Expectations-Cosmo's Cucina

I’m not going to lie, my expectations for the food at Cosmo’s Cucina were pretty much on point. I had observed their website with their menu and they followed through. The food was flavorful, seasonal, creative and different. I could taste it in the dipping oil for the bread, the pasta special, the scallops and the avocado burger. If anything I would say they even exceeded my expectations. The appetizers, the food they were all delicious.

            What did surprise me a little was the atmosphere. I had walked past the Cosmo’s Cucina building before not ever realizing that Cosmo’s was above O’Duffys. So after dining there I felt a little cheated that I had walked past the restaurant so many times without even realizing it. In my head, I had equated Cosmo’s to Food Dance, and while they are similar in food, the atmosphere is different. In Cosmo’s there’s brick walls, candles, it’s home like and historic, there’s dim lighting and it’s a smaller area. This added surprise really lent itself to the experience. These additions made the meal feel more special, quiet, and tasty unlike my expectations.

            While I did not explore an other by ethnicity standards of food, Cosmo’s is definitely a sort of other that can make one question the authenticity of an experience. I thoroughly believed through taste and presentation that the food was undoubtedly made with better ingredients, the combinations proved this difference as well. This was also an other experience as I had never eaten at Cosmo’s before, therefore by eating there I had tried someplace/something new.

            Into other food tourist experiences I will take the idea of being open minded. While it’s good to have preconceived notions about a place, it is also good to have the initiative to try new places. It’s made me value all the aspects of a meal. If I have learned anything it is that context is everything. It is not just the food that makes up an experience, but the people we’re with, the atmosphere, the music. These are all things that helped develop my experience at Cosmo’s Cucina and I cannot wait to go back. 

Process Writing

As with most of my writing in the past I considered writing this quarter to be kind of a puke and finger paint experience. Yes, this is gross sounding, but let me explain. In order to write anything I just have to throw it out there (that’s the puke part) and then rearrange it to make it have some sort of flow, meaning, form etc. (that’s the finger paint part). Therefore, mostly when I write I just have to throw myself headfirst, honestly, into whatever experience I’m trying to convey.

This was no different with food and travel writing however I found the finger paint part to be a little more difficult than usual. I knew almost nothing about journalism coming into the class, so at times this was unnatural and frustrating. As the class came to the conclusion that my food critic piece sounded more like poetic opinion I realized that I was learning something different every day, and I loved it. And well, I’m not looking to become more than a poetic viewpoint anytime soon I enjoyed thoroughly learning about a new style of writing especially through the lens of food.

The whole food and place experiences give a new and dare I say it, fresh look to writing. I know I will never have to go wordless as long as I have food and memories. Apart from that, I can no longer eat a meal without bringing up something from the omnivore’s dilemma, oops.

I found the discussions in class extremely valuable to forming reading responses and interacting with our readings. I also found my classmates’ opinions to be helpful in the editing process. Everyone in our class had such a different perspective and language that any different viewpoint gave me a different way to see my writing and myself. These differences were vital in revision over the course of the quarter.

At times I disagreed with the class’s suggestions, especially with the end of my memoir. The end of that piece was incredibly personal to me and I felt as if I needed to make sure that it rang true with the experience.

Ultimately this course gave me new language, lenses to write through, and a love of food along with writing. Our class became a little opinionated family that helped each other grow in our writing and I am incredibly thankful for that. I now feel as if I have the tools to think more critically, globally, and as a writer thanks to food, place, and our class. 

Perfect Meal Final

I come from a family that has mastered the art of the production. So when I found myself at the grocery store after a long day of classes with an even longer list on a highlighter colored sticky note I couldn’t help but take an anxious breath. I am nothing like my mother. I realized I have no idea how to cook a meal for actual people.

I traced my memory back to the shuffle of the kitchen when my mom threw dinner parties for her and her friends, and well, my mom could pull it off better than anyone I’ve ever met. In my memory there was my mom holding a glass of wine in her soft hands. She was sliding plates of appetizers into the foyer with the sounds of her necklaces jingling. There was everything from clam dip to cilantro dip. She was pulling buttered and baked noodles out of an oven in heels, fixing a flank steak, all while carrying on a conversation with a family friend. The long oak table was elegantly set with seasonally appropriate table runners and candles. She was smiling, she never forgot anything, and there was music softly playing in the background. I never remember being left with a bad taste in my mouth.

