Hummus (The Restaurant)

At Pennfest, I got to sample pretty much half (or 25%. I don't know Hummus' serving sizes) a meal from Hummus. In fact, I could've sampled a bucketful of falafel and pita if I really wanted to... the next morning, as I walked around campus for MI Green, I saw that the whole platter of pita (kilos and kilos!) was on the floor. Delicious, but social suicide to pick up. The servers were friendly (well, of course they would be; here was the one chance to win the allegiance of some 2000 college students!), and the food was all vegetarian!! It was surprising, because before that, I had passed a whole herd of dead cooked animals in the form of deli food, subs, pepperoni, chicken curry...

I really liked the spring-roll-type-thing, and I'm not sure what the filling was but it was really umami. The hummus was beany and the pita tasted gluteny/yeasty (which was unexpected) and pillowy, which contrasts with the normally more dry pita bread that I'm used to. In all, I did enjoy the food by Hummus.

In other news, SR (who gave me the peanut butter cookie), abides by the vegetarian-most-of-the-time-unless-the-animal-flesh-is-getting-thrown-away. This sort of encourages me to be that type of vegetarian (in that case, I wouldn't be a vegetarian anymore), because it means that less food is wasted. Interesting concept, since I've been trying to figure out the logistics of being a sorta-freegan. More on that when I feel like typing an essay.

Hummus Restaurant
3931 Walnut St.

Progressive Dinner!

My dorm house prepares a Progressive Dinner every year. "Progressive?!", you exclaim! Doesn't that sound pedantic? Is this dinner some kind of ceremony involving juniors progressing into seniors? Or, did some professor in this school donate a ton of money to a dinner fund (I wish) in his/her name? Contrary to the typical nomenclature here at Penn (every festival, building, public area, and urinal is apparently In Memory Of or In The Name Of), the name "Progressive" simply means that you start off on the first floor, with salads prepared by the people/RA/GA on the first floor, and move progressively up each floor to scavenge for food! The second floor is soup, the third floor is pasta, and the fourth floor is desserts. And desserts galore! GALORE! You know why it was desserts galore? We made a lot! Myriad! We didn't just stop at two or three varieties of baked goods; we flipped the fridge inside out, along with flipping some crepes!

Since the fourth floor was in charge of making desserts, and since I honestly have not been able to focus on academic subjects (exam in 24 hours...), I decided to devote my afternoon to mixing and decorating desserts. In all honesty, we made way too many chunks of sugary dough; the other floors didn't have multifarious dishes (I'll get to that later).

Since my Victoria sandwich cake was already in the oven when I went to the kitchen, the GA asked me to start making a white chocolate and hazelnut (well, walnut, because we didn't have any hazelnuts) cake using a recipe that TM had submitted, in which the ingredients were listed with the metric system. This was alright, because I had submitted a Victoria sandwich cake recipe which was originally in grams. By approximating everything through comparison (mathematics!), I managed to get a pretty thick cake batter (much like the Victoria sandwich cake batter, actually, although fat-free yogurt was used instead of butter). While I was debating whether or not the chocolate chips should be melted, TM came in and we finished making the cake together. He actually was going to make it himself since he had emailed only the ingredients and no method (and no amount of baking soda either...). We did melt the white chocolate chips in the end, and the cake turned out dense, not too sweet, tasty, and had a rather gluey texture.

The one failure adventurous part of this baking event was the German chocolate cake icing. I used a recipe from online, but it called for three raw egg yolks. Since this didn't seem like a good idea, I just decided to make the icing without it. Unfortunately, there was too much milk in the mixture (I suppose the egg yolks would've made everything thicker), and the butter was melted. In other words, I ended up with a fatty sugar soup, with coconut and pecans as garnish. After adding 2+ cups of confectioner's sugar, I poured half the "icing" on the cake to see whether it would dry and glaze.
It didn't. It just made half the cake soggy.

I didn't to waste the other half of the icing soup, so I decided to stick it on the stove, and hopefully evaporate some of that liquid. After a bit, I realised that I could make caramel! However, I've never successfully made caramel before; somehow, I always end up with something like the image above: a sugar crumble. It's delicious, yes, and a great cake topping (I ended up sprinkling this on top of the German chocolate cake and it looked really pretty. I also used it for the macaroons. I'm telling you; people loved this! People ate it! Fast!), but it isn't caramel. This summer, I WILL make legit caramel. I think it has something to do with the time I add the baking soda; as soon as my sugar mixture started to caramelise, I poured in a LOT of baking soda. Since it didn't look like it was going to set, I dumped in A LOT MORE baking soda. Then, it looked like the mixture was turning into custard, so I poured it into a pan...

