Yale: A Dining Hall Primer

In light of the fact that it is finals week at Harvard (but in two years, it won't be!), I asked my friend Erin, a freshman at Yale, to guest-post about the dining hall system there. As follows, her response:

After coming back from break where I heard horror stories about other colleges mealtime fare, I can say without a doubt that I hit the gastronomic jackpot in attending Yale. Our dining halls are second to none, and the options for places to eat are endless. In addition to the 12 (or rather 11, since one college is always undergoing renovations) residential colleges, which each offer their own atmosphere, there is also Commons, which has the longest hours, and the widest variety of food. For lunch, the choices are even more varied, as students can use their lunch swipe to eat in the Law School, Kline Biology Tower or School of Management.

Before I start on the residential colleges, where I eat almost all of my meals, I’ll give a brief statement about Commons. It is huge, and similar to Annenberg at “the other school.” It is the only place that serves hot breakfast during the week, with daily menus of pancakes, sausage/bacon/ham, eggs, and potatoes. I’m not much of a breakfast eater, but when I do manage to crawl out of bed before 11, it’s a good place to go. All the other residential colleges have a cold breakfast of cereal, bread, bagels, waffles, etc. One thing that is unique to Commons is the Y waffle-maker, which I have yet to try, but have heard good things. Commons also has longer hours than any other dining hall, staying open past 7. It has a pizza bar, a main line, a pasta bar, a salad bar, a sandwich bar, a dessert bar, a cereal bar, and a wide variety of drinks. There has never been a time where I haven’t been able to find something good to eat at commons. Also, Commons is a great place to see people, as it is centrally located to most classroom buildings, and many people eat lunch there.

I however am a much bigger fan of the residential college dining halls. They are much smaller, more intimate, and normally have very good food. Last night for example, at Branford, dinner was southern fried or grilled chicken, some stuffed squash thing that I’m sure vegetarians would have loved, glazed ham, garlic flavored green beans and mashed potatoes with gravy. Yale’s mashed potatoes are some of the best I’ve ever tasted, and I would like to think myself somewhat of a mashed potato aficionado. They are creamy with little bits of potato skins to give them texture, and chicken gravy is great. In addition, my friends also had spinach soup, colorful and delicious salads, various cookies, and ice cream.

Every dining hall has unique specialties that you discover as you sample different ones: Pierson has a soft-serve ice cream machine that sometimes works, Davenport has their precious gnome in the middle of their dining hall, Calhoun, much to the delight of one of my friends, has fresh pineapple, and Berkeley, the famous dining hall that is always PACKED with freshmen because the foods so good, has different tossed salads every day.

Although I’ve been in many of the dining halls, this is most likely only because my own beloved college, Jonathan Edwards, is under construction this year. Many of my other freshmen friends eat most of their meals in their own college. This is because each dining hall acts as a meeting place. By eating in your college, you are guaranteed to see people you know, and also, to meet some new people you may not have seen before. The table set-up creates a great environment for discussion, assuming there aren’t too many people, and you will often see people stop at tables talking to different friends as they walk to their seat. The dining hall workers often become close with the students, and the card swipers memorize new freshman names in their respective college, so they can greet them by name. Being in JE, this has not yet happened to me, but I hold out hope.

In addition, colleges have family meals every week in which only people in the college can use the dining hall, so as to increase the solidarity and camaraderie amongst students. Do not fear if you are sans dining hall, as JE students this year are welcome in any college, although, the food tends to be absolutely amazing on family nights (i.e. sundae bars or high class meats), thus you will be accused of stealing other college’s food.

I cannot think of one meal where I have been able to find nothing to eat. My biggest problem is that I often find one thing I like, only to realize that there’s something else that I want even more, and I end up with too much food on my tray. This is the main hazard of Yale’s all-you-can-eat policy. Many ingredients in our food come from the Yale farm, which I am told is on the edge of campus, and one of their most prolific crops is a green herb which is liberally sprinkled over many foods, including my mashed potatoes, and whose name utterly escapes me at this moment. Every meal has at least one organic entrée, which I suppose is a good thing, but I’ve never noticed a difference in the taste of food. There are always various vegetarian options, and desserts are normally amazing.

