The Kitchenette Files: Adventures in Dorm-Room Cooking
Last week, I decided to ignore my room’s lack of microwave. This was a principled act of protest against a dorm administration that, clearly, wants to limit my access to cheap, fast, unhealthy foods. I bought a few frozen dinners at Franprix, and heated them in the frying pan. Naturally, I felt a need to document this with photographic evidence:
In case you’ve ever wondered what a slowly thawing block of spaghetti looks like, here you go.
I’ve discovered some interesting thing about the way my stove works. For instance, when one leaves a Nutella-and-marzipan sandwich in a frying pan, then goes to browse YouTube and forgets about the sandwich, the stove does not likewise forget about the sandwich, but instead neatly blackens one side:
(Incidentally, I highly recommend the Nutella-and-marzipan sandwich, a true culinary marvel. Properly prepared as illustrated below:
…And yes, it does work best with pink marzipan. Or green. Anything but the generic off-white color, which is far too austere and will give the sandwich crippling self-esteem issues as it fries)
I’ve also learned some fun things about plastic and heat. It seemed like a smart idea at the beginning of the semester to invest in only disposable cups and flatware, since I could just throw it out instead of cramming it into my luggage to go back. And everything went smoothly, at least after I learned not to stir boiling soup with a plastic spoon. And then yesterday I learned that it’s probably a good idea to keep track of where the plastic cups are when one is handling hot frying pans. I poured myself a nice cup of tea, and then stared at it wondering why brown liquid was spontaneously appearing on the countertop, and fridge, and floor. Then I noticed the neat little gash burnt halfway up the cup:
In other news, the front gate to the dorms has been malfunctioning, and 50% of the time doesn’t recognize the RFID badges. The high-tech, high-security solution was to prop the gate open with a bit of wood:
At least for a day. Now they just have us buzz the front desk if the gate won’t open. Which works great when the front-desk person is actually there (in fairness, they almost always are. It’s just that, you know, there’s only one of them at any given time, so there’s still the possibility that you’ll have to stand there buzzing for a while till they come back from the bathroom or whatever).
Next up, I think we have some odd Franglais and such.