Then, I tasted some, and it tasted bitter and salty, so I was upset. I started to stir the "custard" to hopefully allow the CO2 to escape (?) from the mixture. The "custard" then started crumbling, and shrivelling...and I ended up with a crumble. I will definitely go more in depth with caramel-making when I actually get to make caramel this summer...anyway, digression.

My GA made almond cupcakes with amaretto poured into them. I decorated them. I also ate one; there definitely was an almond taste, and it was really moist. Technically I'm not supposed to consume alcoholic substances. I'm not sure what amaretto tastes like, so I really can't say whether it enhanced the flavour of the cupcake. People actually seemed to like the German chocolate cake more than these cute cupcakes, which is saying something about how plating doesn't really matter for college students, haha.

Banana cupcakes (above) and banana bread (below). The ones on the left are decorated with my glaze icing, and then topped with my awesome-crumble-icing.

Cakes decorated by someone else. G4! That's where I live.

We also dipped delicious, moist coconut macaroons (that were really irregularly shaped) with melted chocolate, and the crumble-topping. They are beautiful!!

And finally...here is my Victoria sandwich cake! I didn't bake it, but I jammed it and added powdered sugar. Someone else added the strawberries. I suppose the point of this post is that the Progressive Dinner is about teamwork.

As a side note, this Victoria sandwich cake was less rich, with more evenly shaped holes in the sponge part. I think this is due to the fact that the butter was melted (read = completely liquid) before being mixed. The one I made before was made with solid butter, and the uneven globs, spread throughout, perhaps created a more homemade/less uniform texture while baking. This one was still delicious, though.

Cookies made with leftover toppings, some in muffin pans! That's why they are so round and/or irregularly shaped!

Now to talk about the actual dinner! I started off on the first floor, with the salads. There was pasta salad (with two types of pasta), which was pretty oily, and not really salty, which was nice. The leafy salad had tangerines inside, which was pretty neat.

...And then there was potato salad! FIVE huge containers of potato salad! It was absolutely amazing! I've decided to fall in love with paprika now.

The second floor was soup, and the only vegetarian one was creamy tomato soup, and I got literally 750ml of it. It was only a bit creamy, which was wonderful because I've had a really negative experience with the too-creamy-it's-almost-weird-it's-sour way like the one made by Pacific Natural Foods (you know, the one in the carton).

The third floor included many trays of pasta. I don't have pictures of these because the lighting was terrible, and, although the pasta and soup were delicious, they weren't that exceptional or photogenic. The main focus = dessert!!

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.

Poe-Tae-Toe.

I love potatoes! I love potato salad, too! However, by "potato salad", I mean the cliche vinager+mayo+American potato salad, with chunks of apple and celery, perhaps. Today I found out that I'm not too sure that I like any other type of potato salad.

Today, Commons had a field day - well, not really. They just obtained a lot of potatoes, presumably from a field nearby [since they always boast about how a lot of their ingredients come from within a 150-mile radius]. I've never understood why they always have tubs of raw food just sitting out there; the fruit is for people to take, but apparently they get irked when you take vegetables. Potatoes aren't that aesthetically-pleasing when they look raw and muddy [well, they're still cool, I understand], so why were they on display?

The only conclusion: STUDENTS MUST TAKE POTATOES!!

I am probably wrong.

To use up the huge surplus of potatoes [Seriously, they should have a giant bin that is labeled "free for all!" and dump in vegetables and fruits that they don't want to use to cook, but are perfectly edible - oh wait, those small tubs everywhere? Are those for us to take? I never know.], the fine cooks at Commons made one, I mean, two, no, I mean, seven potato salads.

Going anticlockwise:

The super-white potatoes on the left hand side tasted like coconut. They tasted super creamy, but not fatty or buttery [coconut milk?] and the potato chunks were not starchy; they were sort of raw and apple-like.

The slices were from a German potato salad. These tasted very much like vinegar-potatoes, and the potatoes, again, had an apple-like texture.

The next ones were normal, but not as tangy as cliche potato salad.

The ones without the dressing, and with the French bean, were just ok. Just potato.

