"You're going to have to make all your own meals, you know."
That was the main response I got when I told people I was staying in my college-town over the summer. There is no cafeteria or meal plan, so apparently the scariest thing about living on your own is making your own food.
Well, I proved all those people wrong, because instead of making my own dinners, I banded together with a group of friends at the on-campus apartments. Every evening, someone took a turn to make dinner for the rest of the group. Some lessons I learned were relational, some culinary and some about fire safety.
Here are 14 of those lessons:
1. Adulthood is hard, but community helps.
When you're on your own in the world, being drained and stressed, trying to figure out a job you don't feel very capable of doing or interacting with humans who you're a little bit intimidated by, it makes everything slightly better when your evenings are filled with your friends celebrating you as a hero for figuring out how to make a bomb taco casserole.
2. College is uniquely special.
I'm not sure if there's any other stage in life when you can get together with friends to practice making simple food dishes and have it be a truly brilliant idea.
3. Do not use a bath hand-towel as a pot holder.
Especially not while trying to fetch a 425° Papa Murphy's pizza from the oven. (Spoiler ending: the towel will be suddenly consumed by flames.)
4. Minute rice is different than long white rice.
Additionally, eight cups of uncooked rice is way too much for five people.
5. "Dinner will be ready at 6" means "dinner will be ready anytime between 5:30 and 7."
You might get home from work late or a dish might take less time to prepare than you thought or you have to wait for everyone to get home before you dig in. Don't expect to actually eat the time you project dinner will be ready.
6. Sometimes the best part about dinner is that weird time afterward.
Someone would inevitably have to jet off to some meeting or frisbee game or something. But some nights, we just laid like cats on different pieces of furniture, full and sleepy and content. Then, one by one, we'd come back to life, venturing into the kitchen to clean up, then starting some game together. Someone would make tea, or – even classier – we'd all grab a spoon and dive into a quart of ice cream as we played games for the evening.
7. It's okay to go on a milkshake run right before dinner.
Remember, these are college tips, not parenting tips.
8. Ice cream tastes better the more adjectives it has.
9. Salad tongs.
Having salad for dinner puts you at adult level 9, but having salad tongs with your salad automatically bumps you up to adult level 1000.
10. All chicken is under-cooked chicken if you're paranoid enough.
And I am paranoid enough.
11. Burns. Will. Scar.
That's all.
12. Healthy conflict is healthy.
At the beginning of the summer, I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "What a good group of people. I can't imagine any of us ever arguing. This will be perfect." I felt like that naive main character who believes nothing could possibly go wrong, while the audience is screaming, "You idiot!" But it's not like there were any catastrophic moments. There were just the expected occasional tensions about dishes, cooking responsibilities, etc. It wasn't bad. In fact, I think it was good for me to learn that little tensions and conflicts are natural and, ultimately, good.
13. It's nearly impossible for an entire group of people to meet up consistently.
There was some unease at the beginning when we realized we had nine people in our dinner group; we were unsure how we were each going to feed that many people every night. However, I can't remember a night when more than seven people showed up, and on average there were four every evening. People went on trips or had meetings or just simply wanted to make other plans. Having a family meet every night for dinner is a bigger feat than I imagined it would be.
14. It's horrifyingly easy for me to adopt the distraught mom aesthetic.
"This counter is a mess. I need to do these dishes. Are my children getting enough to eat? Is everyone happy? PLEASE, for the love of God would someone come set the table. This meal is going to be cold by the time we eat it. Everything is going to taste awful. I am failing my family."
This is a severely over-dramatized example of my thought process while cooking, but you get the gist. Turns out I become a perfectionist in the kitchen. Who knew? You learn incredible things when you cook with your friends every night.
