[GUEST POST] Cooked Cooking by Ellie F. '28

It’s (well, it was, at the time of writing) IAP, and all the dining halls except one are closed. Fortunately, we can cook! 

…

Unfortunately, we can cook. 

Every day this past week, I’ve been cooking with my friend Henry J. ‘29 from East Campus. What I love about East Campus is that East Campus indulges my bad ideas >:)

They always have some sort of Bad Idea™ going on. In fact, every IAP, they organize something called Bad Ideas Weekend, which includes things like running up and down the Green Building⁠01 the tallest building on campus as many times as possible, building useless things for the Bad Ideas Hackathon (Ellie elaborate??)⁠02 hi Ellie here to elaborate. IT WAS SUPER FUN!!! Joy made juggling balls that embodied pain, fear, and frostbite. We also had people make a version of reddit that just glazes everything you say, and a wireless mouse that used a wired mouse that connected to a computer that sent info to a 3D printer that had a wired mouse taped to its head that connected to another computer. , and randomized hair dye.

Here are some things we’ve been cooking up! Some of them are extremely cooked (…well, I would hope so). 

Cursed Stir Fry

After stir frying a pretty good dinner (with vegetables!! And protein!!), Henry and I decided to use our powers for evil. We grabbed the most random things we could from Henry’s closet and threw them in his wok, along with a lot of oil. 

Here’s a fun challenge: take a guess at what we stir fried!

Did you get it? The list of ingredients were as follows:

• Raisin bread
• An orange (honestly, this wasn’t bad! It just tasted slightly oilier and warmer than a regular orange. I guess you can’t really ruin an orange.)
• Green onion 
• Cornflakes
• Graham crackers
• Two hi-chews (this was probably hard to spot. I don’t even know where it went. We think it might have evaporated??)

Bread. 

We thought the bread tasted pretty edible from our initial little experiment, so we decided to turn everything into bread. We (along with our other East Campus friend, Samuel R. ‘29), got a bunch of flour, egg, and crushed breadcrumbs. We slapped them on the table (literally),

And rolled them around in the mixture. I think we did it wrong, though (none of us had ever breaded anything before), because the flour tended not to stick and would fall off in the pan. Yum, fried flour! Later, we learned that we were supposed to chill the coated objects first. 

Among some of the things we breaded were:

• An entire bell pepper
• A strip of lasagna pasta (some other people were making actual edible food in the kitchen next to us, and offered us a piece of pasta to bread). 
• Orange slices
• A whole orange (unpeeled)
• Bread (we contemplated crushing the breaded bread into breadcrumbs so we could bread more bread with it to make breaded bread breaded bread, but we were full).
  Orange. Not to be confused with a lollipop.

  Bell pepper!

  Bell pepper, but in the process of making

  Our first batch.

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Surprisingly, everything turned out to be edible! Except the parts that were not (some of it was quite burnt). 

Egg Drop Soup:

Ah, the classic Chinese staple! Unlike the Egg Drop soup you would order in a Chinese restaurant, this one is true to its name—we made it using an egg that I dropped while juggling. (The reason it looks bad is because we dropped the egg into the pan first, then retroactively added water and oil)

Later, I tried to juggle five eggs at once (I’m decently competent at juggling five balls, but apparently eggs are not as forgiving. Who could’ve guessed?!). However, eggs are fun to juggle! Their liquid yolk and smooth shell lend themselves to be surprisingly similar to juggling balls in terms of weight distribution (my juggling balls have a sandy filling in it such that they settle in your hand nicely). 

The result was exactly how you expect. 

Cookies:

After the breading endeavor, I had a lot of flour left and nothing else. So I made one of the things you can make with flour and nothing else: Hard Tack! 

You might know of hard tack as the hard crackers that people ate in the trenches of WWI or as emergency survival food. 

According to Merriam-Webster, “cookie” is defined as a “small flat or slightly raised cake”. According to Merriam-Webster, a cake is “a breadlike food made from a dough or batter that is usually fried or baked in small flat shapes and is often unleavened”. According to Merriam Webster, hard tack is a cookie!

I had hard tack for the first time last semester, when I invaded the 21H.135 ⁠03 JRR Tolkien: Scholar, Author Thinker Lord of the Rings Marathon (yes, they have a Lord of the Rings marathon at the end of the semester! And yes, it’s the extended editions). People brought in thematic snacks, including Lembas bread, Smeagol eggs, and hard tack (something something what Tolkien ate in the trenches as he was beginning to write about Middle Earth).

It turns out hard tack is very easy to make. The ingredients I used were: 2 cups of flour, 3/4 cups of water, and 1 teaspoon of salt. Unfortunately, I forgot to mix the flour and salt well (I am such a good baker) so there was just one hard tack that had all the salt in it. 

Then, I baked it for an hour, flipping after the halfway mark.

The hard tack came out pretty good. It also tasted pretty good (except the one that had all the salt in it… I ate it the next morning and all the liquids left my body), though I may be biased—I do tend to like hard bland foods. And it was indeed hard–I ate two and then my jaw was immediately sore. I also tested this by throwing it on the floor (in a bag) as hard as I could, and it barely cracked. 

I offered some to Henry and Samuel, who both accepted. No one has rejected my hard tack yet, surprisingly! Although maybe that is not too surprising, as tacks evasion is indeed illegal.

Stir Fried Grass:

People always say MIT students don’t touch grass. This is demonstrably false! We gathered some grass from the East Campus courtyard, washed it (hygiene first), and threw it in a pan with some oil and soy sauce!

The result was surprisingly edible… for some definition of edible. That is to say, it was not bad. It only tasted like crispy soy sauce (probably because we put too much soy sauce in).

I realize now that the soy sauce bits look like dirt on the grass…

After cooking this, we joked about joining MIT MINCE⁠04 MIT’s foodie club that occasionally hosts fine dining experiences for students. I’ve never been to one though (perhaps you can see why) and cooking this for them, but we agreed that we’d probably be kicked out, banned, or defenestrated. 

Miscellaneous Quotes during/after cooking:

“surely that will cause some carcinogens to arise” – Samuel R. ‘29

“that’s like the national food of the united states what are you talking about” – Henry J. ‘29

“this is like watching a wikihow article go wrong” -Shelly Y. ‘29

“is a circle the one where you get the most area for the same amount of material?” -Shelly Y. ‘29 

“ MIT MINCE⁠05 MIT’s foodie club that occasionally hosts fine dining experiences for students. I’ve never been to one though (perhaps you can see why) [we should create MINCE but with cursed foods]… and call it CHOPPED” -Shelly Y. ‘29