Lettuce Heists and Other Mythological Beasts: My First Day as a Head Cook

Oh, blog. Have I got a story for you.

If you can, think back to that time long, long ago, when I eagerly posted a menu for the meal I was planning on making. It sounded delicious, right? It sounded like something you might order at a restaurant with "fresh" or "fusion" in the name. It is a meal that you might serve on funky glass plates while entertaining some brilliant poet/artist/architect/filmmaker friends, just having a "casual get-together."It is a meal that you might see on the online menu of a new-agey health resort that specializes in some sort of "detox" and that you definitely cannot afford.

But it was not a meal you might see on a hectic Monday morning at Harkness Co-op.

The dilemma I found myself in consisted of two giant problems that threatened to devour me from both ends, much like the mythological two-headed snake. (What I wonder about two-headed snakes: if there's a head at both ends, how do they go to the bathroom? Just a thought.)

And here were the two heads:

HEAD ONE: There was absolutely no produce in the co-op. No fruit, no vegetables. Nothing. And a new shipment wasn't due until late Monday night.

HEAD TWO: The work chart went up late, and no one had signed up to help me cook.

Now, what would you do in that type of situation? Let me assure you that this story ends well -- lunch was delicious and plentiful. Some said it was their favorite meal of the year thus far.

But how did you do it, Allie? you ask. How did you save lunch?

Here is how I did it.

It was Sunday night, and I had just found out about the challenges I was up against. My friend Jenny and I, both co-op eaters, had our one dining hall meal a week, and as we walked to Stevenson, we concluded my situation was hopeless. Prepare a vegan, gluten-free meal without vegetables? Not possible. And it wasn't until we swiped our cards and walked into Stevie that we realized that the solution to our problems was right in front of us.

And the solution was: garnishes.

I have not been in dining halls much this year since I started eating in OSCA. But the few times I have, I've noticed a disturbing trend: CDS has started using a huge amount of food as garnishes, which are then thrown away at the end of the day (I asked a worker.) There are huge bins of whole potatoes, vats of uncooked quinoa, bowls of red peppers and eggplants. This is all perfectly edible food, and it is completely wasted. The worst offense was the seventeen whole heads of romaine, looking pretty between the bowls of beans and dressings at the salad bar. We sat at our table, eating the things we can't get at Harkness (me, seasoned fries; her, an ice cream sundae drowning in sprinkles) and thinking about what to do. How is it right that this lettuce will be thrown away, I asked, when there is a produce shortage in the co-ops?

It was then that we both knew what we had to do. It was then that the Lettuce Heist of 2009 was born.

It was a very risky operation, or so we thought. We would both go up to the salad bar, making casual conversation. (Or what we thought was casual conversations. I swear that once we walked up there while saying, "So, how's your casual conversation going?" "Oh, you know...casually.") Then one person would be the lookout and the other, once she had received the okay, stuffed as many heads of lettuce into her bookbag as she could. By the end, we had not been caught. We had heisted nine giant heads of lettuce. We walked out triumphantly, our arms full of romaine, our hearts full of joy.

And that other head? Well, that one was vanquished by the fine people of Harkness. They had heard about my plight and a large group of people gave little bits of time, not as much as I wanted, but enough that food got on the table. And best of all, they went around to other co-ops and rounded up more vegetables.

The final menu was:

Corn Tortillas
Roasted Yellow Peppers and Red Onions
Bean Burrito filling (black beans, fresh corn, tomatoes and red onions)
Heisted Lettuce
Grated Cheddar Cheese
and for dessert, a delicious vegan chocolate cookie recipe I found while farming in Canada this summer and cooking for lots of people with eating restrictions. I haven't found a way to make it gluten-free yet. I still have a lot to learn about GF baking.

(And it was pretty damn good.)

And since you've read this far, here is my recipe for:

BEST EVER SUPER MAGIC VEGAN TASTY CHOCOLATE CHOCO-CHIP COOKIES YUM

Ingredients
3/4 cup canola oil
2 cups sugar (I made these cookies for the first time while working on a honey farm, so I know that honey works well too. But it might negate the vegan-ness.)
2 teaspoons vanilla

1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon whole flax seeds*
1/2 cup soymilk**

2 cups all purpose flour (or use whole wheat for more vitamin power!)
3/4 cup dutch processed cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup chocolate chips***

*I used pre-ground flax meal! No messy grinding.
**If you are soy-free like me, you can use rice milk, but add a little extra oil since soymilk is fattier than rice milk.
***Completely optional. Co-ops rarely have things like chocolate chips.

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 F.

Grind the flax seeds on high in a blender until they become a powder. Add soymilk and blend for another 30 seconds or so. Set aside.

