Recipe: Rebecca and Julia's Breadsticks

And I omitted a few things from that list below:

Well, the copious amount of grilled two-slices-Swiss-with-two-pieces-salami-and-two-tomato-slices-on-Italian-bread sandwiches I had. But also the products of the following recipe. Call them breadsticks or slices or even a garlic bread impostor.

The breadsticks:
- one or two slices of bread, preferably Italian
- oregano, red pepper, and olive oil

Drizzle olive oil over the bread - if it looks like there's too much, tilt the bread back and forth to redistribute the oil evenly. Slice the bread into longer stick pieces (although if you're Julia, you'll leave it in one giant piece). Shake oregano over the bread, and stick it into the toaster. (If the bread's Italian, you'll want to take the tongs to knock the bread out - it gets stuck. Again, don't set stuff on fire.)

The sauce:
- consists of what's at the pasta bar.
- parmesan cheese, oregano and garlic powder

We personally cross our fingers for pesto sauce, but regardless of the type, take a small bowl of sauce, and add about two tablespoons of parmesan cheese. The consistency of the sauce should be thick, almost a little bit paste-like. Add oregano - four more shakes more than what you think will be enough. Garlic powder is only needed if the sauce is red pepper flavored; just a little bit will be more than enough.

Dip the breadsticks in the sauce. Happy eating.

A badder better cookbook?

Via Wikipedia, the nursery rhyme:

Betty Batter bought some butter,
"But," she said, "the butter's bitter;
If I put it in my batter,
It will make my batter bitter;
But a bit of better butter,
That would make my batter better."

So she bought a bit of butter,
Better than her bitter butter,
And she put it in her batter,
And the batter was not bitter;
So 'twas better Betty Botter
Bought a bit of better butter.

If you got through that tongue twister, you're in luck. Because I strongly suggest checking out these great (and wonderfully legit!) recipes. To give you a taste, this edition includes "Yogburt, 'Appycots, and Weird Crunchy Stuff," "Om Nom Nom Spaghetti" and "Pan de la vie Boheme" (which should probably remind me of La Boheme and its modern day counterpart, Rent...but surprisingly reminds me of Orwell's Down and Out.)

And admittedly, the recipes are pretty tough competition for our Annenberg Cookbook. A quick shoutout to Phenol for writing - thanks!

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.

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!