The next creamy potatoes were...well, I'm sort of put-off by the idea of having apple-like-textured potatoes. I like potato salad with starchy potatoes that are almost mashed and have a nice, sweet, aftertaste [due to the amylose on our saliva breaking it down]. Most of the potatoes I had today were too solid, firm, and not too flavourful, save the dressing. So, this one would be an example of the potato salad that directly opposes what I envision in a potato salad.

Back up top: These were beautifully coloured and looked practically gourmet, and although the dressing was quite nice [perhaps I was deceived by the looks?], the potato itself wasn't ka-bang.

Centre: Wow. This one was amazing! I love purple potatoes now. The dressing wasn't sour enough for my liking, but the texture of these mini, irregularly-shaped, rainbow potatoes was just amazing! Fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth-after-you-chew, dense, and flavourful!

Overall, I'm surprised Commons decided to stick something at the "special stuff bar" of the dining hall. For the past few weeks, it's been either dips or apples/oranges. Oh, and for the last half of last semester, it was mainly just sandwiches. Except for the one time there were apple items on "Apple day" [which wasn't even that day!]

Sushi! Again!

Last time, I posted about Samurai Sushi but I didn't bring my camera, so I had no pictures. Here is a picture of the salad without the cherry tomato. It has a ginger dressing, which I suppose is what makes it Japanese, because I don't see yellow-green lettuce as something Japanese.

This time, I took a bunch of pictures but the lighting was terrible and everyone wanted to eat. This resulted in blurry pictures. However, I did have a sushi-related epiphany.

So, 6 small pieces of avocado sushi costs $3.95.

The sushi/sashimi boat costs approximately $52.

As a vegetarian, if I spent $52 on avocado sushi at Samurai Sushi, I could savour about 78 pieces of sushi.

Now, that is a LOT of sushi. I love avocado sushi. The avocado is amazingly creamy, and surprisingly goes well with soy sauce. A LOT of soy sauce, actually, because I wanted to savour the moment, indulge, and obtain 420% of my sodium RDA for the day. The avocado was a bit over-ripe but it was still great! I should make avocado sushi at home, actually.

This is the sushi boat. It is not boat shaped because they ran out of boats and apparently we would've had to wait a long time to get a wooden boat... so here is the humble version.

Looks good hm? Well my brother and parents liked it. My sister just ate the rice.

Here is a fried tofu. I like the outside crumb batter thingy, because it's crispy, but doesn't taste oily [although it IS oily]. The sauce is also nice although I don't think I'm too partial to it... I prefer pieces of avocado sushi more.

I know that sushi restaurants are generally more expensive than say, Italian restaurants, especially where I live. I sorely miss ParknShop with its $4 sushi [50c!!], occasionally lowered down to $2. However, we make sushi a lot at home, but it never seems as "legit" as the sushi at the stores, even though we use sushi rice and vinegar and nori. Perhaps we all go to sushi restaurants for the scenery, the dimmed lights, the tea [I'm not a tea fanatic so it's just... plain green tea to me], the cute plates and table-suitable bottles of soy sauce.

I mean, why do some people go to restaurants that sell really expensive yet mediocre food? It's just because they can then say, "Dude, I've been to this sick-famous restaurant...that you can't afford to go to!"

Conversely, going out to eat is considered icky if one is talking about college dining hall food. I don't understand why people think it's okay to speak badly about college restaurants, yet speak well of fast food places or other restaurants that offer the same food.

I suppose it has something to do with marketing; when was the last time a sushi store was advertised as elegant, healthy, and for the 1337? Oh, pretty much always. But, eating avocado sushi is definitely not balanced! With soy sauce, avocado sushi is too much sodium and too little protein.

Well, what about the animal eaters, then? Well, in this case, too much protein and cholesterol (?) and too few vitamins and minerals. Oh, and too much sodium.

It's not advertised that way, though... and I'm not sure why I'm analysing this, because I do like sushi a lot and I should actually be making of list that explain why sushi ought to be cheaper...

CELEBRATE!

Exams over, did terrible in my honest opinion...

Well at least I had a really nice dinner today. Along with some snow in the morning. I should appreciate life more. Hey, I really really am grateful to get this far in life. I think I'm going to add AdSense to my blog now. I mean, I legally can now!

So I went to Kings Court for dinner with TJ, and this is the first time I've had a legitimate dinner since...Sunday. Seriously. I have just been that busy with studying, which was pretty futile because I still did terrible on my calc exam. I went from the 30th [or higher] percentile to below the 60th percentile, because of one exam.