In a large bowl sift together flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt.

In a seperate large bowl cream together oil and sugar. Add the flax seed/soy milk mixture and mix well. Add the vanilla.

Fold in the dry ingredients in batches. When it starts to get too stiff to mix with a spatula, use your hands until a nice stiff dough forms. Add the chocolate chips and mix with your hands again. You know you love getting messy.

Roll dough into 1 inch balls and flatten into a disc that's about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet about an inch apart.

Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool for about 5 minutes, then set them on a wire rack to cool completely.

These cookies are fantastic. Seriously. They are the best cookies I have ever tasted, even in my formerly decadent life as a milk-drinking egg-lover. I think there is something wonderful out of creating something rich and chocolatey out of things only derived from plants. It makes me wonder: will I still continue to be a vegan even after my doctor says I can stop the restricted diet? Part of me really likes the whole lifestyle.

But a bigger, louder part of me really misses cheese.

Bonus Features

Hello again. I come to you today with some other examples of my writing. I am a story writer -- mostly fiction, but also some non-fiction. But I'm not just going to give you my stories. No, that would be too easy. I'm also going to give you the "director's commentary." Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm the kind of person who watches a movie, and then watches that same movie with the director's commentary over it, and then watches hours upon hours of bonus materials, and then goes online and reads interviews with the actors...and so on. Sometimes I think that I like the stories-behind-stories than the actual stories themselves.

So here you go. Some stories written for my fiction workshop last semester (taught by the fabulous Chelsey Johnson, whose class I am TA-ing for this semester) and some stories-behind-the-stories.

NUMBER ONE: FREIGHT

Boy, this was a weird story to write. I have always been fascinated with trains, and for ten years, I have gone to and worked at a strange little summer camp in Western Massachusetts where one was woken the roar of a train running past your bunk only 20 feet away. When I first met my boyfriend four years ago (yes, we've been dating since) he took me deep into the woods of that camp and showed me where the trains sit when they aren't running. And we climbed on top of one rusty silver train and ate sandwiches. So I have been thinking about trains for a while. I love writing stories about young women who love trains and trucks and giant pieces of machinery, and so I knew I wanted my protagonist to drive the train. Of course, I have never driven a train, so I spent a lot of time in Mudd looking at diagrams and learning the train lingo. Some very obvious things surprised me, like the fact that trains don't have steering mechanisms. Duh. They're on a track.

STORY TWO: FUNNY TEETH, or INSTRUCTIONS ON LEAVING

This story came out of a suggestion. I couldn't think of something to write, and so I asked my boyfriend, and he said, "Write about an etrog farm." This is what came out of that. I grew up in a very observant Jewish household, but in a neighborhood where there were few Jews. I like writing about Jews who live in very un-Jewish places, a la Max Apple's story "The Jew of Home Depot" in the book of the same name. I also love writing stories from multiple perspectives. The project I'm working on now uses that a lot, and it's been so much fun.

STORY THREE: VALLEY CATERING

Oh, I liked writing this one. What's more fun than writing about food? I love using food as a symbolic device in writing, although I do it without thinking about it. For example, a character who feels safe would eat something comforting, like an egg-salad sandwich or mashed potatoes. A character who is upset might crunch pretzels nervously and get crumbs on his shirt, or anxiously peel strings off a stalk of celery. This story also makes me think about my parents. When my mother read this story she said that she was the one who taught me that making people food is a way of caring about them, and my dad is an avid reader of obituaries, which feature in the end of the story.

I hope you enjoyed these bonus features. Now, I have to go some Comparative Literature reading -- I shouldn't keep Foucault waiting.

Master of Confidence or Queen of Puke?

Ahem.

I might as well tell you the truth, Internet.

This blog was created for the purpose of getting a job blogging for Oberlin. Now, I know that this seems like a cop-out, the biggest cop-out in the history of cop-outs. I create a blog -- after so many people have badgered me to make one -- and it is not borne out of the pure, untainted desire to put something new into the world, but to do the unthinkable -- make a couple bucks.

Yikes.

Don't get me wrong, I love blogs. I read them all the time. In fact, this past month I have been spending a lot of time on blogs. But this recent internet-foraging hasn't been because I desire to know what my favorite cartoonist ate for breakfast this morning (sticky rice with sliced peaches). No, these blogs have names like, "Gluten-Free Mommy" and "The Macrobiotic Diet Blog" and "Vegan with a Vengance."

