Getting the Shaft

College cafeterias can be a challenge, almost a sporting event, hunting for something to eat in a sea of gross.  It might even take several trips through the steam table line just to find something not worthy of being spit out.   At the first college I attended I literally made the freshman mistake of eating the green beans, the thought of them still make me gag.  Think boiled crayons.  Retch.  While I recall the food at Bennington wasn’t bad, er, let me rephrase that, it was a hell of a lot less worse the cafeteria that produced the aforementioned green beans.  The reality is college was a culinary brain eraser; I can’t really remember anything I ate there over the course of two years save for a couple.  

The first was Friday.  Friday was great.  It is is probably why I remember the college food at Bennington as ‘OK’.  Friday made up for the sins of the previous week.  Lunch on Fridays was always burger, french fry, macaroni and cheese, chocolate chip cookie day.  I thought it odd to put all the good foods on one menu, why not spread them out over the week?  And why sneak the good foods in on Friday when everyone was headed to New York or Boston anyhow?  Either way I would front load or back load, but load nonetheless to make up for existing on salad and soup the other 6 days.  Now I also remember Fridays because oddly, Bennington had one of the better veggie burgers I have ever encountered, only Houston’s makes a better one.   They were so good I usually had two.

The other meal I remember was the cafeteria’s Greek menu, which popped up at least twice a month.  It featured the usual stereotypes: moussaka, spanakopita, pastitsio, etc.  Now I never ate any of this, I learned my lesson after one serving of the spanakopita.  And I suspect these oozy casseroles would have been erased from my memory as well except somehow in college I managed to amass a coterie of Greeks. My best friend and my boyfriend were Greek, their parents directly from, yes, Greece.  This display did not inspire either of them to national pride.  Andrew would laugh and offer some mocking commentary and Myrto would seethe with anger.  While Andrew was willing to accept that the school could and most certainly would butcher these dishes, Myrto could not. 

Now, if college had decided to attempt my national dish of steamed crabs, corn and cucumber salad, I’d be horrified too.  In fact I become equally righteously indignant when restaurants outside of the state of Maryland (falsely) advertise ‘Maryland crab cakes’. But it happens.  And it happened that the college cafeteria was hell bent to personally offend Myrto with their Greek repertoire.  

In addition to the slanderous dinner menu, lentil soup was constantly in one of the two double boilers.  After a trip around the steam table where the ‘regular’ lunch or dinner proved inedible, Myrto would begrudgingly head to the lentil soup pot.  Being Greek, the lentil soup was:  Not. O. K. She’d deliver it to our table.  Put it down in front of her.  Sigh.  Stir it.  Begin to cuss at it.  Under her breath.  In Greek.  And truly crafty cussing; creative stuff.  Stuff that should make any Greek trucker feel inferior.  Still irritated, she’d get up from the table and return with 7-10 lemon wedges from the iced tea station and proceed to squeeze them into her soup, cursing in Greek; perhaps grabbing anything else she could to doctor it.   Then she would call on God, Grandma and the island of Paros (where her family is from) to deliver her from this bowl of soup.  With disgust in her eye she’d begin to eat it, cursing the whole way through.  This show happened several times a week.  This was quite simply lunch or dinner.  To give you a better idea of the irony, go grab a J.Crew catalog, reach in there and rip out a page, any page:  that’s what Myrto looks like.  She’ll help any old lady across the street with a genuine smile but, Dear God, do not give her an inferior bowl of soup that mocks her heritage.

So I submit this.  I’m fairly certain I do it well because many (seriously, a lot) people request this dish from me, and it’s ridiculously cheap, easy, filling and tasty.  I’ll let Myrto look it over and give me her thoughts, hopefully not in Greek and under her breath.

Lentil Soup - Serves 4 - Adapted from Memories of a Lost Egypt

1.5 cups lentils

4 cups vegetable stock 

1 medium - large yellow onion, peeled and cut in half across the equator

12 cloves

1 bay leaf

3 teaspoons cumin

1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper

1/2 stick of cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon sea or kosher salt

3 cups spinach loosely chopped

1 cup water

1 lemon

Greek yogurt

Parsley, chopped

Take the cloves and stab them in the flesh of the onion.  Place the onion with cloves, lentils, vegetable stock, bay leaf, cumin, cinnamon and salt in a large pot.  Bring to a boil, let simmer for 10 minutes, then remove the cinnamon stick.  Continue to simmer for 25 more minutes.  The lentils want to be firm but not hard.  Add more water if needed.  Sprinkle with parsley.  Serve with lemon wedges and a dollop of Greek yogurt.

