Midterm Mojitos

Note: Actually having a mojito with your midterm would be quite possibly one of the worst ideas ever. Do not do this just to make my cheese alliteration true.

The middle of October is officially midterm season. Actually, officially, the midterm is marked by October break I believe, but thats just boring administrative stuff. Regardless, midterms always seem to cluster together--2 in one week, 2 papers and 1 midterm, 2 midterms in one day (that would be my poor sister). On one hand, yes, its nice to just get it all over with. On the other hand, it results in locking-myself-in-a-room-never-seeing-daylight behavior where all I want to do is wear yoga pants 24/7. A friend and I were having a particularly struggle-bus week, mainly because of a class called biochem. It's like if bio-chem was a baseball game, and student was a baseball player on steroids, if pre-meds were not concerned about the health and ethical consequences of doing such things. Anyways, I digress. That was really a terrible joke analogy full of horrible stereotypes.

To celebrate the finish of this midterm (amongst others), she made mojitos! She's a super legit bartender, so she's been practicing her skillz on us so that when she's famous for fantastic mixed drinks and fighting health inequality, we can be like "hey, I once got a drink made just for me by her."

I mean look, she even muddled the ingredients and everything. I didn't even know that muddling was a thing you did for drinks, though that makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

What the Elle: An excuse for swanky bars

This year, a few friends and I decided to start a Young Adult book club, aptly named What the Elle because we live in entryway L this year, so Elle = L get it? Plus, we're all girls, so Elle is the appropriate pronoun. Last year, we spent a dinner time reminiscing about all the great young adult books we read and decided to start a club to read them together as a way to re-live our childhood and to relax. As John Green aptly said on tumblr, adults are just so...boring.
Although we were supposed to read Young Adult books, we ended up starting with The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling. While going out to a nice bar like Ordinary was not part of the original plan, we also at some point decided we wanted to become regulars, so we moved meetings to Ordinary which was one of the best ideas we've had thus far (and its only been like, a month!).
We planned to meet each time we finished a "part" of the book, which had 4 total. The first time, we ordered this fantastic cheesy bread sticks platter with marinara sauce. Of course, it came with the classic pickles all Caseus grilled cheese come with. Caseus being a cheese shop/restaurant knows have to make some pretty quality cheese bread. If this isn't incentive to make Ordinary your favorite bar, wait till you see the interior (I swear I don't get paid to swoon about them).

Sorry for a- instagram filter and b- bad lighting

 After this first time, we ended up not meeting till we all finished the book thanks to some speed demon reading skillz one of us had who finished the book about 3 days after our first meeting. We made a promise to return to Ordinary after we finished the book to order yards (beer in those tall glasses if you're clueless about drinks like I am). We all must have been really motivated by those yards because we actually all finished in about 3-4 weeks, which is pretty impressive for a "fun read" given the fact that I stopped fun reading when I got into college for a combination of sad reasons. For my celebratory yard, I ordered a pumpkin beer named a pretty cliched name like "pumpkin bumpkin" or "pumpin bumpin" or something to that effect.

I would first like to just note that yards aren't actually a yard long. Unless yards are much shorter than meters, these glasses were really not a yard long. Although to be quite honest, I don't think I could have finished one that was actually a yard-long. The one "faux-yard" took some quality time and discussion about Rowling's new crime novel and some reflection on if Robin from The Cuckoo's Calling was more like Hermoine or Ginny (I still stand by my assertion that she's more like Ginny). The beer itself was pretty good, though not in that omg, pumpkin makes it 20x better than all other beers. I'm not really sure what aspect of pumpkin I was supposed to taste--the squash part? Then again, I'm not really a beer connoisseur either, though I feel like the Belgian might hardcore judge a pumpkin beer.

West Coast Best Coast: Guac and Margaritas

I think as a half-CA raised child who has now spent enough time on the east coast to have adopted their dialect (trust me, I took a quiz), I have the necessary experience from both coasts to pretty confidentially claim that truly, the west coast is the best coast. Not even just California. People sometimes forget that Oregon and Washington can be as glorious as California. Granted, its a bit more wet, but it has that greenery that some east coast folks find lacking in California.
Thus, I feel pretty ok with posting this picture in an obnoxiously large size.

