Saturday November 27th

You may be confused as how we skipped from Thursday to Saturday, but I can tell you how...I went bowling with my family and best friend's family on Friday afternoon. After we all bowled a few strings, the parents went to pay for our bowling when they realized it was cheaper to participate in their "family deal" which included two a pizza and a pitcher of soda. So, we had and unexpected dinner( I didn't have my camera with me). I have decided to document one meal on my college campus offering a contrast to the meals I typically eat while living at home.
My last night in town before the long ride back to Indiana. My mom again asked me what I would like for dinner, I couldn't tell her what I would want for an entree, but I was sure to request one of my favorites, asparagus, which I have never seen in the dining hall at Earlham. Saturday was kind of left overs night, my parents were sick of big cooking after preparing for Thanksgiving. I had sauteed mushrooms with Parmesan cheese, Caesar salad(romaine lettuce and  homemade Caesar dressing), asparagus, and squash left over from Thanksgiving. Again, it was our traditional family style dinner. Because it was the night before we were driving back to Indiana(leaving at four in the morning!), we had a long dinner, squeezing in as much conversation as possible to make up for all the missed meals between then and winter break.

Thursday November 25th-TURKEY DAY!!!

Thanksgiving in my family is an all day event(like all of our holidays). We arrived at my aunt and uncle's house around 1:30 and put out the appetizers right away. Our family rolled in over the next hour, with more snacks arriving with each family. Thirty people is a lot of people,  but food for thirty people on Thanksgiving is a TON of food. We all munched throughout the afternoon, until 4:02, when we sat down for dinner. The actual sit down dinner only lasted twenty-four minutes, but I ate for about three hours that day. My Thanksgiving selection included turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, squash, and pumpkin bread. I have never been a big fan of stuffing, so I skipped out. Because my family is so large, we typically have to eat at at least two different tables(when I was a little kid we ate around a table cloth while sitting on the floor), and we separate by age(or marital status). This Thanksgiving, I was at the under thirty table, with my other cousins and one second cousin. After dinner we took our traditional walk while a few who didn't want to brave the cold stayed behind to clean up a bit. We walked to the local high school where my parents and aunts and uncles went to high school. My uncle joked that we should do laps, and we actually did, but we only did one, and it certainly wasn't  a race. After we returned to the house, we had a Just Dance competition on the Wii. It was requested my sister and I compete to the song Rockafeller Skank, surprisingly, I beat my sister. After my cousin won the competition, we braked for dessert. I had a piece of my mom's famous baklava. After dessert we played Scene It and complained about how full we were.

Wednesday November 24th

Wednesday night was another family style dinner. My mom asked me what I would like for dinner, and responded that I had no clue, so instead of waiting for me to make up my mind, she phoned one of my friends who was coming over for dinner that night. They decided on pesto, pasta, and salad. I had no objections so that's what we went with. My mom had planned on using some pesto she made over the summer using basil she grew on our back porch, but when she dug in the freezer, she decided it was freezer burnt and didn't want to ruin an otherwise good meal. She accepted defeat and used store bought pesto and jazzed it up a bit. I had dinner with my family, which includes my mother, father, sister, and grandmother, and two of my friends, Dylan and Greg. My sister, two friends, my father, and I had been watching 2012 before dinner, but we took a 45 minute break for dinner, we  began dinner around 7:30. After we all finished dinner and the dishes, we returned to our apocalyptic film. My mother had cooked, so my sister and I did the dishes, while one of my friends dried. My father and other friend lazed on the couch and watched us work!(as usual)

Tuesday November 23rd

Home at last! My first dinner back in New Hampshire was not exactly what I had bargained for. My mom called me earlier that day asking me if I was going to have friends over, and if so, how many hamburgers should she plan on making. I don't like hamburgers! I voiced that concern and luckily, she was able to pick up something else at the store instead. We had a family sit down meal that night, complete with cloth napkins and candles. I had blueberries, blackberries, salad with onion, tomato, cucumber, and avocado, and for my entree, I had grilled Portabella mushrooms. We began eating at 7:14 and promptly finished at 8:00 so my mother and sister could watch Glee.

