IAP Cooking by Jessica Z. '27

I live in Burton-Conner, which is a cook-for-yourself dorms, but I purchased a meal plan last semester for convenience. I didn’t cook often and pretty much lived off of avocado toast in the morning and Maseeh dining for lunch and dinner. I got slightly sick of dining hall food after a while, though, so when prompted with the option to buy a meal plan for IAP,⁠01 Independent Activities Period is a four week period in January where students don't have traditionally-scheduled classes. If they choose, students can opt into different independent learning and research opportunities. I didn’t.

Simultaneously, my friends and I realized in late December that we were just a few days away from finishing our first semester at MIT⁠02 !!! time is going by alarmingly fast and entering IAP. We also had two other realizations: 1.) we still had to feed ourselves and 2.) we had an abnormal amount of free time on campus.

For some background, we are 100% self-admitted poor cooks. We cooked together once before for Friendsgiving. We burned the mashed potatoes, spent an abysmal amount of time making pasta,⁠03 foreshadowing and ended up dropping the turkey. I’m much more of a baker than a cook, and my friends also didn’t have a lot of cooking experience. In an effort to both improve our cooking skills and spend more time with each other, we decided to make a cooking group together!

We quickly made a Google Doc to brainstorm a list of food we wanted to try to make, as well as organize our cooking schedule. Roughly thirty meals later (and two months late…), I wanted to share some of my favorite memories from cooking over IAP!

January 8: Pasta

First day of IAP! In the spirit of being unconfident freshmen with cooking,⁠04 and in an effort to reduce the amount of jetlag we were all feeling from flying back to campus we opted to make a college staple: pasta.

We were cooking for six people, but we ended up making wayyyy too much pasta.⁠05 friend comment: three pounds of penne and fun! So much so that leftovers were packed for everyone, and we still had more. One of my friends also brought back Southern Illinois cookies for us to try. I wasn’t sure what makes a cookie a ~Southern Illinois~ one, but upon asking my friend, I’ve learned that a cookie becomes Illinois-ified if they’re from a local Illinois bakery. Who would’ve thought?⁠06 friend comment: they are a cultural staple! i am backed up the internet: https://thesouthern.com/news/local/southern-illinois-sweet-tooth-chasing-the-origins-of-the-original-pink-cookie/article_01ee1e10-d03b-5736-8f0d-83af8c435aba.html

lots lots lots of pasta

January 9: Bibimbap

Bibimbap is a Korean rice dish that usually has crispy rice, sautéed vegetables, marinated beef, and is topped with a fried egg and bibimbap sauce. Ours was much more bootleg due to limited ingredients and skill, but it was still pretty good. Minus one very burned egg, nothing went wrong! Would 100% make again. We all collectively cut and ate a piece of the egg in solidarity. 

makeshift bibimbap!

collective solidarity in eating this egg (would not recommend)

January 13: Baked Potatoes + Chocolate Banana Muffins

We had three friends join us for dinner! Two are also MIT ’27, and one is from another college. We met last June at a summer camp, and they were visiting Boston over the weekend. The meals at our summer camp were a bit questionable at times—one of the notable ones being baked potatoes—so we wanted to recreate that for him visiting.

I also baked some chocolate banana muffins. Unfortunately, I already put the batter into the muffin tin before realizing I forgot to add an egg. However, instead of just pouring the batter back into a bowl and mixing in an egg, I chose to crack an egg into a separate bowl⁠07 friend comment: as a bystander, witnessing this was stressful af and spoon 1/12 of the egg into each muffin compartment. 100% not the most effective, but A+ for effort!

now image spooning 1/12 of an egg into each of these

January 22: Noodles @ Lanner Noodles 

We also wanted to use IAP as a time to try out new restaurants nearby or in Boston. One of my friends sent an Instagram post showcasing a video of hand-pulled noodles at a newly-opened restaurant called Lanner Noodles. One unifying factor in our group is a shared love of noodles, so we immediately booked a reservation.