With that being said, one of the best things about the west coast is that the fantastic sunshine weather makes it perfect for growing, producing, and making, amazing food. I forget the exact percentage but something around 60% of all US fruits and veggies come from the CA. And of course, the one fruit that shines the best amongst those is the glorious avocado. Yes, it is a fruit--quick science fact--fruits are plants that produce seeds surrounded a juicy delicious flesh that we like to eat. For them, its their ovaries essentially. Vegetables don't have this.
Sadly, the east coast, and Yale especially severely lacks in the avocado department. Don't even get me started on my Yale-Dining-what-is-this-crap-you-call-guacamole rant. Since I first realized Yale Dining doesn't know the first thing about guacamole, its been my mission to share authentic, or close to authentic as reasonably possible guacamole to my poor non-west coast friends. When the convenience store on campus had avocados in stock (why, I have NO idea), I of course had to spend all my lunch money (literally) on as many as I could buy (4) for a little guac night with suitemates and friends.

Unfortunately, our store doesn't also sell onions, tomatoes, cilantro ect ect, so I took the easy route and mixed avocado with salsa. Still 10000x better than dining hall guacamole though. To finish it off my budding-bartender friend made us margaritas (frozen margaritas) to enjoy with the guacamole. If only all Friday nights could be like this...sigh.

side note for those concerned about the timing and logistics of this blog: this was all done in early September. I didn't think I had any interesting food related stories until now, so I'm playing a little bit of catchup. Expect lots of retrospective posts.

September College Drank

Special emphasis to Drank, since zomg ~college~ (but not really).

There was a "Labor Day Weekend" post saved as a draft here, but:

1. It is clearly no longer labor day
2. The only thing in the draft was a picture of an Old Fashioned from Ordinary.

I'm struggling to decide what I want this blog to be when I'm not baking. Perhaps I lack the genuine passion for an authentic food blog since I allow the patriarchy that is college dorms hinder my creative baking. Perhaps I could simply review cool foods and drinks I've eaten while out and about? But then I turn into an instagram foodie, which, god forbid, I actually have become. (let me know if you want to follow my instagram!) Feel free to judge me, because I am mad judging myself.

I've never been very good at making decisions--I spent an entire week driving everyone insane over class decisions this year. As a result, I have scattered pictures of food taken quasi-half-heartedly just as incase I ever wanted to post them on a blog. Which I've now decided, heck, why not? I'm not writing deep, emotional posts about my food. I'm not writing for an acclaimed audience. Heck, I'm not even writing. I'm just spewing stream of consciousness onto the internet, and as we all know, the internet REALLY needs less of that.

So to reference number 2 of my short list from above, Labor Day Weekend was the first, and currently most recent going-out-to-bars-with-friends outing I've had. Yea I know, I'm super cool. We went to both Briq and Ordinary that evening. Briq was rather disappointing for several combined reasons of poor drinks, poor service, and strange liability forms attesting that should us, 21+ students get excessively drunk, we won't blame Briq...

Ordinary was great though! I had an Old Fashioned pictured below in grainy, instagram glory. 

look! #nofilter. Its that good.

To be quite honest, I've always enjoyed just the simple act of drinking and having light and reasonably intelligent conversations with friends over the going out aspect of college. There's only so much juice that can mask ethanol-like Kirkland signature vodka (actually, no amount of juice can mask that horrid smell and taste). I'm not much of a dancer either. Say what you will about what that means about my ability to let loose and be confident in myself. (But seriously, my attempts to dance usually involve me trying to be funny and looking like a frightening jellyfish). 

But I'm liking the trajectory my last year of college is heading towards--less dark dance floors, more dim-lit conversations.