So, I had a hodge podge of a-tad-undercooked roasted potatoes [it was raw enough to not taste floury, and roasted enough to not taste crunchy like an apple], green peppers, a tomato, basil, and tofu with vinaigrette salad thing, glazed carrots, and two random dips. The best thing about Kings Court's dining hall is the variety of dips. There are the staple hummus and lentil dips, but also tofu chipotle dip and carrot brown rice dip [the ginger in it ruins it, in my opinion]. Today, I tried the mustard cauliflower dip [which tasted just like really mild wasabi].

The main reason I go to Kings Court's dining hall is that the vegan brownies are amazing. They taste like gingerbread, with slivers of moist carrot dotted througout. They do not taste chocolatey at all, though, which I suppose would otherwise ruin the gingerbread flavour.

Actually, I will blog about the various vegan baked goods later, since I do have pictures of them, and there is actually a story about how I didn't end up with that many of them in my take-out box.

However, there were no vegan baked goods today!! I had to celebrate, somehow, so I got some ice cream. Actually, to be more correct, I obtained one scoop of raspberry sorbet [not that great. It wasn't tangy enough... and didn't taste like raspberry], two scoops of rainbow sherbet [yes! any sherbert is amazing! I particularly like lime/sour sherbert], and one scoop of peanut butter frozen yoghurt. I'm not quite sure what the peanut chips are, because they are definitely not normal peanut chips; it seems like it's frozen defatted peanut butter. I don't understand how they can solidify peanut butter into chunk form, but perhaps there's some saturation of the C bonds, or gelatin, or corn syrup solids...

The problem is that the peanut chunks tasted really smooth, which is generally not the case when there are stablisers, corn syrup solids, or flour etc. It didn't taste waxy, which you get with commercial-grade chocolates [Next time you get that chocolate coating on ice-creams or "chocolate candies", note how it tastes... oily and segmented...]

Mind the Food Gap - Urban Nutrition Initiative Dinner

Today at Commons there was a dinner from 6 to 7:30pm hosted by the Urban Nutrition Initiative, which is a community service group that teaches high school kids how to plant gardens and how to cook and do nutritional planning. This week, actually, is Food Week. Initially I wasn't even going to go, but I figured that I might as well go after my Nutrition midterm [which I did not do well on. I definitely didn't get above a 95% which really irks me because this stuff is really easy...] and I wondered if I'd be late, since I had to get my camera from my dorm. The really stupid thing is that I came into my dorm, left my school bag in my room, then went back out. As I approached Commons, I realised that I'd forgotten to bring my camera. By then, it was 6:10 so I figured I might just blog without pictures. However, downstairs in Commons, no one was serving food or anything... so I went back to my dorm and rushed back out and back to Commons. By then, they'd started discussing stuff about food justice. I think it's a really broad topic that one could write a book about, or devote a blog to. Either way, it was a light discussion for my table since we didn't have a table leader from the group to talk to us.

This event seemed pretty legit since they gave us 3 different sized forks and a spoon. They also emphasised the fact that the produce was local; the first course was "Roasted Red Pepper & Brie Cheese Soup", which was really delicious, actually. It was really tangy, great with the bread crust [but the bread by itself was pretty plain].

The "Spinach Salad with Local Feta, Red Onion and Warm Shallot Vinaigrette" was amazing. I seriously loved the vinaigrette!!!! I could drink that stuff [okay, I can't.]

The feta cheese chunks were really huge though, and different from the feta cheese I had eaten at this Greek restaurant back in high school.

Everyone else had "Hendricks [sic. no apostrophe] Chicken with Tarragon Cream Sauce, Sage Whipped Potato and Sautéed Broccoli Rabe". Since I'm a vegetarian, they gave me some butternut risotto. I tell you, this is NOT risotto. It's bulgur with butternut squash and cranberries. It is not a risotto. Risottos are sticky and creamy and made with arborio rice or other short-grain sticky rice. It was alright. The vegetable side was way too buttery. I guess it's personal preference, but I've grown up eating either steamed vegetables or vegetables cooked in light oil. I'm not used to the butter-drenched vegetables thing. Nor am I used to spreading a tablespoon of butter on bread, either...

However, the lighting was great so my pictures turned out nice. Actually, the guy next to me took pictures of his food too!