From the Archives

At the age of 10 I crafted my first culinary creation with my neighbor John; it was called the cheese melt. It was a piece of white bread with some yellow stuff pretending to be butter and a single slice of cheddar cheese on top placed in the microwave for 17 seconds. More time than that the cheese scorched, less than that and the goo factor was not acceptable. It was best when eaten molten hot, folded in half. It only took seconds to eat it because you had to race the cheese before it poured out of the ends and burned an unsuspecting body part or the cat.

During high school I was able to master more conventional and appetizing dishes such as pesto sauce and baked salmon. But the early college years brought a new method of cooking that can only be described as the dump, stir and wait culinary school. This involved the development of (groan, how predictable) stir fry! Mine featured chick peas and cabbage and a variety of dried spices, like mustard powder. I cringe.

The first college years also brought the equally predictable vegetarian chili. Working in tandem again, I developed this recipe with my friend Suzy in her college apartment. It was not a burning desire to eat chili that gave way to this recipe but rather it was actually a scam to get another, of age student, to bring the wine. The box of wine. We figured we could master chili quickly and easily. I had never made or had chili aside from the Stouffer’s boil-in-bag kind. I don’t know if Suzy had either but she is from New Mexico which gave us some credibility. We must have had some basic recipe to get us started, but I couldn’t tell you from where. The internet was not for use by the general public and I can’t imagine we had many cookbooks. I can only guess that Suzy’s mom got us started or I found something at the school library.

After college was over, after the requisite traipse through European youth hostels, and before my job in Texas started I was in post collegiate limbo. I was employed at both a consignment shop and a bookstore. I lived with my childhood friend, Mattie, in her childhood home in Waverly. I was always surrounded by my friends. We were always laughing. We entertained ourselves with trips to the reservoir for skinny dipping (peer pressure) in the middle of the night, making our own mad-libs about each other, creating dioramas, playing pool, watching the X-Files and writing sardonic essays about the state of our fellow barflies. On one of those perfect fall days I was making the chili. A blimp was circling outside and my friend Tim was reading articles (yes the real articles) aloud from a Playboy that had somehow made its way into our home.

‘You need cinnamon in there.’ I looked at him to see if he was joking. ‘No, seriously, you need cinnamon in there, for the beans.’

‘I do?’

‘Yup. I do it all the time. Seriously, just a little.’

And there it was; the secret ingredient, it had been hiding in a granola bar all this time.

I'd like to say the recipe has remained virtually unchanged with the exception of the cinnamon in the 20 years since Suzy and I set out to score a box of Franzia but I'm pretty sure it has evolved with me. I think I have it exactly where I want it now. I’ll add some bragging rights: this chili won second place in a chili competition that did not, at the time, have a vegetarian category.

Thanks Timmy, I still owe you a wok for the stir fry gone awry.

Vegetarian Chili - Serves a bunch (8-12)

2 14 oz. cans dark kidney beans

1 14 oz. can black beans

2 28 oz. can peeled tomatoes (I cut them in to smaller bits in the can with kitchen scissors)

2 green bell peppers (chopped in to 1” chunks)

1 red or yellow bell pepper (chopped in to 1” chunks, the total amount of all peppers should be about 4 cups chopped)

2 large or 3 medium Spanish onions (4-4.5 cups chopped in to 1/2” chunks)

8 garlic cloves (2 tablespoons minced)

3 tablespoons chili powder

1 tablespoon paprika

1 teaspoon cayenne

1.5 teaspoons cumin

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

2 teaspoons crushed red pepper

3 tablespoons olive oil

Drain and rinse the beans. I had a rather heated discussion with Jim about rinsing the beans recently, and he reluctantly admitted that rinsing the beans cut down on the negative after effects of his chili in a surprisingly wonderful way. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large pot. Add the onions and saute until they just start to think about becoming translucent. Add in the garlic and saute for another 3-5 minutes. Add in the peppers and continue to cook for another 5-7 minutes. They want to be al dente. Add in the chili powder and paprika and saute for another minute. Then add in the tomatoes and bring to a slight simmer. Add in the beans and the remaining spices. Simmer for about 1-15 minutes. The vegetables still want to have some texture and crispness to them. Serve with whichever chili condiments float your boat.