We ordered chili & garlic stir-fried cabbage and various soup noodle dishes⁠08 friend comment: get the main thing (you'll know what it is). to try. Cambridge has a lot of really, really good food, but this was one of my favorite places I’ve ever eaten.

i <3 noodles

January 26: Pizza 

Our commitments started to die down a little more towards the end of IAP, and we had a bit more time to dedicate towards cooking. We followed this general recipe to make pizza, and we ended up with two very big pizzas that tasted pretty good. We also made the dough from scratch, which I was personally very proud of :)

they tasted better than they look i promise

February 1: Random Leftover Food

February 1st was the last day before IAP officially ended, and we wanted to clear out all the leftover food we had accumulated. We did a pretty good job detailing what ingredients and how much we needed to buy for our weekly grocery store trips,⁠09 friend comment: 30 minute treks back from trader joe's in wind and snow took years off our lives but we inevitably ended up with strange amounts of random food. After taking inventory of what was left, we had:

• 1 bag of kale
• 1 jar of pasta sauce
• Many onions⁠10 friend comment: *many* means <em><strong>multiple</strong></em> for every meal. I have no natural cooking talent, so I cut <em><strong>*every*</strong></em> onion. If you were curious, you should look up how to cut an onion (especially the Gordan Ramsey video). There are other, worse, less efficient, dangerous (again, don’t ask) ways I discovered to cut an onion. Follow the video; I'm begging you
• A lot of parmesan cheese
• Tortillas
• 1.25 bags of rice
• Leftover chicken
• Pasta shells
• Heart-shaped pasta⁠11 an impulsive but welcomed Trader Joe's purchase
• 1 lb frozen ground beef
• Feta cheese
• Many eggs
• 2 bags of sandwich bread
• Various asian condiments
• 0.25 bags of Spinach
• Garlic cloves
• Sour cream
• Mini bell peppers

Overall, we ended up with six omelets, pasta with chicken, sautéed kale & spinach, heart pasta soup, quesadillas and a clean pantry!

February 2: End-of-IAP & Birthday Sushi @ Bangkok Bento

The last day of IAP was February 2nd, which is also my birthday! My friends ~mysteriously~ told me the week before to make no plans for this evening to celebrate. We ended up going to Bangkok Bento on Newbury Street because Asian food, specifically sushi, is my favorite food. We had a larger group of people, so we opted to get a sushi boat :0

We got ice cream from Emack & Bolio’s afterwards, where my friends presented me with a little candle⁠12 that we had to go indoors to light because it started pouring rain and lighter to make a wish for my birthday. When I got back to my dorm, my roommate and close friend also surprised me with a cake they made; very good day :)

lots lots lots of sushi

cake my roommate and friend surprised me with!

A few questions: Did we get better at multitasking? Did we clean way too many dishes? Did we overestimate the amount of food we needed to make several times? Did we drop and break a plate? The answer is a resounding yes⁠13 especially for the second and third question to all of these.

And, finally, the ~most~ important question: did we improve at cooking? 

a chart i made to measure our cooking progress before and after IAP

loss in following instructions..

a win!!

a concerning loss in ability to follow instructions BUT an increase in natural cooking ability

...

perhaps the most concerning data entry

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IAP was genuinely one of my favorite periods of time on campus. I liked working full-time on my UROP, but it was mostly enjoyable because I started cooking more. It was fun to go on grocery shopping trips with friends, cook most nights together, and try out new restaurants around campus. All of us had varied commitments over IAP that still kept us busy—classes, clubs, UROPs, jobs—but it was nice to know that we had a built-in time to de-stress by cooking together.

In the fall, college felt very rush rush rush to me. I had a difficult time balancing classes, clubs, and other commitments, but IAP helped remind me to slow down. I grew up with food being a symbol of appreciation for people; I remember baking cookies for friends as care packages back home, and my parents making me my favorite dishes for special occasions.⁠14 when I got into MIT, my parents made me noodles :) My favorite memories often include food with people I care about, whether it be making Chinese pastries with my grandparents, baking with my brother, or trying new types of cuisine with friends. IAP still felt rushed at times, but cooking with a group brought me a lot of comfort.⁠15 I'm also very, very grateful to my friends for going through the effort to plan a birthday celebration for me, despite them all being slightly sleep-deprived and swamped with any lingering IAP commitments <3

Would highly recommend making a cooking circle—we saved money off of meal plan, got to try new foods, and spent a lot more time together before the even-busier spring semester started :)