Basically, I can’t say enough good things about Yale’s dining options. Everyone comes to have their own favorite dining halls. I personally really like Trumbull for lunches and sometimes dinner, and TD for brunch on the weekends. Also, Silliman, the newest renovated college, has an amazing dining hall that I bring my pre-frosh to, to show off Yale dining. Berkeley’s a good option, but always packed, although this is due to its great food, and perhaps to its animal head décor. You will never feel entirely let down by Yale food, even in Morse & Stiles, which are so far away (relatively speaking) and appear to me to be caves. Regardless, you can’t go wrong at Yale, in eating or anything else imaginable.

Now that the advertisement's over (kidding - thanks, Erin), I'll point out that Yale is a well-publicized leader in the locavore college scene - a trend that Harvard seems to be following up on. (My opinions on that later.)

Especially as a freshman at Harvard, I'm intrigued by upperclass dining (and indeed, I get emailed commentary on it by my classmates), so it's fairly interesting to see a different version of a house system. And of course, eating options, like different (read: copycat) Veritaffles.

Dining-wise, the main difference is really that Harvard offers the same daily menu across all dining halls. Which can be great if you're in the Quad and still want the same herbed orzo offered at Adams...or bad if it's turkey night. And we also all have soft-serve machines.

If you're an inquisitive Yale prefrosh, Erin can be reached for questions (dining or otherwise) through the comment boxes (below) or by email (erin.fackler@yale.edu).



Want to complain about your d-hall system? Comment or drop me a line (heidi@foodivia.com).

Recipe: Nancy and Kat's Guacamole

Brief notes from the past two d-hall dins before I begin:

• After its lull in the two-week menu rotation, sweet potato souffle appeared Sunday night. Delicious and so ridiculously unhealthy that my roommate barely convinced me that sweet potato was a vegetable.
• Meanwhile, tonight featured 8-spice jerk chicken, which my dormmates proclaimed as good. They're right, it wasn't that bad. But it was misleading - the jerk chicken was basically a saltier version of the "Mollie Katzen Moroccan chicken" that we're served every two weeks. (Yes, The Moosewood Cookbook author consults for Harvard. Wait, I thought she was vegetarian...guess not.)
  
• Last Friday in the 'Berg was a hodgepodge of leftovers gathered from the previous few days. This upcoming Friday proves to be the same, as jerk chicken reappears on the menu.
  
• Finally, due to reading period...upperclassmen are allowed to eat inside Annenberg during reading period. Coupled with the nearby presence of the Science Center, this means it's getting pretty crowded, especially when people are nearly camping out in the Cabot Library inside.

And now...the featured recipe. We actually thought this deal - with ingredients entirely from the salad bar - would taste kind of gross (especially given the fact that the avocados are partially frozen and generally damp at the bar). The guac was a stale split-pea-soup color, but turned out to be the sleeper hit of dinner. Initially, Nancy and Kat had made a small bowl, but the whole table ended up having a taste and Nancy ended up making more. Since there weren't tortilla chips leftover from Sweet and Savory, we used potato chips from the sandwich bar as scoops. This was actually a tasty substitution - the sodium-laced chip compensated for us not adding salt to the guac.

• 1.5 cups avocados
• 5 rings of red onion, sliced into cubes
• 2 tablespoons of diced tomatoes (preferably fresh...but ours was canned)

Mash the avocados with a fork until they retain a paste-like consistency. Add the red onion and tomatoes gradually and mix. Add lemon juice and pepper to taste.

Happy eating.

Recipe: Laura's Brown Sugar Toast

The first time I tried this was last Wednesday, when Laura made a few slices for our dormmate dinner table in the 'Berg. Incidentally, that day was also 65 degrees outside - ridiculously warm for a January day in Boston. But one bite made me warm and fuzzy inside; I almost felt obligated to not enjoy the spring breeze and to eat oatmeal for dinner. But since the January thaw is now ending (major snow tomorrow!), I'm legitimately obligated to enjoy this.

