Oberlin Blogs

Keeping in the vein of keeping my blog Oberlin-centric, even if I'm a few thousand miles removed, I'm going to do a run down of local food things I like to play with, in Oberlin industrial kitchens and Hawaiian home kitchens. Kitchens are my playgrounds, but with infinitely more sharp objects and dangerous things the average kid shouldn't play with.

No matter how far away you go from Oberlin, you're still going to crave it.

I've been working at the Decafe ever since, my hours fluctuating every semester, but I still keep signing up for hours because I truly love working there. I love playing with food, I love making people happy with their food, and I love being creative. And here is where the adjective sandwiches come in.

I have just passed the two week point of being home for the summer. And since this is an Oberlin blog, this is about what's different at my summer home and my Oberlin home.

Thankfully, there were senior members who talked me through the best ways to peel garlic, fry potatoes, and make an omelet. Never would I have imagined that a group of students could be efficient and capable enough to orchestrate what functioned like a self-contained dining hall.

There comes a weekend in April that you don't necessarily know how it exists. Namely, there is so much packed into a 72 hour period that you need something akin to a Time-Turner (from Harry Potter, lest you forget) to process everything.

Inside, podcasts of A Prairie Home Companion ushered Keepers and visitors into the dining room where we filled our plates and other eating receptacles with hamburger noodle hotdish, green bean casserole, wild rice, powdermilk biscuits, and jello with Swedish fish before heading outside to the sunshine.

I knew that college was supposed to be full of life-changing realizations, but I'm not sure I could have prepared myself for this.

Once we landed at Cleveland-Hopkins Airport, I woke up and raced for the bus stop. After waiting outside for 10 minutes, I huddled indoors and discovered I had missed the last bus by 15 minutes. Gahhh.

I learned that there is a certain art to pie-making, kneading from the center out, making sure that the middle isn't too thin, and being careful to leave a slightly raised border along the outside so there's some semblance of crust after it bakes.

It looked delicious... but we were told we couldn't eat yet. It is an extremely sadistic thing to show us food and tell us we can't partake. I was ready to dive in. But there was a reason.

As a rule, I try to avoid soaking in sicky-sweet pools of sentimentality (diabetes does, after all, run in my family), but when I talk about Thanksgivings at Fairkid I can't help but get that...