I must have picked up something. I had forty-five minutes to complete the shopping for the perfect meal in time to meet my sister back at Crissey Hall, Kalamazoo College.

            When I thought about the perfect meal my mind first came to comfort food, however the comfort food I think of has nothing to do with the comfort food in the cafeteria.

Mac n Cheese, a comfort food staple, has been ruined by the cafeteria. The flavorless noodles that are saturated with some strange cheese glop just doesn’t have the same appeal as Mac N Cheese made with actual cheese. So, that’s what I set out to do, ease my friends’ nearing exam stress with the perfect comfort food.

            The menu planned was my mom’s baked Mac n cheese with a breaded top, green beans, and for dessert, Funfetti cupcakes.

            Next I needed rules. Don’t all well planned events follow some sort of etiquette? I decided that I would do all the planning, buying, cooking and baking alone as a present to a few friends who had been extra supportive over the course of my fall quarter. My roommates Tess, Maddy, and Erin would be attending, my sister Grace, a new friend Morgan who lived in the same dorm, a writer friend Eric, and my ex boyfriend Jordan. We were a motley crue to say the least, but it was okay as long as everyone came hungry.

            Into my cart went Gruyere cheese, pecorino Romano cheese, and sharp white cheddar cheese, soft white bread, vanilla frosting, and pounds of elbow macaroni. I snatched other necessities for a meal off of the neatly organized shelves. I traced back and forth through the fluorescent lighting of Harding’s. As I checked out I realized that feeding a huge group of people for fifty dollars wasn’t that bad. I was glad I had splurged and gotten the nicer cheese.

            I unloaded my plastic bags on the table of the Crissey Hall Kitchen while my roommate Tess carried down skillets, salt, and a mixing bowl. Jordan arrived with cayenne pepper, and black pepper.

            I have never wished that I could have more arms as much as I did then. I needed one to shoo Tess away from the stove, another to whisk the hot milk with the butter, and another to toss the bread in a buttered mixture while grating the three blocks of cheese.

            I realized then I didn’t have any cupcake papers. Something once as trivial as cupcake papers then seemed like I had forgotten something as integral to cooking as say, one of the two arms that I actually do have. Tess ran upstairs only to bring down a flimsy silicon cake pan, it then looked as if dessert would consist of funfetti cake instead.

            My sister Grace arrived from my hometown with a casserole tin and a cheese grater. I was in business. I had two ovens blazing, noodles cooking, and milk, butter, flour and cheese hardening into a cheese sauce.

            “But I’m hungry now,” Tess said, “Let me help.”

            Breaking my own rule that I would cook the entire meal myself, I handed over the whisk. Eric and Morgan arrived next.

            The kitchen was hot but my friends kept the conversation going over the Modest Mouse CD I had playing quietly. They were laughing about how horribly a Developmental Psychology exam had gone, they were talking about the first jobs they ever had.  It started to feel less like a stressful production and more like comfort. I put the cake in the oven, sliding it in natural just like my mom would have done.

            But then, the cheese sauce wouldn’t thicken, but it was something that we could laugh at. Jordan told a story about how once I had broiled a tin of banana bread by accident. Eric explained how overrated perfect is. We were all friends. It was fine.

            The cheese sauce became a whole with the noodles and was poured into the buttered casserole dish. I didn’t even spill, but I held my breath the whole time. I felt like a kid playing the game of Operation. I layered the buttered, torn bread over the top of the noodles.

            The pan was heavy like good comfort food should be, and the oven was warm as I slid the Mac n cheese into its open mouth.

            The cake was ready to come out of the other oven and I set it on the cold burner to breathe.

            I set my eyes on steaming the green beans next. I had already clipped the ends and I carefully placed them on the steamer above the boiling pot of water. The lip had to rest on top of the beans’ slender stalks, as there wasn’t as much room in the pot as I had planned. Lifting the lid to check on them led to instant steam burn.

