OFF CAMPUS

Today, sadly, I didnt even get a chance to try and eat on campus! After my classes got out today at about 12:35 I decided to go out to lunch with two of my friends Emily and Lauren to lunch. We went to La Madeline which is right down the street from Trinity on Broadway. Boy was that good food!

I ordered the small caesar salad and got a small french onion soup on the side too. emily got some ham and cheese sanwhich which looked awesome except for the fact that I knew that I couldn't eat bread products for still another couple of days because of passover.. that made me a little sad.

Lauren had ordered a large salad but mixed meat and cheese in it, which I of course couldnt eat because it wasnt kosher.

Sometimes its so hard to try and keep kosher while im at school, but the school still doesn't find that a valad reason to let me off campus! sad day..

Most of the things that they offer here are either not kosher to begin with or have meat and chease in the same dish. The school will sometimes offer students coupans and stuff to stores off campus to get their desired dietary needs at, anything to keep us from leaving the "community". It seems kinda dumb to me honestly, if people want OFF campus.. let them off. It gives the school more room to accept a larger freshman class and make more money anyways, so i don't see the point in forcing the upper classmen to stay on campus.

Passover Food

This weekend it was a nice break from the food that we normally get at school. I went home to Houston for Passover and got to eat home cooked food with the family. Since it was passover though, we couldn't eat anything containing bread products so that was a little bit of a downer.

The plus side of it though was that I got to eat as much matza ball soup as I could possibly ask for.

The recipe that my grandma uses is from the food network and includes the following:

Ingredients
Matzo Balls:
2 cups matzo meal
9 eggs
1/2 cup kosher for Passover vegetable oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Directions
Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
Mix all of the ingredients together until evenly distributed (there should be no lumps). Cover with waxed paper and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Roll dough into balls about the size of a golf ball. To keep batter from sticking to your hands, rub them with oil or water as needed. Drop balls immediately into boiling water.
Cook the balls for about 20 minutes or until done. They will sink to the bottom and then float back up to the top as they cook and the water returns to temperature. The balls should have expanded to be about 2 1/2 times their original size (about the size of a tennis ball). Check to make sure that the balls are done by cutting in half. The center should look grainy and yellow.
Remove balls from pot and use immediately or set them in a pot of cold water and let cold water run over them until completely cooled. Set them in cold water in the refrigerator until ready to use. They may be reheated either in the broth or in the water.
Vegetable Broth:
1 tablespoon salt
3 carrots cut into chunks
2 medium onions cut into chunks
2 parsnips cut into chunks
3 turnips cut into chunks
12 cloves of garlic
1 leek thinly sliced
3/4 teaspoon tumeric
Pepper to taste
Handful of parsley and dill
Water
In a large stockpot, add all ingredients and water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for about 2 hours. Taste and adjust seasoning. Let cool. Strain vegetables out of the broth. Use immediately or it may be frozen.

You should try it sometime. Its pretty good :-)

but for the next week, I can't eat bread products so finding food to eat on campus is going to be interesting.

FINALLY :-)

So today I finally enjoyed my meal at Trinity! I think I have figured out the trick to getting decent food, be the first one in line :-)
since I pulled an all nighter last night I had plenty of time this morning to get ready and get some nice hot breakfast! Since I was one of the first ones there when coats started making breakfast tacos I got the freshest batch of eggs and potatoes and boy were they good! For once the eggs didn't taste like they had been sitting there for days and the potatoes were actually edible. I was so excited I even bought an extra one to take with me for later... which wasn't so good later.. but still the one that I had made fresh for me actually tasted like real food that people outside of the Trinity bubble eat!
Now I can only hope that lunch will be the same way.. but I don't want to jinx it.

The one thing that has been bothering me lately about the food here is how they started to put little packets of wasabe in the sushi now instead of putting FRESH wasabe in it. I guess I can understand the concerns about sanitation and everything but I would really like it if I got my fresh little dab of wasabe in my dish. The one that they have now tastes a little different too, it tastes a lot stronger than the one they used to have. I guess that might just take a little getting used to. I'll keep y'all updated on that one!

Meal Plan

When I first arrived at Trinity and saw all the different kinds of food that were available in Mabee Dining hall I didn't think that the food could possibly be THAT bad. There were so many options I didn't think I'd ever get tired it. Boy was I wrong. Half the time when I go into Mabee they are out of whatever I was planning on eating that day or their food just looks ridiculously unappetizing. I remember once when I had my heart set on macaroni and cheese for dinner, the second i got to the counter and looked at the food, it slightly resembled a mountain of stale cheese that had been crusted onto some undercooked pasta. Aramark, the company that provides the catering services for school, overprices their foods tremendously. Never did I ever expect to pay $2.65 for a HALF of a grapefruit, when I can have a WHOLE grapefruit for under a dollar from the grocery store. I understand that they want to be able to make some money off of the food they are selling, but the fact that we are forced into buying a meal plan that provides us with foods that are overpriced and unappetizing bothers me. If it was optional, I might not have as much of a problem with it. I know that we can use tigerbucks off campus at certain restaurants, but that only works to add to the high expenses that we already have to pay just to attend school here. If Trinity is going to continue having the meal plan mandatory at least make it so that we can either use that money to go to off campus venues and or use it to buy fresh groceries at the local grocery stores. Having C3 helps a little bit by being able to buy cereal and such with the meal plan, but I dont like how I am not able to get fresh fruits and veggies for my room.

Dining Halls

At Trinity University there two major dining places that you can choose to eat in, there's Mabee and Coats. Maybe usually has more options than Coats does so normally I choose to go there. They have several options on different kinds of foods to choose from. We have a Mexican food station, sushi, pasta, chicken,"the home zone", salad bar, wraps and a BBQ one. You would think that this would be a good set up since there are so many different options, wrong. Half the time one of the stations is closed so its any ones guess which ones are actually going to be available when you want them.

It gets frustrating too when mabee closes before I even get out of class on some days so I don't even get a choice on which place to eat at.

Today I thought that I would be lucky and be able to eat at mabee and maybe even get something to eat that didn't look like it had been sitting there all day. When I got there, It was just my luck that the station that I wanted to eat at was closed, so I just settled for a salad. :-(

I don't understand why on some days like Friday and Sunday, only half of the stations are ever opened. I usually end up going off campus to some where that takes tiger bucks on those days. I don't like having to do this because I am just having to spend more money on food that i could have gotten at school on my meal plan if the station had been opened.

Coats is usually opened till midnight which is convenient when you are up late studying and need a snack. They have things like a pizza, salad bar, yogurt place, a grill, and a sandwhich line. I like eating at coats because I can usually eat healthier there than at mabee. Only thing is, since there is not as many options, I get tired of the food really quickly. As much as i complain though about the food here, I'm glad I'm not still eating the awful food they had at my high school.