Belgian Beer Collage Round Up

While in Belgium, one is obligated to drink beer. Prior to Belgium, I was really not a huge fan of beer. I could enjoy it in certain contexts, such as while out with my parents. But cheap college beer? Horrifying. While I still don't know what a trappist beer is exactly or the main difference between dark/amber/blond/pale or wheat or whatever (yea, so much for learning from those brewery tours), I do appreciate beer and enjoy it much more now. That being said, maybe I've become spoiled by Belgian beer and will hate any beer I try here.
Below is a sampling of the many beers I had over the course of my 9 weeks in Belgium.

This really makes me look like an alcoholic at first glance, but this was over the span of 9 weeks. There were a number of other beers that I had (probably another 5-10 kinds) that were not photographed since I was a bit haphazard about when I felt like being silly and taking my phone out to photograph at a bar. Also, Kilkenny is technically an irish beer, and Douglas is actually a cider, both of which I had at an irish pub while watching futbol in Belgium. There was some Swedish Cider I had while in London too, but I'm going for the just things I drank in Belgium theme here. Oh I'm going to miss the beer.

Brewery Tours

Like a good Belgium tourist, I did brewery tours last weekend.
Saturday we went to Cantillon Brewery in Brussels. Its one of the last traditional breweries left in the world. They're very proud of their natural fermentation cycle and how they must respect nature and deal with natural fluctuations in yeast/fermentation. As a result, no two batches of beer they brew taste completely the same. Since they also don't use industrial fermenters to speed up the process, it takes at least 18 months, and usually 36 months for the whole fermentation process to happen. The most interesting thing about their brewing process I found was the fact that they ferment their beers in wooden casks, recycled from wineries. Obviously the gas from the fermentation can escape, so this fermentation is only the first stage. They then ferment the beer again in glass bottles to get those bubblies we're all so used to in beers.

Anyways, they're famous for their lambic beer which I'm not sure how it differs from other beers wrt to its brewing (clearly I paid attention to my handout), but its a very sour beer, almost wine-like, and like nothing in the US. The 3 beers I tried there were Lambic, Geuze, and Frambois. The Lambic is, as mentioned, what they're known for, and is a flat beer. Basically, what comes out of the wooden casks I think. Afterwards, the Geuze and Frambois are made with some additional steps. Geuze is a mix of three different beers and is considered the "campagne of beers" or something. And Frambois, is basically the raspberry version of Kriek beers aka cherry beer aka fruit beers. The fruit beer here was SO much better than stuff I've had at bars. The way they make their fruit beers is by literally putting fruit into the beer and by the end of the fermentation process the flavors been imbibed into the beer and the fruit dissolved. Its very clear that its not just some terrible fruit flavoring.

Sunday, we went to basically the polar opposite of Cantillon and went to the Stella Artois brewery in Leuven for a big tour. Minus getting mildly lost on the way there and biking in a flat, the trip was fun, and definitely worth the 8 euros in just free beer alone. Unlike the self-guided Cantillon brewery, the Stella one was led by a tour guide, and we were made to wear bright yellow vests, and told to not walk outside the white lines. We weren't even allowed to take pictures of the control room, where men who have received Master's in brewing worked to oversee the brewing process. Quite different from the traditional brewery where if you screwed up your beer, you wouldn't know till after fermentation.

the crushing of the grains into sugar water 

the industrial fermentation process 

THE BOTTLING LINES 

The best part of the industrial tour was seeing the bottling assembly lines. They package beer in cans, bottles, and kegs, but only the can line was fully visible and in operation. AND IT WAS FASCINATING. It was great fun watching the lines speed up, slow down, look for the cans that had tipped over, or were screwed up and spilled beer all over the place when the machine tried to flip them ect. I wish the other packaging lines were open, but alas.

The tour ended with a tasting of course. We were all served Stella Artois first (the Stella part of their name came in the early 1900s after a Christmas beer they brewed became so wildly popular they decided to brew more). Stella is really not that great compared to the other Belgium beers I've had here, such as Leffe. Leffe is I guess another similarly pils beer (whatever that means....), but tastes better in my opinion. At the end we were also given gift bags with more Stella and Leffe. All in all, definitely worth the 8 euros, and maybeeee worth the pain of biking on a flat.