            “Shit,” I said.

            Grace misinterpreted my use of shit to mean that I had done something horribly unalterable to the food.

            “I’m willing to lie to you and tell you that the food is good,” Grace said.

            That’s what sisters are for.

            Next I had to figure out how to get the cake in all of its confetti colored glory out of the cake pan.

            “Flip it,” was being chanted throughout the Crissey basement kitchen, and I’ve never been one to not take a dare, and so I did it. I took the flimsy pan with the funfetti cake and turned it upside down onto a piece of paper napkin. The no stick silicon had decided to take a few chunks prisoner, but the cake, on the whole, flipped. I used the whole can of frosting, apart from what fingers had already swiped from the jar.

            What I couldn’t forget is that cake tastes like cake no matter what shape it’s in. I am not my mother. Not yet, anyways.

            Modest Mouse had switched to The Mountain Goats and the smells from the baked Mac N Cheese were starting to gush out from the oven. It was done.

            I had to use huge hunks of cardboard to manage to slide the heavy casserole dish out into the kitchen. Sometimes college students have to improvise. The bread on top was golden brown and the cheese sauce had decided to thicken to its desired consistency.

            Perfection.

            Maddy and Erin, two of my other roommates arrived in perfect time with their forks. We were all ready to eat.  It was a Friday night so there was talk of evening plans, but other than that it was silent and appreciative.

            There is something about eating together that is such a unifying experience. We felt happy because we didn’t slide our plates along a conveyor belt in order for food to be splashed across the blue surface. We had privacy in the otherwise empty kitchen.

Even though I was the only one who had shopped, grated cheese, and attempted to create a production of comfort food, everyone had taken part in the creation of the meal just by being there. Was it a production like one of my mother’s? The answer would have to be no, not for now, but there was definitely an element of perfection anyways. 

Final Memoir

A Memoir in Veins

When I say chicken veins, I think of chicken veins in all of their glory. I imagine the sinewy texture of them, like rubber, an opaque white with chicken drumstick batter flecking the surface. I imagine chicken veins in my teeth, in my hair, stuffed into the crevices in a lunchbox, in between my toes. The chicken veins, they loop around my fingers like rings.

When I say chicken drumsticks I imagine cold, fleshy, battered, glowing, white bone. I think of biting down on the flakiness of it. I taste the deli spices on my tongue. I can’t decide if they’re cheap, or delicious, or both. I think of licking the grease off my fingers when no one is watching. I find some pleasure when I slip the bones back inside a lunchbox. I feel the pleasure in being invisible with my bones and my veins to myself.

Growing up, I was, what one would call a nerd. I stood at 5’9 by the time I was in middle school as a regular girl giant. I believed hair gel was essential to every ponytail, I had baby fat despite my growth spurt, and I loved doing history homework. In this description of my middle school self I am ignoring my blue wire rim glasses, and the love poems that were scrawled into all of my notebooks, because I am too embarrassed to incorporate those things. If only I could tell my fifth grade self that Derek Klingaman turned out not to be so cool after all, maybe I could have stopped scrawling his name onto every available inch of paper.

            Now, you have to take into consideration how middle school is by definition. Kids are mean, and it is a cruel, wild world. In the cafeteria I was afraid to throw out my trash after lunch due to the sheer fact that I would have to walk in front of the entire cafeteria to do so.

My lunch was always packed by my mother in a blue insulated lunch box. All of my friends got to use paper bags. My mom told me that it was important to not be wasteful. I told my mom it was important to survive middle school so that you could move on with the rest of your life.

Often in this blue lunchbox, my lunch would be comprised of chicken drumsticks from Felpausch, the local grocery store. While my mom thought this was a special kind of lunchtime treat, I found it horrifying. Yes, the chicken veins. They laced through the flesh. They wound around the bone. Since I never faced my fear of throwing out food in the cafeteria, these chicken veins found their post lunch home within the insulation of the lunch box.

