Harrison's Masquerade with Maggiano's

Last night, Harrison had a semiformal event with a dinner catered by Maggiano's, an Italian restaurant about 26 streets away. The main part of the semiformal wasn't the food, of course (it was the dancing! And laughing!...even though there were only about 40 of us there...), but I've decided to blog about it anyway. The sad part is that 2/3 of the time, the lights were off, so I had to use flash and it bleached my photo. In any case, the food wasn't that photogenic, and because there was a whole group of us, we evidently got to Harrison kind of late. So, half the food was gone (no linguine left!!).

The food that I did eat included angel hair pasta with very unevenly distributed tomato sauce (with real large chunks of tomato! and nothing much else...), two oily asparagus spears, some broccoli, and some salad. The salad was basically lettuce with feta cheese and onion, and midway through, I noticed something crunchy. Upon dissecting my salad, I noticed a few rectangles of some dark pink crispy stuff, which I am assuming is bacon. :(

You think that's sad (for a vegetarian)? Well, I tell you, that bacon wasn't even good! It was dry and didn't taste like bacon! It was tasteless!

The dessert was tiramisu, which was different from the tiramisu I usually consume (not that I consume tiramisu much...I've only had it about 4 times in my life, perhaps?). This tiramisu was literally 90% mascarpone, 0.005% cocoa powder, 3% coffee, and 7% ladyfinger biscuits. The mascarpone was super overwhelming. It's good, but I prefer a more 1:1 ratio of ladyfinger biscuits : mascarpone. The top half of the tiramisu was literally fatty, sweet, mascarpone. The cliche pictures of tiramisu have cocoa powder dusted on top. This one didn't, so no one could recognise it as tiramisu. Either way, the dessert was better than the meal itself.

There was frozen pomegranate juice, which was really nice.

In all honesty, I wouldn't've cared if the food was barbecue flesh; for $5, I got to party with my friends, scream, dance to The Lonely Island and Ce Lo Green (you guys know the songs...I just don't want to write them out because it's not really PG), and have fun for 3 hours.

Trustees Dinner

Alright, I have to admit that food draws me to places. Greedy, right? For every student, whether in high school or college or even kindergarten, [and, okay, maybe the workplace but I wouldn't know], food is a motivator.

It's a good motivator too, because otherwise, I probably wouldn't have met the Trustees of UPenn, which was pretty cool because they're pretty accomplished people. Although they state that they don't get paid to do anything, I kind of doubt it ... because would they truly fly over [from Hong Kong! London!] to Penn 3x a year [or more] to just... meet up? Do their loyalties really lie that deeply with Penn? Then again, I'm just a first year student, so I probably haven't gotten to the point where I simply adore UPenn.

There was a lot of leftover food and a lot of the stuff was actually vegan. Vegan orange vinaigrette dressing [which I really... didn't like], vegan asparagus [well, duh.], amazingly crispy roasted roots/tubers, vegetarian lasagne, and "seasonal" fruit, which included the most unseasonal fruits ever for February: blueberries, strawberries, and pineapple.

This was catered by Bon Appetit although TJ refused to believe it since the food was "so good". I think the food was quite nice and my picture is terrible.

It's kind of funny how context changes how "delicious" food is perceived; in a dining hall, the same cooked asparagus appears much less savoury than a nice metal tray of perfectly organised asparagus on a heating block. Fruit that's usually in a metal canister plopped on ice appears much less "exotic" [I guess?] compared to fruit that's thinly sliced on a tray.

That's the theory of plating, anyway, but I don't think I believe in it. My brother does though, so he always reprimands me for not plating my food whenever I cook. Really, why does plating matter so much? Is it really necessary to have a small 5cm^3 chunk of lasagne, cut perfectly, on a 24-cm diameter white plate, with exactly 3 sprigs of parsley as garnish? Does that really taste better than a lump of badly cut lasagne splattered onto a plastic plate that's also filled with carrots and salad and other stuff that make a meal [save plates!! Save dishwashing liquid!! Save water!]? I think I prefer the latter...

Another reason I went to this dinner was that they were giving out scarves and shirts. The really sad part was that for the class of 2014, there were T-shirts, not scarves. These weren't even new shirts; they were the ones we got during Orientation! They were leftovers! The scarves were leftovers too, but they only had the class of 2011/12/13.

The smart thing to do, of course, was to take a 2011 scarf and using thread to sew the 1 into a 4.

Which I did later, and it looks alright from far way. TJ has decided just to wear a 2011 scarf. It's not everyday we can be seniors, after all.

Senior Sports Dinner...

...was boring. [Dude check out my napkin rose! "The Art of Napkin Folding" taught me skillz :D]

Seriously, for a posh swanky parlour, the food didn't meet my expectations. With all those fancy chandeliers and embossed and labelled napkins, and actual slabs of butter rather than the plastic-ky tini containers, one'd expect Mayfair Farms to have really nice food. Of course, the menu on its website is dead elegant and extravagant. However... we got served really late [well, for that, I blame the program schedule], the salad looked kinda wilted [but tasted okay], and the options ranged less than our school cafeteria. Quality-wise, though, the BREAD WAS AWESOME. There was a tiny nutty taste with the corn grits bottom, and the crust was perfect [as in, there was a ton more crust than there was the soft part, which I like]. They had about seven dishes, of which I only ate four, since one was chicken, one was salmon, and the other was cow.

The eggplant parm was really nice, though the top wasn't crispy or cheesy enough. The asparagus was seriously saturated with ammonia and GM-ed so that they were literally the size of whiteboard markers. The potato... was potato :). And the pasta was really nice, with fresh parm, and a nice sauce [with tomatoes].

The dessert was vanilla or chocolate ice cream, with butterscotch, walnuts, or chocolate syrup. The weirdest thing is that earlier on, while staring at the butter slabs, I had said, "Dude, I want some butterscotch"... and I got it! Though, I don't really have a good photo since my coach wanted to talk to me so the ice cream kinda melted... but that was my first and last time eating butterscotch syrup from a wine glass.