Brown sugar and toast initally seems like a logical combination in retrospect - especially since both have gritty textures - but the more I think about it, I've only really done honey and toast, and for elevenses at that.

• 1 slice of bread
• brown sugar and butter

Take one slice of bread and toast it. During this time, take a small bowl and mix 1 teaspoon of brown sugar with one or two teaspoons (or "knife-fuls") of butter. Immediately after removing the bread from the toaster, slather the mixture onto the hot toast. There shouldn't be any visible white chunks of butter on the toast, and the brown sugar should be clumping.

Note: Our dining hall toaster (and I believe others' colleges) works like an assembly line machine. I suppose you should imagine its movement like the doughnut machinery at a Krispy Kreme shoppe. That is, you put the toast onto a moving platform where it moves toward the heat in the back of the toaster, and it suddenly falls down onto a crumb tray below the toaster. The reasoning behind this is for strangers to toast with you at the same time without waiting...but not that sketchy-sounding.

So given that platform, you could hypothetically put the brown sugar/butter mixture onto the bread, and then into the toaster...but I probably wouldn't do that. Some reasons:

1. Dude, it's against the rules? (Technically, the toaster could get set on fire, and dining services wouldn't be happy.)
2. If that doesn't happen though, don't expect your brown sugar toast to be melty good - I mean, I know that brown sugar and heat pretty much make up caramel. We used to do that in chem. But chances are that your toast is also going to get burned and turned black; word on the street is that eating that crusty black stuff causes cancer (fancy word: carcinogen.) And you really can't control the timing on your toast (unless you stick your hand in the back of the toaster to reach for your bread - um, bad idea), to boot.
3. In the final step, the newly-born toast falls off the platform into the crumb tray, possibly doing a little aerial trick in the process. That means if you put brown sugar and butter on your bread, it could possibly flip face down and collect those bagel crumbs from someone's random breakfast for you to eat. That's kind of weird.

Um...yeah. Happy eating.

"Would you like some cheese with that whine?"

I just got back from breakfast (late enough for you to say, "brunch?") and wanted to report on the ham and artichoke pizza.

Because I'm just that tireless.

But really, I was pleasantly surprised to find hot food in Annenberg past ten, when it starts getting shuffled away. That said, it looked they had a sufficient amount of leftovers to keep it going.

That's a surprise, because there were three pans of pizza left (one entirely full; two halfway-taken - one for each line), and the pizza definitely beat the greasy mushroom-and-cheese frittata that we have every two weeks. Or the vegetable omelette, made with dehydrated broccoli that necesitates the Heimlich. Or even today's meal, which seemed to be an open-faced egg sandwich (though it looked like another sleeper hit that I didn't try - there were only two left).

And that's where the pro of Annenberg is: the square pizzas. By consensus, this might be the epitome of an Annenberg meal...especially when served with tatortots. The flavor is great - the Margherita adaptation features fairly tender tomatoes, although I wish there were more of a basil presence. The vegetable pizza features seemingly-roasted peppers, tomato and squash, while the ham-and-artichoke is flavorful without being too salty. All three pizzas share a good balance of herbage (not to be confused with pwnage) as well as bite-sized, diced toppings (so I don't have to try to take down that two-foot-long green pepper ring in one bite). The whole wheat crust (like an upgraded pita - at times the crust of the pizza can be too hard, even though the center is undercooked) allows for the rationalization that the pizza is healthy.

But don't get me talking about the round pizzas, actually - well, too late now.

Although bacon-and-spinach or pepper-and-onion are actually great topping combinations, it's the cheese that's the problem on these round pizzas. So...let's reminisce about junior high, when the pizza came fast and greasy and everyone would take a one-inch stack of cheap, tiny-sized napkins to wipe (or dab, in a few cases) it off. The girls would scream in a coo about how gross it was, and the guys would probably have thrown the desecrated napkins at each other by the end of lunch. I don't really do that anymore - and really, the Annenberg pizzas are so healthy that you don't need to.

