Taste Cheese with Chopsticks

I guess there are stages in most of the things happening around us. Two weeks ago I was complaining about the dining hall food, mainly because I just spent more than three months at home with my favorite dishes every day. Now that I have accepted that I will have to live with our lovely dining hall food for the following three months, things have changed into a second stage—instead of plainly complaining about it, I need to do something to improve my quality of life!

I discovered yesterday that I could make tuna sushi at Ross. Bring some seaweed to the dining hall, roll some jasmine rice into the seaweed, and top with mixed canned tuna at the salad bar and mayonnaise. Yum!

Since many of the dishes in the dining halls are lacking some flavor for me, I decided to consider those as half-processed and use my creativity, like students in Proctor do. Pour some corn and beans into the green color wrap, add curry and cumin powder, and it becomes one of my favorite panini recipes.

My international friends are masters at creating their home flavors using ingredients at hand. The Middlebury Co-Op is a fair place to find some authentic Asian seasonings. Last semester, a friend from Thailand taught me how to make a Thai dessert called tabtim. First he chopped water chestnuts into little squares, colored them with pink syrup, and covered the pink squares with cornstarch. Then he boiled the covered squares in hot water, they turned into beautiful shapes that looked like a ruby embedded in transparent crystal. At last he put the lovely crystals in iced sweetened coconut milk. The dessert is so beautiful that I showed if off to my friends several times after learning it.

But there are still some crucial ingredients that cannot be found in Middlebury. For example my favorite snow fungus sweet soup with lotus seeds in it. I brought the snow fungus and lotus seeds back. Last weekend I missed the taste of it a lot so I made a pot of it. My friend had never tasted it before and I was glad she liked it. When I was cleaning the pot, I realized that it was not the taste that I missed the most, but the experience of sharing a whole pot of the sweet soup with others.

Sometimes my friends and I will go to Sabai Sabai to have some Asian food to cure our nostalgic stomachs, but it would  be more similar to home if the serving size could be larger. In China, the dish rarely comes in an individual portion. Instead, family and friends on the same table order a variety of dishes that everyone could share. Dishes will be put down in the middle of the table, and chopsticks are long enough for us to pick out whatever we want, and if the table is too large, there’ll be a round table in the middle to rotate any dish right in front of us. A lot of interactions happen since people literally have to reach out for food.

Sharing food with people on the same table makes me feel connected and closer to the ones around me. Maybe it’s another reason why language tables are so popular on campus.