Let me tell you a story. It starts in the eight grade, a time of braces, unfortunately large hair and a certain bushy-haired, brace-faced girl (who I assure you has blossomed into the most beautiful of swans) who spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about a boy that I'll call Ted. Ted was a boy with the shinest hair I had ever seen and a gap between his two front teeth made him whistle a little bit when he talked. And God, in his unbounding wisdom, had reached His hand down into the crummy middle school hallway where my puke-colored locker sat, and placed Ted's locker right next to mine. I took this as a sign. This year was my year, I vowed.

Now, I must reveal to you a secret that very few people know. This is not my first blog. Back in the Ted days, I had a blog. And through the wonder of the internet, that long-ago blog still exists. Horrifyingly, you can find it through Google. And this is the last entry that I posted:

Thursday, January 27, 2003

i am nervous. i should not be nervous, because i am ALLIE! Doer of Good! Champion of All Things Awesome! Master of Confidence! Fighter for Justice, Truth, and So On! but I am still nervous. allie out.

Now, why did I feel so nervous? Why did I long to be Allie exclamation point? Champion, Doer, Master, Fighter? I would like to tell you that I don't know, that I have forgotten because it all happened so long ago. But that would be a big fat lie. The reason was that I was planning to ask Ted, he of gap-toothed, shiny-haired glory to go sledding. I had never done something so terrifying. I'd like to tell you that Ted and I had a lovely time going sledding, that we have been dating since and that we both go to Oberlin, and walk all the time in Tappan Square in the newly fallen snow or swirling colorful leaves or whatever. But it's not that kind of story. I think you know that.

What really happened: I turned to Ted, clutching my En Espanol! textbook as tightly as I could. He was rummaging around in his extremely messy locker. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. Instead, puke did. An entire ocean of puke splashed forth, waterfalling onto the dirty linoleum floor, rivers of puke running spreading towards classrooms, streams and tributaries trickling down the stairs. And Ted looked at me as I wiped my mouth, the Kool-Aid I had drank for lunch staining his perfect white sneakers, shook his head and walked (squished) away.

Everyone has a story like this. And if you don't, maybe it's because you are one of the Teds of the world, gap-toothed and gleaming and perfect. And now you have gleaned the moral from this story, which is that even freaky little projectile-puking pre-teens can grow up to have moderately normal lives. But that isn't the moral, because the story isn't over yet. You have jumped the gun. The story isn't about the boy. This story is about the puke.

Here is the thing: while I soon got over Ted, from that day on I could not stop throwing up. I would throw up every day after lunch, and then right after I got off the school bus, and then once after dinner. My stomach and esophagus burned constantly, and I lost weight, too much weight. I spent the rest of my eighth grade year in and out of hospitals, doctor's offices. I had x-rays and allergy tests and barium scans and endoscopies and even swallowed a pill-sized camera once, which my little brothers thought was extremely cool. For a while, I was a medical mystery. No one could figure out what was wrong with me.

In the end, it was the pediatrician I'd had since I was a baby, and not any of the specialists who diagnosed me with a rare and incurable disease called eosinophilic gastroenteritis. Since then, EG has gotten less rare but is still incurable. I have been dealing with it since with strong medicine, and was even in remission for a couple months. But last winter, in the right before finals week, I experienced so much stomach pain that I ended up at Allen Hospital. The medicine had stopped working, and when I flew home with a couple of academic incompletes, my doctor gave me two choices: one, take powerful steroids with lots of side effects, or go on a specialized diet, starting with a month of nutrition therapy.

So now I spend my free time on the internet, looking for soy-free, wheat-free, dairy-free, peanut-free, egg-free brownies that I can make for my co-op, that taste "just like Mom's!" I don't really mind. I love to cook. During my month of nutrition therapy, I couldn't eat, only consume a special medicinal formula that came in special, foil lined boxes and smelled like hamsters. There were so many things about food that I missed. The feel and taste of a square of chocolate melting on my tongue. The crunch of a carrot, the prickly fizz of soda bubbles on my lips. And the closeness of cooking with friends: of fingers dipped in sauces and lifted to mouths, the stories that are told when food is around, the feeling you get when you create something with people you love. And if those sauces are a little thin because you had to use rice milk and take out the peanut butter, so be it. You do what you have to do to be happy.

So what I am trying to say is that I love blogs. I haven't blogged since that fateful day before that fateful puke, and I'm ready to come back. I still puke sometimes, but now I try to aim into the compost or a nearby toilet. And I'm getting by, thanks to some bloggers who care about people like me. I am a head cook at Harkness for Monday lunch, and here, thanks to the recipe bloggers of Whole Life Nutrition, is my menu:

- Gluten-Free Corn Tortillas
- Mashed Sweet Potatoes with Red Chilis
- Sweet-Spicy Mole Beans
- Peach Salsa
- Lemony Greens

and some shredded cheese on the side, for my dairy-eating friends.

Allie out.