"Warm Bread Pudding with Maple Crème Anglaise" was pretty intense...the plate was cold and the pudding was sort of lukewarm. The bread pudding was nicely textured, and there were a lot of raisins. Overall, it was really sugar saturated. The maple glaze did not have any maple flavour. The thing that confuses me is that they said that this was grown locally, so I wonder whether Philly has a maple tree farm? I doubt it...but I could be wrong.

Interesting. I think I want to join this group to teach nutrition to kids.

Today! - Fall Fest

I'm finally updating about something that happened today. I still have heaps to write about concerning the past two weeks, but for today, I will blabber on about the blubber today. And yes, that is the line for Coup de Taco about an hour and a half into Fall fest.

Fall fest is overrated. I'm not kidding. Sure, you get free stuff, but the cool stuff actually costs money. The first 750-1000 people get a taco and cupcake for free, but that's if you stand in line.

For at least half an hour.

With a wristband, that you had to stand in line to obtain, as well.

Luckily, I had gone to the library from 12-2, so I was basically right inside the door [outside the door? I wasn't "outside" the door, though, since Fall fest was OUTSIDE the library. Anyway. I was right next to Fall fest], so I went, stood in line for a few minutes, realised I needed a wrist band, then went allllllll the way to the LOVE statue to get a wrist band, and jumped back in line. By this time, the line for Coup de Taco had doubled, although it wasn't as bad as it was 10 minutes later, where it had quadrupled. Oh exponential equations...

[Indoor photography pales - I mean, yellows - in comparison to sunlight photography]

I'm not actually sure why I bothered to stand in line for half an hour [ish?]. I do have a meal plan that guarantees that I get food and don't starve. I also have many kilos of adipose tissue that can sustain me for a while. However, I suppose it was just the fact that I didn't want to outline more for Comparative Med. Anyway, halfway through, two guys who were behind me in line were contemplating getting out of line, and then I told them that they didn't have wristbands... and I asked if they wanted mine. They said no, and went to get wristbands, and came back. Later, two girls [their friends?] dropped by, and they decided to beat the system by just cutting to the front. This meant they cut off ... at least thirty of us. Okay, maybe twenty. Which is still plenty [that wasn't meant to rhyme]. Pretty douche-bag thing to do, in my opinion, especially as there were another zillion people standing behind us [quadrupled, remember?] waiting patiently. The guys behind me, however, said "oh, we got honour... we're not going to cut", which is nice to know.

Anyway. I finally got a vegetarian taco.

Then I went to get a cupcake from Call Me Cupcakes, which was extremely fast since all the dude had to do was hand out a cupcake. No toasting or cooking needed.

I'll review the cupcake first because it sucked.

It's just a generic, bland, un-moist, unflavourful, NONchocolately, dry, small-air-holes, cupcake-shaped cupcake. It did not taste chocolatey, which is always an issue for me, especially when something is labelled CHOCOLATE. I tried to be unbiased about the icing. It was too fatty and oily for my liking. It was also quite tasteless [no chocolatey flavour, at all. It was just chocolate coloured]. Oh, it's pretty alright, but most cupcakes these days ARE pretty.

The taco, however, was quite amazing. It was crunchy, due to sliced tortilla chips INSIDE the taco!! The outer shell was a soft flour tortilla. I'm actually confused as to the difference between a burrito and a taco. Apart from the fact that the taco is open, I can't really see a difference. I guess it's like asking what's the difference between a sandwich and an open-top sandwich. Anyway, about the tortilla strips - I was amazed at this piece of ingenuity. It actually reminds me of the time I had a tortilla chip sandwich. It was amazing, too, although this surely beats it. The Cuban rice and beans were full of chunky flavour; the salsa companion was spicy, but not overwhelming. The cheesy-sour-creamy-cilantro thingy was actually pretty good, because I couldn't really taste the cilantro [I don't particularly like cilantro, so it's a plus for me, but maybe a minus for other people].

I also got an apple from the Penn Environmental Group, although it was just a generic fat GMO apple. The International Students Association [I think that was the group name?] gave out some candy and stuff too, so that was cool. Apart from that, I ended up falling asleep at the library again.

[Note the boxes of cupcakes at the back of the truck. I could've totally taken a box of them.]

I did, however, have a delicious Greek salad with a lot of creamy feta cheese this evening, which reminded me of AK. I miss her.