of pastas and meats thick with European influence, care, and panache, and I couldn’t stand the thought of waiting for my next home visit to change that. So, after hearing that Hannah and Adèle cooked a lot, I asked if I could join them for a meal and make my mother’s simple, yet addicting, pasta with homemade tomato sauce. They agreed, and the experience was incredible.

After two-plus hours of chopping, cooking, simmering, boiling, baking, and mixing we had filled the pitiful table in the lounge of Hinton James with such a heaping amount of appetizers, salads, breads, dips, pasta and toasts that one would have thought we were cooking for the entire floor. All of us brought our own unique tastes and styles from home to the table, and it was like home again, but thrice over.

We dipped and mixed one dish with the other, ripped off this or portioned off that — and finished near all of it within the hour. All of the food was delicious.

Cleaning up afterwards, there was a sense of satisfaction I felt in what we’d done. My inner-foodie was contented, and I don’t feel like I’m venturing hyperbole when I say that there a few things better than enjoying a good meal with your friends.

I’m still too lazy to cook every one of my meals, but I’ve since applied a lot more of my own cooking abilities to what I consume, especially with my coffee and snacks.
Hannah and Adèle, on the other hand, don’t have meal plans. They cook every day, and constantly experiment in their dorm kitchen with whatever they have on hand. Recently, their recipe for Coconut Encrusted French Toast with Raspberries received considerable views on food52.com, and in response they’ve just started their own food blog to share their culinary experiments here.

I haven’t tried the French toast yet, but I’ve read the recipe and it looks incredible. Speaking from the position of someone that’s tried their stuff before, I feel pretty safe in that assumption. The story is pretty cool too.

“One Sunday we were both starving and really wanted brunch but had little time,” the two told me.
“One of us had leftover bread and the other coconut and frozen fruit and our original idea of making traditional French toast soon transformed since we did not have milk! After substituting with coconut milk, we then got creative and encrusted the French toast with toasted coconut and topped it off with one of our favorite fruits. This flavorful concoction was created and consumed in the span of half an hour…making us realize that delicious dorm cooking could be easy and convenient.”

I don’t know about you guys, but thanks to them, I’m seriously starting to consider shifting more of my meals to my own cooking.

A UNC campus food revolution, anyone?