Brunch!

How can two dorm rooms feed a whole college dorm house [~100 people? More?] with $80? It's the same question that many families ask themselves; how does one feed a family of 3-5 with, say, $20/week?

The answer? Bleached, refined flour bread, just-add-water-cake-mix with a lot of fat, eggs, and, well, more eggs. Oh, and Tater tots and potatoes. And, apparently, pumpkin pie fits the bill too.

How can two dorm rooms feed a whole college dorm house [~100 people? More?] with $80? It's the same question that many families ask themselves; how does one feed a family of 3-5 with, say, $20/week?

The answer? Bleached, refined flour bread, just-add-water-cake-mix with a lot of fat, eggs, and, well, more eggs. Oh, and Tater tots and potatoes. And, apparently, pumpkin pie fits the bill too.

Did you notice the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables? I really think that if society sold items based on caloric value, we'd have a much healthier society. Plus, we'd make more use of our land, and processing wouldn't delete nutrients from foods [think corn -> corn flakes saturated with sugar].

Cheap muffin mix - just add half a cup of water. $1.39. We bought 8 packs of them.

Tater tots - the other dorm room bought two packs of these.

The cake. No, the blueberries do not count as a proper serving of fruit. Oh, and we used 7 dozen eggs. Just saying.

Other dorm room made biscotti.

We ran out of egg... so we had one loaf [$1.09] of cheap white bread for French toast, and we used half of the other loaf for buttered bread.

More biscotti...

We also made toasted potato cubes [breakfast potatoes]... and a lot of scrambled eggs.

It is apparently a feat to have food remaining after 10 minutes of Brunch. It is an even larger feat to have 3 plates of food [one pie, a lot of cake, and some toast] remaining, 40 minutes after Brunch.

Is it positive or negative? From an energy perspective, it is absolutely more worth it to have fed people vegetable pancakes, or veggies with dip, or fruit. However, from a price perspective...

I do not think that I feel... proud of the fact that we just served really really unhealthy food [except for the eggs] to our dorm house.

However, had we bought fewer high quality vegetables, our brunch would've been cow poop [literally... since crops get manure, if one's into some sort of sustainable farming]. No one would've liked it.

This is why we have fast food chains.

Bread'n'Backerr.

Hey. I'm back. From AP exams and mental instability [studying]. I had 5 AP exams. which was utterly terrible. Especially as I've been obsessed with the Harry Potter series in the past few months... I wish that I could get a memory charm on all my Harry Potter memories... so that I wouldn't CRAVE magic. I think I've read each book at least 7 times. haha.... 7 is such a special number...

Anyway, I was done yesterday, so I went to Shoprite for the first time in ages and I got some Greek Yoghurt, and cocoa powder, among other stuff that I will consume in the future. After dinner, I made some gingerbread with my sister, using this recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Gingerbread-Biscotti/Detail.aspx This has to be my favourite recipe site because you can narrow stuff down to ingredients you want/don't want, there are reviews, and there are PICTURES!! [So I suppose you've realised that I don't care for cooks.com]. Anyway, I gingerly tweaked it a bit...

You shall require:
0.25 cup oil. I used olive oil.
0.5 cup sugar. White sugar.
0.4 cup honey. My honey happened to separate into the liquidy part and the solidy-liquidy part. I used the solidy-liquidy part at the bottom, because it looked more treacly.
3 eggs.
2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. I dunno why, it just seems to work in whatever I bake.
3.2 cups of flour. I think. It could've been 2.2 cups, which would explain why my dough wasn't stiff.
leftover baking powder. I don't know how much I used.
2 big tablespoons of ginger powder. I think I should've added one more, but at the moment it tastes gingery enough.
tiny bit of salt.

What to do:
1. Mix oil, sugar, honey, egg, vinegar.
2. Mix flour, salt, baking powder, ginger.
3.Bake in preheated oven for 25 minutes. Remove from oven, and set aside to cool.
4. Mix dry stuff into wet stuff 3 large tbsp at a time. Use figure 8s.
5. Spread into two slabs of approximately equal length and width and height [aka volume] and decorate with whatever you want [my sister wanted pixie stix and chocolate].
6. Bake for 17 minutes at 375F on the near-bottom rack [I hate it when recipes don't tell me what rack I'm supposed to use]. Then, get all nervous and add another 3 minutes.
7. Leave pan in the oven [which is off] for 5 minutes.
8. Stick a fork in the middle off the slab. If it comes out clean'n shiny, you're done. Get those mitts on. The edges, by now, are probably dark brown, but the middle is yellowy gold.
9. Cut into whatever shapes you wanna. Biscotti shape kinda killed it for me so I just did squares.
10. Eat. I didn't stick these on the cooling rack and they were fine.

If I had baked it for a little more, it would've been biscotti-ish. I don't like biscotti, but my mum loves it... It's weird coloured because my sister insisted on putting coloured sugar over it.

So much for them being the same volume...

The dough was the most delicious raw cookie dough I have ever had. Ever.