My Dad's first time grilling mushrooms, he said, "Hey, they were black from the start!"

Monday November 22nd

I slept while my friend had morning classes, and when he got back, we spent the afternoon walking all around Boston, checking out the parks, monuments, and the different cultural neighborhoods. We walked through Chinatown to the North end, famous for its cannoli (I learned that cannoli is actually the plural term of cannolo, not cannolies, which I and my family have been saying forever) and other Italian specialties. We stopped of at the world famous, Mike's Pastry and picked up a cannolo and an eclair. 

We thought about having dinner in the North end, but we decided against it because it is really expensive and neither of us were up for a heavy dinner, so we decided to go for the old standby-The Cheesecake Factory. Oddly enough, we were sat in the exact same both as the last time we went. We each ordered a salad. I had the French Country Salad(I'm not really sure what was so French about it). It was mixed greens, asparagus, goat cheese, and candied pecans with a sweet vinaigrette dressing. While we waited for our meals, I also devoured rye bread and butter. As usual, water was my beverage of choice. For dessert I had a couple bites of my cannolo later at home.

Sunday November 21st

Sign above the compost bin at Stetson West dining Hall, Northeastern University

On Sunday I  spent the day wandering around Boston and exploring Northeastern University. For dinner my friend from Northeastern and I decided to save money by eating at a school dining hall. Northeastern has a bunch of eateries, but we chose to go to Stetson West. We didn't eat lunch and we were pretty hungry, so we had an early dinner. It always amazes me how environmentally friendly and organic(not to mention delicious) dining halls at other colleges are. Everywhere I went there were placards for organic, free trade, and local produce and dairy. Local food! In Boston! Why can't we have more of that in Richmond, Indiana, where we are surrounded by farms? I also discovered that a lot of the produce used in their dining halls are grown by employees of the dining halls, and that they are actually  paid more for their produce than their hourly wage. All of these factors combined with the delicious food offered at Northeastern dining halls made me very jealous indeed.

   We started out early dinner at 5:12. I had a bunch of small dishes to start and then finished off with some stir fry. I had a salad of spinach, chick peas, red peppers, tomatoes, carrot sticks, homemade croutons, and Ken's Caesar dressing. I ate my salad, and Swiss cheese with bread while I waited for my vegetable stir fry. The salad was really good and just what I needed, fresh vegetables! After being in the car for 16 hours, I hadn't eaten and vegetables and only grapes for fruit. The cheese and bread were okay, they both were a little hard, like they had been sitting out for a while. My stir fry was a little disappointing, the vegetables I chose, zucchini, carrots, sugar snap peas, and peppers were really flavorful, but the sauce I chose for my vegetables to be cooked in was a little too salty for my liking, which detracted from the dish itself unfortunately. Typically, I drink water with every meal, with the occasional supplemental glass of juice in the morning, and tonight was no exception, water it was! But in keeping with the style of their dining hall, it wasn't just water or water with lemon, but lemon infused water. We finished our huge meal by splitting vanilla frozen yogurt with crushed oreos and a cone on top. I took a fair trade banana home for a snack. We left the dining hall around 5:50 to catch the 6:30 show of Harry Potter, which we walked to of course!

Why a Food Blog?

I chose to make this food blog as one of many options for a creative activity project for my Environment and Society class at Earlham College. The assignment required that we make a blog post of one meal per day for a whole week. The post was required to include a photograph and the description of the meal eaten, and one food had to be traced back to its source as far as possible. I began this journey(literally), on my drive home from college for Thanksgiving break. Its a 16 hour drive from Indiana to New Hampshire, and we wanted to get home as soon as possible, so our meals weren't exactly meals while we were on the road. Mostly cheese and crackers, grapes, bagels and peanut butter, bananas, and some snack food. Once I arrived in Boston, MA, I began to eat real meals and that is when I started recording what I was eating. I stayed with a friend as Northeastern University for roughly four days and then continued onto New Hampshire, so my meals show a little of the big city and also of my meals from my small, rural-esque, hometown.