After school it was my duty to attend dance class. Ballet, Jazz and Tap were the best ways for all of us to spend Monday afternoons together. Our mothers decided this. This was before I actually loved dance. This was when dance leotards were the worst things ever invented. I went to dance with the same group of girls that I grew up with, and they were the same group of girls that tortured the hell out of me on a regular basis. I never could understand why our parents insisted that we were friends. It was due to this insistence that I was included, but as an outsider.

While I took tap class the rest of the girls got to sit on the wooden bench in the lobby that was inside of the girls’ dressing room. Their mothers didn’t make them take tap like mine did. My mom told me it’s important to try everything. I told my mom that it’s important to survive dance class so you can move on with the rest of your life.

On that fated day I had chicken drumsticks for lunch along with their veiny counterparts. Those girls had figured out that I hid the veins in baggies in the corner; they had found my next weakness.

I left the resin filled dance studio to rejoin my “friends,” untie my tap shoes, brush out my coarse pony tail, put on my boots to go home. As soon as I pulled the brush through my hair and began to slide on my boots the group of girls erupted into laughter.

I remember my face getting flushed. I remember self-consciously going over everything I had just done to find the error in my actions. I remember the constriction of my throat, the rising heat through my body.

            Lucy called, “Chicken veins,” and they all laughed as if chicken veins in their stringed glory were the worst possible fate for any food, or in my case, girl. I remember the first tear that slid out, like hot embarrassment. It came fast like the surprise that the chicken must have felt in the slaughterhouse.

The girls filed out, their soft ponytails bobbing. I pulled chicken veins out of the bristles of the hairbrush, out of the soft corners of my lined boots. I sat there with the chicken veins on my lap. I was able to fully cry by then, alone in the girls’ dressing room.

            Miss Tricia heard me. She was my dance teacher then, and the epitome of everything I wanted to grow up to be. She was sweet, patient, and graceful. She was like the light at the end of the tunnel for me in my awkward changing body. She saw the chicken veins, she saw my tears, and in a fit of anger that I had never seen Miss Tricia display she whispered between tight lips, “They’re just jealous Kate, they’re just jealous.”

            I threw away the chicken veins on my way out the door. They made a satisfying swish noise as I dropped them into the tin trashcan. I walked out into the snow, I got into my mom’s mini van, I went home. 

            My mom looked at me as I strayed in the hallway near the kitchen. She opened her mouth and then closed it. I walked upstairs to peel the layer of dance leotard off my body before she could say anything else.

I like to think that she would have told me that being different was in my best interest. I like to think that I would have believed her, then.

I may have grown up, but the veiny taste of chicken drumsticks has not escaped me. I remember once sitting on the floor of the dance studio examining the veins in my feet while I pointed my toes. I now like to think of the veins in my changing awkward body while I was still a child dancing as the same veins in my body now. These veins are tough, they are sinewy, they are what carries the life through our bodies. This rare, blood mixture of who and what we are highlights our differences, yet at the same time is our common thread.

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The Perfect Meal

I come from a family that has mastered the art of the production. So when I found myself at the grocery store after a long day of classes with an even longer list on a highlighter colored sticky note I could help but inhale a deep breath of anxiety, I am nothing like my mother. I realized I have no idea how to cook a meal for actual people.

I traced my memory back to the shuffle of the kitchen when my mom threw dinner parties for her and her friends, and well, my mom could pull it off better than anyone I’ve ever met. I must have picked up something. I had forty-five minutes to complete the shopping for the perfect meal in time to meet my sister back at Crissey Hall, Kalamazoo College.

            When I think about the perfect meal my mind first came to comfort food, however the comfort food I think of has nothing to do with the comfort food in the cafeteria.

Mac n Cheese, a comfort food staple, has been ruined by the cafeteria. The noodles flavorless saturated with some strange cheese glop just doesn’t have the same appeal as Mac N Cheese made with actual cheese. So, that’s what I set out to do, ease my friends nearing exam stress with the perfect comfort food.

            The menu planned was my mom’s baked Mac n cheese with a breaded top, green beans, and for dessert, Funfetti cupcakes.

