After lunch, we prepared (and consumed) a delicious local dinner! This meal was definitely the most labor intensive of the day. As Nora mentioned in the previous post, one of our biggest obstacles in this project was the lack of a fully stocked kitchen. Luckily, for this meal, we were able to utilize the kitchen of the UEL (Urban Environmental Lab)!
And did we ever utilize it! For this meal, we had fettuccine with red pepper flakes, tomato sauce, garlic bread, salad, and sautéed parsnips with onions and garlic. Everything in our dinner was local, minus the oil used to sauté the parsnips and as part of the garlic bread, the salt in the water used to boil the (completely local) pasta, and the balsamic vinegar used to dress our local salad greens.
The pasta, tomato sauce and garlic were all purchased at the farmers market, with the rest of the ingredients from our market share. It’s worth noting, that though the pasta and sauce were both billed as local, and comprised of mostly local ingredients, that they do include some ingredients that just aren’t able to be produced locally – like olive oil and salt. Though our efforts may not have been quite as 100% local as we hoped, we were overall content with the quality (and locality) of the ingredients we were able to source.
Cooking itself was a really nice change! Though it was slightly stressful at first, given that neither Nora nor myself have cooked in months, it really wasn’t very difficult, and was actually pretty fun! It was definitely a very sociable experience, cooking with a partner, and one that I really enjoyed. Cooking in this way was a very collaborative process, and very satisfying.
We did have a few mishaps, involving slightly burnt caramelized parsnips, pasta a little further than al dente as Nora tried to wiggle out of the trashion show costume she was helping to make (can you say ES-11 multi-tasker or what?), and garlic bread that could’ve used a tiny bit more garlic oomph, but overall the food was delicious! If you don’t believe us, ask the members of Nora’s section, who, smelling our delicious cooking came in to try a few bites!
After finishing cooking, and plating our food, it was very rewarding to sit at the solid wood table and enjoy our food that we had cooked together. Such a refreshing change from the normal ratty experience. As you can see, our plates were scraped clean!
No comments:
Post a Comment