But the cheese on the round pizzas is white-colored, not because mozzarella is naturally white, but because it's been undercooked. It's clammy-textured and yet barely warm; in fact, the cheese hasn't really interacted with the actual pizza part and so it's like eating crust with good toppings and this random chunk of cheese hanging on top. Dannng.

I didn't really have to deal with that today (or yesterday), but I certainly thought about it a lot. My tip is that you cover up the cheese (or actually remove it if you weren't a fan to begin with) with more red pepper and oregano (that's grilled cheese spiking, by the way). Or just get the square pizza in the first place.

[P.S. My roommate reminds me to say that "the bananas today were beautiful."]

Recipe: Rebecca's Grilled Cheese Sandwich

This is the dish that prefaced the Annenberg Cookbook - my dormmate Rebecca's grilled cheese.

A few facts about Rebecca: She is one of the most flexible cooks I know, adding a pinch of this or that to her tray for another go. A fellow Minnesotan, Rebecca brought back German recipes - including a sweet almond bread - to try the first month of school. Every Sunday, she insists on a Veritaffle, actually mixes the Belgian waffle and plain mix in the iron for a swirled pattern, and brings her own legit maple syrup, to boot.

And about the grilled cheese - my roommate came back earlier this week to tell me about this "must-have." The next night, I snagged a third of Rebecca's sandwich, and since then, all of us have been making sandwiches on our own. It's fairly simple, as it should be:

• 2 pieces bread
• 1 slice cheese

Put in panini grill until ready.

But here's the kicker:

Add oregano, dill and red pepper as needed on top of the sandwich.

Yes'm, the red pepper dust basically makes the sandwich magical. In the few days since, a few variations have come up. For example:

• putting red pepper, oregano and dill inside the sandwich instead of the outside of the bread,
• inserting ham/cheese/sliced tomato
• using healthier whole-wheat bread
• putting salsa inside the sandwich (but between two slices of cheese, so that the bread doesn't get soaked)

Thanks to Rebecca, today was the first day that I used the panini grill for something other than toasting my bagel. Although my grilled cheese came out undercooked (apparently I should watch the cheese melt), yours probably won't.
Enjoy.

Updates on the site

As a few of you might have noticed, I've been tweaking some odds 'n ends on Foodivia. Some highlights:

- Foodivia is now available in RSS subscription, so you'll be able to read posts as soon as they're up.

- More posts, more often.

Specifically, in addition to "Did you know?" you'll be seeing a new feature: The Annenberg Cookbook. The dormmates and I have been experimenting with the dining hall food - we're figuring out how to add a little punch to the entree and to make do with what we have. Stuff that college students in d-halls (or people overwhelmed by their refrigerator contents - both descriptions fit me well) are still learning.

I've been impressed with the number of recipes we've made in this week alone (one a meal!). If we're especially ambitious, I daresay that we might be able to beat Rachael Ray's proliferation of recipes in Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats. While we're at it, I'll point out that unless there's a line for trays and silverware, we also go faster than 30-Minute Meals and eat for less than $40 a Day. Bring it, Ms. Ray.

That said, do bring your comments - active readership encouraged, too.

Happy reading!

"My Courses," indeed

Maybe it's Food 2.0 (...think Web 2.0).

Instead of another rehash of the "My Courses" third-party application on Facebook, a Harvard freshman has created another Facebook profile add-on. Instead of stalking people by figuring out what classes they're in, now you can instead stalk Harvard University Dining Services (henceforth referred to as HUDS). And thankfully, you don't have to send another fake "pastry" using the "Bakery Shop" application. "MyPlate" features the next two days' dining hall menu on your profile and includes stats on which foods pop up in Annenberg most often. More intriguingly, the application allows users to rate menu items (leading to a collaborative, Amazon-style review).

I also know of one other menu-related program in development out there. It looks very promising, so I'll be sure to let you guys know when that comes out.