            Into my cart went Gruyere cheese, pecorino Romano cheese, and sharp white cheddar cheese, soft white bread, vanilla frosting, and pounds of elbow macaroni. I snatched other necessities for a meal off of the neatly organized shelves. I traced back and forth through the fluorescent lighting of Harding’s.

            I unloaded my plastic bags on the table of the Crissey Hall Kitchen while my roommate Tess carried down skillets, salt, and a mixing bowl, Jordan arrived with cayenne pepper, and black pepper.

            I have never wished that I could have more arms as much as I did then. I needed one to shoo Tess away from the stove, another to whisk the hot milk with the butter, and another to toss the bread in a buttered mixture while grating the three blocks of cheese.

            I realized I didn’t have any cupcake papers. Something once as trivial as cupcake papers then seemed like I had forgotten something as integral to cooking as say, one of the two arms that I actually do have. Tess ran upstairs only to bring down a flimsy silicon cake pan, it then looked as if dessert would consist of funfetti cake instead.

            My sister Grace arrived from my hometown with a casserole tin and a cheese grater. I was in business. I had two ovens blazing, noodles cooking, and milk, butter, flour and cheese hardening into a cheese sauce.

            “But I’m hungry now,” Tess said, “Let me help.”

            Breaking my own rule that I would cook the entire meal myself, I handed over the whisk.

            Eric and Morgan arrived next.

            The kitchen was hot but my friends kept the conversation going over the modest mouse CD I had playing quietly. They were laughing about how horribly a Developmental Psychology exam had gone, they were talking about the first jobs they ever had.  It started to feel less like a stressful production and more like comfort. I put the cake in the oven.

            The cheese sauce wouldn’t thicken, but it was something that we could laugh at. Jordan told a story about how once I had broiled a tin of banana bread by accident. Eric explained how overrated perfect is, we were all friends, it was fine.

            The cheese sauce became a whole with the noodles and was poured into the buttered casserole dish. I didn’t even spill, but I held my breath the whole time. I felt like a kid playing the game of operation. I layered the buttered, torn bread over the top of the noodles.

            The pan was heavy like good comfort food should be, and the oven was warm as I slid the Mac n cheese into its open mouth.

            The cake was ready to come out of the other oven and I set it on the cold burner to breathe.

            I set my eyes on steaming the green beans next. I had already clipped the ends and I carefully placed them on the steamer above the boiling pot of water. The lip had to rest on top of the beans slender stalks, as there wasn’t as much room in the pot as I had planned. Lifting the lid to check on their tender green stalks led to instant steam burn.

            “Shit,” I said.

            “I’m willing to lie to you and tell you that the food is good,” Grace said.

            That’s what sisters are for.

            Next I had to figure out how to get the cake in all of its confetti colored glory out of the cake pan.

            “Flip it,” was being yelled throughout the Crissey basement kitchen, and I’ve never been one to not take a dare, and so I did it. The no stick silicon had decided to take a few chunks prisoner, but the cake on a whole flipped. I used the whole can of frosting, apart from what fingers had already swiped from the jar.

            What I couldn’t forget is that cake tastes like cake no matter what shape it’s in.

I am not my mother. Not yet, anyways.

            Modest mouse had switched to The Mountain Goats and the smells from the baked Mac N Cheese were starting to gush out from the oven.

It was done.

            I had to use huge hunks of cardboard to manage to slide the heavy casserole dish out into the kitchen. Sometimes college students have to improvise. The bread on top was golden brown and the cheese sauce had decided to thicken to its desired consistency.

            Perfection.

            Maddy and Erin, two of my other roommates arrived in perfect time with their forks.

We were all ready to eat.

            It was a Friday night so there were talks of evening plans, but other than that it was silent and appreciative.

            There is something about eating together that is such a unifying experience. We felt happy because we didn’t slide our plates along a conveyor belt in order for food to be splashed across the blue surface. We had privacy in the otherwise empty kitchen.

Even though I was the only one who had shopped, grated cheese, and attempted to create a production of comfort food, everyone had taken part in the creation of the meal just by being there.

And that, just like the taste of the sharp cheddar and the buttered and crunchy bread, the salted green beans, and the sweet, frosted, slightly sad looking cake was completely perfect.